The call transcript - initial thoughts

Have you read it yet? By virtue of the fact that you are an LITD reader, it goes without saying that you are on top of political / economic / cultural / world-affairs matters as they develop, but here it is in case you've had a busy morning so far.

The first thing that struck me was that after all the congratulatory niceties, the back-and-forth thank yous, the next thing Trump wanted to do was bad-mouth the European countries for not doing more to help Ukraine, even calling out Germany, and Angela Merkel, by name. Why was that necessary? It has a distinct high-school-clique vibe to it. "Stick with me. I'm not a fair-weather friend like those kids who live in your neighborhood." Not exactly conducive to fostering cohesion among what should be our closest allies.

I guess it's just his crude way of buttering Zelensky up so as to kind of hint at a quid-pro-quo, but it's not explicit.

There's not a lot that the impeachment crowd is going to find particularly juicy, and what's there has the Very Stable Genius's signature word-salad quality to it:

. . . I· heard you had a prosecutor who· was very·good and he was shut down and that's really unfair.
_·A lot of people are talking about that, the way they shut your �ery good prosecutor down and you had some �ery bad people involved. Mr. Giuliani is a highly respected man. He was the_ mayor bf New York Ci:ty, a great mayor, and I would like him to

call you. I will ask him to call yoti along with the Attorney·_· General.·:Rudy very much knows what's happening and he is a very capable guy. If you could _speak to him that would be great. Theformer ambassador from the United $tates,· the woman., was badnews �nd th� people she was dealing with in .the Ukraine .were bad news so I jtist wan� to_let you know that� The ot�er thing, There's a lot 6f. talk about Biden's son,. that Eiden stopped the prosecution and a lot of people want to find out about that so whatever you can do with the Attorney General would be great. Biden went around bragging that he stopped the prosecution so if

you ·can look into it... It sounds horrible to me. 

It's a tad unsavory, but that's all there is that's Biden-specific. A bit later, he reiterates that he'll have Attorney General Barr call.

And the Justice Department says it never got any such request from the VSG for Barr to call the Zelensky administration:

The DOJ said Trump has not spoken with Barr about having Ukraine investigate anything relating to Biden or his son. And the department said the president has not asked Barr to contact Ukraine on this or any other matter; nor has Barr has communicated with Ukraine about this or any other subject, or has he discussed this matter, or anything related to Ukraine, with Giuliani.

I'm no legal authority on anything, much less what a US president is authorized to discuss with other countries' leaders, but this seems like rather thin gruel for the impeachment bunch.

Not that it makes the VSG look like a principled, visionary statesman. Moments when he remotely comes close to that are pretty rare.