Department of Energy Secretary Rick Perry is leaving the Trump administration. After nearly three years in the role, Perry is exiting just as the Ukraine scandal is heating up. In October, Perry announced that he’d be leaving his post—his last day is scheduled for Sunday.
There are many questions surrounding Perry’s involvement in the Ukraine scandal involving President Donald Trump trying to get Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate Democratic candidate Joe Biden in exchange for foreign aid. The alleged quid pro quo led to the US House launching an impeachment inquiry. After Perry attended President Zelensky’s inauguration in May, two political supporters of Perry received lucrative oil and gas exploration contracts from the Ukrainian government. During that trip, the energy secretary gave President Zelensky a list of people who should be awarded the contract; the list of names included a Perry backer.
Up until the Ukraine scandal broke, Perry managed, somehow, to be one of the least controversial members of the Trump cabinet.
Granted, he recently said that Donald Trump was chosen by God to be president, but he also believed Barack Obama became president because of divine intervention as well.
It’s unclear how the Perry’s involvement in Ukraine will play out during the impeachment process, but US Ambassador Gordon Sondland testified earlier this month that the energy secretary knew about the quid pro quo, so Perry has even more incentive to find an excuse to get out of Washington.
The White House has one week to decide to decide if it will participate in the impeachment inquiry hearings. In a Friday letter, Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.), the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, informed Donald Trump that the committee will be considering obstruction of justice charges against the president, and that he must notify Congress by December 6 if he plans to mount a defense or call witnesses.
“Please provide the committee with notice of whether your counsel intends to participate, specifying which of the privileges your counsel seeks to exercise,” Nadler wrote. The letter comes after two weeks of explosive impeachment hearings in the House which included testimony from Bill Taylor, Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, Fiona Hill, and Gordon Sondland.
The House moved to begin impeachment proceedings against the president after news broke that Trump asked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden and his son, Hunter in exchange for foreign aid.
dDespite confessing to the quid pro quo, Trump has continued to refer to the hearings as a “hoax” or a “witch hunt.” Impeachment hearings will resume on Wednesday.
Welcome back to the Mother Jonesimpeachment blog, where I talk at length about the phrase “quid pro quo” despite my inability to say it aloud without slurring the “quo.”
Last time, we wondered how the hell the phrase “quid pro quo” became the litmus test for impeaching President Donald Trump. A reader emailed to note that this is far from the first time conservatives have used “quid pro quo” to limit prosecuting corruption.
In 2013, the US Supreme Court decidedMcCutcheon v.FEC, a case concerned with “aggregate limits,” which was a two-year cap on the total amount a single donor could give to political candidates. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that limiting donations damages the right to free speech and does “not further the permissible governmental interest in preventing quid pro quo corruption.”
But, wait—what separates quid pro quo corruption from all other corruption?
Corruption, under Robert’s view, didn’t just include quid pro quo; it had to be quid pro quo. In a dissent, Justice Stephen Breyer noted that the Supreme Court had found other versions of corruption in the past. For example, in FEC v. Beaumont in 2003, the court ruled that a corporation could not give directly to candidates (which instead required the creation of a PAC) because corruption could manifest not only as “quid pro quo agreements, but also as undue influence on an officeholder’s judgment.”
But this narrow form of corruption has become the status quo. In 2016, the Supreme Court unanimously overturned corruption charges on former governor of Virginia Robert McDonnell—Roberts also wrote that decision. He ultimately ruled that the “Ferraris, Rolexes, and ball gowns” that McDonnell received from a Virginia nutritional supplement CEO who wanted a favor didn’t meet the standard.
As Zephyr Teachout, former candidate for attorney general in New York and author of Corruption in America: From Benjamin Franklin’s Snuff Box to Citizens United, pointed out in 2014, Roberts’ McCutcheon decision gave credence to the idea that “corruption isn’t corruption if there isn’t a quid pro quo.”
There was clearly a quid pro quo AND there is clearly no requirement of a quid pro quo, in this horrifying master class in all the actions for which impeachment is needed.
“Several of the justices attempted to make the phrase the epitome of corruption, instead of an example of it,” Teachout wrote in 2014. In fact, quid pro quo has “shallow roots,” she argued in a law review article from the same year. It is “not a major part of traditional white collar criminal law doctrine” and “not a requirement in many states for proving bribery.”
The basic point is that quid pro quo corruption is just one type of corruption, and the Supreme Court’s 2013 ruling limited the scope of corruption, thereby allowing other types of thievery by the powerful to go unchecked.
