The Phone Call Transcript: Impeachable Abuse of Power or Not?

Many people are familiar with the unauthenticated transcript of the president's phone call with the Ukrainian president. Democrats generally see impeachable abuse of power in the call, and republicans generally see either no quid pro quo offer at all, or an offer that does not amount to any impeachable offense.

Here is the unauthenticated transcript, with key passages underlined:


UNCLASSIFIED
Declassified by order of the President
September 24, 2019

MEMORANDUM OF TELEPHONE CONVERSATION
SUBJECT: Telephone Conversation with President Zelenskyy of Ukraine
Participants: President Zelenskyy of Ukraine
Notetakers: The White House Situation Room
Date, Time July 25, 2019, 9:03-9:33 am EDT
and Place: Residence

The President: Congratulations on a great victory. We all watched from the United States and you did a terrific job. The way you came from behind, somebody who wasn't given much of a chance, and you ended up winning easily. It's a fantastic achievement. Congratulations.

President Zelenskyy: You are absolutely right Mr. President. We did win big and we worked hard for this. We worked a lot but I would like to confess to you that I had an opportunity to learn from you. We used quite a few of your skills and knowledge and were able to use it as an example for our elections and yes it is true that these were unique elections. We were in a unique situation that we were able to achieve a unique success. I'm able to tell you the following; the first time you called me to congratulate me when I won my presidential election, and the second time you are now calling me when my party won the parliamentary election. I think I should run more often so you can call me more often and we can talk over the phone more often.

The President: (laughter) That's a very good idea. I think your country is very happy about that. President Zelenskyy: Well yes, to tell you the truth, we are trying to work hard because we wanted to drain the swamp here in our country. We brought in many many new people. Not the old politicians, not the typical politicians, because we want to have a new format and a new type of government. You are a great teacher for us and in that.

The President: Well it is very nice of you to say that. I will say that we do a lot for Ukraine. We spend a lot of effort and a lot of time. Much more than the European countries are doing and they should be helping you more than they are. Germany does almost nothing for you. All they do is talk and I think it's something that you should really ask them about. When I was speaking to Angela Merkel she talks Ukraine, but she ·doesn't do anything. A lot of the European countries are the same way so I think it's something you want to look at but the United States has been very very good to Ukraine. I wouldn't say that it's reciprocal necessarily because things are happening that are not good but the United States has been very very good to Ukraine.

President Zelenskyy: Yes you are absolutely right. Not only 100%, but actually 1000% and I can tell you the following; I did talk to Angela Merkel and I did meet with her I also met and talked with Macron and I told them that they are not doing quite as much as they need to be doing on the issues with the sanctions. They are not enforcing the sanctions. They are not working as much as they should work for Ukraine. It turns out that even though logically, the European Union should be our biggest partner but technically the United States is a much bigger partner than the European Union and I'm very grateful to you for that because the United States is doing quite a lot for Ukraine. Much more than the European Union especially when we are talking about sanctions against the Russian Federation. I would also like to thank you for your great support in the area of defense. 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.

The President: I would like you to do us a favor though because our country has been through a lot and Ukraine knows a lot about it. I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine, they say Crowdstrike... I guess you have one of your wealthy people... The server, they say Ukraine has it. There are a lot of things that went on, the whole situation. I think you're surrounding yourself with some of the same people. I would like to have the Attorney General call you or your people and I would like you to get to the bottom of it. 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. Whatever you can do, it's very important that you do it if that's possible.

President Zelenskyy: Yes it is very important for me and everything that you just mentioned earlier. For me as a President, it is very important and we are open for any future cooperation. We are ready to open a new page on cooperation in relations between the United States and Ukraine. For that purpose, I just recalled our ambassador from United States and he will be replaced by a very competent and very experienced ambassador who will work hard on making sure that our two nations are getting closer. I would also like and hope to see him having your trust and your confidence and have personal relations with you so we can cooperate even more so. I will personally tell you that one of my assistants spoke with Mr. Giuliani just recently and we are hoping very much that Mr. Giuliani will be able to travel to Ukraine and we will meet once he comes to Ukraine. I just wanted to assure you once again that you have nobody but friends around us. I will make sure that I surround myself with the best and most experienced people. I also wanted to tell you that we are friends. We are great friends and you Mr. President have friends in our country so we can continue our strategic partnership. I also plan to surround myself with great people and in addition to that investigation, I guarantee as the President of Ukraine that all the investigations will be done openly and candidly.. That I can assure you.

