The impeachment inquiry is just about “eight lines in a call transcript,” the House Republican counsel claimed Monday morning. This is a lie. While there are eight deeply problematic lines in the White House summary of the July 25 call between Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, they are a small part of the overall case for impeachment.
Trump told Zelensky, “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”; and, “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.”
Witness after witness told the House Intelligence Committee about the many episodes of pressure from Trump administration officials that took place before and after that call. Republicans objected that most of these were hearsay because the officials hadn’t spoken to Trump and heard directly from him that he was holding up hundreds of millions of dollars in aid to Ukraine in order to pressure it to launch public investigations into Trump’s political opponents—but those eight lines fill in that blank about Trump’s intentions.
And, as The Washington Post details, Castor’s claim that this is all about eight lines is simply false. “Zelensky never vocalized any discomfort or pressure on the call,” Castor said. But Zelensky did make clear that he understood what he was being pressured to do, saying, “I also wanted to thank you for your invitation to visit the United States, specifically Washington DC. On the other hand, I also wanted (to) ensure you that we will be very serious about the case and will work on the investigation.” And plenty of text messages between U.S. and Ukrainian officials show that Zelensky knew the pressure existed.
Castor also claimed, “At the time of the July 25 call, senior officials in Kyiv did not know that the security assistance was temporarily paused. They did not learn that it was paused until the pause was reported publicly in U.S. media on August 28”—but testimony has made clear that Ukrainian officials did know something was up with the security assistance.
”Finally, President Zelensky met with President Trump and the U.S. security assistance flowed to Ukraine—both without Ukraine ever taking actions on investigations,” Castor claimed. Except for the part where Ukraine did try to find a way to negotiate an investigation pledge with Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer, and Zelensky agreed to a CNN interview that was only abandoned when the pressure campaign came to light.
Castor is a Republican lawyer. It’s his job to lie. But, sadly for him, the facts are shouting out against him.