Impeachment for Dummies

Waking up in the early morning hours, as seems to be the custom lately, the Internet ends up being my choice of entertainment.   After catching up on email and posting Facebook Happy Birthdays, my next view is of the news.  Recent news in the headlines is the possible impeachment of Donald Trump.

Now, I'm definitely not part of the political scene or analysis, but to be honest my opinion of Trump has been pretty darn low. He's a bad egg.  However, I didn't understand the facts behind his possible impeachment. Lots of terms such a Ukraine, Zelensky, Biden, weapons, quid pro quo, and whistleblower were being tossed around. I didn't have a clue as to how everything fit together.

So I did the next best thing - I Googled "explanation of Trump impeachment" and found the following step-by-step outline:

https://www.vox.com/2019/11/5/20914280/impeachment-trump-explained

In a nutshell, in a phone conversation with the Ukranian president, Trump said he would release American foreign aid to Ukraine if they would investigate his top 2020 Democratic competitor Joe Biden and his son Hunter for wrongdoing, thus using his presidential powers via quid-pro-quo in order to influence personal gain.

You may recognize quid-pro-quo from sexual harassment cases as it is a Latin term meaning "you give me what I want, I'll give you something in return", i.e. "give me sex, I give you a promotion." In this case, it was "investigate my top presidential competitor and I'll give you foreign aid aka money."  Not a very presidential stance.

There are a lot more actions involved with the above incident that have occurred, including:

A whistleblower (later determined to be a member of the CIA), sent a written report in July 2019 via proper channels of the conversation that occurred to the Director of National Intelligence.  Instead of following procedure, he sat on the report deeming it not a matter of urgent concern.

Knowledge of the report came to light in September, at which point it was discovered the transcript of the phone conversation with Ukraine was on "lockdown" and not accessible, which is outside of standard protocol. It wasn't until September 26 that the White House allowed both the whistleblower's complaint and the transcript of the phone call to become public.

Sounds very Watergate doesn't it? At some point I expect Redford and Hoffman to pop up with Deep Throat.

It's a long read but very clear and informative.