Looks like Steve gets owned in the first tweet down, and by everyone who understands what is happening and why it is happening the way it is. Cue: Trey Gowdy, Chair of the House Select Committee on Benghazi.
Can Republicans in Congress talk about the merits of the President's use of the office with the President of Ukraine? Yeah, not so much. Party over country; party over Constitution; party over rule of law.
Little pieces of the GOP's explanatory edifice just...keep falling away:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-polic ... ne-abroad/
"The Trump administration has sought repeatedly to cut foreign aid programs tasked with combating corruption in Ukraine and elsewhere overseas, White House budget documents show, despite recent claims from President Trump and his administration that they have been singularly concerned with fighting corruption in Ukraine.
Those claims have come as the president and his administration sought to explain away a July phone call between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, during which Trump pressured his counterpart to open investigations into Joe Biden and his son Hunter, and into a debunked conspiracy theory involving a hacked Democratic National Committee computer server.
“I don’t care about politics, but I do care about corruption. And this whole thing is about corruption,” Trump told reporters earlier this month when discussing the Ukraine issue. “This whole thing — this whole thing is about corruption.”
....
The administration’s professed interest in fighting corruption in Ukraine has not been reflected in its annual budget requests to Congress.
For example, the administration sought to cut a program called International Narcotics Control and Law Enforcement. Among the goals of the program, as described in White House budget documents, is “helping U.S. partners address threats to U.S. interests by building resilience and promoting reform in the justice and law enforcement sectors through support to new institutions and specialized offices, such as Ukraine’s National Anti-Corruption Bureau and Special Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office.”
The program directs specific sums of money to individual countries. In 2019, $30 million was directed to Ukraine, after Congress rejected an administration request to cut the sum to $13 million. In its 2020 budget request, released in March, the administration again sought to cut the program’s spending on Ukraine to $13 million. Congress seems likely to once again reject the proposed cut, although lawmakers have yet to agree on any spending bills for the 2020 budget year that began Oct. 1.
In another example, the administration sought to streamline a number of overseas democracy assistance and foreign aid accounts under one larger umbrella called the Economic Support and Development Fund. The White House believed that consolidation would cut those programs by more than $2 billion. This fund, too, is aimed at fighting corruption in countries around the world, among other goals, according to White House budget documents. Spending in Ukraine for the accounts in question was $250 million in 2018; the White House has asked for $145 million in 2020 under the new iteration of the program.
Democrats have alleged the White House’s recent comments on combating corruption aren’t consistent with the administration’s track record.
“Numbers don’t lie,” Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) said in a statement. “It’s even more clear now that President Trump is not the anti-corruption crusader he claims to be. The House impeachment inquiry must continue unimpeded so all the facts can come out.”