AOC and the Power of Party Norms by Matthew Green on The Mischiefs of Faction

AOC and the Power of Party Norms

by Matthew Green
• The Mischiefs of Faction
• • Sept. 23, 2019
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  • 3 min read

Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) has apparently changed her tactics. No longer is she a rabble-rousing newbie criticizing her colleagues and threatening them with primary challengers. Instead, the freshman lawmaker has become less confrontational and more willing to work with fellow Democrats in the House.

The recent New York Times article that makes this claim offers several examples of how Ocasio-Cortez has “learn[ed] to play by Washington’s rules.” She has backed away from earlier calls for liberals to mount primary challenges against other Democratic incumbents. She has endorsed the reelection campaigns of party leaders and more conservative freshmen Democrats. And her first chief of staff, who compared defecting Democrats to southern segregationists, was replaced with a less vocal and more seasoned aide.

Ocasio-Cortez has disavowed the story, accusing the paper of “dripping condescension.” But if the article is accurate, I think it highlights the important role of informal norms in shaping and enforcing party discipline in Congress. And by “discipline,” I don’t mean just voting unity—AOC votes with her party most of the time—but also avoiding the kind of public and private intraparty conflict that keeps a party and its members from achieving their key goals.

For example, political parties in Congress care a great deal about their reputation or “brand,” believing it is key to securing the support of voters. But when one party member publicly attacks others, it may damage that brand by fostering an image of disunity and disarray. Similarly, congressional staffers who are in the public eye more than their bosses create an impression that it is they, not members of the governing party, who are the real decision-makers on the Hill. And if a lawmaker actively recruits challengers to fellow incumbents, it costs those incumbents valuable resources to defend their seats, possibly endangering the party’s majority status.

This kind of behavior is not illegal, but it violates unwritten codes of congressional parties (as well as Congress in general). And party members will impose strong social and political sanctions on individual legislators who do it.

Take, for instance, the criticisms of other House Democrats by Ocasio-Cortez and her staff. They may be greeted enthusiastically by liberal party activists, but who in Congress would want to help a colleague who openly disparages them? What staffer would confide in a legislative aide who makes his private complaints public? Someone who does these things is not likely to have many allies in Congress, and since successful legislating requires coalition-building within (if not between) political parties, this can seriously weaken one’s ability to pass bills and amendments.

Threatening the reelection of fellow party members, even indirectly, may be met with even greater scorn. As Ocasio-Cortez told the New York Times, “In many ways, I feel like I walk around with a scarlet letter because many members who just have any primary, whether I know about it or not, tend to project that onto me.”

Party leaders as well as the rank-and-file can make life difficult for a lawmaker who doesn’t follow norms. Pelosi repeatedly indicated her displeasure with Ocasio-Cortez, and given the influence of speaker over committee assignments and the legislative agenda (and Pelosi’s reputation for punishing disloyalty), this boded poorly for the freshman legislator’s long-term chances of success within the chamber.

Norms contribute to congressional party discipline and unity in other ways too. As Briana Bee and I have noted, if there is an established and widely-followed norm of voting with one’s party, leaders will not need to resort to threats or bargaining to enforce compliance on every roll call. Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD) once said that he sought to achieve a “psychology of consensus” in the Democratic Caucus so that its members would “want to be with the team.”

A few political scientists have recently written about norms as a major element of contemporary congressional politics. Brian Alexander, for example, discussed how norms restrain legislators from acts of disobedience in Congress. Looking beyond Congress, Julia Azari (a fellow Mischiefs of Faction writer) and Jennifer Smith (a former graduate student colleague who tragically passed away last year) wrote an insightful 2012 article about the role of norms in political institutions. Ocasio-Cortez’s experience underscores the wisdom of studying how norms shape political behavior within institutions—especially within congressional parties.

We Will See Whether Biden is Up to This Challenge Editors’ Blog – Talking Points Memo / by Josh Marshall

We Will See Whether Biden is Up to This Challenge

Editors’ Blog – Talking Points Memo / by Josh Marshall / 2h

I’ve wanted to focus on the substance of President Trump’s extortion scheme with Ukraine. But the attempt inevitably impacts the Democratic primary campaign. There’s a lot of chatter to the effect that President Trump has already succeeded in making the story about Biden and baseless claims of alleged wrongdoing rather than Trump’s criminal behavior. That’s not quite how I see it, though there are many news organizations doing a lot to make that possible. I think you can read the drift of public opinion from the rapid movement of Democratic representatives in the direction of impeachment.

