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Take it away, Lindsey!
“What I can tell you about the Trump policy toward Ukraine: It was incoherent, it depends on who you talk to, they seem to be incapable of forming a quid pro quo, so no I find the whole process to be a sham and I’m not going to legitimize it.”
OK, OK. So what we have here is this argument: The Trump White House is so disorganized that they couldn’t possibly have quid pro quo’ed it! They are too incompetent! So therefore, this whole thing is a sham!
(Sidebar: We heard this same argument from Republicans privately during the Mueller probe into Russia. The Trump campaign was too disorganized to collude!)
The Ukrainians had no way of knowing that the White House was, in Graham’s formulation, too disorganized to push a quid pro quo. All they knew was that Sondland told a top aide to Zelensky what he believed the way to get the aid released was.
Graham’s argument is a classic attempt to spin past events in a way that none of the players could have reasonably expected to understand in the moment. And incompetence, even if it’s not fully known, is no excuse anyway.
The Point: Call Graham’s “explanation” what it really is — bad spin that directly contradicts known facts.
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