The Washington Post published an in-depth but stomach-churning account of the CIA analyst who blew the whistle on Donald Trump’s blackmailing of Ukraine President Volodomyr Zelensky. That eventually led to Trump’s first impeachment, followed by a partisan acquittal. The overall message of the article is that the good guy lost and has paid a big price while bad guy Trump became emboldened.
That’s disturbing enough. But the details also paint a picture of how Trump used his position to get others to go along, either unwittingly or not, and enabled him to get away with it.
If there’s one thing the whistleblower’s story reveals, it’s how ill-equipped our American institutions were and probably still are to withstand bad-faith efforts of anti-democratic crooks like Donald Trump and his henchpeople.
Notice how The Hill and Fox News each had a hand in the Trump plot:
The analyst had been back at the agency for nearly two years, assigned to its Ukraine team, when he spotted an article in the Hill newspaper that accused senior Ukrainian officials of interfering in the 2016 election to hurt Trump. Another maintained that Biden, while serving as vice president, had bribed the Ukrainians to drop an investigation into an energy company with ties to his son.
