This was written in the first term of our present president. Some of you may recall that Jim Acosta was a CNN representative journalist to the White House and was once stopped from doing his job--press pass taken-- by the then, and now, president...
As I have shared, a book never gets old, so while I read, I find there is much that I already knew about that time... But, it didn't take me long to find the following excerpt... It seems appropriate at this time, especially, to open a discussion of the following:
On January 19, 2017, I was reporting from the White House on the final day of Barack Obama’s administration. But the story was no longer Obama; his time was up. The story was the arrival of Trump. And there was a sense of dread inside the Obama West Wing. That day, the last before Trump would be sworn into office, I decided to roam the media-accessible hallway of the West Wing that leads to the area known as “Upper Press.” This is where the office of the White House press secretary is located, and I was milling around, looking to say farewell to some of the people who had worked for Obama. The last press secretary of the Obama administration, Josh Earnest, had already cleared out his office. He was gone. So, too, was Eric Schultz, Obama’s deputy press secretary. Schultz and I had developed a good working relationship during my time covering the Obama White House. Anybody who knew Eric understood full well that he had his own misgivings about the press. He thought we chased Trump’s bright, shiny objects too much, and he was right...
--Acosta, Jim. The Enemy of the People: A Dangerous Time to Tell the Truth in America (p. 9). Harper Paperbacks. Kindle Edition.
There was a feeling that the great weight of the presidency of the United States, with all its trappings and ceremony, would rest upon Trump’s shoulders and humble him, turning the New York businessman into a leader all Americans could admire. But as Obama’s longtime strategist David Axelrod has observed, presidential campaigns have a way of magnifying one’s character—like an “MRI of the soul.” Trump’s soul was about to be magnified...
--Acosta, Jim. The Enemy of the People: A Dangerous Time to Tell the Truth in America (pp. 11-12). Harper Paperbacks. Kindle Edition.
Choice of Latest Song as Most Relevant, in my opinion
Trump’s supporters were so loyal that they booed as a Bruce Springsteen song played over the loudspeakers. They weren’t yelling “Bruce”; they were booing, perhaps in response to Springsteen referring to Trump as a “moron” in the weeks before the election. But that wasn’t the memory that stayed with me. It was when Trump’s Pennsylvania campaign manager, David Urban, came up to me and said, “Follow me.” We made our way outside and then walked the length of the line of people waiting to get inside. It was easily a mile and a half long. “Does this look like a losing campaign to you?” Urban asked. “No, it doesn’t,” I replied. It was a sight to behold. A thought occurred to me: If Trump wins Pennsylvania, Clinton is in very big trouble. The next night, we covered Trump’s last event of the 2016 campaign, a rally in Grand Rapids before thousands of screaming Michiganders wearing red “Make America Great Again” hats. Trump had remarked that the large crowd hardly had the look of a second-place finish. How right he was! With crowds like the ones he was receiving in the final days of the campaign, Trump didn’t need the press. And what happened after his final rally in Grand Rapids made that all too clear. Although Trump’s plane was parked on the tarmac right next to the press plane, the Republican candidate refused the time-honored tradition for a presidential candidate of posing in front of the plane for a photo with the journalists covering his or her campaign. One of Trump’s traveling press aides, Stephanie Grisham, told us he was unavailable. (Yeah, right.) Disappointed, we schlepped onto the press plane for the final ride back to New York. It was hardly surprising that Trump would stiff the press out of the planeside picture. He had spent the better part of the last year savaging the news media. We were, in his words, “disgusting,” “dishonest,” “scum,” “thieves,” “crooks,” “liars,” and so on. Trump simply could not stand us. As a journeyman correspondent, I had already covered three presidential campaigns before “the Donald” came along. My first Election Eve picture with a candidate was in 2004, with John Kerry, who lost. I’ll never forget that day. Unlike Trump, who rode on his own private plane (dubbed Trump Force One by the press), separate from the press plane, Kerry and the media all traveled on the same charter jet. (That’s the campaign norm, one of many that Trump was happy to break.) And on Election Day 2004, Kerry walked to the press cabin and handed out red fleece jackets. Emblazoned on each were the words “Kerry Edwards Press Corps.” (One small problem with the jackets: “Kerry Edwards” was written in a bright white stitching. The words “Press Corps” were barely visible in a dark blue—so dark that at a gas station on the way home after Kerry lost, a motorist looked at my new fleece and said, “Sorry, you lost.” He