Trump Only Has Bad Days Now-- Although I Guess Some Are Worse Than Others

Everybody ready for Halloween?

Assuming-- as you should-- that Mulvaney was speaking for the White House, he admitted that the aid to Ukraine was indeed held up as part of a quid pro quo. So everyone agrees that the military equipment was the quid; the only disagreement is what the quo was. That Trump was shown to be a liar doesn't seem to matter at the White House at this point. His supporters don't care and everyone else already knows everything he says is false anyway. NY Times congressional correspondent Nick Fandos tweeted that Adam Schiff's response to Mulvaney's admission was that "things have gone from very, very bad to much, much worse." And Mulvaney's bullshit that it wasn't really about the Bidens is easily disproven and laughed at. [Late in the day the chief of the gang that couldn't not tell a lie, revised his statement and said there was no quid pro quo after all. Oopsie-doopsie. No one believes him, but Trump's defense team insisted on it for future court arguments.]

The context was Gordon Sondland's devastating testimony yesterday. Sondland was an Oregon hotelier and banister who regularly plowed immense sums of money into the GOP. Examples:

• May 16, 2017- NRSC- $33,900
• May 31, 2016- NRSC- $33,400
• September 11, 2015- RNC- $33,400
• June 28, 2013- RNC- $32,400
• January 30, 2012- RNC- $30,800 x 2
• Jan 14, 2015 Right To Rise, USA- $25,000
• April 19, 2016- Kentucky Republican Party- $10,000
• June 24, 2016- Ohio Republican Party- $10,000
• October 12, 2012- Oregon Republican Party- $6,750

And that doesn't count dozens of max donations to Republicans like Romney, McCain, Bush, Cathy McMorris Rodgers, Thom Tillis, Rand Paul, Portman, etc. And the big one-- a million dollars to Trump's inaugural committee. That's big not just because of the sum, but because Trump pocketed much of that still unaccounted for money. In return, Sondland wanted and got the EU ambassador job, a post he took up in July of 2018. Washington Post reporter John Hudson wrote that "Sondland, a major Trump donor who has became a focus of the impeachment inquiry due to his outsized role in U.S.-Ukraine policy, said in his remarks that he criticized the president’s handling of Ukraine policy, including the temporary hold on nearly $400 million in aid to the country and the recall of the former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch. Sondland called her an 'excellent diplomat' and said he 'regretted' her departure, which followed a campaign by Giuliani to paint her as disloyal to the president... In this remarks, Sondland said in principle he opposes any 'quid pro quo' that would exchange U.S. support to a friendly nation for an investigation into Trump’s political rival, former vice president Joe Biden. But he said he became aware only recently that Trump’s efforts to investigate an obscure Ukrainian energy company named Burisma were due to its associations with Biden, whose son Hunter worked for the energy company. Joe Biden is a leading Democratic candidate for president.

“I did not understand, until much later, that Mr. Giuliani’s agenda might have also included an effort to prompt the Ukrainians to investigate Vice President Biden or his son or to involve Ukrainians, directly or indirectly, in the President’s 2020 reelection campaign,” he said. “Although Mr. Giuliani did mention the name ‘Burisma’ in August 2019, I understood that Burisma was one of many examples of Ukrainian companies run by oligarchs and lacking the type of corporate governance structures found in Western companies.”

Sondland’s apparent failure to connect the dots between Burisma and the Bidens occurred as Giuliani made several televised appearances over the spring and summer criticizing Hunter Biden’s involvement on the board, and numerous newspaper and magazine articles questioned whether his role at Burisma could prove to be a drag on his father’s presidential campaign.

In his testimony, Sondland, a hotel magnate who came to the job with no diplomatic experience, depicts himself as a well-meaning but in some cases out of the loop emissary for the president who tried to do what he could to prop up the government of Ukraine as it fends off Russian-backed separatists.

“My goal has always been to advance U.S. interests in securing a strong relationship with Ukraine,” he said in his remarks. “Withholding foreign aid in order to pressure a foreign government to take such steps would be wrong. I did not and would not ever participate in such undertakings.”

Parts of his testimony appear to conflict with the testimony of other officials this week, including Fiona Hill, the National Security Council’s former senior director for Russia and Europe. Hill told House investigators that she was concerned by Sondland’s talk of investigations in a July meeting, which she eventually relayed to a lawyer for the National Security Council.

Sondland, in his opening remarks, said was never aware of objections from her or her boss, national security adviser John Bolton. “I have to view her testimony-- if the media reports are accurate-- as the product of hindsight and in the context of the widely known tensions between the NSC, on the one hand, and the State Department, on the other hand,” he said.

Sondland claims that his pursuit of investigations in Ukraine were always in line with long-standing U.S. policy to push for transparency and anti-corruption efforts in the country.

You can read all of Sondland's prepared statement here. And... Rick Perry, on a trip to Texas with Trump on Airforce One, that he's resigning. Wonder what Trump was like when he was just 34 years old?