This is more an opportunity for Biden than a challenge. But only if he has the muscle and agility to rise to it.

As we’ve seen over the last week or so, we appear to clearly be in a two person race for the Democratic presidential nomination. And it’s a race where Warren appears to have all the momentum in her favor. Polls have come out in recent days showing her in the lead in Iowa and New Hampshire. Though I haven’t seen a very recent poll there, there’s every reason to believe Biden remains way up in South Carolina. So, with the caveat that much can change over the next few months, this sets up a scenario in which Warren wins Iowa and New Hampshire (where the demographics of the Democratic electorate are favorable for her) and then Biden makes a stand in South Carolina (where they are more favorable to him). Does he stop her in South Carolina or at least get back into the race? Or does the momentum of two rapid fire victories cripple his candidacy and put Warren on the path to the nomination?

President Trump has been caught more or less red-handed in a criminal abuse of power. That will play however it does on Capitol Hill and the electorate nationally. But this also gives Biden an opportunity to elevate himself into a one on one fight with Trump. Trump’s wrongdoing is directly aimed at the threat of Biden’s candidacy. That is a demonstrable measure of how Trump fears Biden. Biden can obviously play that in his favor. Biden can also shape that around his experience in foreign policy, which has always been his comfort zone more than domestic policy.

My point is that the whole scandal provides Biden with an excellent opportunity to grab hold of the campaign narrative, portray it as a fight between him and Trump and even stitch it together with the events of the Obama administration. The question in my mind is whether he has it in him to do that. His first comments last week were defensive and feeble. Pretty quickly he went on the offensive and made efforts at the kind of response I sketch out above.

Elizabeth Warren is running a very different kind of campaign. It is heavily policy-based, clearly reformist and focused on fundamental socio-economic change. Biden can’t, doesn’t want to and never will run that kind of campaign. But Trump’s crimes (directed at him and focused on Trump’s fear of Biden) gives him a clear opening (at a moment when he could really use an opening) to run the kind of campaign that works for him.

This is why I’ve never been terribly worried about whether Biden is up to the rigors of a presidential campaign, either because he’s never really been in a competitive election since the 1970s or because of his age. The primary campaign itself and how voters react to it will answer that question and there’s plenty of time to do so. This fast forwards that challenge. This story is both a threat and an opportunity. We will see pretty soon how and whether he rises to that challenge.

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Opposing Trump’s corrupt abuse of power is today’s form of patriotism by Michael Gerson

washingtonpost.com

Opinion | Opposing Trump’s corrupt abuse of power is today’s form of patriotism

By Michael Gerson

 

5-6 minutes

 

September 24, 2019 at 6:25 a.m. GMT+9

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In the Trump era, a columnist risks appearing like the boy (or girl) who cried wolf. Time and time again, we say this scandal is the big one.
But in our ill-fated version of the story, the wolf comes every time. The violations of morality and law have become progressively bolder and more dangerous to the constitutional order. And they have culminated in an abuse of power both highly serious and totally unconcealed.

