A22 TUESDAY, OCTOBER 8, 2019
NPay to Play at the White House
EDITORIAL“Heard from White House — Assuming President Z con-
vinces trump he will investigate/‘get to the bottom of what
happened’ in 2016, we will nail down date for visit to Wash-
ington.”
So wrote Kurt Volker, until recently President Trump’s
special envoy to Ukraine, to Andrey Yermak, an adviser to
Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, on the morning of
July 25, the same day Mr. Trump asked Mr. Zelensky for “a
favor” in their now-infamous phone call. Among a trove of
encrypted texts that Mr. Volker turned over to Congress last
week, this message is brief and informal. It is also a text-
book example of a quid pro quo, one intended to advance not
American foreign policy goals but Donald Trump’s re-elec-
tion.
As the Ukraine scandal continues to unfold, there hasbeen much disagreement about whether Mr. Trump with-
held nearly $400 million in military aid to the former Soviet
republic in an attempt to bully its government into pursuing
investigations that would benefit him politically. Mr. Trump
had demanded that Ukraine look into whether former Vice
President Joe Biden misused his office to protect his son
Hunter, who served on the board of a Ukrainian gas com-
pany. (There has been no evidence to suggest this.) He also
wanted an inquiry into the (debunked) conspiracy theory
that Ukraine, not Russia, was behind the hacking of the
Democratic National Committee in 2016. Democrats say Mr.
Trump’s extortion attempt is undeniable, and even a few Re-
publican lawmakers have expressed discomfort. But most
members of the president’s party have stuck by him, insist-
ing that a direct connection is not clear.
But Mr. Volker’s offer of July 25 could not have been
more clear: If Mr. Zelensky agreed to give Mr. Trump the in-
vestigations he so desperately wanted, then Mr. Trump
would give Mr. Zelensky the White House visit he so needed
as a sign of the United States’ continued support of Ukraine
in its conflict with Russia. It is an exchange so explicit that
even Mr. Trump’s fiercest apologists cannot wish it away.
If further clarification is needed, several of the other
texts Mr. Volker provided lay out the details of the negotia-
tions and clarify just how serious Mr. Trump was about what
another American official called “the deliverable.” Before a
White House visit could be confirmed, Trump officials ex-
pected Mr. Zelensky to formally and publicly announce the
desired investigations. Mr. Volker even typed out what ap-
pears to be recommended language to send to Mr. Yermak.
Mr. Yermak obviously grasped the terms of the agree-
ment, but he seems to have suspected the Americans might
not be as good as their word. In an Aug. 13 text, he told Mr.
Volker: “I think it’s possible to make this declaration and
mention all these things. Which we discussed yesterday. But
it will be logic to do after we receive a confirmation of date.”
Once upon a time, Americans — and especially Republi-can lawmakers — used to worry a great deal about access to
the White House being traded for cheap political gain.
When allegations arose of campaign-finance irregular-
ities in the 1996 presidential election, including that Chinese
interests had illegally funneled donations to the Clinton-
Gore re-election effort, the Republican-controlled Senate
started an investigation to determine whether any top cam-
paign officials, or possibly even Vice President Al Gore, had
been knowingly involved. Among other excesses, Mr. Gore
violated the spirit, if not the letter, of the law by making
fund-raising calls from his office (this episode provoked Mr.
Gore’s notorious “no controlling legal authority” news con-
ference). From July to October 1997, the Governmental Af-
fairs Committee, led by Fred Thompson of Tennessee, held
public hearings on the matter.
On the House side, another Republican, Dan Burton,
spearheaded a far more extensive investigation, which
spanned two Congresses, cost upward of $7.4 million and
turned the overzealous Mr. Burton into a political punch
line.
Concerns about White House access weren’t limited to
the corrupting influence of foreign actors, either. The Clin-
tons’ practice of rewarding big donors with sleepovers in the
Lincoln Bedroom drew widespread condemnation when it
came to light in 1996. The Senate majority leader at the time,
Mississippi’s Trent Lott, called for an independent prosecu-
tor to investigate the Democrats’ 1996 fund-raising — a re-
quest rejected by the Clinton Justice Department. David
McIntosh, then a Republican House member from Indiana,
put it simply: “Very clearly, it is wrong to use government
property, government assets for political purposes.”
