White House accidentally sends Dems their transcript game plan then begs them to ignore it
The White House gang that simply can’t shoot straight made the kind of rookie mistake this morning that can only be compared to an NFL coach who accidentally emails his entire playbook to the opposing team.
According to Politico‘s Congressional reporter, Andrew Desiderio, someone on the White House staff just sent a draft of the GOP’s own talking points on the rapidly exploding Ukraine scandal to Democratic members of the House of Representatives. The missive was apparently unintentional since whoever sent the Republican party line to their chief antagonists desperately tried to recall the email after it had already been sent.
Unfortunately for the Oval Office, the genie was already out of the bottle as Desiderio included a copy of the approved acceptable responses to questions about Donald Trump’s attempts to hold up military aid to Ukraine until they agreed to help investigate the activities of the son of his potential rival in the 2020 election, Joe Biden.
Source says the White House just sent a follow-up to “recall” the email to House Democrats containing talking points…
— Andrew Desiderio (@AndrewDesiderio) September 25, 2019
The inadvertent disclosure of the talking points will hardly add to the damage that Trump has suffered from the scandal to date, particularly since all one has to do to discern the official White House line on the subject is watch Fox News for a few hours to hear every point included in the memo repeated endlessly by right-wing commentators defending the president and by Fox News’ own hosts.
The memo does make it simpler to see a summary of the Oval Office response to the incriminating contents of the five-page “memorandum of telephone conversation” distributed by the White House. The memo is described as “not a verbatim transcript” of the call but was based instead on “notes and recollections of Situation Room Duty officers” and national security staff.
The document shows that immediately after Ukranian President Volodymyr Zelensky raised the issue of acquiring military equipment from the United States to help in its continuing conflict with Russia in Eastern Ukraine, President Trump replies by saying “I would like you to do us a favor” and then goes on to request that officials in the former Soviet republic coordinate with Attorney General William Barr and Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani in investigating the activities of Joe Biden’s son Hunter while he was working in the country.
Neither Trump nor his personal emissary Giuliani has provided any evidence of their claims of wrongdoing by either of the Bidens, but their transparent attempt at leveraging U.S. military aid for personal political benefit was the final straw for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) who finally announced that she was ready to authorize official impeachment proceedings to begin.
The White House can distribute all the talking points they can muster, but with the information already included in the summary of Trump’s call with Zelensky — not to mention the most likely even more incriminating information in the intelligence agency whistleblower’s as yet unseen complaint — there is little they can do to stop the impeachment train from rolling right over the Trump administration no matter how they try to excuse the president’s behavior.
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