By his own admission, the president of the United States urged Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to open a criminal investigation of the son of a political rival. Trump denies that this request involved a quid pro quo. But with Ukraine engaged in conflict with Russian-backed separatists, and with $250 million in U.S. military aid being held up (at the time) for “review,” the threat did not need to be explicit to be palpable and powerful. A mob boss doesn’t need to issue threats personally to be feared and obeyed. And that is what the Trump presidency increasingly resembles — a criminal family sending out their slimy factotum (a part played enthusiastically by Rudolph W. Giuliani) to “fix” what needs fixing.
This groundbreaking form of political corruption shocked everyone with a conscience who was privy to it. U.S. Embassy staff in Kiev expressed alarm about Giuliani’s contacts with Ukrainian officials. A whistleblower in the intelligence community risked his or her career to report it. The intelligence community’s inspector general found the matter of “urgent concern.” But acting director of national intelligence Joseph Maguire and the Justice Department — playing the role of political enforcers — have blocked the transmission of the whistleblower’s report to Congress. They are pursuing a coverup in plain sight.
The Constitution assumes that the president will interact with foreign governments to seek the interests and express the values of the United States. With Trump, nothing decent can be assumed. By making corrupt personal requests of a foreign power, the president is not only misusing $250 million in leverage, he is misusing the presidency itself. His actions may constitute bribery, extortion and/or the violation of campaign-finance laws. But his breach of public trust is ultimately a more serious matter. Trump has violated his oath of office by using his office for selfish gain.
Here, we need to be clear. Treating the presidency in this fashion is not only corrupt but unpatriotic. Trump is not only a preening, prating fool; he has set his own interests above the interests of the nation. He has replaced love of country with a kind of self-love that dishonors the institution he leads.
And Trump may have lost the ability to distinguish between patriotism and egotism. He may regard his crass political needs as the definition of his nation’s good. In this case, he is both bent and delusional.
The U.S. criminal justice system was created to deal with normal types of political corruption, not with a rogue president, testing the limits of executive power. That form of warped ambition must be checked and balanced by the equal branches of government. But many members of Congress — mostly Republicans but also some Democrats — appear to have lost their taste for that role.
The political risk to elected Republicans when they oppose Trump appears very real — though it is hard to be sure when so few test the proposition. But the moral hazard is far greater. When they use their office to shield shady political dealings, they become a party to public corruption. When they ignore or excuse Trump’s use of the nation’s power and influence for private reasons, they have chosen Trump above their country and deserve to be defeated. Every one of them. Worst of all, they are teaching their political supporters that the rule of law is a small and expendable thing.
In the scarier regions of the Trump right, the problem is far advanced. Every revelation of the president’s abuse of power is met with a sentence beginning: “But Biden . . .” Their tolerance for corruption seems limitless — and frightening. By what firm political principle would they condemn Trump if he closed down the New York Times (an “enemy of the people”) or arrested a few whistleblowers (part of the “deep state” that is conducting a “coup”)?
None of this seems possible. But too many impossibilities have recently become realities. Opposing Trump’s corrupt abuse of power — here, now, before it goes further — is the calling of patriotism in our time.
Read more from Michael Gerson’s archive, follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook .
Read more:
Chris Whipple: Joseph Maguire should remember that he also answers to Congress
Jennifer Rubin: What the House should ask the director of national intelligence
Greg Sargent: As the whistleblower story gets worse for Trump, his corruption keeps spreading
Harry Litman: A whistleblower filed a complaint to the intelligence IG. Why is it being withheld from Congress?
The Post’s View: The Trump administration cannot withhold a whistleblower complaint from Congress
Max Boot: If Trump extorted a foreign leader for political gain, it’s impeachment time

Rectification of Names Editors’ Blog – Talking Points Memo / by Josh Marshall

Rectification of Names

Editors’ Blog – Talking Points Memo / by Josh Marshall / 1h

September 23, 2019 08:32 AM

Over the last two days, I’ve been trying to take stock of the quick rush of new details about this emerging Trump/Ukraine scandal. It is clear purely on the basis of what is now undisputed in the record that the President and Rudy Giuliani are guilty of a criminal abuse of power and that most or all of the President’s top national security advisors have been complicit in and quite likely participated in that criminal activity.

But before we can really understand this story in any coherent way we need to realize that many of the words and concepts are simply wrong. Indeed they pack the criminal conduct and deception into the very vocabulary we use. That makes it next to impossible to make sense of what’s actually going on.

Let’s start with the “investigation.” The standard description is that President Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani is pressing the government of Ukraine to launch an investigation of Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden. This is a non-sequitur. As I noted last week, what’s being demanded isn’t an investigation. Trump and Giuliani are demanding that Ukraine that manufacturedamaging and false information about Joe Biden, either directly or via his son. This is likely directly through manufactured evidence or indirectly simply by standing up a bogus investigation.

The U.S. government has ample resources to conduct its own investigations and little compunction about investigating bad acts that Americans commit abroad. Indeed, there’s a whole set of laws to cover corrupt acts by Americans abroad. To the extent the FBI needs assistance of local law enforcement, treaties or geo-strategic clout will make that happen. The central claim – that Biden got a Ukrainian prosecutor fired to protect his son – is preposterous on its face to anyone who followed what was happening at the time. The U.S., the EU and numerous international organizations agreed that the prosecutor in question should be dismissed. Biden was the U.S. point-man on the issue. Clearly it didn’t stem from his decision-making. The other claim is that the DNC framed Paul Manafort. This has already been the subject of the Special Counsel investigation and two Inspector General’s probes. More importantly, the government of Ukraine has repeatedly said there’s nothing to investigate.