In its investigation, the Justice Department wound up
securing guilty pleas or convictions from multiple players,
including some with longstanding ties to the Clintons.
The Times editorial board was vocal in its own concern
about the campaign-finance practices of the Clinton era.
“Using the White House and Camp David for sleepovers has
tarred the presidency and cheapened institutions that
should be above political advantage,” a Times editorial
noted in 2000, when the issue popped up to haunt Hillary
Clinton’s first Senate run. During the investigations, the edi-
torial board accused Democrats of being “involved in a fi-
nance system that was running amok throughout 1996.
Money was being harvested while benefits ranging from
jobs on obscure presidential commissions to nights in the
Lincoln Bedroom were being handed out like candy.” In
early 1997, the board backed the call for “an independent
counsel to check the vice president’s reading of the law and
the legality of the entire Democratic fund-raising operation.”
Such concerns seem nearly quaint now. Mr. Trump isn’t
yet known to be hosting pay-to-play pajama parties or dial-
ing for dollars from his office. He has warped American for-
eign policy and directed administration officials to put the
interests of his re-election campaign above those of Ameri-
can national security. This is not merely tacky or ethically
dubious. It is a flagrant violation of his oath of office — one
that should be of grave concern to lawmakers of both par-
ties.ILLUSTRATION BY LIZZIE GILL; PHOTOGRAPH BY DOUG MILLS/THE NEW YORK TIMESTO THE EDITOR:
“Under Attack, Biden Wrestles
With Response” (front page, Oct. 6)
states that Joe Biden has been
uncertain about how to respond to
President Trump’s repeated accusa-
tions of corruption. Mr. Trump
himself has famously responded to
accusations by forcefully repeating
slogans such as “no collusion, no
obstruction” over and over again,
regardless of their veracity.
Mr. Biden’s response to Mr.
Trump’s baseless accusations could
be equally succinct and forceful,
with the additional merit of being
correct: “He’s lying.” In fact, this
simple, clear response could prove
useful to Democrats in connection
with any number of issues related
to Mr. Trump. With repetition, it
might sink in with the voting public.
For that matter, perhaps some
energetic writer at The Times could
draw on the paper’s extensive
coverage and analysis to put a book
together with these same two
words as the title: “He’s Lying.”JAMES CULNAN
LA CRESCENTA, CALIF.TO THE EDITOR:
There is no substantive proof of
corrupt acts by Joe Biden or his son
Hunter in their dealings with
Ukraine. At the same time, the
optics are ugly and disturbing. At
the very least this is a prime exam-
ple of influence peddling.
A Ukrainian oil and gas company
put Hunter Biden on its board at a
seemingly highly inflated level of
compensation (reported to be
$50,000 per month). Hunter seems
to have had no skills or wisdom
worth near that sum, just his famil-
ial ties. It is clear that Joe Biden did
not counsel his son well about the
wisdom of accepting such a post.
Still, President Trump is wrong to
be calling out the Bidens for corrup-
tion, particularly when his own
corrupt behavior is out there for all
to see.
KEN DEROW, SWARTHMORE, PA.TO THE EDITOR:
It appears that some of President
Trump’s most ardent supporters
(for example, Tucker Carlson) arenow suggesting that Republicans
stop their fruitless efforts to label
Mr. Trump’s conversation with the
Ukrainian president as appropriate
but instead urge that such conduct
does not merit impeachment and
that his fate should be determined
by the 2020 election. And, of course,
Democrats agonized for months
over impeachment versus a fair
and free election by the people in
2020.
How can we wait for and rely
upon an election when it is now
absolutely established that Mr.
Trump has done, is doing and with-
out question will continue to do
everything he can to make sure the
2020 election is neither fair nor
free? There is no choice but to
impeach.LAWRENCE B. LAME
REGO PARK, QUEENSTO THE EDITOR:
In your coverage of the “do us a
favor” conversation between Presi-
dent Trump and the Ukrainian
president, there’s one word that is
consistently overlooked: “though.”
