Debunking Charlie Kirk on Impeachment
As impeachment fever continues to climb, Charlie Kirk, founder and president of Turning Point USA, has begun defending President Trump.
Many of his claims are easily debunked and I will curate those facts here. But it is also important to show the pattern Kirk employs: he misdirects and misleads.
Claims about the Whistle Blower
First, we should point out the tunnel vision of focusing on the call with the Ukrainian president and not the cover-up of that call by the White House.
Second, it is not a fact that “we know more about” that call” than “the whistle blower ever knew.” This is a misdirection, directing our attention to the fact that the whistle blower did not hear first-hand the call.
In fact, the whistle blower knew about the call before we did, knew the elements of the call before we did. We received the summary of the call, and then the complaint. The complaint was written on the knowledge of many people who had knowledge of the call, officials we don’t know about and haven’t heard from.
The call summary released by the White House proves the whistle blower correct. The whistle blower wrote he had received information from multiple US officials that the president was “using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country in the 2020 U.S. election.”
And this is what the call summary shows.
The whistle blower knew about the cover-up, something we did not know before the complaint was released.
And we “have to” listen to this whistle blower because he filed the complaint, the inspector general whom it first went to found it credible and of an urgent nature, and then it was passed on to Congress, per the law.
It’s hard to know what Kirk is referring to when speaking of Schiff here. Schiff has never said he knows the identity of the whistle blower.
Kirk may be misquoting or exaggerating a Sept. 21 “analysis” from the conservative Washington Examiner that led with this question: “Did House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff have the inside details about the Trump whistleblower two weeks ago?”
There is no evidence to support the affirmative and the “analysis” notes Schiff says he doesn’t know the identity.
Update 10/2: The New York Times reported Schiff “learned about the outlines of a C.I.A. officer’s concerns that President Trump had abused his power days before the officer filed a whistle-blower complaint, according to a spokesman and current and former American officials.”
Kirk tweeted in response that “the “politically-motivated whistleblower” went to Adam Schiff before filing their official complaint… Schiff was in on this from the beginning.”
Obviously Kirk is lying when he said whistle blower “went to Schiff.” The story notes “the C.I.A. officer approached a House Intelligence Committee aide with his concerns about Mr. Trump only after he had had a colleague first convey them to the C.I.A.’s top lawyer…. The House staff member, following the committee’s procedures, suggested the officer find a lawyer to advise him and meet with an inspector general, with whom he could file a whistle-blower complaint. The aide shared some of what the officer conveyed to Mr. Schiff. The aide did not share the whistle-blower’s identity with Mr. Schiff, an official said.”
Therefore of course Schiff was not “in on this from the beginning.”
On Pelosi, we know the source of Kirk’s claim (a 60 Minutes interview Pelosi gave), but Kirk misleads on the substance like others who have questioned the interview. Pelosi noted she was referring to public domain information, such as reports by The Washington Post 10 days before her interview aired (and most likely more than five before her interview was conducted) that summarized the call.
This “change” in whistle blower rules has been debunked by many (see here, here, and here), including the Inspector General who “issued a statement Sept. 30” according to Politifact.
Claims about Ukraine
On the Clinton campaign, Kirk is referring to a Politico report from 2017 that began like this: “Ukrainian government officials tried to help Hillary Clinton and undermine Trump by publicly questioning his fitness for office. They also disseminated documents implicating a top Trump aide in corruption and suggested they were investigating the matter, only to back away after the election. And they helped Clinton’s allies research damaging information on Trump and his advisers…”
The “allies” here was a Ukraine-American lawyer who had begun investigating Paul Manafort long before he became Trump’s campaign manager and shared her information with reporters, the DNC, and the Clinton campaign.
The DNC noted to Politico that this lawyer “was a consultant paid to do outreach for the party’s political department, not a researcher. She undertook her investigations into Trump, Manafort and Russia on her own, and the party did not incorporate her findings in its dossiers on the subjects….”
The claim of collusion is false as is the claim that the Ukraine government helped the Clinton campaign in any underhanded or illegal way.
On Schiff, Kirk is referring to a Sept. 30 report from the alt-right “news” site Breitbart that noted “a staffer for Rep. Adam Schiff’s House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence took a trip to Ukraine last month sponsored and organized by the Atlantic Council think tank.”
The trip included nine other House employees and included GOP staff.