When you demand an “investigation” when investigations have already happened and there’s demonstrably nothing to investigate, this is a mislabeling of what is happening. You’re pressuring someone to manufacture damaging information – in this case, using the existential threat of withholding great power military support.

Now let’s talk about Rudy Giuliani, the President’s “personal lawyer.” Rudy Giuliani is clearly not the President’s personal lawyer. He had some involvement in the President’s defense in the Mueller investigation. But he is not the lawyer of record in any of the President’s numerous ongoing legal controversies in which he is litigating as private individual. Lawyers either defend or vindicate their clients’ legal interests in some definable legal process. Sometimes a lawyer will also advocate for their client in a broader court of public opinion. But no private lawyer speaks with the backing of the most powerful person in the world in private negotiations and threats with foreign governments.

Giuliani is acting as a private ambassador of Donald Trump, President of the United States. This is very useful since he can speak with the authority of and issue threats on behalf of the President of the United States, literally the most powerful man in the world, and conduct what amounts to personal diplomacy in the President’s interest without any of the legal restrictions over a public official.

He not only speaks with the President’s full power at his disposal, he also makes selective use of government diplomatic services. According to Giuliani, State Department officials helped him arrange meetings with Ukrainian officials. So Giuliani works entirely in the President’s personal interest even though he speaks with the full authority of the President’s official power. It’s a great system. He has none of the responsibilities of a government official, none of the susceptibility to oversight. And he claims the additional protection of attorney-client privilege. There’s a good argument that these non-legal services and probable criminal conduct aren’t really covered by such a privilege. But that hardly matters since extensive fact-finding and litigation would be required to test that proposition.

Giuliani can be refreshingly frank about his unique status. “Some government lawyer would be nervous to do what I do. I’m a private lawyer, I represent my client, and I’m going to prove it to you that he’s innocent.” Of course this is nonsense because there’s no legal jeopardy he’s protecting his client from and any notional wrongdoing by the son of a former Vice President has no connection with him outside the context of a future political campaign.

Giuliani is President Trump’s personal ambassador and Ukraine isn’t his only stomping ground. He has continued to work for the MEK, the Iranian dissident group until recently classified as a terrorist organization by the U.S. government, while President Trump tries to topple the government of Iran. Josh Kovensky assembled this list of nine other countries where Giuliani has traveled, since becoming Trump’s “personal lawyer” for either private consulting or speaking engagements: Armenia, Ukraine, Turkey, Bahrain, Qatar, Israel, Albania, France and Poland. Giuliani has been doing foreign consulting work with regimes around the world since 2002, leveraging his reputation as Mr. 9/11. So foreign consulting isn’t new for Giuliani. But it’s impossible to imagine that his juice hasn’t been turbocharged to an infinite degree by the fact that he is now the personal emissary of the President of the United States. It also seems quite unlikely he isn’t doing business for the President too, either for the President’s businesses or for his political protection.

The U.S. Constitution gives the American President great power to conduct foreign policy and enforce the laws on behalf of the Republic. They are delegated specifically for that purpose, much as a private individual might delegate to an investment advisor or attorney the power to act on the individual’s behalf or in their interest. The President also has great latitude to decide what is in the national interest. But when he or she clearly uses those powers – which are massively inflated by the power of the American state – to profit personally or defend his personal interests they immediately become an abuse of power. When they are used to interfere with conducting a free and fair election in the U.S. they clearly constitute criminal abuse of power.

The words here matter. Giuliani is the President’s private diplomat, private ambassador. If those words are too rich for your blood call him the President’s personal representative. Whatever it is, the President has given him the power to threaten and negotiate with the full weight of presidential power for Donald Trump’s private gain. That’s not lawyering. He’s not a “personal lawyer.” And he’s asking a foreign power to manufacture evidence to tamper with a U.S. presidential election.

