Annals of Impeachment: From Nixon's "Smoking Gun" Tape to Trump Zelensky Summary

On August 5, 1974, Nixon was forced by the Supreme Court to release the smoking gun tape in which he and his chief of staff H. R. Haldemann had a conversation, in the course of which Nixon could be heard acknowledging his knowledge of the burglary of the Democratic National Committee office files in the Watergate building and the bugging of those offices, and discussing ordering the CIA to lean on the FBI to stop its investigation of the break-in. This tape caused his support among a majority of Republicans in Congress to collapse, making it clear that he would be impeached, and so he resigned.

Nixon did not need to steal the DNC files (which he probably did order, but certainly tried to covr up)- he likely had been well-placed to win reelection. He was just so paranoid that he was sure that the Democrats were conspiring against him and he had to know how.Nixon tried to set in train a a break-in at the liberal Brookings Institution and his aide Chuck Colson suggested they firebomb it so that its files could be stolen and it could be wiretapped. (The planned bombing did not take place. But when we used to chant against the "mad bomber in the White House," we had no idea how right we were).

Nixon was a habitual crook, but he at least retained some notion of what normal people would think of him if they knew who he really was. He at least tried to cover it up.

Trump and his cronies are so far gone that they actually thought that staffers' summary of his July conversation with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky would exonerate him. Instead, it has so many Nixonian smoking guns that it single-handedly provoked a smog alert on Capitol Hill.

I edited down the summary a little, and it is clear that Trump began by holding out a carrot (how much we are doing for Ukraine), and then urged him to look into the (untrue conspiracy) theory that Hillary Clinton's emails were on a server in Ukraine ("crowdstrike").

Trump went on to withhold $250 million in military aid from Ukraine, which Congress appropriated, and many suspect the suspension of aid was a way of pressuring Zelensky to look into Hunter Biden.

And then Trump wanted to reignite the investigation of the Burisma Holdings natural gas company, on the board of which Hunter Biden served. That investigation had begun years before and went nowhere, and was shelved.

Trump and his fellow conspiracy theorists are convinced that Joe Biden pushed for the firing of prosecutor general Viktor Shokin because he was too energetically looking into Burisma and its CEO. It was the opposite. Shokin, despite his own protestations, was known to have dropped the ball on that and many other investigations, and the European Union, the IMF and the US all wanted him gone.

So Biden would have had to be trying to get Hunter's company in trouble if he pushed out the do-nothing Shokin. Actually Burisma and Hunter were not the issue. Hunter himself was never under investigation, and the company had long since announced the end of the investigation and its willingness to repay any taxes it still was held to have owed. Biden wasn't acting on his own behalf but rather was a messenger of the international community in pushing for Shokin's ouster.

Rudy Giuliani was lobbying for the restart of the Burisma investigation before Zelensky was elected, last spring, and then tried to get his hooks into the new president. Giuliani thinks that Biden will be the Democratic standard-bearer, and that Trump can do to him what he did to Hillary Clinton by spinning crazy conspiracy theories that are amplified by Bob Mercer and Vladimir Putin's St. Petersburg troll farms on social media, and which might tip the election to Trump.

Zelensky is a comedian and actor who starred in a popular TV show, playing the president of the Ukraine. So he is a neophyte (sort of like Trump) and perhaps easily manipulated.

Here's the edited summary, which clearly shows that Trump solicited the interference of a foreign power in a US election (which is illegal) and that he held US aid over Zelensky's head in exchange for a king of oppo research, which is a form of buying a thing of value for the election and is also illegal.

A smoking gun.