Breitbart then makes the implication about the dates of the trip: “Eager’s visit… began 12 days after the so-called whistleblower officially filed his August 12 complaint…”
The trip was pre-planned so any connection to the whistle blower is conspiracy. We do not know when Schiff was made aware of the complaint but he publicly issued a subpoena on Sept. 13. In that public move he said the complaint has been filed “a month” earlier. On Sept. 9 the intelligence community inspector general informed Schiff about “the existence of a whistleblower complaint. The following day, Schiff requested the complaint.
Kirk makes it seem that Burisma funded the trip as the only funder. That is misleading. The company is one of many donors to the Atlantic Council, which vigorously asserts its intellectual independence. The council notes on its website that it “publicly acknowledges all its donors who give $250 or more in an annual Honor Roll of Contributors or similar listing on its website…”
Yes, Burisma paid Hunter $50,000 a month to be a board member.
Kirk is referring to comments made by the Ukraine president “that no one explained to him why millions of dollars in U.S. military aid to his country was delayed, shrugging off suggestions that President Donald Trump froze the funding to pressure Ukraine to investigate Democratic rival Joe Biden,” according to PBS.
The quid pro quo in the July phone call is simple: Trump wanted a favor from the Ukraine president before he would release the weapons Ukraine wanted.
Consider this CNN report: “ CNN has confirmed that Trump ordered a hold on millions in military aid to Ukraine roughly one week before the call with Zelensky, which was first reported by The Washington Post.”
Furthermore:
“CNN chief legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin argued on CNN Wednesday that there’s “very strong evidence that there was a quid pro quo here” in Trump’s phone call. Toobin pointed to the section of the White House transcript in which Zelensky mentioned that Ukraine was ready to buy more Javelin missiles from the US. Trump replied, “I would like you to do us a favor.” “He raises that at the precise moment after Zelensky raises the issue of we need money for our defense,” Toobin said. “Money, favor. Quid pro quo.”
Second, The Washington Post reports “the carefully constructed [whistle blower] complaint shows that this coercion was not limited to one phone call but consisted of a series of acts over time.”
Kirk’s “logic” is this: for a quid pro quo to happen, both sides have to be aware of it. He insists that because the Ukraine president didn’t know the weapons aid was delayed, he couldn’t have known he was in a quid pro quo.
But Trump knew he was delaying and used the Ukraine president’s ignorance as leverage. The Ukraine ignorance of the delay is central to Trump’s gambit.
The president thinks he is getting the weapons…. if he does Trump a favor. This was the implicit point of the phone call, set up in advance.
Trump, after hearing about the Ukraine’s desire for the weapons, asks for that favor. The Ukraine president knew what Trump wanted which is why the Ukraine leader responded to Trump like this: “It is very important for me and everything that you just mentioned earlier. For me as a President… it is very important and we are open for any future cooperation. We are ready to open a new page on cooperation in relations between the United States and Ukraine.”
Update Oct. 23, 2019: The New York Times reports that top Ukrainian officials were “told in early August about the delay of $391 million in security assistance, undercutting a chief argument President Trump has used to deny any quid pro quo.”
Finally, to Obama and the senators.
First, on the senators. According to CNN:
“The 2018 letter from Sens. Patrick Leahy, Dick Durbin and Bob Menendez did not include any threat at all, about US assistance to Ukraine or anything else; it did not even mention US assistance. Rather, it expressed concern about a New York Times article that said Ukraine had — with the aim of avoiding Trump’s anger — stopped cooperating with the Robert Mueller investigation and frozen investigations into the Ukraine-related activities of Paul Manafort, Trump’s former campaign chairman. It urged Ukraine to “reverse course” if the Times story was accurate.”
On Obama, Kirk’s claim seems to be based on two reports from two conservative columnists within days of each, Sept. 23 and 29, 2019. The earlier one reported on a January 2016 meeting in DC that “brought some of Ukraine’s top corruption prosecutors and investigators face to face with members of former President Obama’s National Security Council (NSC), FBI, State Department and Department of Justice (DOJ).”
The FBI had shut down a 2014 investigation into Manafort and this meeting was designed to push Ukraine to help re-open it, so says the columnist.
Yet in this Sept. 23 report the key source notes “he couldn’t remember whether Manafort was mentioned during” that meeting.”
Another blow to the conspiracy is that as the Sept. 23 story notes, “Manafort joined Trump’s campaign on March 29, 2016, and then was promoted to campaign chairman on May 19, 2016.”
Kirk’s claim that Obama asked Ukraine to investigate his rival’s campaign manager falls on many levels. One, Obama didn’t ask anything of anyone. Two, Trump was not his rival. And three, Manafort was not part of the Trump campaign until March, three months after this meeting where supposedly he was the implicit center of the conversation.
