The Intelligence Committee’s report is a triumph
By Jennifer Rubin
Opinion writer
Dec. 3, 2019 at 5:00 p.m. EST
Some observers of the impeachment hearings conducted under the auspices of the House Intelligence Committee bizarrely concluded that the proceedings lacked “pizzazz.” While that is a ridiculous metric for evaluating an inquiry into gross misconduct by the president, no one will find the report on those hearings and on other evidence boring. It’s got pizzazz to spare.
First, the nuts and bolts from the executive summary:
President Trump’s scheme subverted U.S. foreign policy toward Ukraine and undermined our national security in favor of two politically motivated investigations that would help his presidential reelection campaign. The President demanded that the newly-elected Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, publicly announce investigations into a political rival that he apparently feared the most, former Vice President Joe Biden, and into a discredited theory that it was Ukraine, not Russia, that interfered in the 2016 presidential election. To compel the Ukrainian President to do his political bidding, President Trump conditioned two official acts on the public announcement of the investigations: a coveted White House visit and critical U.S. military assistance Ukraine needed to fight its Russian adversary.
Those facts have yet to be contradicted. We have Trump’s own words on the July 25 rough transcript (“do us a favor though”), diplomat David Holmes’s account of the president pressing Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland about “investigations," the hold on nearly $400 million in aid, Trump’s public statements inviting China and Ukraine to weigh into the election and the testimony of multiple career civil services that Trump outsourced his scheme primarily to Rudolph W. Giuliani, who publicly bragged that he was talking about Biden with Ukrainians.
more:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/12/03/an-intelligence-committee-report-with-pizzazz/
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