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04 November 19
FOCUS: Barbara McQuade | Trump's Demands That We 'READ THE TRANSCRIPT!' Are Just Sleight of Hand
Barbara McQuade, The Washington Post
McQuade writes: "A magician uses a puff of smoke to misdirect an audience's focus while he performs his trick by sleight of hand. When it comes to the impeachment matter involving President Trump, the smoke takes the form of the summary of his July 25 telephone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that the White House released in September."
Barbara McQuade, The Washington Post
McQuade writes: "A magician uses a puff of smoke to misdirect an audience's focus while he performs his trick by sleight of hand. When it comes to the impeachment matter involving President Trump, the smoke takes the form of the summary of his July 25 telephone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that the White House released in September."
EXCERPT:
Why, then, does Trump keep focusing on “the transcript”?
Although he refers to the document he released as a transcript, it is a summary, not a verbatim recitation of the conversation — and we learned this week that it appears to be missing some alarming details of Trump’s conversation. The summary was circulated and then marked up by those listening to the call. One person who listened to the call as it occurred was the witness Trump was so fired up about this week, Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, a National Security Council staffer who focuses on Ukraine. Vindman testified that when he saw the summary, he noted two key omissions: one, a reference by Zelensky to Burisma, and two, a reference by Trump to recordings of Joe Biden discussing Ukraine corruption. Vindman further testified that when he asked that the summary be corrected, his request was denied. Leaving out this information suggests that some member of the White House team understood the troubling nature of those references and omitted them, even after the omissions were raised.
Trump also suggests that he must be innocent if he engages in conduct in plain view. This strategy is sort of a reverse theory of consciousness of guilt — a legal concept that holds that the secretive nature of someone’s conduct suggests knowledge of guilt, because it shows awareness that exposure of the conduct would be incriminating. Trump, on the other hand, argues that what he’s doing can’t be wrong because he does it so openly. By constantly pointing to the very evidence the House wants to use to impeach him, Trump thinks he’s undermining the argument that he knows he did something wrong and had to hide it. Presto!
Finally, Trump argues that the summary is exonerating because it contains no quid pro quo. Perhaps he believes that if he repeats this point enough, people will believe him without reading the summary for themselves — even though he constantly urges them to. Or maybe he simply doesn’t understand what a quid pro quo really is.
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