The President: Good because I heard you had a prosecutor who was very good and he was shut down and that's really unfair. A lot of people are talking about that, the way they shut your very good prosecutor down and you had some very bad people involved. Mr. Giuliani is a highly respected man. He was the mayor of New York City, a great mayor, and I would like him to call you. I will ask him to call you along with the Attorney General. Rudy very much knows what's happening and he is a very capable guy. If you could speak to him that would be great. The former ambassador from the United States, the woman, was bad news and the people she was dealing with in the Ukraine were bad news so I just want to let you know that. The other thing, There's a lot of talk about Biden's son, that Biden stopped the prosecution and a lot of people want to find out about that so whatever you can do with the Attorney General would be great. Biden went around bragging that he stopped the prosecution so if you can look into it... It sounds horrible to me.

President Zelenskyy: I wanted to tell you about the prosecutor. First of all, I understand and I'm knowledgeable about the situation. Since we have won the absolute majority in our Parliament, the next prosecutor general will be 100% my person, my candidate, who will be approved, by the parliament and will start as a new prosecutor in September. He or she will look into the situation, specifically to the company that you mentioned in this issue. The issue of the investigation of the case is actually the issue of making sure to restore the honesty so we will take care of that and will work on the investigation of the case. On top of that, I would kindly ask you if you have any additional information that you can provide to us, it would be very helpful for the investigation to make sure that we administer justice in our country with regard to the Ambassador to the United States from Ukraine as far as I recall her name was Ivanovich. It was great that you were the first one who told me that she was a bad ambassador because I agree with you 100%. Her attitude towards me was far from the best as she admired the previous President and she was on his side. She would not accept me as a new President well enough.

The President: 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. I'm sure you will figure it out. I heard the prosecutor was treated very badly and he was a very fair prosecutor so good luck with everything. Your economy is going to get better and better I predict. You have a lot of assets. It's a great country. I have many Ukrainian friends, their incredible people.

President Zelenskyy: I would like to tell you that I also have quite a few Ukrainian friends that live in the United States. Actually last time I traveled to the United States, I stayed in New York near Central Park and I stayed at the Trump Tower. I will talk to them and I hope to see them again in the future. I also wanted to thank you for your invitation to visit the United States, specifically Washington DC. On the other hand, I also want to ensure you that we will be very serious about the case and will work on the investigation. As to the economy, there is much potential for our two countries and one of the issues that is very important for Ukraine is energy independence. I believe we can be very successful and cooperating on energy independence with United States. We are already working on cooperation. We are buying American oil but I am very hopeful for a future meeting. We will have more time and more opportunities to discuss these opportunities and get to know each other better. I would like to thank you very much for your support.

The President: Good. Well, thank you very much and I appreciate that. I will tell Rudy and Attorney General Barr to call. Thank you. Whenever you would like to come to the White House, feel free to call. Give us a date and we'll work that out. I look forward to seeing you.

President Zelenskyy: Thank you very much. I would be very happy to come and would be happy to meet with you personally and get to know you better. I am looking forward to our meeting and I also would like to invite you to visit Ukraine and come to the city of Kyiv which is a beautiful city. We have a beautiful country which would welcome you. On the other hand, I believe that on September 1 we will be in Poland and we can meet in Poland hopefully. After that, it might be a very good idea for you to travel to Ukraine. We can either take my plane and go to Ukraine or we can take your plane, which is probably much better than mine.

The President: Okay, we can work that out. I look forward to seeing you in Washington and maybe in Poland because I think we are going to be there at that time.

President Zelenskyy: Thank you very much Mr. President.

The President: Congratulations on a fantastic job you've done. The whole world was watching. I'm not sure it was so much of an upset but congratulations.

