Don’t Focus on Ukraine Aid. Focus on the Phone Call.

(Bloomberg Opinion) -- The Washington Post unloaded another seminal scoop Monday night in the chronicle of President Donald Trump’s reckless phone calls around the world.

The Post’s reporting, since confirmed by Bloomberg News and other media outlets, revealed that Trump told his acting chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, to withhold about $400 million in military aid for Ukraine at least a week before the president phoned his counterpart in the Ukraine in July and asked him to unearth dirt about a political rival, former Vice President Joe Biden. Per the Post’s reporting, the White House wanted to keep the aid block sub rosa:

Administration officials were instructed to tell lawmakers that the delays were part of an “interagency process” but to give them no additional information — a pattern that continued for nearly two months, until the White House released the funds on the night of Sept. 11.

The Post neatly encapsulates the obvious problem all of this has highlighted since it first surfaced a week ago, thanks primarily to the principles and courage of a still-anonymous government whistleblower:

Trump’s order to withhold aid to Ukraine a week before his July 25 call with Volodymyr Zelenskiy is likely to raise questions about the motivation for his decision and fuel suspicions on Capitol Hill that Trump sought to leverage congressionally approved aid to damage a political rival.

So now we know that aid was in play as part of Trump’s strong-arming of Zelenskiy. In the wake of the Post’s story, White House officials have said — on background, of course — that the aid was not presented to Zelenskiy as a quid pro quo: you shiv Biden, you get aid.

Trump said on Monday that he didn’t tie aid to his request that Zelenskiy play dirty for him. But one of his lawyers, Rudy Giuliani, continuing his Yosemite Sam routine, said on Monday that he couldn’t rule out the possibility that Trump linked an aid threat to a Biden probe when he spoke to Zelenskiy. Chatting with reporters at the United Nations on Tuesday, Trump confirmed that he withheld aid from Ukraine, but said he did so to induce European countries to pay more to support the country.

From a reporting standpoint, focusing on how aid was tied to Trump’s machinations is historically and journalistically useful (as it would be for the public to get its hands on a reliable transcript of Trump’s chat with Zelenskiy). It fills in the details of an important narrative. From a purely legal standpoint — how many crimes can we find this time? — it also matters. Extortion, bribery, conspiracy, contempt of Congress and more have all possibly surfaced here.

But from an impeachment perspective? Quid pro quos tied to military aid for Ukraine don’t matter. Trump’s phone call to Zelenskiy is enough. The president of the United States is granted extraordinary powers and leeway under the Constitution to conduct foreign policy — which, of course, is why Trump gravitated toward that playing field as he learned on the job how to be president. The framers also expected the president to exercise those powers responsibly and ethically.

Article II, Section 4, of the Constitution, which famously cites “high crimes and misdemeanors” as grounds for the impeachment of a president, derives its moral authority from Article II, Sections  1 and 3, which mandate that the president “faithfully execute” his or her powers.

Trump’s call to Zelenskiy demonstrated that he was willing to put his self-interest (knee-capping Biden to improve his re-election odds in 2020) ahead of the national security and the national interest of the country he serves (cultivating Ukraine properly as a diplomatic and military partner in a strategically sensitive part of the world). 

As Tom Nichols, a professor at the U.S. Naval War College, argued in the Atlantic on Saturday, Trump’s “dangerous, unhinged hijacking of the powers of the presidency” — demonstrated by the phone call to Zelenskiy — show that Trump had “abandoned his obligations to the Constitution.”

And what does Nichols think about nailing down further quid pro quos in the Ukraine episode before Trump is brought to heel?

As I noted on Monday, Trump’s machinations in Ukraine track closely with activities that former Justice Department special counsel Robert Mueller examined about Team Trump’s intersection with Russia before and during the 2016 presidential election — something that shouldn’t be surprising because Trump has been rolling this way for decades. He’s not about to stop, and so far law-enforcement authorities and both political parties have essentially acquiesced. It’s not a question anymore of what Trump has done — the Zelenskiy call is evidence enough — but what voters and the rest of the country want to do about it.

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Jonathan Landman at jlandman4@bloomberg.net

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Timothy L. O’Brien is the executive editor of Bloomberg Opinion. He has been an editor and writer for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, HuffPost and Talk magazine. His books include “TrumpNation: The Art of Being The Donald.”

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