Still, even with that narrow definition, Trump’s exchange with the Ukrainian president counts as quid-pro-quo corruption.
The House Judiciary Committee has set the date for its first impeachment hearing, scheduled to take place on December 4. The chair of the committee, Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.), sent Donald Trump a letter on Tuesday informing the president of his rights in the impeachment process and inviting him to attend the hearing. “I am hopeful that you and your counsel will opt to participate in the Committee’s hearing, consistent with the rules of decorum and with the solemn nature before us,” Nadler writes in the letter.
It’s the next step in the House’s impeachment inquiry, after a week of testimonies in the House Intelligence Committee, which included several bombshell testimonies from Bill Taylor, Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, and Fiona Hill. The hearing next week will consist of legal experts who will discuss the “historical and constitutional basis of impeachment.”
The announcement comes after a federal judge ruling Monday that former White House counsel Don McGahn must testify before Congress as part of the impeachment inquiry process. It’s a ruling that could have a significant effect on other White House officials that are at the center of Trump’s Ukraine scandal, including acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney.
Donald Trump with then-Senate candidate John Kennedy (R-La.) in December 2016Andrew Harnik/AP
An influential Republican senator on Sunday lent credence to President Donald Trump’s deranged “Crowdsrike” conspiracy theory—the debunked notion that the Democratic National Committee, with help from Ukraine, fabricated the 2016 Russian hacking operation. Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) claimed during a Fox News Sunday interview that neither he nor anyone else knows whether it was Russia or Ukraine that stole Democratic emails during the campaign. The is simply untrue: The US intelligence community has definitely concluded that the Russian government directed the hacking.
On FOX News Sunday: Louisiana Senator John Kennedy reacts to President Trump saying Ukraine may have the DNC server, an idea that runs contrary to the intelligence community. Chris asks Senator Kennedy who he thinks is responsible for hacking the DNC. #FNS#FoxNewspic.twitter.com/zBbzuoXSje
On Fox, host Chris Wallace played a video of Trump claiming last week that the DNC “gave the server to Crowdstrike,” a cybersecurity firm that the president said was “owned by a very wealthy Ukrainian.” Trump added, “I still wanna see that server. You know, the FBI has never gotten that server.” Virtually every word of this was false, as Mother Jones’ Dan Friedman explained:
This is a nonsense conspiracy theory…Crowdstrike, based in California, is not owned by a wealthy Ukrainian. The DNC did not have one server. They had about 140. Crowdstrike imaged them and then gave the data to the FBI, not Ukraine. Trump’s claim is part of a false argument that Ukraine, not Russia, meddled in the 2016 election. Russia, which US intelligence agencies have concludedinterfered in the 2016 election, haspromoted the lie that Ukraine was responsible.
Wallace then asked Kennedy, “Who do you believe was responsible for hacking the DNC and Clinton campaign computers—their emails? Was it Russia or Ukraine?”
“I don’t know,” Kennedy responded. “Nor do you. Nor do any of us.”
Wallace then noted that the “entire intelligence community says it was Russia.”
“Right, but it could also be Ukraine,” Kennedy shot back. “I’m not saying that I know one way or the other.”
Trump has repeatedly attempted to undermine the intelligence community’s conclusion that Russia interfered in the 2016 election to help him win—most famously during a joint press conference last year with Vladimir Putin in Helsinki. The president’s obsession with Crowdstrike has now become a key element of the ongoing impeachment crisis. He pressured Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate this conspiracy theory during their July 25 call. Last month, acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney seemed to acknowledge that Trump had suspended military aid to Ukraine in an effort to get Zelensky to probe the “corruption related to the DNC server.” Mulvaney later tried to walk back that admission.
During her opening statement in Thursday’s impeachment hearing, Fiona Hill, the former top White House adviser on Russia, said that she believed individuals who possess valuable information related to the Ukraine scandal have a “moral obligation” to come forward. For many, the line was taken as a subtle jab at the various Trump administration officials who have spurned requests for their testimony, including Hill’s former boss, John Bolton.
So far, Bolton has refused to testify without a court order—a legal process that could prolong the impeachment investigation. Still, his lawyer has publicly suggested that he has juicy details to share. In the meantime, Bolton has inked a lucrative book deal, sent oddly cryptic Tweets, and returned to his political action committee, Bolton PAC.
Asked about the former national security adviser’s antics on Sunday, House Intelligence Committee chair Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) didn’t hide his displeasure. “He was invited to come in, and he did not choose to come in and testify,” Schiff told CNN’s Jake Tapper. “His deputy, Fiona Hill, and his other deputy, Col. Vindman, and Tim Morrison, others in the national security council have shown the courage to come in.”