President Zelenskyy: Thank you Mr. President bye-bye.

- - End of conversation - -

If it were president Clinton 

If it was president Hillary Clinton instead of the current US president speaking to a foreign president about a political rival of hers, would republicans see anything wrong in that phone call? Would republicans be fine with a president Clinton having tried to hide the phone call from the public? Does it matter that the president is lying to the public about fact issues related to Biden?[1] Does it matter that a whistleblower saw the call as a serious abuse of power?

When the president said “I would like you to do us a favor though because our country has been through a lot and Ukraine knows a lot about it,” does what the US has ‘been through’ refer to anything other than investigations of Trump’s own political problems? Would it be inaccurate to translate that sentence as: “I would like you to do me a favor though because I have been through a lot, and investigations into my presidency are getting closer to critically damaging me, and opinion polls show Joe Biden beating me, and you know exactly what I am talking about.”?

More broadly, does impeachable abuse of power need to be blunt, such as this: “Mr. President, I will release US military aid to your country only if you investigate and find the evidence that the Russians did not hack and attack Clinton’s campaign and only if you find the evidence that Joe Biden acted illegally and corruptly in shutting down a fine corruption investigation by a fine investigator. If you promise me those two things, I will promise you I will release the military aid as a quid pro quo to help my re-election campaign in 2020.”

Is that what it takes to abuse power? No, it isn't. For republicans, that kind of language by a republican president might rise to the level of something of some concern, maybe even to the level of impeachable abuse of power for some. However, it is as certain as most things in politics can get, that if it was president Clinton making those statements and trying to hide the phone call from everyone, 100% of republicans in congress and probably 98% of rank and file republicans would be screaming, not asking, for her immediate impeachment for treason, not just abuse of power.

Is this a matter of partisan hypocrisy by spineless republicans defending a corrupt republican president? Or, are democrats seeing things that are not there?

Footnote:
1. Slate reports on one of Trump’s lies concerning Biden and efforts to disrupt a Ukraine investigation into (non-existent) evidence of misconduct by Biden or his son: “1. The Lutsenko retractions. Trump claims that he pressed Ukraine for the investigations because he sincerely believed—and believes today—that Ukraine had information implicating Biden and other U.S. Democrats in conspiracies. But Trump escalated these allegations even as Yuri Lutsenko, the Ukrainian prosecutor on whose statements the president relied, was admitting that they were false. In April, Lutsenko, who is seen as corrupt by many Ukrainians, retracted his claim that the Obama administration had ordered him not to investigate a list of possible suspects. Despite this, a week later, Trump hyped Lutsenko’s work as “big stuff” that could expose a Democratic plot. In May, Lutsenko retracted additional allegations: that he had evidence of misconduct by Biden or his son and that the family was under investigation. Again, a few days later, Trump repeated the allegations. He wanted dirt on Biden, regardless of whether it was true.”

The Intractable Reality of Racism

The NPR program This American Life is broadcasting a story about racism in the Amsterdam fire department. The overall story seems painfully familiar to me, but just in a different place in present time. The broadcast begins with firefighters urinating in the helmets of other firefighters. It spirals down from there.

The point is simple: Some racists do not believe they are racist and allegations of racism against them are nonsense. The facts contradict that, but attitudes among many people in Western societies is changing for the worse. Western culture and civility are in retrograde. Western political and educational systems are failing to combat the propaganda of hate and bigotry. Liberal democracy and tolerance are failing, while hate, bigotry and authoritarianism is rising.

The broadcast will be available today at 8 pm Eastern time: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/684/burn-it-down

Transcript: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/684/transcript

WHAT DO YOU SEE IN THIS PHOTO

Five Things You Notice When You Quit the News

DATED BUT STILL RELEVANT!!
https://www.raptitude.com/2016/12/five-things-you-notice-when-you-quit-the-news/

I grew up believing that following the news makes you a better citizen. Eight years after having quit, that idea now seems ridiculous—that consuming a particularly unimaginative information product on a daily basis somehow makes you thoughtful and informed in a way that benefits society.