couldn’t make out from the jacket that I was with the press.) No one thought a fleece jacket would be forthcoming from the Trump campaign. There had been no candidate bonding time with Trump as the 2016 campaign came to an end, so it wasn’t exactly a surprise when Trump skipped the group photo and one last moment as a candidate to make peace with his imagined enemy. Leaving nothing to chance, his staff had arranged it so that the two planes didn’t even land at the same airport, with the press plane landing in Newark, far away from Trump Force One’s home at LaGuardia. I felt bad for the younger campaign reporters, some barely into their twenties, who had spent the last eighteen months chronicling Trump’s candidacy. I had wanted them to have that picture. So, as we got off the press plane in Newark at 3:30 a.m. on Election Day and started plodding toward the sad, dark buses awaiting us, I shouted at everybody to assemble in front of the plane. We were going to have our goddamned picture. One of my colleagues had procured a cardboard cutout of Trump. We propped it up in the middle of us and all gathered together on the tarmac for the money shot. And with the flashlights on our mobile phones angled up at our faces to provide some much-needed lighting, we managed a pretty damn good middle-of-the-night photo in front of the plane. After all the taunting and all the abuse from a candidate who repeatedly lashed out at the news media, posing for that picture gave us all a good laugh. * * * IT WAS 4:30 IN THE MORNING ON ELECTION DAY WHEN THE CAMPAIGN reporters following Donald J. Trump’s unlikely, unconventional, unbelievable bid for the presidency arrived, haggard, half-drunk, and bleary-eyed, at the Manhattan hotel preferred by the press corps, the JW Marriott Essex House. We were standing in line, waiting patiently for our room keys, when in walks Reince Priebus, the chairman of the Republican National Committee. Priebus had become a trusted adviser to Trump, sticking by the real estate tycoon when times were tough. I had always liked Priebus. A Wisconsin nice guy, he was the GOP’s smooth operator, easygoing with the party and the press. He seemed genuinely human to me, a rarity in the Washington viper pit. The RNC chair had been with Trump through good times and bad. He had dutifully gone on the “shows” and fought the good fight, insisting against all evidence to the contrary that the former host of the reality TV show The Apprentice was going to win the presidency. But privately, Priebus was less confident. In the lobby of the Essex House, he walked right up to me and said, “It’s going to take a miracle for us to win.” Priebus was a little tipsy that morning. Still, I couldn’t believe my ears. He just walked up in a bit of a stupor and uttered those unbelievable words. So, I let him talk. Priebus laid out what all the data were telling them: that the Trump campaign would lose but by a narrow margin. In Reince’s mind, that was a small victory. “Didn’t you think we were dead after the Access Hollywood thing?” he asked. “Yes,” I said. “I said so on TV.” I had, actually. On The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer, the very day the Access Hollywood tape surfaced. On the tape, as most of the world knows by now, Trump was caught on a hot microphone saying he could grab a woman “by the pussy” and get away with it, among other outrageous remarks. At the time, I said that the tape probably meant the end of his campaign. “The bottom of the barrel” was how I described Trump’s behavior on the recording. Oh, how wrong I was. Priebus repeated himself: “Didn’t you think that was the end?”
--Acosta, Jim. The Enemy of the People: A Dangerous Time to Tell the Truth in America (pp. 13-16). Harper Paperbacks. Kindle Edition.
Trump was going to be president, and the whole world was starting to freak out. * * *
IT FELT AS IF NOVEMBER 9 WOULD LAST FOREVER. AFTER MY THREE-HOUR nap in the morning, I went for a run. And then it was back to work. We did a piece for The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer that evening. And before long, it was time to do a live shot for Anderson Cooper 360. It was back on the hamster wheel. The frenetic pace of the campaign did not end on November 8. If anything, it was accelerating. As we were preparing to do our 8:00 p.m. live shot, something incredible was beginning to happen.
Thousands of people were marching on the streets of Manhattan, descending on Trump Tower, chanting, “Not my president!” I was walking down West Fifty-Seventh Street, toward Fifth Avenue, and the demonstrators were everywhere. The election of Donald J. Trump had ended.
The resistance to Trump was born. But this new political force was an unstable source of energy, not completely directed at the incoming president. As I was getting set up for my 8:00 p.m. live shot, with my producer Kristen Holmes and a security official standing with me, the swarm of protesters was starting to gather around us. The demonstrators, understandably, were angry. Many of them were emotional and raging, and not all of them were friendly toward us. Then I started to hear the chant. “CNN elected Trump . . .