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The Case Against the Popular Vote The New Republic / by Matt Ford

The Case Against the Popular Vote

The New Republic / by Matt Ford / 16h

Two hundred years ago, the Founding Fathers made a mistake. They decided that the president of the United States should be elected by a popular vote held among the entire country’s citizens. The results of this flawed system speak for themselves. Under the popular vote, Americans have endured two centuries of elections where the presidential candidate who receives the most votes is also the winner.

This is simply too much democracy. Time and time again, the American people have shown that they can’t be trusted to choose the leader of the free world with such a simplistic electoral method. Then again, Americans would most likely overthrow a system in which they never got to choose their leaders. The only viable alternative is one where the majority only gets to choose its leaders some of the time. In other words, we need an electoral college.

Here’s how it would work: Each state would get a certain number of electors equal to their seats in the House plus their seats in the Senate. That would give each state a minimum of three electoral votes and roughly 535 votes altogether. The District of Columbia would also somehow have three electors, bringing the total to 538 electoral votes. These electors would then gather in Washington one month before inauguration day to vote for the president and vice president. Whoever receives a simple majority of 270 votes would win. This wouldn’t be quite as radical as it sounds. Similar mechanisms exist in other thriving democracies, like the Vatican and the Holy Roman Empire.

Who would choose these electors? State legislatures could decide whether to let the people elect the electors, thereby preserving an element of the old popular-vote system. Or they could save their citizens the time and money of holding a presidential election and simply choose the electors themselves. Leaving both options on the table seems like a good idea. If no candidate receives 270 votes, either because of a 269-269 tie or because the electoral vote fractured across three or more candidates, the House of Representatives will elect the president and the Senate will elect the vice president. This creates the possibility that the elected president and vice president could be political foes, which would be productive.

Such a system would have multiple benefits for our political system. First, it would treat Americans differently according to where they live. The popular vote currently gives every citizen—Californians and Texans, Hawaiians and Mainers, Alabamans and Oregonians—an equal say in choosing the president. An electoral college would solve this problem by giving Americans in some states more influence than Americans in other states. Those benefits would largely be felt by smaller rural states, whose residents deserve to wield disproportionate levels of influence in our political system.

The numbers speak for themselves. Had the country used an electoral college in the 2016 election, an elector from California would have represented roughly 712,000 people, while an elector from Wyoming would have represented just 195,000 people. That imbalance might seem unfair to some political observers, particularly among Democrats and liberals. But they are hardly unbiased in this matter. After all, they have a vested interest in defending an electoral system that would favor their preferred outcomes, and I do not.

Creating an electoral college would also reduce the political influence of Americans who live in territories like Guam and Puerto Rico. Under the popular vote, they would enjoy an equal say in choosing their president. But because electors are divvied up among states, they would lose that status under the electoral college. Maybe this is for the best. As one National Reviewcontributor pointed out when arguing against Puerto Rico’s statehood earlier this year, the island’s three million American citizens largely speak Spanish and live under a mismanaged government. Why should their votes count equally alongside those cast in corruption-free, fiscally sound states like Illinois and Kansas?

The electoral college would simplify presidential elections in other ways, too. It’s possible that some states would choose to allocate their electors in a proportional fashion. Modern political polarization makes it more likely that they’ll adopt a winner-take-all system instead, where candidates can capture a state’s entire slate of electors with a mere plurality of the vote. Critics somehow see this as a downside. They argue that it would disenfranchise large swaths of Americans across the country—conservatives in bright-blue California and New York, liberals in ruby-red Alabama and Utah, and those who don’t quite fit in to either camp.

On the contrary, it would only effectivelydisenfranchise them. Those voters could still cast ballots for president; they just wouldn’t matter most of the time. And there are benefits to shrinking the electorate as well. Candidates won’t have to waste time traveling across the country and trying to appeal to as many voters as possible. Instead, they could win just by focusing on small pockets of them. Most presidential elections would likely end up focusing on a handful of “battleground” states where either of the two major-party candidates might prevail. So instead of forcing the entire country to fully participate in the democratic process, the electoral college would relegate most of that burden to just part of it.

Under the popular vote, whoever receives the most votes will always win. The electoral college would finally end this tyranny of the majority by ensuring that candidates who come in second will occasionally become president. A study published this week by three University of Texas researchers used historical election data to measure how often the electoral college would elect someone who didn’t win the most votes. They found that in races where the candidates are separated by just two percentage points, there’s a 30 percent chance of an “inversion” where the popular vote winner and the electoral vote winner are two different people. The odds of an inversion only increase as the hypothetical margin narrows.