But I still encounter people who balk at the possibility of a smart, engaged adult quitting the daily news.

To be clear, I’m mostly talking about following TV and internet newscasts here. This post isn’t an indictment of journalism as a whole. There’s a big difference between watching a half hour of CNN’s refugee crisis coverage (not that they cover it anymore) versus spending that time reading a 5,000-word article on the same topic.

If you quit, even for just a month or so, the news-watching habit might start to look quite ugly and unnecessary to you, not unlike how a smoker only notices how bad tobacco makes things smell once he stops lighting up.

A few things you might notice, if you take a break: 

1) You feel better

A common symptom of quitting the news is an improvement in mood. News junkies will say it’s because you’ve stuck your head in the sand.

But that assumes the news is the equivalent of having your head out in the fresh, clear air. They don’t realize that what you can glean about the world from the news isn’t even close to a representative sample of what is happening in the world.

The news isn’t interested in creating an accurate sample. They select for what’s 1) unusual, 2) awful, and 3) probably going to be popular. So the idea that you can get a meaningful sense of the “state of the world” by watching the news is absurd.

Their selections exploit our negativity bias. We’ve evolved to pay more attention to what’s scary and infuriating, but that doesn’t mean every instance of fear or anger is useful. Once you’ve quit watching, it becomes obvious that it is a primary aim of news reports—not an incidental side-effect—to agitate and dismay the viewer.

What appears on the news is not “The conscientious person’s portfolio of concerns”. What appears is whatever sells, and what sells is fear, and contempt for other groups of people.

Curate your own portfolio. You can get better information about the world from deeper sources, who took more than a half-day to put it together.

2) You were never actually accomplishing anything by watching the news

If you ask someone what they accomplish by watching the news, you’ll hear vague notions like, “It’s our civic duty to stay informed!” or “I need to know what’s going on in the world,” or “We can’t just ignore these issues,” none of which answer the question.

“Being informed” sounds like an accomplishment, but it implies that any information will do. You can become informed by reading a bus schedule.

A month after you’ve quit the news, it’s hard to name anything useful that’s been lost. It becomes clear that those years of news-watching amounted to virtually nothing in terms of improvement to your quality of life, lasting knowledge, or your ability to help others. And that’s to say nothing of the opportunity cost. Imagine if you spent that time learning a language, or reading books and essays about some of the issues they mention on the news.

You’ll find that your abstinence did not result in any worse cabinet appointments than were already being made, and that disaster relief efforts carried on without your involvement, just as they always do. As it turns out, your hobby of monitoring the “state of the world” did not actually affect the world.

We have inherited from somewhere—maybe from the era when there was only an hour of news available a day—the belief that having a superficial awareness of the day’s most popular issues is somehow helpful to those most affected by them.

3) Most current-events-related conversations are just people talking out of their asses

“Because it helps you participate in everyday conversations!” is a weak but at least meaningful answer to the “What is accomplished” question. But when you quit playing the current events game, and observe others talking about them, you might notice that almost nobody really knows what they’re talking about.

There is an extraordinary gulf between having a functional understanding of an issue, and the cursory glance you get from the news. If you ever come across a water-cooler conversation on a topic you happen to know a lot about, you see right through the emperor’s clothes. It’s kind of hilarious how willing people are to speak boldly on issues they’ve known about for all of three hours.

It feels good to make cutting remarks and take hard stands, even when we’re wrong, and the news gives us perfect fodder for that. The less you know about an issue, the easier it is to make bold proclamations about it, because at newscast-distance it still looks black and white enough that you can feel certain about what needs to happen next.

Maybe the last thing the world needs is another debate on Issue X between two people who learned about it from a newscast—at least if we’re trying to improve relationships between people from different groups.

4) There are much better ways to “be informed”

We all want to live in a well-informed society. The news does inform people, but I don’t think it informs people particularly well.

There are loads of sources of “information”. The back of your shampoo bottle contains information. Today there’s much more of it out there than we can ever absorb, so we have to choose what deserves our time. The news provides information in infinite volume but very limited depth, and it’s clearly meant to agitate us more than educate us.

