It’s public
The House Intelligence Committee has released the whistleblower complaint.
Today, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence released the declassified whistleblower complaint. The complaint can be viewed here, and the Intelligence Community Inspector General letter regarding the complaint can be viewed here.
Chairman Adam Schiff (D-CA) made the following statement:
“The Committee this morning will be releasing the declassified whistleblower complaint that it received late last night from the ODNI. It is a travesty that it was held up this long.
“This complaint should never have been withheld from Congress. It exposed serious wrongdoing, and was found both urgent and credible by the Inspector General.
“This complaint is a roadmap for our investigation, and provides significant information for the Committee to follow up on with other witnesses and documents. And it is corroborated by the call record released yesterday.
“I want to thank the whistleblower for having the courage to come forward, despite the reprisals they have already faced from the president and his acolytes. We will do everything in our power to protect this whistleblower, and every whistleblower, who comes forward.
“The public has a right to see the complaint and what it reveals.”
I just read it (skipping the footnotes until later) and I’m duly gobsmacked. It wasn’t just Trump flailing around being random, it was a systematic effort over many months. They tried to get rid of all records of that phone call, by stashing them in a system that’s reserved for classified information (which isn’t normally interpreted to mean “the president’s dirty secrets”).
It’s gruesome.
So is this game on? Is Trump going to be able to survive this? Our media reports so little about Trump’s malfeasance/incompetence/idiocy/narcissism/senility/moral vacuum/just plain horribleness that I for one don’t really understand much about how big a threat this is to him.
I’m starting to broadly understand how the US government is supposed to work but it seems that with your government as with ours, all bets are off.
In fairness to our media, there is no room left in our news at the moment for anything other than everyone rubbing their eyes in disbelief at current domestic events and then throwing up their hands and admitting they have no idea what is going on or what it means. That’s been happening for about three years now but to say it got kicked up a gear in the last couple of days is as big of an understatement as the phrase “our prime minister is a dangerous moron.”
I don’t know, but it looks as if it’s game on and as if he won’t be able to survive. But who tf knows.
It’s hard to imagine how he could continue though. Anyone he talks to will know all about this, and he’ll know that, and everyone will know it, and and and. It seems untenable, so untenable that even Republicans will see it. It would seem like letting a rotting corpse go on being president, to let him go on.
But who knows.
Thanks. I can’t decide whether I’m glad nobody else knows either or whether I’m terrified that nobody else knows either. I guess those states are not mutually exclusive.
While we fret, here is our shame without even including the insanity of the last few days and weeks: https://youtu.be/dXyO_MC9g3k
Trump is laying it bare for everyone to see what has been fairly obvious all along: he sees no distinction between his personal interests and the country’s. As far as he’s concerned, Trump is good for America, therefore anything that is good for Trump is good for America. Thus it’s not just ok, but a positive good for him to use the powers of his office, taxpayer money, and anything else at his disposal to leverage personal political gain.
What scares me is that I’m not sure enough Americans are bothered by that. You’ve got the foaming-at-the-mouth types who are convinced that the brown communists hordes are at the gates, and anything and everything is justified to Protect The Republic from the horrors of universal health care and taco trucks. Then you’ve got the more-cynical-than-thou types who think that this is how politics always works, so what’s the big deal?
If there’s enough Republican voters out there who still believe that there are lines that should not be crossed, then maybe this could be the Beginning of the End. But I don’t have much confidence in that.
I’m not convinced Trump bothers with the “Trump is good for America, therefore anything that is good for Trump is good for America” part. I don’t think he thinks about it that hard. I think he’s almost pure id; I think he just wants what he wants and acts accordingly. There’s no thought going on. He has his formulas, and he recites them, but it’s like knowing how to start the car because you’ve done it a million times. He wants to harm Biden so he goes for it; he wants to rage at the press and the Democrats so he goes for it; he wants more money so he goes for it.
I don’t think he even processes “wanting to” rage … he just rages.
I don’t think he even processes “wanting to” rage … he just rages.
He does “want” to hurt people, and he does “want” money, but I don’t think rage crosses that threshold of consciousness.
Aren’t they kind of the same thing? I didn’t mean “he wants to __ so he goes for it” as a two-step process so much as a description of unthinking mindless…explosionofaction.
I don’t know that he’s 100% impulse. I mean, we’ve seen signs in the past of him having awareness that something could cause him a problem and so he should hide it. It’s why he avoids using email, had his mistresses and porn stars contact him through his bodyguard, gave hints instead of direct orders for some things, lied about the status of Trump Tower Moscow, etc.
Here, he could have left this all to off-the-record backchannels. But I don’t think he had any awareness that it’s wrong to use the power of the office to entrench himself. He assumes that if his predecessors didn’t do it, then more fool they. That’s why he took the dumb course of saying what he said in a phone call that was being recorded or at least memorialized, and why his aides had to scramble after the fact to “re-classify” the notes to a high secrecy level to try to cover it up.
