Up against witnesses who have named names and spelled out a clear quid pro quo, Republicans have adopted a new defence of President Donald Trump’s dealings with Ukraine.
They argue there was ultimately no harm done, therefore Trump did nothing wrong.
READ MORE: ‘The answer is yes’ to ‘quid pro quo,’ Sondland tells impeachment hearings
The accusation, levelled by numerous witnesses, is that the White House was withholding a phone call and a meeting between Trump and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy, along with military assistance to counter Russian aggression, as leverage to convince the Ukrainians to launch investigations into the Bidens and 2016 election meddling.
President Trump went a step further with his own defence, quoting directly from Ambassador Gordon Sondland’s testimony about a phone call the two men had on Sept. 9, 2019.
“I want nothing, I want nothing, I want no quid pro quo, tell Zelenskiy to do the right thing,” Sondland recalled Trump saying, when he testified about asking the president about what, exactly, he wanted from Ukraine, having grown suspicious about the hold on military aid.
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READ MORE: Who is Gordon Sondland, and why is his testimony key?
Trump walked out to the White House lawn moments later and read Sondland’s words aloud as exonerating evidence.
“It’s all over!” the president proclaimed.
So those are the dual defences: Trump told Sondland he didn’t want a quid pro quo, so it couldn’t have happened. And the Ukrainians eventually got their meetings and their money, so there was nothing wrong done.
But there’s an inescapable problem with all of this: the timeline. The Washington Post has published a detailed one online, but here are some of those key dates.
That Trump-Sondland phone call happened on Sept. 9, and military aid to Ukraine was released on Sept. 11. Trump and Zelenskiy met face-to-face in New York on Sept. 25.
All three of those events happened after the anonymous whistleblower filed the initial complaint with the Inspector General for the Intelligence Community, which happened on Aug. 12.
By Sept. 9, the House and Senate Intelligence Committees were notified that a whistleblower had filed a complaint. On Sept. 10, Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) wrote to Joseph Maquire, Trump’s director of national intelligence, demanding a copy of the complaint.
The next day, Sept. 11, was when the White House released the military aid to Ukraine.
In other words, the walls were closing in.
The White House, and presumably the president, would have known their conduct was about to be thrown out into the open, so the counterargument is that they started denying the existence of a quid pro quo and later lifted the hold on the money.
The administration faced additional pressure to release the money, because authority to spend the funds expired on Sept. 30, and the Pentagon reportedly had warned it needed the spending authorized even earlier — by Aug. 6.
The decision to withhold the funds and then release them suddenly looks even more curious up against those ‘use it or lose it’ deadlines.
The entirety of that timeline is damaging and inescapable. It is an inconvenient fact that has not featured prominently in the hearings so far.
As Congress decides whether the president’s conduct merits impeachment, that sequence of events will be a central fact that the White House will have difficulty defending.
Ambassador Sondland was asked if that timeline might have prompted President Trump to make his statements about “no quid pro quo.”
“I can’t rule that out,” he admitted.
Jackson Proskow is Washington Bureau Chief for Global National.
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