Adam Schiff on John Bolton's refusal to testify before Congress: "He will have to explain, one day, if he maintains that position why he wanted to wait to put it in a book instead of telling the American people what he knew when it really mattered to the country" #CNNSOTUpic.twitter.com/W7cN6zhMtE
“He will have to explain one day,” Schiff continued, “if he maintains that position why he wanted to wait to put it in a book instead of telling the American people what he knew when it really mattered to the country.”
Schiff then pointed to Hill’s defiance of White House efforts to block her testimony as the kind of “courage” Bolton lacks. “She made the decision that this is the right thing to do. John Bolton should make the same decision.“
Tapper noted that even if Bolton refuses to appear before the House, he might still be compelled to testify in a Senate trial. “He could,” Schiff responded, before adding, “That doesn’t relieve him of the obligation right now to show the courage that Dr. Hill did.”
Throughout the last week, House Intelligence Committee Chair Adam Schiff has used his position to lay out a powerful argument for impeaching President Trump for withholding military aid from Ukraine in exchange for investigations into the Bidens. His closing statements for each of the public hearings clearly outline evidence against Trump and carefully dismantle the Republican talking points that seek to absolve the president of guilt. Let’s review Schiff’s impassioned statements from the past week.
Tuesday
Schiff was emphatic in his closing statements Tuesday that there is no evidence to support the notion that Trump was only seeking to root out corruption in Ukraine, following testimony from Lt. Colonel Alexander Vindman, the Ukraine expert on the National Security Council, and Jennifer Williams, an aide to Vice President Mike Pence. Republicans have tried to argue that Trump’s interest in investigating Burisma, the natural gas company for which Hunter Biden served as a board member, was borne from a genuine interest in fighting corruption.
“The evidence all points in the other direction,” Schiff said. “The evidence points in the direction of the president inviting Ukraine to engage in the corrupt acts of investigating a US political opponent.”
After former envoy to Ukraine Kurt Volker and former Trump adviser Tim Morrison testified later that day, Schiff homed in on a meeting Volker witnessed between Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland and Andriy Yermak, a top aide to Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky. “Sondland told you that he had informed the Ukrainians that if they wanted that $400 million in military aid, they were going to have to do those investigations that the president wanted,” Schiff said, addressing Volker.
Then, he defined bribery as, “the conditioning of official acts in exchange for something of personal value.” “The official acts we’re talking about here,” he said, “are a White House meeting that President Zelensky desperately sought and, as you have acknowledged, Ambassador Volker, was deeply important to this country at war with Russia.”
According to Volker’s testimony, Trump withheld military aid and conditioned both the aid and a meeting with Zelensky upon an investigation of Burisma. Republicans were upset only that Trump got caught, Schiff said.
Wednesday
Wednesday’s hearings began with testimony in which Ambassador Sondland affirmed that there was a quid pro quo. During his closing statement, Schiff read Sondland’s testimony back to him:
Mr. Giuliani’s requests were a quid pro quo for arranging a White House visit for President Zelensky. Mr. Giuliani demanded that Ukraine make a public statement announcing investigations of the 2016 election, DNC server, and Burisma. Mr. Giuliani was expressing the desires of the president of the United States, and we knew that these investigations were important to the president.
Moreover, Sondland testified that the hold on aid was directly related to Trump’s request that Ukraine investigate both Burisma and the 2016 elections. Schiff refuted the idea that anyone other than the president was behind the scheme. “I do not believe that the president would allow himself to be led by the nose by Rudy Giuliani or Ambassador Sondland or anybody else,” he said. “I think the president was the one who decided whether a meeting would happen, whether the aid would be lifted, not anyone who worked for him.”
Following the testimony of Laura Cooper, deputy assistant secretary of defense for Russia, Ukraine and Eurasia, and David Hale, undersecretary of state for political affairs, Schiff made clear that the United States’ actions in Ukraine were not, as Republicans have argued, anti-corruption. Those actions were corrupt in and of themselves.
Schiff identified several of Trump’s actions as corrupt: when Trump recalled Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch, “an anti-corrupt champion,” from her post in Ukraine; when Trump praised Ukraine’s corrupt former prosecutors and said that “they were treated very unfairly”; when Trump conditioned a meeting with Zelensky on investigations into his political rival, Joe Biden; and when Trump told Zelensky, “I want you to do us a favor” and requested investigations into a conspiracy theory about the 2016 election hackings and into the Bidens.