CNN elected Trump!” some of the demonstrators were shouting, a few of them directly at me. Theirs was a point shared by others. We seemed to give Trump too much coverage during the GOP primary season. The network brass has since admitted as much. We didn’t elect him, but, as I like to remind a lot of Trump supporters, the press as a whole gave their candidate a boost during the primaries that no money could have bought. The hostility we encountered that night felt unrestrained and possibly dangerous. As soon as our live shot was over, the show producers for Anderson Cooper 360 told us to get the hell out of there.
--Acosta, Jim. The Enemy of the People: A Dangerous Time to Tell the Truth in America (pp. 18-19). Harper Paperbacks. Kindle Edition.
“Rudy has become a liability,” a Trump adviser texted me. “Rudy has issues,” the adviser added. It was the fall of 2019 and former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani was back, and not in a good way. The same Giuliani who had relished his role as a one-man fog machine during the Mueller investigation, explaining away Trump’s roles in both the payoff to porn star Stormy Daniels as well as the president’s repeated attempts to obstruct the investigation, as outlined in the special counsel’s report, had returned for another round as a consequential figure in Trump’s presidency. But this time around, Rudy’s resurrection in the news was a bad moon rising for Trump. Giuliani, who once appeared on the cover of Time and was dubbed “America’s Mayor” in celebration of his leadership after the 9/11 attacks, was no longer the heroic figure known to most Americans simply as “Rudy.” Unsuccessful in his own bid for the presidency in 2008, Giuliani still traveled with a small entourage, which typically included a loyal security guard. My colleagues and I had run into Rudy several times while staying at the Marriott in Palm Beach, near Trump’s Florida resort, Mar-a-Lago. Why was Giuliani staying at the Marriott and not the “Southern White House,” as Trump called it, we all wondered. On one occasion, I was standing in the lobby of the Marriott as Giuliani rolled his suitcase up to the front desk to check in. “Are Michael Cohen’s documents in there?” I asked with a laugh. Giuliani chuckled. Despite not being a guest at Trump’s seaside resort, Rudy hob nobbed plenty at Mar-a-Lago. But by the end of 2019, Giuliani had become, to some at MAL, something of a skunk at the garden party. “I try to stay clear of him when he’s there,” one Trump confidante said of Giuliani to me in early 2020. Here’s why. Giuliani was becoming more infamous for his milling around a different Trump property, as in the president’s hotel in Washington, DC, just down Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House. The former mayor, a fixture in the lobby, which was akin to the Star Wars cantina, for its tendency to attract Trump world figures, both big and small, was working on a new project: Ukraine. “You can see oil sheiks heading into conference rooms with soldiers for hire,” one Trump confidante quipped about the rogue’s gallery of characters patronizing Trump’s hotel. You’d also often see Rudy, the confidant said. A frequent visitor to the Trump hotel lobby bar would not only rub elbows with people like Giuliani, former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, and former press secretary Sean Spicer, to name a few. Then there were the patrons who coveted their own place in Trump world, people like Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, two shadowy associates of Giuliani who would go on to appear prominently in the massive Ukraine scandal that engulfed the administration by the end of 2019. By the end of the year, an embarrassing piece of video surfaced on Twitter showing Giuliani, Parnas, and Fruman carrying on one night inside the Trump DC hotel lobby, just another rendezvous in what had become the living room of Trump’s version of the swamp. The video was playing in heavy rotation on the cable networks. What the Ukraine affair revealed about Rudy was that he was not just Trump’s personal attorney. The former mayor had become something of an international consultant on security issues, his bread-and-butter business in a post-9/11 world. Giuliani traveled the world, advising foreign leaders on pressing national security issues in their respective orbits, whether that be in Eastern Europe or the Middle East. Rudy had clients and contacts in some rough places, namely Ukraine. Guiliani reached into his Rolodex to assist Trump administrative efforts to coerce Ukraine, a weaker foreign power, into providing dirt on a key adversary and a leading Democrat in the race for 2020, former vice president Joe Biden. Several other top Trump administration officials were aware of at least elements of the alleged scheme, from the acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney to former national security advisor John Bolton. Trump was genuinely shocked the Ukraine scandal was leading to his impeachment, I was told. A couple of his advisers joked to me that Trump had done worse things as president. Before we get to the part when Donald Trump is impeached, it’s important to look back. Trump didn’t become only the third U.S. president to be swatted with the constitutional equivalent of the ugly stick by accident. A lot