President Trump on Thursday excoriated an unidentified whistleblower and the White House aides who informed their complaint as “almost a spy” and likened their work to treason — part of a scorched-earth strategy he is directing for the Republican Party at the outset of an impeachment showdown.
Trump has acted impulsively and indignantly as he wages an all-out political war to defend himself from allegations that he abused his power to solicit foreign interference in his 2020 reelection bid.
And in a testament to how completely he controls the Republican Party, many GOP officeholders and conservative media figures have followed Trump’s cues by joining his attempts either to attack the anonymous whistleblower, discredit the explosive accounts in his or her complaint, or malign the media for covering it.
The coming weeks will test whether Trump’s familiar blame-the-accuser-and-counterattack playbook — while floating dark conspiracies to divert attention — will be successful in the face of mounting evidence that he asked Ukraine to dig up dirt on potential 2020 Democratic opponent Joe Biden.
Trump’s own appointed intelligence chief testified Thursday to the whistleblower’s credibility, and some of the allegations in the complaint were confirmed by the rough transcript of Trump’s July 25 call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that the White House released Wednesday.
Long indifferent to the norms that restrained his predecessors, Trump shattered another one Thursday by alluding to violence and possible death for the whistleblower’s sources in an apparent warning to witnesses inside the government who might be asked to testify against him.
Addressing employees of the U.S. Mission to the United Nations during a closed-door meeting in New York, Trump said, “I want to know who’s the person, who’s the person who gave the whistleblower the information? Because that’s close to a spy.”
“You know what we used to do in the old days when we were smart? Right? The spies and treason, we used to handle it a little differently than we do now,” Trump said, according to an audio recording published by the Los Angeles Times. An attendee confirmed the comments to The Washington Post.
Read More...
Trump writes the GOP impeachment playbook: Scorched earth. But will it work?
Current News
Senate RINOs Are Squandering a Golden Opportunity to Fix America’s Broken Election System
Senate Majority Leader John Thune is doing his level best to make sure none of the SAVE America Act becomes law… Read more
White House Slams ABC News for ‘False’ Iran Drone Strike Report, Calls for Immediate Retraction
The White House is pushing back hard against an ABC News report warning that Iran had plans to strike the West Coast of the United States with drones… Read more
Trump Is Dismantling Xi’s ‘China Dream’ Piece by Piece
For over a decade, Chinese President Xi Jinping has pursued what he calls the “China Dream” — a sweeping nationalist vision of national rejuvenation in which China supplants the United States… Read more
Trump Rejects Biden’s Executive Privilege Claims, Opening Floodgates on Biden Health, Family Finances, and Politically Motivated Probes
President Donald Trump just made a big decision that will likely expose a lot of information that was not released about Joe Biden during his occupation of the Oval Office… Read more
FBI Secretly Seizes Terabytes of Election Records from Arizona’s Largest County as Voting Probe Expands Nationally
The FBI has secretly obtained a massive tranche of voting records from Maricopa County, Arizona… Read more
The Runoff That Will Define a Party: Cornyn, Paxton, and the Unfinished Promise of Republican Immigration
When the delegates at the 2024 Republican National Convention raised their now-iconic signs reading “Mass Deportations Now,” they were not merely engaging in political theater. Read more