This isn’t meant to be in any way exculpatory, by the way. A President who doesn’t even understand that the line exists is worse, in my opinion, than one who intentionally steps over it from time to time.
Screechy, I think that is right on. He has no concept of the distinction between President and King, and no concept that the powers of a king could be limited by another governing body (i.e., QEII cannot just do what she wants. She is subject to Parliamentary authority, and is merely a figurehead for most things). Even in the days of kingly power, the kings were often checked at least some of the time. And there was a time when emperors and kings were removed for enriching themselves – often removed with extreme prejudice by removal of a vital part of their anatomy that they required to continue living.
Trump has a very fairy tale version of an absolute power monarch, and he believes the President is such. He doesn’t realize that the president was actually designed to be weaker than Congress, and that many of the powers the president currently enjoys is only because they were ceded by Congress at some point in the life of that rather short-sighted body.
Oh yes, I know you’re not saying he’s a great guy! I guess I’m just always so amazed by his childish carrying on that I have a hard time believing he has any real thought process any more.
One thing that seems to have driven Trump his entire life is his deep anxiety that he is New Money and not part of the established blue-bloods of American society, as it were. He’s so sensitive to any the barest hint of disrespect or of being looked down-upon, and his anxiety forces him to center himself in every situation. He wants to show it to Them, the ones who make him feel so small and weak in his mind, which of course is anyone and everyone who is not Ivanka or JaredFalpha. I’m trying to think of a literary character who he is like, but failing at the moment; I feel like there must be one among the characters of Charles Dickens, some mean, scraping little man who disdains everyone.
Ophelia,
It’s not much of a thought process. In fact, it’s precisely because his thinking is so unsophisticated that he can’t contemplate a distinction between the U.S. and himself. (Well, except when it comes to taking money out of the Defense Department and putting into his pocket by having the military use his golf resort — then he grasps the distinction.)
I think, in a weird way, he actually believes that was a “beautiful conversation” with Zelensky. He was so nice about it! Didn’t explicitly threaten Zelensky, didn’t embarrass the guy and make him beg for the money, just let him know hey, we’re just asking for a favor, easy-peasy. It’s just like he’s done his whole life — you remind the zoning commissioner of how happy you were to donate to his charity, his wife’s campaign fund, etc., and then say oh, by the way, can’t you see your way clear to approving my latest real estate project, and unless you’re dumb enough to say explicitly that it’s an exchange, you’ll never get prosecuted for bribery. It’s just business!
James Garnett,
I tried to come up with an answer to your question of a literary comparison. Trump has a bit of Tom Buchanan in him: ostentatious displays of wealth, a jock, obsessed with status, condescending and bullying, sexist, and racist. But of course the Buchanans were old money, which is one of the reasons Tom resented the nouveau riche Gatsby.
I thought about one from television — Sir Richard Carlisle on Downton Abbey. He’s a businessman who envies and craves the respectability of the aristocracy, and turns out to be a nasty piece of work. But Carlisle actually appeared to be a genuinely self-made man, and I don’t think his inferiority complex was his main driving force. He also has enough discipline to disguise his nastiness most of the time, whereas Trump’s is just there for everyone to see.
In terms of the resentment as a driving factor, he reminds me of Petyr “Littlefinger” Baelish from Game of Thrones. For those who are unfamiliar, Littlefinger is a very minor noble who wasn’t distinguished enough to be able to marry the woman he preferred, and his resentment fuels a career of scheming and manipulation and treachery that drives a lot of the plot. He gets away with quite a lot simply because the nobles dismiss him as petty and lowbrow; aside from his low birth, he openly makes absurd sexual jokes and remarks inappropriate to a royal court. Nobody seems to believe that someone like him would be capable of doing the things he’s doing (such as robbing the royal treasury blind). He’s also like Trump in being a sexual creep — the woman he intended to marry wasn’t really that into him anyway, and he transfers his obsession onto her adolescent daughter.
Of course, Littlefinger differs from Trump in that the former is (1) actually fairly intelligent and (2) good at business. So it’s not a perfect comparison by any means. And no doubt many GoT fans will protest that they consider LF to be a sympathetic character — but then, Trump has his fans, too, and even those of us who hate him can acknowledge that the old money NY society types who Trump resents are pretty hateable. Like Littlefinger, Trump wasn’t entirely unjustified in having a chip on his shoulder — but it hardly justifies the person he becomes.
I’ve had that thought about Carlisle in Downton Abbey too. The big difference for me though is that he’s so much less overtly crude and clownish – as you say, better at hiding his malevolence, but also intelligent, presentable, etc. It’s hard to think of parallels because Trump is so clownish and so evil both. I think that would be difficult to bring off in fiction – it wouldn’t seem credible.