of folks in Trump’s world certainly saw it coming. As one of my sources told me almost immediately after Democrats won back control of the House of Representatives in late 2018, Trump feared he would eventually be impeached. The source, a Trump confidant, posited that without Chief of Staff John Kelly, Defense Secretary James Mattis, and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, it was only a matter of time before Trump was in the kind of hot water that potentially leads to one’s removal from the Oval Office. In fact, Kelly had revealed to a reporter in 2019 that he warned Trump if he appointed a “yes-man” as his chief of staff he would be impeached. That successor to Kelly, Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney, was made merely the “acting” chief of staff, a reminder that Trump enjoyed having top officials in “acting” roles, a power play that obviously gave him more control of the bureaucracy. Mulvaney, who, as “acting” chief of staff, had returned to former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski’s doctrine of “let Trump be Trump,” went on to become embroiled in the Ukraine scandal as well. Adding to the witch’s brew was something aides had also feared about Trump, that his highly questionable behavior on foreign leader calls was something of a ticking time bomb. More than just his interactions with Russia’s Vladimir Putin, there were examples, both big and small, that seemed to spell trouble. Trump often said outlandish things on his calls with foreign leaders that just flabbergasted veteran national security officials in the administration, as well as aides to those heads of state on the other end of the line. For example, as a former top aide to Emmanuel Macron told me, Trump once mentioned an alternative cell phone number to the French president as a way to work around his own White House staff. The number, Macron’s team assumed, was Trump’s personal cell phone number. Macron had just won his election to the presidency in May 2017 and was sitting at his desk when Trump called. As the former aide who witnessed the exchange described it, Trump kept gushing to Macron during their conversation that the French leader’s victory was “phenomenal.” Trump, Macron thought, “sounded like a kid,” the aide said. “It’s easier if you call me directly,” Trump told Macron as he passed along this alternative phone number, according to the senior aide, who said jaws dropped in the room. That way, Trump told Macron, people can’t listen to what he’s up to, the French aide recalled the U.S. president as saying. Trump has since said he no longer uses a personal cell phone. But it was during his infamous July 25th phone conversation with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky that Trump, for all practical purposes, impeached himself. As polls would demonstrate throughout much of the last half of 2019, a large majority of Americans (Democrats, Independents, but not many Republicans) believed Trump acted inappropriately by soliciting the assistance of a foreign government in the 2020 election. Trump’s violations, which eventually became memorialized in the two articles of impeachment approved by the House, can be broken down into two basic parts. First, Trump had abused the power of his office in pressuring Zelensky to produce damaging information about his leading 2020 rival, former vice president Joe Biden, and his son Hunter. To squeeze his counterpart in Kiev, Trump froze hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid to Ukraine and withheld an Oval Office meeting prized by Zelensky. It looked and sounded like a shakedown. To cover up his actions, Trump sealed the deal on the second article of impeachment by blocking key administration officials from cooperating with the House inquiry. Mulvaney and countless other officials were simply barred from testifying. In other words, Trump obstructed Congress, just as Richard Nixon tried but failed to do before he resigned in disgrace. The White House rationalized the stonewalling by claiming executive privilege, while writing off the impeachment inquiry as a partisan exercise conducted by Democrats who simply couldn’t beat him fair and square in the 2020 election. Trump’s request for a “favor” from Zelensky was not quite as dramatic as, say, Bill Clinton’s line, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman.” In the grand scheme of things, Trump’s Ukraine scandal was more Watergate than Whitewater. * * * BUT ZELENSKY WAS CLEARLY IN POSITION OF WEAKNESS. AT WAR with Russia, the newly elected Ukrainian leader told Trump during their July 25 conversation that his country was eager to purchase more tank-busting Javelin missiles for his military’s ongoing battle with Kremlin-backed fighters. “We are ready to continue to cooperate for the next steps specifically we are almost ready to buy more Javelins from the United States for defense purposes,” Zelensky said. “I would like you to do us a favor though,” Trump replied, before laying out his proposal for Zelensky’s cooperation in the upcoming 2020 election. Trump had all the leverage. To repel Putin’s threats, Zelensky needed the weaponry. In my reports on CNN, I described it as a “dirt for dollars” scheme. That’s what it was. All you had to do was turn on a newscast to find Trump’s suggestion of a “favor” had