Every minute spent watching news is a minute you are unavailable for learning about the world in other ways. Americans probably watch a hundred million hours of news coverage every day. That’s a lot of unread books, for one thing.

Read three books on a topic and you know more about it than 99% of the world. Watch news all day for years and you have a distant, water-cooler-level awareness of thousands of stories, at least for the few weeks each is popular.

If we only care about the breadth of information, and not the depth, there’s not much distinction between “staying informed” and staying misinformed.

5) “Being concerned” makes us feel like we’re doing something when we’re not

News is all about injustice and catastrophe, and naturally we feel uncomfortable ignoring stories in which people are being hurt. As superficial as TV newscasts can be, the issues reported in them are (usually) real. Much more real than they can ever seem through a television. People are suffering and dying, all the time, and to ignore a depiction of any of that suffering, even a cynical and manipulative depiction, makes us feel guilty.

The least we can do is not ignore it, we think. So we watch it on TV, with wet eyes and lumps in our throats. But staying at this level of “concerned” isn’t really helping anyone, except maybe to alleviate our own guilt a bit.

And I wonder if there’s a kind of “substitution effect” at work here. The sense of “at least I care” may actually prevent us from doing something concrete to help, because by watching sympathetically we don’t quite have to confront the reality that we’re doing absolutely nothing about it.

Watching disasters unfold, even while we do nothing, at least feels a little more compassionate than switching off. The truth is that the vast majority of us will provide absolutely no help to the victims of almost all of the atrocities that happen in this world, televised or not. And that’s hard to accept. But if we can at least show concern, even to ourselves, we don’t quite have accept that. We can remain uninvolved without feeling uninvolved.

This may be the biggest reason we fear turning off the news. And it might be the best reason to do it.

Have you quit the news? What did you notice?

RETRACTED IN PART: Does the President Share Any Responsibility for Bad Behavior?

I retract the discussion below as marked. It is fake news. The girl who accused others of bullying her made her accusations up. The WaPo grossly erred by prematurely reporting this story. A follow-on story describing the real story is here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/virginia-sixth-grader-now-says-she-falsely-accused-classmates-of-cutting-her-hair/2019/09/30/ad0cbd92-e390-11e9-a331-2df12d56a80b_story.html

The original WaPo article is now marked: (UPDATE: Virginia sixth-grader now says she falsely accused classmates of cutting her hair)

The damage from the mistake will be real and long-lasting. Millions of people will use this gross error by the WaPo to attack the press and its credibility. They will also use it to downplay evidence of bigotry, arguing the professional press is just propaganda, democratic talking points and the enemy of the people. In my opinion, such extreme beliefs are clearly false and highly socially damaging. Unfortunately, given the raw tribalism, hate and distrust that dominate politics, those minds cannot be changed any time soon, maybe ever.

I do not retract the portion of this discussion that focuses the broader idea on the influence of a president on society and social behavior. This story does not affect the underlying facts or logic.

RETRACTED

The Washington Post reports that white school children attacked a black 12 year old sixth-grade student:

“Fairfax County police are investigating an alleged attack on a sixth-grade girl by three boys Monday at the private Christian school they attend in Springfield, Va.
The 12-year-old girl, who is African American, told police that three white sixth-grade classmates held her down, covered her mouth, called her insulting names and used scissors to cut several of her dreadlocks from her head during recess in the playground at Immanuel Christian School.

‘I was about to go down the slide, and the three boys came up and surrounded me,’ the girl said in an interview Thursday afternoon. ‘They were saying my hair was nappy and I was ugly and I shouldn’t have been born.’”

.... She also said the boys had been bullying her at school and taking her lunch for weeks. According to Allen [the girl’s aunt], her niece was afraid to tell teachers about the incident because she feared retaliation from the boys and also didn’t want to get anyone in trouble.

“I felt hurt and angry, but I also felt compassion for them because something must have happened to them and that’s why they bully,” the girl said.