“The great men and women in your department under Secretary Hale and in your department, Ms. Cooper, they carry that message around the world, that that the United States is devoted to the rule of law,” Schiff said in conclusion. “But when they see a president who is not devoted to the rule of law who is not devoted to anti-corruption but instead demonstrates in word and deed corruption, they are forced to ask themselves, what does America stand for anymore?”
Thursday
On the final day of the hearings before a congressional recess, Schiff let loose for 20 minutes following the testimony of the White House’s former top Russia adviser Fiona Hill and US Embassy official David Holmes. He stressed that there was ample evidence for Trump’s wrongdoings, calling Republicans’ cries of hearsay “absurd.”
Trump, he said, used his political office for his personal gain. “And in my view, there is nothing more dangerous than an unethical president who believes they are above the law.”
President Donald Trump on the phone on June 27, 2017.Alex Wong/Getty Images
Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee, as recently as Thursday, have argued President Donald Trump did not direct a freeze on $400 million in US aid to Ukraine in exchange for the country announcing investigations that would help Trump’s campaign in 2020. But Trump, as ever, is making his apologists look dumb. In a 53-minute phone call this morning to Fox & Friends, Trump pretty much confessed, again, to the actions for which he faces impeachment.
“There’s tremendous corruption,” Trump said during the call. “Whyshouldwebegivinghundredsofmillionsofdollars to countries when there’s this kind of corruption?”
Trump seems to admit quid pro quo at 6:34: "We're looking for corruption. There's tremendous corruption. Why should we be giving hundreds of millions of dollars to countries when there's this kind of corruption? If you look at my call I said 'corruption.'" https://t.co/77jZY8DYTD
To be sure, the president’s defenders can note that Trump asserted here that he was worried about corruption. But moments earlier, Trump defined just what he meant by “corruption.” And it’s not actually corruption.
“They have the server, right, from the DNC, Democratic National Committee,” Trump said. “The FBI went in and they told them, get out of here, we’re not giving it to you. They gave the server to CrowdStrike or whatever it’s called, which is a country—which is a company owned by a very wealthy Ukrainian. And I still want to see that server. You know, the FBI’s never gotten that server. That’s a big part of this whole thing. Why did they give it to a Ukrainian company?”
This is a nonsense conspiracy theory that even unctuous Fox hosts weren’t endorsing. Crowdstrike, based in California, is not owned by a wealthy Ukrainian. The DNC did not have one server. They had about 140. Crowdstrike imaged them and then gave the data to the FBI, not Ukraine. Trump’s claim is part of a false argument that Ukraine, not Russia, meddled in the 2016 election. Russia, which US intelligence agencies have concludedinterfered in the 2016 election, haspromoted the lie that Ukraine was responsible. This is an apparent Kremlin effort to deflect blame from its own intelligence agents.
But putting that aside, Trump’s words were revealing. Asked by host Steve Doocy: “Are you sure?” Trump bore down: “Well, that’s what the word is,” the president said. “That’s what I asked, actually in my phone call.” (This refers to Trump’s July 25 call with Ukraine’s President, Volodymyr Zelensky.)
“I asked it very point-blank, because we’re looking for corruption,” Trump continued. “There’s tremendous corruption. Why should we be giving hundreds of millions of dollars to countries when there’s this kind of corruption. If you look at my call, I said, you know, ‘corruption.'”
In fact, Trump did not once say the word “corruption” in the reconstructed transcript of his call with Zelensky that the White House released in September. Instead, Trump mentioned the same conspiracy theory. “I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine,” Trump said. “They say CrowdStrike…I guess you have one of your wealthy people…The server, they say Ukraine has it.”
So when Trump referred on Fox and Friends to “this kind of corruption” what he actually meant was his conspiracy theory that a Ukrainian oligarch has the DNC server. Trump and his chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, havemade similar statements that seemed to confirm a quid pro quo involving aid to Ukraine. But as Business Insidernotes, this was the first time that Trump explained that his supposed worry about corruption in Ukraine related to the server issue.
Trump is telling everyone that he froze military aid to Ukraine to get them to announce an investigation into Ukraine’s alleged involvement in the 2016 election. Congressional Republicans should listen to him.
In a hard pivot from what you’d ordinarily see on Fox & Friends, host Ainsley Earhardt made a desperate plea on behalf of Americans everywhere Friday morning: “We want gun safety.”