immediately struck veteran prosecutors as a “quid pro quo” (Latin for “this for that”), a key component in many federal bribery cases. Bribery, of course, was specified by the Founding Fathers as grounds for impeachment in the U.S. Constitution. The President, Vice President and all civil officers of the United States, shall be removed from office on impeachment for, and conviction of, treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors. During the Zelensky call, Trump would go on to describe the favors he was seeking. Oddly, the president was still fixated on a debunked conspiracy theory from the days of the Mueller investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, “CrowdStrike.” What’s more baffling was that Trump had raised the issue just one day after Mueller testified about his findings before Congress. “As you saw yesterday, that whole nonsense ended with a very poor performance by a man named Robert Mueller, an incompetent performance, but they say a lot of it started with Ukraine,” Trump told Zelensky, according to the rough summary transcript of their call. As a source close to Trump told me, the president had been obsessed with the CrowdStrike theory for months. Without going too far down the rabbit hole, especially because it’s not true, Trump believed Ukrainian operatives were somehow behind the hacking of Democrats in 2016 (perhaps even in possession of the hacked DNC server), not the Russians. This was contrary to the assessment of leaders of the U.S. intelligence community, as well as Republican and Democratic lawmakers in the national security realm, who all believed with certainty that Moscow had interfered in 2016, not Ukraine. Trump’s own former homeland security advisor Tom Bossert once publicly declared that the CrowdStrike theory had been discredited. But Trump wasn’t buying it. The conspiracy-theorist-in-chief was back. Or perhaps more accurately, he had never really left. The same Trump who peddled the bogus Birther theory about Barack Obama and the same Trump who had falsely said Obama had wiretapped him at Trump Tower was simply at it again, trying to make the ridiculous claim that the Ukrainians were responsible for something the Russians had done. As Trump’s own top adviser on Russia, Fiona Hill, testified during the impeachment inquiry, the CrowdStrike theory was Russian propaganda. “This is a fictional narrative that has been perpetrated and propagated by the Russian security services themselves,” Hill told Congress. “The unfortunate truth is that Russia was the foreign power that systematically attacked our democratic institutions in 2016. This is the public conclusion of our intelligence agencies, confirmed in bipartisan Congressional reports. It is beyond dispute, even if some of the underlying details must remain classified,” she added. After first pushing the CrowdStrike investigation on the Zelensky call, Trump then made his second request of the new Ukrainian president. He asked Zelensky to work with Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani and the U.S. Attorney General, William Barr, to dig up any dirt that could be found on Hunter Biden’s work with a Ukrainian energy company named Burisma. Yes, it was suspicious that Hunter Biden had been appointed to the board of the company without any experience in the energy sector. But as of the writing of this final chapter, no evidence has surfaced that the Bidens had done anything wrong. Trump was taking a kernel of truth and constructing a grand theory to damage the man who could unseat him in the 2020 election. Trump had seized on a video clip showing Biden relaying a story from his days as vice president, when he threatened to hold up aid to Ukraine unless the country’s main prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, was fired. But at the time, Shokin was under global pressure to step down, mainly because he had failed to investigate corruption, not as a result of his nosing around in Hunter Biden’s Burisma business activities. Trump’s allegation, spread by his allies in conservative media, that Joe Biden and his son were crooks, could not be substantiated. It appeared to be yet another Trump conspiracy theory, like the Birther craze, fantastical and unfounded. It was also nakedly political. Still, it’s notable that Trump, after essentially being cleared of colluding with the Russians in the Mueller investigation (though not obstruction), was advancing the Kremlin’s narrative on what happened in 2016. It’s worth repeating that this was yet another example of Trump contradicting the U.S. intelligence community’s conclusion that it was Moscow that intervened in the 2016 election, not Ukraine. As House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told Trump about his administration’s surprise withdrawal from Syria, another move that played into the Russians’ hands, “All roads lead to Putin.” While Trump was pressuring Zelensky over the phone, a call the president insisted repeatedly was “perfect,” Giuliani was scrambling to produce the evidence to back up Trump’s bogus claims behind the scenes in Ukraine. Fiona Hill shed some light on some of these activities during her dramatic deposition conducted during the impeachment inquiry. She recounted, sources confirmed, that Bolton had once described Giuliani as a “grenade” that was