What’s more, the researchers also found an imbalance in who would benefit from those inversions. They estimate that Republicans would win the presidency in 65 percent of cases where they narrowly lose the popular vote. Democrats will likely fearmonger about this projected result by saying that it enshrines an illiberal structural bias in the American political system, and that it could destabilize public confidence in the democratic process. But it’s an acceptable outcome to me, a neutral observer who has absolutely no larger interest in which party wins presidential elections.

After all, one of the virtues of my proposal is that it would restrain “mob rule.” I borrowed those terms from a handful of early American leaders who opposed the popular vote when it was approved at the Constitutional Convention. Is this an anti-democratic straw man? Absolutely not. After all, the United States is a republic, not a democracy, which are two mutually exclusive things. An electoral college would help prevent the presidency from being wielded by those who would use it to impose tyrannical measures like universal background checks for firearms. Instead, it would ensure that governance occasionally falls to sober, responsible leaders who can enact moderate policies like breaking up migrant families at the border and jailing their children.

Sadly, while the case for an electoral college is clear, the path to breaking the shackles of the popular vote is not. Changing the system would require getting a constitutional amendment through both chambers of Congress, and then it would need the assent of three-fifths of the state legislatures. That shouldn’t deter reformers who want to ensure they’ll get access to political power from time to time. After all, the alternative is letting the people elect whoever they want as president forever. It’s hard to imagine anything less American than that.

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As whistleblower scandal deepens, Trump bets on the coverup working, by Greg Sargent

September 20, 2019 at 11:54 p.m. GMT+9

President Trump and his minions went to great lengths in 2016 to coordinate with a foreign power’s interference in our election on his behalf. Then Trump engaged in extensive corruption and lawlessness to try to prevent it from coming to light.

While Trump did suffer serious political damage in the process, he basically got away with all of it, thanks to Justice Department regulations that protect a president from indictment, and to extensive help from a handpicked attorney general who subscribes to a theory of presidential power that in effect places presidents above the law.

So why wouldn’t Trump try something very similar a second time around?

The emerging contours of this story contain eerie echoes of what we’ve already been through.

The Post reports that the whistleblower’s complaint — which top officials are refusing to forward to Congress, in apparent violation of the law — involves a “promise” Trump made to a foreign official, and apparently concerns Ukraine.

Given that Trump and his lawyer Rudy Giuliani have already gone to great lengths to pressure Ukraine to launch an investigation that would damage Joe Biden, the most likely general-election opponent of Trump, speculation has naturally centered on the idea that the whistleblower complaint might concern this effort.

Giuliani appeared on CNN on Thursday night, where he denied that he is pressuring Ukraine to do this, before reversing and confirming as much. He then made the strange decision to vaguely suggest on Twitter that if Trump did this, there would be nothing wrong with it.

That’s morbidly amusing. But here’s the darker side to all of it.

Trump just lashed out on Twitter against Rep. Adam Schiff, ridiculing him for trying to determine the facts of the whistleblower’s complaint, and scoffing at the idea that there was anything wrong with his conversation with the foreign leader.

In so doing, Trump brashly flaunted his ability to act with total impunity. That’s because the effort by Trump’s Justice Department and Director of National Intelligence to keep the whistleblower’s complaint buried makes it impossible for Congress to actually evaluate whether there was anything wrong with the conversation or not.

Convenient, isn’t it?

Trump is openly advertising his contempt for the very notion that Congress might want to carry out its role in holding the executive accountable — secure in the knowledge that his top officials will corruptly keep all the facts of the situation away from Congress, making actual evaluation of his conduct impossible. In sum, Trump is basically giving our political system the middle finger.

The Ukrainian connection

The reporting is vague on how this matter involves Ukraine. But we already know three House committees are investigating what appear to be extensive efforts by Trump and Giuliani to pressure the Ukrainian government into launching investigations designed to dig up dirt on Biden.

The ostensible reason for those efforts is a complicated allegation that Biden improperly pressured Ukraine to fire a prosecutor who was looking into a company on whose board Biden’s son sat.

This is a pile of nonsense — see this takedown from Salvador Rizzo. In fact, there were extensive efforts by many parties to oust the prosecutor for other reasons, and the current prosecutor has said neither Biden did anything wrong.

