The Trump-Ukraine affair raises at least two significant issues. First, did President Trump use the office of the presidency and its resources to coerce a foreign nation to dig up dirt on a presidential rival? Second, did he intimate a quid pro quo? That is, did President Trump threaten to withhold hundreds millions of military aid to Ukraine if President Zelenskiy didn’t investigate the dealings of Joe Biden’s son?
Utah’s two senators view this issue in starkly different ways. Mitt Romney, in a Sept. 25 Atlantic Festival interview said, “If the president of the United States asks or presses the leader of a foreign country to carry out an investigation of a political nature that’s troubling … if there were a quid pro quo, that would take it to an entirely more extreme level.” To the question “Could this rise to an impeachable offense?” Romney replied, let’s “leave it at what I said” and “let the process gather the facts that will ultimately come out.”
On Oct. 4, speaking on the south lawn of the White House, President Trump publicly urged China to investigate Democratic challenger Joe Biden. Romney responded on Twitter saying, “By all appearances, the president’s brazen and unprecedented appeal to China and to Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden is wrong and appalling.”
Speaking at a Facebook live tele-town hall on Sept. 25, Utah Sen. Mike Lee had a different opinion on the Trump-Zelenskiy conversation. He didn’t think the rough transcript of the phone call between President Trump and Ukraine’s leader, President Zelenskiy, was “a problem” and said “Contrary to the media reports and all the hype … President Trump did not ask his counterpart in Ukraine to dig up dirt on a political rival.”
Context is important. One week before his July 25 phone call, President Trump ordered the withholding of military aid to Ukraine. Also, through diplomatic back channels, it seems Zelenskiy was told that in order to secure a meeting at the White House with President Trump, he needed to search for evidence that Ukraine, not Russia, hacked the Democratic National Committee during the 2016 election.
In the easily accessible rough transcript of the Trump-Zelenskiy conversation, Trump says: “I would like you to do us a favor …” and then goes on to ask Zelenskiy to investigate CrowdStrike, an internet security company that probed the Democratic National Committee hack in 2016. And then he asked a second favor:
“There’s a lot of talk about Biden’s son, that Biden stopped the prosecution and a lot of people want to find out about that so whatever you can do with the Attorney General would be great. Biden went around bragging that he stopped the prosecution so if you can look into it … It sounds horrible to me.”
Sen. Lee is wrong; shaking down the Ukrainian president to get dirt on a potential political rival is exactly what President Trump did. As if reading straight from the White House talking points, Lee went on to impugn the motives of the whistleblower (although we don’t know the whistleblower’s identity) and to complain how it was “unfair” to President Trump.
Lee, as a student of the Constitution, should understand the seriousness of what President Trump did. Lawyer George Conway and Georgetown professor Neal Katyal opined the Framers of the Constitution “believed that a president would break his oath if he engaged in self-dealing — if he used his powers to put his own interests above the nation’s. That would be the paradigmatic case for impeachment.”
Regarding President Trump publicly urging China to investigate Democratic challenger Joe Biden, Lee said he “read Trump’s statement as not asking China to investigate but suggesting that it would be in China’s interest to do so.” Listening to the audio, however, reveals his interpretation is not even close.
Sen. Lee would be wise to act upon the words of former Arizona Sen. Jeff Flake who wrote in The Washington Post:
“My fellow Republicans, it is time to risk your careers in favor of your principles. Whether you believe the president deserves impeachment, you know he does not deserve reelection. Our country will have more presidents. But principles, well, we get just one crack at those. For those who want to put America first, it is critically important at this moment in the life of our country that we all, here and now, do just that.”
I thank Sen. Romney. While most of his Republican colleagues are shamefully silent, and others, like Sen. Lee, are complicit in enabling President Trump’s actions, Romney is a true patriot in rising to the occasion in the defense of democracy and the country we love.
Justin Thulin is a dermatologist practicing in Salt Lake City.