going to “blow everybody up.” “I am not part of whatever drug deal Sondland and Mulvaney are cooking up,” Fiona Hill quoted Bolton as saying, a reference to both the acting chief of staff as well as the ambassador to the European Union, Gordon Sondland, who would later deliver stunning testimony about the administration’s alleged operation to pressure Zelensky. Giuliani’s hand in the Ukraine matter resurfaced time and again, at the most inopportune moments. Incredibly, on the night before the House of Representatives transmitted the articles of impeachment to the Senate, another major bombshell in the Ukraine probe shook the White House yet again. House investigators released a trove of documents and texts related to Lev Parnas, Giuliani’s friend often seen with the former Big Apple mayor at the Trump hotel bar. Parnas and that other associate, Igor Fruman, had been arrested at Dulles International Airport in October 2019 with one-way tickets to Frankfurt and subsequently charged with violating campaign finance laws. Giuliani, it was learned, was under investigation as part of the probe. Parnas and Fruman, who looked like they walked off the set of a Martin Scorsese film, suddenly became instrumental characters in the Ukraine saga. In a news dump on the public just before Trump’s trial began, much of it related to Parnas, the documents released by House Democrats bolstered the case that there was indeed an administration scheme to pressure the Ukrainians. For starters, there was a purported letter from Giulani to Zelensky in May 2019, stating that he was operating with the “knowledge and consent” of the president, a seemingly damning piece of paper. “In my capacity as personal counsel to President Trump and with his knowledge and consent, I request a meeting with you on this upcoming Monday, May 13th or Tuesday, May 14th,” Giuliani’s letter read. The letter stated Giuliani was on a “personal” mission for the president, suggesting Trump’s goal wasn’t to root out official corruption in Ukraine, as so many of his Republican loyalists insisted. It was more proof that Trump was simply shaking down the Ukrainians to damage Biden. But there was more. There was also a handwritten note from Parnas submitted into the House Democratic evidence. On a hotel note pad, Parnas had scrawled out a simple message: “get Zalensky [sic] to Annonce [sic] that the Biden case will Be Investigated.” On top of that, there were text messages between Parnas and other figures allegedly connected to the Ukraine scheme submitted into the record and sent over to the Senate. The texts revealed outright Trump-world hostility aimed at the Ukrainian ambassador at the time, Marie Yovanovitch, who was seen as being in the way of the Trump team’s goals to substantiate the CrowdStrike theory and damage the Bidens. Suddenly, a new figure had emerged in the Parnas documents. Republican Connecticut congressional candidate Robert Hyde, it was alleged, had sent vile text messages to Parnas, expressing his own anger toward Yovanovitch. Some of the disturbing texts indicated that Yovanovitch was under some kind of surveillance while she was in Kiev, the Ukrainian capital. Hyde told reporters he was just mouthing off via text and not a part of any kind of intimidation effort aimed at getting Yovanovitch out of the way. “Fuck that bitch,” Hyde wrote in one message. “Wow. Can’t believe Trumo [sic] hasn’t fired this bitch. I’ll get right in that.” These documents seemed to fit like puzzle pieces with what was already known, that Trump had his own fixation on Yovanovitch. Trump, during his July 25 phone call with Zelensky, also indicated he wanted Yovanovitch out of the way. “It was great that you were the first one who told me that she was a bad ambassador because I agree with you 100 percent,” Zelensky told Trump during the call. With the Parnas documents added to the Ukraine puzzle, the response from the president during that July 25 phone call seemed almost chilling. “Well, she’s going to go through some things. I will have Mr. Giuliani give you a call and I am also going to have Attorney General Barr call and we will get to the bottom of it,” Trump told Zelensky. During her testimony to the House Intelligence Committee on November 15, Yovanovitch explained to lawmakers how she felt intimidated by the president’s words laid out in that rough transcript of the call. “Did you feel threatened?” the panel’s democratic attorney Daniel Goldman asked her. “I did,” Yovanovitch testified. Yovanovitch was one of several Trump administration officials to defy White House efforts to obstruct the impeachment inquiry and step forward to offer their insights on Trump’s alleged dirt-for-dollars deal with Ukraine. Names like Bill Taylor, Alexander Vindman, Gordon Sondland, and Kurt Volker were suddenly thrust into the national spotlight. Sondland, the EU ambassador, provided what was arguably the inquiry’s most compelling testimony as the probe made its way through the House. Sondland was a key player in the exchange of favors, the so-called quid pro quo, with Ukraine and said so publicly. The moment was devastating for the president’s denials of any wrongdoing. “I know that members of this committee have frequently framed these complicated issues in the form of a simple question: Was there a quid pro quo?” Sondland testified under