Trump's International Crusade Against Corruption Is Kim Jong-il's Legendary Round of Golf

WASHINGTON—An old Ukrainian fairy tale, told, at top volume, by Rep. Jim Jordan, in public, in Congress.

55 days, 55 days between July 18th and September 11th there was a delay on sending tax dollars of the American people to Ukraine. Not one of the three most corrupt countries on the planet, our witness on Friday testified in her deposition, corruption is not just prevalent in Ukraine, it's the system. So our president said time-out. Time-out. Let's check out this new guy. Let's see if Zelensky is the real deal.

Let's see if he's legitimate. Keep in mind, this has already been discussed. In 2018 President Trump had done more for Ukraine than Obama did. That's right. President Trump who doesn't like foreign aid, who wanted European countries to do more, who knew how corrupt Ukraine was did more than Obama because he gave them Javelins to fight the Russians. Our witnesses have said this, others have said this, when it came time to check out this new guy, President Trump said let's just see if he's legit. For 55 days, we checked him out. President Zelensky had five interactions with senior U.S. Officials in that time frame. One was the phone call, the July 25th phone call between President Trump and President Zelensky. And there were four other face to face meetings with other senior U.S. Officials and guess what, not one of those interactions, not one, were security assistance dollars linked to investigating Burisma or Biden.

But guess what happened in those 55 days? U.S. senators, Ambassador Bolton, Vice President Pence all became convinced that Zelensky was in fact worth the risk. He was in fact legit and a real change and guess what, they told the president, he's a reformer, release the money. And that's exactly what President Trump did. Over the next few weeks, we're going to have more witnesses like we've had today that the democrats will parade in here and they're all going to say this, so-and-so said such and such to so-and-so and we got to impeach the president. We covered this a little bit ago, they'll say something like, Ambassador Sondland said, in his deposition, where he said Ambassador Taylor recalls that mr. Morrison told mr. Taylor that I conveyed this message to Mr. Yermak and a meeting with President Zelensky. If you can follow that, that's the Democrats plan and why they want to impeach the president. That's what we're going to hear over the next couple of weeks. But no matter what they do, how many witnesses they bring, the facts have not changed, the call shows no linkage between dollars and into the investigation of the Bidens or Burrisma. The Ukrainians didn't know the aid was withheld at the time of the phone call and most importantly, they didn't take any specific action relative to investigations to get the money released.

Jim Jordan reaches new levels of the absurd.

There's one witness, one witness that they won't bring in front of us, they won't bring in front of the American people, and that's the guy who started it all, the whistle-blower. No. 435 members of congress, only one gets to know who that person is. Only one member of congress has the staff who gets to talk to that person. We will never get the chance, we will never get the chance to see the whistle-blower raise his right hand, swear to tell the truth and nothing -- we'll never get that chance. More importantly, the American people won't get that chance. This anonymous so-called whistle-blower with no firsthand knowledge who's biased against the president, who worked with Joe Biden who is the reason we're sitting here today, we'll never get a chance to question that individual. Democrats are trying to impeach the president based on all that, all that? 11 1/2 months before an election. Will not get to check out his credibilities, motivations, biases. This is a sad day.

This is a sad day for this country. You think about what the democrats have put our nation through for the last three years, started July of 2016 when they spied on two American citizens associated with the presidential campaign and all that unfolded with the mueller investigation after that and when that didn't work, here we are based on this. Based on this. This is a — the American people see through all this. They understand the facts support this president, they understand the process is unfair and they see through the whole darn sham.

Of all the absurdity we’ve had to swallow since November of 2016, I think the notion of this president* as an international crusader against corruption is probably the most garish absurdity of all. It’s something of the same order as Kim Jong-il’s legendary round where he shot a 38-under-par 34 with five holes in one. Come to think of it, it’s too damn close for that.

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Charles P. Pierce

Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976. He lives near Boston and has three children.