The End of Whatabout

"Meanwhile," said Trump in Louisiana on Thursday night, "the far left Democrats in Washington want to abolish the production of oil and natural gas. How do you like that idea? How about this clown, [inaudible]? He was against guns, religion and oil, and he lives in Texas. That's not going to work." I don't even know who he's talking about (it wasn't the Democratic gubernatorial candidate he'd come to attack, incumbent John Bel Edwards, who ended up winning in spite of Trump's efforts, as you've heard).  Image via Bruce Gagnon/Organizing Notes.

One way for a blogger to deal with the firehose aspect of the news these weeks is to just resign oneself to being a couple of days behind and looking for the bits that nobody's managed to pick up yet.

Thursday afternoon, 14 November, a strange commotion took place in the Oval Office while the helicopter was waiting to deliver Trump to the plane to Bossier City, Louisiana for a rally in his losing campaign to unseat Democratic governor John Bel Edwards, and it seems they were discussing the forthcoming report from FBI Inspector General Michael Horowitz on the "origins" of the Trump-Russia investigation (focusing, we're told, on the FBI's decision to put a FISC order on Trump's former "foreign policy adviser" Carter Page, Ph.D., some weeks after Page left the campaign, although the investigation had already begun, over the alarming story of the indiscreet former "foreign policy adviser" George Papadopoulos).

A lot of faithful Trumper paranoids have been looking to this report to prove to the world that the Trump-Russia investigation was actually a conspiracy among the "angry Democrats" who are naturally in charge of the FBI's counterintelligence activities to take down Trump's presidency (it had to wait for Trump to become president to go into real action, though you'd think it would be more efficient to just stop him from winning, but apparently the sinister cabal was expecting Hillary to win, like everybody else, and this conspiracy roping together the forces of the FBI, CIA, intelligence services of UK, Italy, and Australia, and possibly the White House, was just an "insurance policy"), and they've been waiting for this thing to come out with increasing excitement.

Not that any of this is going to happen. As with his report on Andrew McCabe, Horowitz will make an attempt to be pissy about some of the people Trump is after but nobody is going to be anywhere near locked up, because they didn't do anything wrong (Marcy Wheeler has suggested there may have been cut corners in the warrant on Dr. Page, but added that whatever they did has been done much more abusively to many, mostly Muslims, in recent years, and it's kind of ridiculous to single out this particular case of somebody who obviously needed to be watched and who had practically no remaining connection with the Trump campaign at this point anyway).


There's something kind of funky about the way the report's being handled; witnesses, who have been given two weeks to review their testimony, were at first told they couldn't put any suggested corrections in writing, and they still must do it in a secure area, after signing an NDA, and not take any notes out of the room:

The initial directives left some witnesses concerned that their objections might not be recorded precisely and incorporated into the inspector general’s findings, the people said. The witnesses, they said, were also concerned that the process gave the inspector general complete control in characterizing any comments witnesses make — and left witnesses with limited ability to create a paper trail that might help them show their words were captured inaccurately.

Still, I really don't think they could cook this into something that does the job Trumpers have been hoping it would do. The narratological material has just never been there: hints to chill the marrow of the believers, but no story, because you just can't make the motivations and the timeline add up. I was imagining as we heard about the Barr-Trump Oval Office maniac moment that Barr might have been giving him the bad news, that nothing horrible was going to happen to those "angry Democrats", and he was losing his shit. Barr wasn't being his Roy Cohn after all!

If that's what happened, Trump wasn't talking about it at the Louisiana rally. He was all keyed up with some other news, over the Ukrainian business, and some news that had just appeared in The New York Times (and Daily Mail, Epoch Times, and National Review):

"Ambassador Sondland did not tell us, and certainly did not tell me, about a connection between the assistance and the investigations. You should ask him," [Foreign Minister Vadym] Prystaiko said about Sondland, the U.S. ambassador to the European Union.

Trump was over the moon at this total exoneration, and for a change he had more to say in self-defense than attack—