oath. “The answer is yes.” Sondland explained the issue for him and for Volker, the former envoy to Ukraine, as following the president’s demands. “We did not want to work with Mr. Giuliani,” Sondland told the committee. “Simply put, we played the hand we were dealt. We all understood that if we refused to work with Mr. Giuliani, we would lose an important opportunity to cement relations between the United States and Ukraine. So we followed the president’s orders.” The story kept coming back to Giuliani. And it kept coming back to Trump. Trump’s defenders, apologists, and propagandists were pointing fingers in every direction except where the blame ultimately belongs, with the forty-fifth president himself. “Trump being an ass isn’t an impeachable offense,” one adviser told me, brushing off the notion that Trump had committed any serious crimes. But, along party lines, Trump was impeached in the House of Representatives. Michigan representative Justin Amash, a Republican who left his party in protest of Trump’s behavior, sided with the Democrats. On the night of his impeachment, Trump let loose one more outrage, mocking the late Democratic congressman from Michigan, John Dingell, suggesting that he was watching the impeachment saga unfold, “looking up,” as in from hell. Much of Washington was aghast yet again. But it was just another Trump distraction. He had been branded an impeached president. * * * LET’S FACE IT. IT HAD ALL BEEN BUILDING UP TO THIS. TRUMP’S ODD, inexplicable relationship with Putin, in many ways, was coming home to roost. The president’s team didn’t provide the press with many opportunities to drill down on the Putin question in 2019. After the debacle in Helsinki and with the Mueller probe underway for much of the year, why would they? The new press secretary, Stephanie Grisham, who replaced Sarah Sanders in June, never once held a briefing with reporters for the remainder of the year, killing off what had been a tradition of keeping the public informed held by both Democratic and Republican administrations. For his part, Trump continued his practice of leaning on reporters from conservative media outlets for questions at news conferences. This meant there were precious few opportunities to poke and prod at Trump’s tendency to bend his policies in the Kremlin’s direction. Trump increased the number of press availabilities as he left the White House by helicopter from the South Lawn of the Executive Mansion. But those “chopper talks” were ridiculous. Faux access, I thought. With the roar of Marine One drowning out all of our questions, Trump could answer our inquiries any way he saw fit. The viewers at home couldn’t really hear the questions being asked, so they couldn’t really understand how he was dodging our questions. They were like White House briefings, except only one person could be heard, Trump. I advocated to people inside CNN that we should stop taking the video of the “chopper talks” to air. All that being said, it was clear to me that I had to seize on every possible chance to question Trump about his close ties with dictators and autocrats around the world like Putin, the kind of warm relationships he often seems to lack with longstanding U.S. allies. After largely avoiding my attempts for months, Trump called on me for a question at a news conference following the June 2019 G20 summit in Osaka, Japan. At the summit, Trump had raised eyebrows once again by seeming to let Putin off the hook on the nagging subject of election interference. When asked at one point whether he would warn Putin to stay out of the 2020 election, Trump smiled at the former KGB agent and offered what sounded like a feigned warning to the Russian leader. “Don’t meddle in the election, please,” Trump said with a grin. Trump had also met with Saudi Crown Prince Muhammad Bin Salman. But it was all warm fuzzies, so it was essential, in my view, to press Trump on whether he had raised the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi with the Saudi crown prince as well. The CIA had concluded MBS and his operatives were behind the assassination. “What is it with your coziness with some of the dictators and autocrats at these summits?” I asked at the news conference in Osaka. “I get along with everybody. Except you people,” Trump responded, drawing some laughs in the room. He then defended his kid-gloves approach to some of the world’s worst actors, arguing those questionable relationships have paid dividends. “I get along with a lot of people. I have a tremendous relationship with President Xi. Nobody else would have the deal that we have. We are getting tens of billions of dollars from China coming in. A lot of things are happening. We are moving along toward something that could be very historic. But I get along with President Putin. I get along with Mohammed from Saudi Arabia.” The problem for Trump, his critics would argue, is that the United States sees very little in return. For example, in reality American consumers were paying the trade tariffs, not the Chinese. By and large, the record indicates that Trump has been played by these tyrants. For starters, Saudi Arabia never paid a price for murdering Khashoggi. Russia, it could be argued, is a much more serious indictment of the president’s dalliance with dictators. The Kremlin inserted itself