In the president’s statement “I
would like you to do us a favor
though,” “though” is qualifying (in a
grammatical sense) the previous
sentence, in which President
Volodymyr Zelensky states his
desire for more American military
aid.
By using the word “though,” the
president establishes a conditional
relationship between the military
aid for Ukraine and the president’s
request for an investigation of Joe
Biden and his son. If that isn’t a
quid pro quo, I don’t know what is.ELYSE GUNTER, DAVIS, CALIF.TO THE EDITOR:
Re “Mr. Trump, Self-Impeaching
President” (editorial, Oct. 4):
You’ve nailed it. The president’s
strategy is not to conceal his
wrongdoing, but to repeatit, more
and more blatantly, in order to
make us think, “Well, if he is so
open about it, I guess it can’t be a
big deal.” A term for this clever and
destructive tactic comes to mind:
“Trumpwashing.”
SUSAN GELLMAN, COLUMBUS, OHIOTrump-Biden Imbroglio Over Ukraine
LETTERSIT’S HARD TO BELIEVEthat barely three
weeks have passed since Adam Schiff,
the chairman of the House Intelligence
Committee, issued a mysterious sub-
poena to the acting director of national
intelligence, demanding that he produce
a whistle-blower complaint filed by
someone in the intelligence community.
Since that subpoena was issued, the
impeachment of Donald Trump has gone
from implausibility to near certainty; I at
least find it hard to see how the House
can fail to impeach given what we al-
ready know about Trump’s actions. Con-
viction in the Senate remains a long shot,
but not as long as it once seemed.
And the whole tenor of our national
conversation has changed. It looks to me
as if we’re witnessing the rapid collapse
of a powerful faction in U.S. public life,
one whose refusal to accept facts at odds
with its prejudices has long been a major
source of political dysfunction.
But I’m not talking about the right-
wing extremists who dominate the Re-
publican Party. Sorry, but they’re not go-
ing anywhere. Most of Trump’s base is
sticking with him, while the list of promi-
nent Republican politicians willing to call
out Trump’s malfeasance in clear lan-
guage consists so far of Mitt Romney
and, well, Mitt Romney.
No, I’m talking about fanatical cen-
trists, who aren’t a large slice of the elec-
torate, but have played an outsize role in
elite opinion and media coverage. These
are people who may have been willing to
concede that Trump was a bad guy, but
otherwise maintained, in the teeth of the
evidence, that our two major parties
were basically equivalent: Each party
had its extremists, but each also had its
moderates, and everything would be fine
if these moderates could work together.
Who am I talking about? Well, among
other people, Joe Biden, who has repeat-
edly insisted that Trump is an aberra-
tion, not representative of the Republi-
can Party as a whole. (Biden’s refusal to
admit what he was facing may be one
reason his response to the Ukraine
smear has seemed so wobbly.)
Some of us have been pushing back
against that worldview for many years,
arguing that today’s Republican Party is
a radical force increasingly opposed to
democracy. Way back in 2003 I wrotethat modern conservatism is “a move-
ment whose leaders do not accept the le-
gitimacy of our current political system.”
In 2012 Thomas Mann and Norman Orn-
stein declared that the central problem of
U.S. politics was a G.O.P. that was not just
extreme but “dismissive of the legitima-cy of its political opposition.”
For a long time, however, making that
case — pointing out that Republicans
were sounding ever more authoritarian
and violating more and more democratic
norms — got you dismissed as shrill if
not deranged. Even Trump’s rise, and the
obvious parallels between Trumpism
and the authoritarian movements that
have gutted democracy in places like
Hungary and Poland, barely dented cen-
trist complacency. Remember, just a few
months ago most of the news mediatreated Attorney General William Barr’s
highly misleading summary of the Muel-
ler report as credible.
But my sense, although it’s impossible
to quantify, is that the events of the past
several weeks have finally broken
through the wall of centrist denial.