But Trump did talk to Ukrainian president in July. And Trump held up $250 million in military aid to Ukraine, even though the Pentagon recommended lifting the hold, as CNN reported.

As Viola Gienger put it in a must-read explainer: “With the drama over assistance to Ukraine unfolding alongside Trump’s and Giuliani’s months-long drumbeat for an investigation into Biden’s role there, the clear impression is that the United States is extorting a partner country for political gain.”

Giuliani helpfully tweeted this:

A President telling a Pres-elect of a well known corrupt country he better investigate corruption that affects US is doing his job. Maybe if Obama did that the Biden Family wouldn’t have bilked millions from Ukraine and billions from China; being covered up by a Corrupt Media.

— Rudy Giuliani (@RudyGiuliani) September 20, 2019

Trump, of course, denies there was anything wrong with the call. Perhaps we’ll soon learn that there’s nothing untoward going on here.

Oh wait, perhaps we won’t. Because Trump administration officials are not letting Congress learn the complaint’s details.

Inspector general pushes back

As of now, acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire is still refusing to forward the whistleblower’s complaint to the congressional intelligence committees, even though the inspector general deemed it an “urgent concern” and “credible,” triggering a statutory requirement that he do so.

The Justice Department has advised Maguire not to follow this directive, asserting that the matter falls outside the parameters of the statute, because the subject of the complaint supposedly doesn’t concern activity within the DNI’s purview.

But the inspector general, Michael Atkinson, has now sharply disputed this, claiming that the complaint “relates to one of the most significant and important of the DNI’s responsibilities to the American people."

We’re also learning that the Justice Department — run by that same handpicked attorney general, William Barr — has given details of the whistleblower complaint to the White House, so lawyers can decide whether to exert executive privilege to keep it from Congress.

If that sounds familiar, it’s because the White House has exerted presidential prerogative to an extraordinary degree to prevent Congress from talking to witnesses to some of Trump’s worst corruption and wrongdoing, as documented in the special counsel’s report.

Schiff has talked about going to court. But there’s a provision in the statute that suggests such DNI actions might not be subject to judicial review at all.

We don’t know that an effort to get Ukraine to dig dirt on Biden is the subject of the whistleblower complaint. But we do have clear indications that Trump and Giuliani are, in fact, trying to get Ukraine to do this.

And that’s the through line here: Just as Trump and his advisers went to great lengths to benefit from a foreign power’s interference in our election and got away with it, it’s perfectly plausible that Trump is trying to do the same thing again.

Worse, if this is the subject of the whistleblower complaint, Congress may never learn about it — because Trump may be able to count on his top law enforcement officials to keep it buried. And Trump is rubbing our faces in all of it.

Ukraine, if you’re listening . . .: How Trump tries to quell controversies by saying the quiet part out loud

Ukraine, if you’re listening . . .: How Trump tries to quell controversies by saying the quiet part out loud
The Debrief: An occasional series offering a reporter’s insights

“Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” Trump said in July of that year, referring to the trove of messages that Clinton deleted from a private email server. “I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.” 

Then-candidate Donald Trump at a July 2016 news conference in Doral, Fla., at which he called on Russia to hack Hillary Clinton’s emails. (Gustavo Caballero/Getty Images)
 So yes, if Ukraine happened to be listening Friday, the president’s desired outcome could not have been more clear. 

For Trump, controversial public disclosures have became almost routine, with the president saying the potentially scandalous part aloud. It is a form of shamelessness worn as a badge of protection — on the implicit theory that the president’s alleged offenses can’t be that serious if he commits them in full public view. 

Less than a year after Trump’s public encouragement of Russia to meddle in the 2016 presidential election, special counsel Robert S. Mueller III and a host of congressional committees would devote months to investigating that very question — whether the president or his campaign had conspired with Russia and, later, whether Trump had tried to obstruct justice.

President Trump and first lady Melania Trump meet with Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison at the White House on Friday. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
Yet Trump’s penchant for reading the stage directions almost seems to inoculate him from the kind of political damage that would devastate other politicians.

