3 Stories You Should Read 9/25/2019: Watergate, Cindy McCain, Impeachment

September 25, 2019 Confluence

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In the category of: He really is self-impeaching

Trump Asked Ukrainian President To Investigate Joe Biden, Record Shows

The White House released a summary of the call, which is tied to a whistleblower complaint that has led to an impeachment inquiry.

A White House summary of President Donald Trump’s July 25 phone call with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky released Wednesday confirmed that the U.S. leader asked his foreign counterpart to investigate a political rival, Joe Biden.

The summary, which includes a note saying it is not a verbatim transcript of the conversation, shows Trump repeatedly asking Zelensky to speak with Attorney General William Barr and Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, stressing how “very, very good” the U.S. has been to Ukraine.

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In the category of: Not all change is progress

Cindy McCain: Today’s GOP ‘is not the party that my husband and I belonged to’

McCain said she can see Democrats winning Arizona in 2020, and warned that the Republican Party is “excluding people.”

In the year since her husband died following a long fight against brain cancer, Cindy McCain has largely stepped away from the public eye. But she has maintained a vocal role on two issues of deep personal import: promoting civility in politics and combatting human trafficking.

“The inability to even discuss issues — differing issues — it’s degenerated into name-calling and Twitter responses, and all of these things that not only do they not help the argument, but they don’t help foster good relationships with people,” McCain said.

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In category of: History repeats

How Watergate Set the Stage for the Trump Impeachment Inquiry

To put the current mess in a historical context, I spoke by phone on Tuesday evening with Beverly Gage, a professor of American history at Yale and the author of a forthcoming biography of J. Edgar Hoover. She has written extensively on issues such as government leaking, Presidential corruption, and Watergate. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed the ways in which Nixon tried to control the bureaucracy, why impeachment is never a comprehensive response to bad Presidential behavior, and how Watergate laid the groundwork for the current scandal.