The Washington Examiner columnist contends that one of the main contentions of the House Democrats’ case against Trump is “flat-out wrong.” Trump, the Democrats say, wanted an investigation of “a debunked conspiracy theory that Russia did not interfere in the 2016 presidential election to aid President Trump, but instead that Ukraine interfered in that election to aid President Trump’s opponent, Hillary Clinton.”
That’s not true, York says. The Trump theory is that Ukraine and Russia interfered: “Trump and his supporters have long pointed to the example of Ukraine’s interior minister, former prime minister, and ambassador to the U.S. taking to social media to condemn Trump during the campaign.”
I wouldn’t have leaned as hard on the exculpate-Russia argument as the Democrats have done, as it is not central to what was wrong about Trump’s conduct. I suppose they can’t help themselves, any more than the president can when he has an iPhone in hand. But I think York has gone wrong here (again) by paying too little attention to Trump’s own words.
At the center of this controversy is the summary, released by Trump himself, of Trump’s call to Volodomyr Zelensky on July 25, 2019. In that summary, Trump doesn’t talk about social-media condemnations of him by Ukrainian figures. Here’s what he actually says: “I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine, they say Crowdstrike . . . I guess you have one of your wealthy people . . . The server, they say Ukraine has it. There are a lot of things that went on, the whole situation.” As garbled as Trump’s words were, they are a reference to the theory that Ukraine rather than Russia hacked the Democratic National Committee’s server in 2016.
That’s not York’s theory: He has dismissed it on the ground that there is no evidence for it. The president’s own former homeland-security adviser, Tom Bossert, who opposes impeachment, has called it a “debunked conspiracy theory.” It was, nonetheless, Trump’s theory. If Trump had instead talked about social-media criticisms of him in 2016, he would have been on firmer ground and would not have been pushing a line of argument that tends to exculpate Russia. But Trump said what he said, and the Democrats are under no obligation to pretend otherwise.