Two major obstacles to the Dems' impeachment agenda

John Podhoretz at Commentary says there are two factors that have arisen that could quickly turn this latest attempt to nail the president into a big fizzle:

The first concerns a difficult-to-understand detail in one of the early stories on the matter by Kenneth Vogel of the New York Times. Vogel reported that the Ukrainians were unaware of the suspension of U.S. military aid when Presidents Trump and Zelensky had their phone call on July 25. That detail has now been confirmed by Christopher Miller, an expert reporter in Kyiv, in a Buzzfeed dispatch: “The Ukrainian government didn’t know it was being held up in Washington by Trump, according to the two Ukrainian officials. Nearly a month after the call—which Zelensky has since described as ‘good’ and Trump has called ‘perfect’—the Ukrainian government was left stumped when they received word that the aid had in fact been suspended.”

Obviously, if Zelensky did not know about the aid suspension, then the entire notion that the call was drenched in Trumpian mob-boss menace is wrong. To be sure, Ukraine is dependent on American good will, and when Trump asked Zelensky for the favor of looking into something, he was leaning on that. But the “do this for me or you’ll never get that money” threat was not hanging unspoken in the air for the simple reason that Zelensky had no idea the money wasn’t in the pipeline. The House can investigate this all they like and find every manner of supposedly nefarious conduct in the Trump administration’s internal deliberations and thus-far inexplicable aid suspension (and reinstatement on September 11).

The second detail is that the whistleblower who revealed the phone conversation in the first place was in touch with the office of Adam Schiff, the chair of the House Intelligence Committee—which means Schiff knew about the whistleblower’s concerns before he wrote the report. The New York Times story claims the whistleblower was dissatisfied with the way the chief lawyer at the CIA heard his claims. An aide to Schiff “suggested the officer find a lawyer to advise him and meet with an inspector general, with whom he could file a whistle-blower complaint. The aide shared some of what the officer conveyed to Mr. Schiff.” Thus it appears the way in which the contents of the phone call made its way into the general conversation was literally orchestrated by Schiff’s office. If this is accurate, it means Schiff has been an active participant in these events rather than merely a horrified spectator and eventual judge in his role as House Judiciary Committee chair. And a liar, as he said he had no idea what was in the report.

Podhoretz goes on to stress that he is in no way defending how the Very Stable Genius has handled all of this. The VSG's utter lack of discretion, subtlety, and ability to put together two coherent sentences in a row,  combined with his conflation of his own political situation with the national interest, brought on his present troubles.

He continues to make it worse, by the way. His tweets over the last few days have exuded a fair amount of meltdown vibe. His bizarre and awkward press interaction while seated next to the Finnish president was unhelpful in the extreme.

This is one of those contemporary situations we see so frequently in post-America that, unless one is an ate-up tribalist of one stripe or another, presents us with no heroes to cheer for.