In the current controversy, The Washington Post first reported Wednesday that a whistleblower complaint that has spurred a showdown between the intelligence community and Congress involved a “promise” made by Trump to a foreign leader, now believed to be Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. In response on Thursday, Trump tweeted a two-part defense in which he claimed that because he knows calls with foreign leaders are closely monitored, no one should be “dumb enough to believe that I would say something inappropriate with a foreign leader while on such a potentially ‘heavily populated’ call.”

Nick Akerman, a former Watergate prosecutor, said Trump manages to “worm out of things” by making his bad behavior so blatant. 

“I think the normal reaction for a lot of people is that something that someone does in public, it takes away the idea that it’s nefarious,” Akerman said. “They think, ‘Would he really be doing it in public if there was something wrong with it?’ ”

But Akerman added that when Trump takes actions such as asking Russia to hack Clinton’s emails or publicly pressuring Paul Manafort, his former campaign chairman, not to cooperate with prosecutors, his intent is the same — whether he acts publicly or behind closed doors.

“What he’s been saying in public is the kind of thing I used to prosecute people for doing in private,” Akerman said.

Barbara McQuade, a former U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan, said Trump’s confounding public behavior — for example, she said, “he says stuff in tweets that seems blatantly illegal” — allows for two competing theories. 

“Are we giving him too much credit and he’s just so undisciplined that he can’t help but say and tweet these things?” she asked. “Or is he so diabolical that putting it out there is like a jujitsu move?”

The president has a long history of broadcasting his questionable actions and intentions to the general public. In May 2017, just two days after he fired FBI Director James B. Comey, Trump gave an interview with NBC News’s Lester Holt in which he linked Comey’s dismissal to the ongoing Russia investigation. 

“And in fact, when I decided to just do it, I said to myself — I said, you know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story,” the president said.

He also spent a signification portion of his presidency publicly hectoring Jeff Sessions, his former attorney general, to undo his recusal from the Russia investigation — a move that would have made it easier for Sessions to take control of the investigation and protect Trump. 

And in June — three months after Mueller submitted his 448-page report — Trump struck an unapologetic note, saying that the despite the nearly two-year investigation of Russian interference that clouded his presidency, he might still accept damaging information from a foreign adversary, such as Russia or China.

“I think you might want to listen. There’s nothing wrong with listening,” Trump told ABC News’s George Stephanopoulos. “If somebody called from a country, Norway — ‘We have information on your opponent’ — oh, I think I’d want to hear it.”

Brendan Nyhan, a professor of government at Dartmouth College, said Trump’s sheer brazenness makes him a difficult target for his critics and puts him outside the scope of previous leaders brought low by high crimes and misdemeanors. 

“There’s a striking contrast between Watergate, where secret tapes helped bring about the downfall of a president, and the Trump White House, where many of the statements that violate the norms of the presidency are made right out in public,” Nyhan said. “His opponents are routinely uncertain how to proceed, because they’ve never encountered a political opponent who so directly states what they mean even when it’s politically scandalous.”

In evaluating whether Trump’s actions constituted obstruction of justice, Mueller noted that “many of the President’s acts directed at witnesses, including discouragement of cooperation with the government and suggestions of possible future pardons, took place in public view.”

In his report, Mueller dubbed that reality “unusual.” Mueller ultimately decided to make no determination as to whether the president broke the law.

Now the president’s relationship with a foreign country is in the spotlight again, this time Ukraine. Even before the whistleblower complaint, House Democrats were investigating a July 25 call with Zelensky as part of their inquiry of whether Trump and his attorney, Rudolph W. Giuliani, tried to ma­nipu­la­te the Ukrainian government into helping his 2020 reelection bid. 

 Giuliani has long been trying to draw attention to Biden’s involvement, as vice president, in pressuring Ukraine to drop its top prosecutor, who was viewed as ineffective at ferreting out corruption but was also, at the time, investigating a natural-gas company on whose board Biden’s son Hunter sat. 

In a combative and disjointed interview with CNN’s Chris Cuomo on Thursday evening, Giuliani contradicted himself in rapid succession, first saying he had never asked Ukraine to investigate Biden, before shouting that he had, in fact, pushed for such an investigation.

“Of course I did!” Giuliani said. 

On Friday, Clinton tweeted out a clip of the interview, offering a stark rejoinder of her own.

“The president asked a foreign power to help him win an election,” she wrote. “Again.” 

Rosalind S. Helderman contributed to this report.