No Wonder They Need Him Quiet Editors’ Blog – Talking Points Memo / by Josh Marshall

No Wonder They Need Him Quiet

Editors’ Blog – Talking Points Memo / by Josh Marshall / 29min

CNN is reporting that immediately after the President’s notorious July 25th phone call with Ukrainian President Zelensky. According to Shimon Peokupecz, “aides to Trump scrambled in the aftermath of his July 25 phone call with Ukraine’s leader both to alert lawyers of their concerns and to contain the damage. Unsettled aides also immediately began quizzing each other about whether they should alert senior officials.”

This is not terribly surprising. It’s basically in line with other reporting. But this tells us something important.

As we’ve already learned, this call and the President’s asks were not out of the blue. The President’s emissaries, official and unofficial, had been pushing this exchange for months. Other than the President saying these things himself, over official channels, there’s really nothing new about what he said.

So why were these unnamed officials so freaked out?

There are two possibilities here. One is simply that these other aides and officials knew this stuff was going on but did not expect or at least hoped Trump wouldn’t get into the explicit quid pro quo on the call. That’s certainly possible. But it doesn’t sound right to me. This is Trump after all. He’s known for intemperate remarks, being too direct, being indiscrete. It’s hard for me to imagine that if staffers knew this was happening, knew the President was a part of it and knew the call was related to it that they’d be running around like their hair was on fire. At a minimum they would have known this was a strong possibility if not necessarily a likelihood.

What seems much more likely is that a number of the aides or staffers on this call – which would include everyone from the highest level political appointees and more anonymous duty staffers in the Situation Room – did not know this stuff was happening. They were out of the loop, as the phrase goes. Or at least they didn’t know the President had so closely involved himself.

So what it sounds like we have happening here is the President’s private channels diplomacy suddenly collided with official channels diplomacy.

I raise this because it’s relevant to Gordon Sondland.

NBC reported a short time ago: “U.S. officials and others with knowledge of their relationship also say that Sondland is part of a small cadre of ambassadors who enjoy direct and frequent access to Trump. They say the two speak frequently by phone and have spoken extensively about Ukraine in the past.”

It seems clear that Sondland was the confidant/trusted operator through whom Trump was operating. We had further confirmation today that when the acting Ambassador in Ukraine said he thought the extortion scheme was “crazy”, Sondland got on the phone with Trump then went back to text and gave that response that there was no quid pro quo as the President has always made clear.

For now the point is this. A lot of people pretty versed on Ukraine apparently didn’t realize this was happening, at least not that it had risen to the level of full extortion and election interference. So Sondland seems pretty key as the trusted fixer type, someone Trump could talk frankly to, Trump could talk to and operate through.

SHAREVISIT WEBSITE