Earhardt was complaining about the impeachment hearings, making the argument that the time and attention spent investigating the Ukraine scandal was preventing Congress from moving forward on other important issues, like gun safety. To the tape:
Ainsley Earhardt: “America is not stupid. They are watching this happen. It’s weeks and weeks of impeachment. And they’re screaming, please we want gun safety”
Is this a joke? Where was this after Sandy Hook, San Bernardino, Pulse, Parkland, Las Vegas, El Paso or Dayton? pic.twitter.com/Af2GL22aMD
Let’s back up a second. After each of the countless mass shootings in recent years, when a majority of Americans call on Congress to strengthengun control laws, Fox & Friends hasn’t exactly joined that chorus of calls. Here’s what Earhardt had to say about gun control laws after the El Paso shooting, nearly four months ago:
Ainsley Earhardt says gun control is irrelevant and useless because "if you're bad enough" to massacre people, "you're bad enough to steal a gun." pic.twitter.com/LjHvd7ZsgD
And in September, Tony Perkins, the president of the anti-LGBTQ Family Research Council, went onFox & Friends to blame gun violence on “an absence of morality” and lack of religion, rather than loose gun laws.
Of course, impeachment isn’t the reason gun control legislation hasn’t moved. As Cydney Hargis, a researcher at Media Matters For America notes, the Democratic-controlled House has already passed gun control legislation, which Senate Republicans have refused to vote on. After an outbreak of mass shooting this summer, President Donald Trump promised to put forward his own gun control proposal. He has not done so.
At the start of Thursday’s impeachment hearing, former Trump national security official Fiona Hill took a thinly veiled shot at Republicans. “Based on questions and statements I have heard, some of you on this committee appear to believe that Russia and its security services did not conduct a campaign against our country—and that perhaps, somehow, for some reason, Ukraine did,” she said. “This is a fictional narrative that has been perpetrated and propagated by the Russian security services themselves.”
Donald Trump, it seems, wasn’t paying attention. This morning, the president phoned into Fox & Friends for an hour-long interview in which he once again repeated his long-debunked “CrowdStrike” conspiracy theory. This is the same nutty theory that Trump pressured Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to look into during the infamous July 25 call. And it’s the same theory that Trump wanted investigated in return for releasing the hold on military aid to Ukraine, according to acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney. (Mulvaney later attempted to un-say this.)
On Fox & Friends, President Trump promotes the completely debunked Crowdstrike conspiracy theory about Ukraine. Steve Doocy asks if he is sure that's what happened, and Trump replies "that's what the word is," going on to ramble about other countries not "putting up money." pic.twitter.com/uGXZ4tMBic
The CrowdStrike nonsense is an elaborate conspiracy theory, but at its core, it holds that the Russian hack of Democratic National Committee emails in 2016 was actually a hoax and that Ukrainians were somehow involved. As David Corn explained:
Immediately after the Democratic National Committee in June 2016 revealed that its computer servers had been infiltrated and that a cybersecurity company called CrowdStrike had determined the hackers were Russian operatives, right-wing websites and chat groups began challenging this idea and promoting other scenarios. They focused on CrowdStrike, and eventually the theory emerged that the DNC was not infiltrated by the Russians and that CrowdStrike had moved the servers (which held the proof!) to Ukraine to prevent the FBI from inspecting them and learning the truth. (This theory overlapped with the debunked conspiracy theory that a young DNC staffer named Seth Rich, not Russia, had obtained the purloined DNC emails and passed them to WikiLeaks. Rich was murdered in an attempted robbery in Washington.) On 4chan and Reddit, Trump devotees advanced this idea that the DNC and CrowdStrike had fabricated the Russian attack. And, not surprisingly, Russian media outlets spread the tale. (BuzzFeed News has detailed this transmission belt of skulduggery.) So there was Trump echoing Russian propaganda and telling Zelensky, “I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation with CrowdStrike, they say CrowdStrike…I guess you have one of your wealthy people. The server, they say Ukraine has it.”
Of course, in the real world the facts were established by the Mueller probe, two congressional investigations (led by Republicans), and an investigation conducted by the intelligence community: Russia hacked the DNC to steal information it could use in its covert campaign to subvert the 2016 election.
The CrowdStrike theory is so ludicrous that not even the Trump sycophants at Fox seemed to buy it. “Are you sure they did that?” an incredulous Steve Doocy asked Trump. “Are you sure they gave it to Ukraine?”
“Well, that’s what the word is,” the president responded.
Can you pitch in a few bucks to help fund Mother Jones' investigative journalism? We're a nonprofit (so it's tax-deductible), and reader support makes up about two-thirds of our budget.
We noticed you have an ad blocker on. Can you pitch in a few bucks to help fund Mother Jones' investigative journalism?
