Nancy Pelosi has announced that the House will finally hold a formal vote dictating the rules for the impeachment inquiry, six weeks after it was launched by a whistleblowers complaint mysteriously withheld from Congress. And on Tuesday, Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman backed up both the initial whistleblower and U.S. diplomat Bill Taylor by testifying that he too was concerned about the Trump administrations push to use congressionally-allocated military aid to Ukraine to coerce an investigation into Joe Biden.
Congressional Republicans have long since stopped defending Trump on the merits since shortly after the White House released a transcript of a July call between President Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Instead, theyve sought refuge in increasingly meaningless process arguments. So of course Pelosi agreeing to a formal vote on the rules of impeachment hasnt stopped Republican complaints about the process. The goalposts will shift once again. No matter what the Democrats agree to, Republicans will complain about procedural unfairness and also refuse to concede the inquiry is legitimate. But how much of Republicans unwillingness to hold Trump accountable for his self-dealing is because they're in on it?
On Monday the Washington Post published an interview with a Ukrainian diplomat who claimed to have met with Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., this summer to discuss the baseless conspiracy theory promoted by President Trump that Ukrainian officials had interfered in the 2016 election on behalf of Hillary Clinton.
Johnson reportedly met with Ukrainian diplomat Andrii Telizhenko for at least 30 minutes on Capitol Hill in July, and Telizhenko then met with Johnsons Senate staff for five additional hours. According to the report, the discussions focused in part on the DNC issue a reference to his unsubstantiated claim that the Democratic National Committee worked with the Ukrainian government in 2016 to gather incriminating information about then-Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort. Telizhenko said he could not recall the date of the meeting, but a review of his Facebook page revealed a photo of him and Johnson posted on July 11.
Johnson is a vocal Trump defender who has hounded the inspector general of the intelligence community about investigating media leaks regarding the Ukraine call. He has previously admitted that he was told by Gordon Sondland, the U.S. ambassador to the European Union, that Ukraine needed to "get to the bottom of what happened in 2016" in order to receive military aid.
As Johnson told the Wall Street Journal earlier this month, after Sondland told him that, he was assured "if President Trump has that confidence" that the Ukrainians would do his bidding, "then he'll release the military spending." Now, as the Post points out, Johnson's "knowledge of key events" in the case may "complicate his role as a juror in a trial by the Senate."
Recall that when Johnson was asked about his defense of Trumps actions, he snapped at the simple question from NBC News Chuck Todd and spun out the same deep state conspiracy theory pushed by the likes of Fox News Sean Hannity.
Beyond his apparent involvement in Trumps Ukraine dealings, Johnson is alleged to have benefited from campaign money illegally funneled from Russia via shell corporations owned by the National Rifle Association, which helped him win his tight 2016 race in Wisconsin.