into the 2016 election, attempted to alter its outcome, and didn’t suffer any major consequences. Beyond sanctions that have disrupted the Russian economy, Trump never punished Putin for his crimes against the United States. What could be a worse lesson for the Russians to learn? Which leads back to Ukraine. The day before he was impeached, Trump welcomed the president of Guatemala to the Oval Office. It was CNN’s day in the pool, so I asked Trump whether he accepts any responsibility for the fact that we faced impeachment. “No, I don’t take any. Zero, to put it mildly,” Trump said. “They took a perfect phone call that I had with the president of Ukraine, an absolutely perfect call—you know it, they all know it—nothing was said wrong on that call,” he continued. As for Parnas, Trump later insisted to me in the Oval Office he didn’t know him. Five days before his trial began in the Senate, Trump was sounding like a broken record, repeating the same stale talking points. The impeachment was a “hoax.” The call was “perfect.” Trump had run out of answers. “I don’t know him. I don’t know Parnas, other than, I guess, I had pictures taken, which I do with thousands of people,” Trump said. When I reminded Trump that Parnas had said that other administration officials knew about his alleged scheme in Ukraine, the president got testy. “Quiet,” the president snapped at me. “You just have to take a look at the pictures. You just have to take a look at the polls. You see I don’t need anybody’s help. We’re doing phenomenally well,” he continued. I tried to ask Trump about the allegations raised in the Parnas documents turned over to House Democrats that Yovanovitch was being surveilled by Trump-connected thugs in Ukraine, as part of an attempt to intimidate her. But Trump did not respond. By that point, the press wranglers were shouting in our faces to leave the Oval Office. “Let’s go, we’re finished,” shouted Katie Price, one of the wranglers. “Jim, we’re done. Let’s go. Jim, keep moving,” she kept yelling. “Nothing on Yovanovitch?” I tried one last time as I walked out of the Oval Office. Parnas had told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow and CNN’s Anderson Cooper that Trump was in on the Ukraine plot. “President Trump knew exactly what was going on,” Parnas told Maddow. It was “all about 2020,” he told Cooper. Trump brushed off Parnas as a man under indictment, attempting to cut a better deal for himself. Minutes after the exchange, Parnas’ attorney Joseph Bondy tweeted out a video, showing Parnas with Trump in December 2016, one of more than a dozen photos of his client with the president, his family, and top officials, from Kellyanne Conway to former press secretary Sarah Sanders. Trump, who had seemed to corner the market on trolling people on social media, was on the receiving end of some embarrassing tweets. But it was worse than that. Trump, it would be proven, was lying about Parnas. Little more than one week after Trump had denied knowing Giuliani’s associates beyond taking pictures with them, Parnas’s lawyer released a video showing Trump having dinner with the two men at his Washington hotel. Trump was captured on video having a discussion about Ambassador Yovanovitch with Parnas and other White House aides. “Get rid of her,” Trump said, apparently ordering staffers to fire Yovanovitch. “Get her out tomorrow. I don’t care. Get her out tomorrow. Take her out. Okay? Do it,” Trump added. Oddly, Trump also mused about what would happen if Putin attempted to seize Ukraine. “You think Russia ever goes in and gets Ukraine, or no?” Trump asked. The video not only confirmed that Trump was lying about Parnas. It also seemed to hammer home a point a Trump confidante made to me about the Senate trial. The president was in “maximum danger,” this confidant said. What did that mean? Essentially, while the trial was underway, any bombshell could drop during the proceedings that could sink Trump’s presidency. That all hinged, of course, on Trump’s fellow Republicans in the Senate.
Acosta, Jim. The Enemy of the People: A Dangerous Time to Tell the Truth in America (pp. 353-368). Harper Paperbacks. Kindle Edition.
I found little of value that I did not personally already know from my daily watching of CNN during the first term... I would not recommend that you actually buy this book, although it's been brought into the news recently and that's how I bought it... Should have checked the actual date of publishing... But it's a great book for a political library if you have one... At this time, I'm choosing to spend more time with those books that I'll be checking closer for what they actually cover... This is now a historical book. It does document the year well if you need that... I chose what I found of potential interest in that Trump has recently, once again, banned "some" news representatives--this time in a much more derogatory manner than even before... Pay attention. If we don't support those who cover politicals truthfully as much as is possible these days, our democracy is really not going to last, in my opinion...
God Bless
Gabby
These excerpts are within fair use as provided by the publisher through Amazon's electronic control which I routinely use and have for many years... for copyright purposes...
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