At this point, things that previously
were merely obvious have become unde-
niable. Yes, Trump has invited foreign
powers to intervene in U.S. politics on his
behalf; he’s even done it on camera. Yes,
he has claimed that his domestic political
opponents are committing treason by ex-
ercising their constitutional rights of
oversight, and he is clearly itching to use
the justice system to criminalize criti-
cism.
Politicians who believed in American
values would denounce this behavior,
even if it came from their own leader. Re-
publicans have been silent at best, and
many are expressing approval. So it’s
now crystal clear that the G.O.P. is not a
normal political party; it is an American
equivalent of Hungary’s Fidesz or Po-
land’s Law and Justice, an authoritarian
regime in waiting.
And I think — I hope — that those whohave spent years denying this reality are
finally coming around.
It’s important to understand that the
G.O.P. hasn’t suddenly changed, that
Trump hasn’t somehow managed to cor-
rupt a party that was basically O.K. until
he came along. Anyone startled by Re-
publican embrace of wild conspiracy the-
ories about the deep state must have
slept through the Clinton years, and was-
n’t paying attention when most of the
G.O.P. decided that climate change was a
hoax perpetrated by a vast global scien-
tific cabal.
And anyone shocked by Republican
acceptance of the idea that it’s fine to
seek domestic political aid from foreign
regimes has forgotten (like all too many
people) that the Bush administration
took us to war on false pretenses — not
the same sin, but an equally serious be-
trayal of American political norms.
No, Trump isn’t an aberration. He’s un-
usually blatant and gaudily corrupt, but
at a basic level he’s the culmination of
where his party has been going for dec-
ades. And U.S. political life won’t begin to
recover until centrists face up to that un-
comfortable reality. 0PAUL KRUGMAN
The Education of Fanatical Centrists
Will they finally admit
what the Republican
Party has become?
TO THE EDITOR:
Re “Sanders Had Heart Attack,
Aides Confirm” (front page, Oct. 5):
Twenty-seven years ago, when I
was 56 years old, I had a cardiac
arrest, was defibrillated and had an
angioplasty to relieve a coronary
artery blockage. After this my aim
was to prevent a second heart
incident.
There is unanimous medical
agreement about what to do: Avoid
emotional and physical stress, eat
well, sleep at least eight hours a
day, keep your weight in check,
exercise on a regular basis, adjust
your lifestyle and take medications
as needed to keep your cholesterol
and blood pressure under control.
My advice to 78-year-old Bernie
Sanders comes from my heart. Stop
now your efforts to become presi-
dent so you can preserve your
health and remain a stalwart figure
for your country.
DAVID S. CANTOR, LOS ANGELES
The writer is a retired gastroenterolo-
gist.TO THE EDITOR:
I had wondered if and when Bernie
Sanders and his team would dis-close what actually happened. Such
decisions have historical prece-
dence and consequences.
During World War II, Winston
Churchill was at the White House
when he had severe chest pain at
rest. His personal physician, Lord
Moran, decided not to share his
diagnosis of heart attack with the
press, or even with Churchill him-
self, because of concerns about how
that might negatively affect the
Allied war effort. In 1955 President
Dwight Eisenhower, a four-pack-a-
day smoker, had a heart attack. He
decided to share that information,
and the stock market had a $14
billion drop.
Patients like Mr. Sanders, who
are on medication and an appropri-
ate food plan, and who exercise,
have a generally good prognosis.
Churchill, by the way, had none of
our current cardiac treatments
available, and he lived to 90.
Mr. Sanders’s heart attack should
be a nonissue.GREGORY D. CHAPMAN
BIRMINGHAM, ALA.
The writer is a professor of medicine/
cardiovascular disease at the Univer-
sity of Alabama at Birmingham.Sanders’s Heart Attack: Should He Withdraw?
An editorial on Saturday about the Trump administration’s hos-
tility to California misstated California’s regulatory authority
under the Clean Air Act. The state sets its own vehicle emissions
rules, not fuel efficiency standards.correction