WaPo also commented that Vice President Pence’s wife, Karen Pence, teaches art part-time at the school in grades 1-5. The school is investigating the incidents, claiming it has a “zero tolerance policy” for bullying and abuse.

NOT RETRACTED

Any presidential responsibility?

Some research indicated that school bullying increased in areas of Virginia that voted for the president. Fairfax County did not vote for him. Some other research indicated that school bullying increased after the president announced his candidacy for president.

Is it rational and fair to think that the president bears some degree of responsibility for bad behavior in schools and elsewhere in society? His public rhetoric can be harsh, insulting and racially divisive. People pick up on that and some act on it. One man was arrested for planning to murder journalists at the Boston Globe after being inspired by Trump repeatedly attacking the press as the enemy of the people. Can one reasonably think that the president is, say, 50% responsible at least for the increased level of bad behaviors that arguably are tied to him, his rhetoric and his behaviors? If, instead of being divisive and polarizing, the president had turned out to be a unifier and aggressively anti-racist, would the level of bad behavior before taking power have decreased?

Self-Regulation in America

A long-time personal acquaintance has been complaining for decades that self-regulation doesn't work. Instead, it is mostly a cover for companies, congress, special interests and professions such as doctors and lawyers to protect themselves and profits from transparency, accountability and liability. The Washington Post describes an interesting example in an article today of how self-regulation can work.

WaPo describes how Uber protects itself from liability by have an investigating unit of employees look into bad experiences that passengers sometimes have with some Uber drivers. The top priority for company investigators is to protect the company first. Passenger safety is a secondary concern. WaPo writes:

“Uber has a three-strikes system, investigators said, but executives have made exceptions to keep drivers on the road. For instance, a New York-area driver allegedly made three separate sexual advances on riders, said an investigator assigned to the case. After an executive overruled the investigator, the driver was allowed to continue working until a fourth incident, when a rider claimed he raped her.

The agents are forbidden by Uber from routing allegations to police or from advising victims to seek legal counsel or make their own police reports, even when they get confessions of felonies, said Lilli Flores, a former investigator in Phoenix — a guideline corroborated in interviews with investigators, alleged victims and plaintiffs’ attorneys.”

The top priority is to protect Uber from liability. Even if Uber kicks a driver out because felonies were committed, the company does not report driver’s crimes to local police, other ride-share companies or background check firms. In other words, an Uber driver who commits felonies against customers can just go to work for Lyft and continue to commit felonies.

Uber does this for obvious reasons -- liability avoidance and profit maximization. Uber insists its drivers are not employees but are independent contractors. Therefore the company isn’t liable for illegal actions by bad drivers. Uber isn't alone in using independent contractors as a liability shield tactic. As discussed here before, Amazon claims that its drivers are independent contractors to avoid liability for driving accidents.

California recently passed a law that consider drivers for companies including Uber and Lyft to be employees, not independent contractors, thus opening the companies up to liability for employee bad acts, taxes, employee benefits and fuel and vehicle insurance costs. Not surprisingly, gig economy companies that had rejected employees over independent contractors are fighting the California law tooth and claw.

In essence, what companies that reject employees in favor of independent contractors does is privatize profit, while socializing cost as much as possible. These companies assert that they are doing their best for society. For example, Uber denies that the top priority of its own investigations unit is to protect the company first. Instead, Uber claims its top priority is to protect customers. However, the rationale is nonsense because it is irrational. WaPo writes:

“At the end of the day, we’re not the judge and jury to determine whether a crime has occurred,” said Tracey Breeden, Uber’s global head of women’s safety. “We’re here to gather information, make a business decision. We’re not law enforcement.”

Is that rationale convincing? It does not explain how a simple referral of criminal actions to police to a company by its customers amounts to being a judge, jury, law enforcement or anything of the sort. Reporting crime amounts to a responsible, moral corporate citizen reporting to police, nothing more.

On the other hand, irresponsible, immoral corporate citizens help hide criminal acts to protect their profit and shift corporate liability to society. Arguably, one consider self-regulation as trickle up for profit and trickle down for liability.

Is that a reasonable, fair analysis of how the profit and liability game is played under self-regulation rules and morals?