The president’s detractors point to this as the nail in the proverbial coffin, evidence he used the power of his office, and the sacred trust placed in him by the American people, to pressure a foreign leader to get dirt on an election opponent.
His die-hard supporters say this is yet another smear campaign, a political hit job and just more “fake news,” that the so-called whistleblower was merely repeating unverified second-hand information, little more than water cooler gossip.
The truth, eventually, may lie somewhere in the middle.
The transcript phone call between President Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is certainly unsettling. On its face, there’s something very wrong when a sitting U.S. president tries to elicit compromising information about a political opponent in the run-up to the 2020 campaign. And the timing of the White House freezing, and then releasing, Congressionally-approved military aid to the Ukraine is suspicious, to say th...