All of the things that they've been doing and now the absolutely crazed lunatics, the Democrats, radical left and their media partners standing right back there are pushing the deranged impeachment witch hunt for doing nothing wrong, doing nothing wrong. You know, we did nothing wrong and they're doing nothing. They haven't done a thing since Nancy Pelosi, as speaker, they haven't done a thing, but once again, their lies will be exposed just like the last times. Their schemes are already unraveling. You saw yesterday. How about when they asked these two Never Trumpers, "What exactly do you think you impeach him for?" And they stood there, went like, "What?" But they're unraveling and their sinister plans will fail. They've already failed as far as I'm concerned. In fact, so as I'm getting out of that beautiful airplane, Air Force One, it is a beautiful plane, this just came out, big story. New remarks from top Ukrainian official damages Democrats impeachment narrative. Just came out. I only read it because they don't like to report stories like this [it was in The Times], you know about that. Because we're fighting the Democrats, but much more difficult to fight is the fake news, I'm telling you, and they're a partnership. I call them a partnership made in hell. Here it is: Ukrainian foreign minister said on Thursday, listen to this though, and they won't even want to report it, this stuff because it ends it. It ends it. It's all about that. Ukrainian foreign minister said on Thursday that the United States ambassador did not link financial military assistance to a request for Ukraine to open up an investigation into former vice president and current Democratic... Can you believe? Like we need help to beat sleepy Joe Biden? I don't think so.

The "two Never Trumpers" are Ambassador Taylor and Mr. Kent in their oral testimony on the 13th, under questioning from Rep. Ratcliffe:

John Ratcliffe: (03:44)
Okay, very good. In this impeachment hearing today where we impeach presidents for treason or bribery or other high crimes, where is the impeachable offense in that call? Are either of you here today to assert there was an impeachable offense in that call? Shout it out. Anyone?

Bill Taylor: (04:05)
Mr. Ratcliffe if I can just respond. Let me just reiterate that I’m not here …

John Ratcliffe: (04:13)
I’ve got one minute left.

Bill Taylor: (04:13)
I know you only got a minute left.

John Ratcliffe: (04:13)
Let me just make this point.

Speaker 3: (04:14)
You asked the witness a question.

As you see, Taylor and Kent did not go, like, what? Taylor tried to answer the question and Ratcliffe wouldn't allow him to do it. He decided he'd rather hog all the remaining time for himself, and fuck the witnesses. With good reason, I suppose, from Ratcliffe's standpoint, since the correct answer is obvious; they're not before the committee to give it legal advice on what is or isn't impeachable, they're there to to report on the facts of which they have become aware. If they started talking statute and informing the committee what laws they believed had been infringe on, it would have been extremely improper.

Ratcliffe tried to pull the same thing today, on Col. Vindman and Ms. Williams, complaining that Trump couldn't possibly have committed bribery, because neither witness had used the word:

Hi Rep. Ratcliffe if I saw Pres Trump shoot someone dead on 5th Ave and was called as witness you wouldn't find the word "murder" anywhere in my testimony. Because witnesses aren't supposed to decide what crime it is.

— Gastroblyansky 🦃 (@Yastreblyansky) November 19, 2019

As far as the Ukrainian foreign minister goes, that's even worse, as you can see from the slightly more filled-out account in the Mail:

'Ambassador Sondland did not tell us, and did not tell me exactly, about the relation between the [military] assistance and the investigations,' Prystaiko told journalists in Kiev. 'You should ask him. I do not recall any conversation with me as foreign minister. It was not we, the Ukrainian officials (who were told this).'

What he means to say is that the Ukrainian foreign ministry didn't know anything about it, and if he did he didn't know it officially. Not that it didn't happen. And that's not surprising because this was the "irregular channel" of Trump policy, for whom their main contact is the president's own "personal aide" (I can't find a more descriptive job title) Andriy Yermak.

Morrison testifies that five minutes after Pence-Zelensky meeting in Warsaw, Sondland had a conversation with Ukrainian official, Yermak. Sondland told Yermak that an announcement of investigations by the prosecutor general would be “sufficient” to release the aid.

— Manu Raju (@mkraju) November 16, 2019

God forbid the foreign ministry should know anything about it. The object was to get President Zelenskyy to do something without anybody knowing why. What part of "irregular channel" don't you understand?

So no, there was nothing exculpating Trump in that hearing either.

The next day, Friday, Trump's old friend Roger Stone was convicted on all seven counts; after the announcement of the verdict, Trump issued a remarkable tweet

No, they didn't, but that's not the point I want to make just here. What strikes me is that this is the same rage and grief that the reporters saw through the Oval Office windows on Thursday afternoon, when Barr was telling him something about the Horowitz investigation, and that could even have been connected to that unexpected hospital visit on Saturday

All the whatabout investigations of all the whatabout enemies are collapsing now. Hunter Biden is an unattractive and overprivileged scion, but he didn't commit a crime (unlike the older Trump children). Joe Biden didn't commit a crime and Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton didn't either. Or Brennan or Clapper, or Page and her lover, or, really, any of them. If my guess is right, it's the end of whataboutism—not that they'll stop trying, but it will stop working, and Trump has glimpsed that, briefly...