Ron Johnson is Now a Trump Co-Conspirator

Oct. 08, 2019

2:51 p.m.

Photo credit: Gage Skidmore

Donald Trump isn’t going to make it easy for Republicans to ignore all the evidence and exonerate their party’s president in a U.S. Senate impeachment trial. First, he released a partial transcript of a telephone call with Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, confirming nearly every detail in the whistleblower’s complaint that prompted the House of Representatives’ impeachment investigation. Then, speaking from the White House lawn, Trump publicly encouraged both Ukraine and his archenemy, China, to interfere in the 2020 election to help him win just like Russia did for him 2016.

Soliciting foreign interference in U.S. elections is both illegal and unconstitutional. It’s exactly what democracy’s founders had in mind when they created impeachment to remove presidents for “high crimes and misdemeanors.” Most nervous Senate Republicans who will cast the deciding votes on impeachment are buying time by saying little and pretending they’ll weigh the evidence. But they also know they could go down along with Trump if he doesn’t stop committing his impeachable offenses in public.

Then there’s Republican Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson. He flailed around Sunday morning on TV’s “Meet the Press,” tossing out unrelated Trump conspiracies about FBI agents having affairs to avoid answering why he claimed he winced upon learning Trump was tying aid to Ukraine to the country investigating former Vice President Joe Biden. Finally, Chuck Todd said, “Answer the question I asked you instead of trying to make Donald Trump feel better here that you’re not criticizing him.”

Strong-arming America’s Allies

Behind the scenes, Johnson has become one of the president’s most loyal Republican co-conspirators. As chairman of the Senate’s Homeland Security Committee, Johnson told fellow Republicans he’ll look into possible wrongdoing by Biden, his son Hunter and much more. That includes one absolutely loony rightwing conspiracy Trump raised in his telephone call with the Ukrainian president.

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Most public outrage over the Zelensky phone call focused on Trump delaying nearly $400 million Congress appropriated for Ukraine so he could extort Ukraine into criminally investigating Biden, a possible Democratic opponent in 2020. It’s a brazen example of Trump abusing his power as president for his own personal benefit.

But attention also should be paid to another favor Trump requested in exchange for releasing Ukraine’s military aid. It’s rooted in a truly nutty conspiracy theory spread on extreme rightwing websites claiming—hold onto your hats—Russia was framed to make it look like they were interfering in the 2016 election by bad people in Ukraine conspiring with Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee (DNC)!

CrowdStrike, the cybersecurity firm that helped the FBI expose Russia’s hacking of DNC computers to steal and publicize its emails, is accused of covering up that evil plot by Ukrainians and Democrats and hiding DNC computers that are chockful of all the shocking evidence somewhere in Ukraine. Trump wanted Zelensky to work with U.S. Atty. Gen. William Barr and Trump’s possibly deranged private attorney, Rudy Giuliani, to find those computers in Ukraine. They were never there. One of the computer servers breached by the Russians on Trump’s behalf is on public display in the DNC’s Washington, D.C., office right next to a filing cabinet broken into by President Richard Nixon’s Watergate burglars in 1972.

Loony Conspiracy Theories

Trump isn’t the only Republican crazy enough to believe totally debunked internet conspiracies. Sen. Johnson and Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), as Senate committee chairmen, recently wrote a joint letter to Barr urging him to investigate whether Ukrainian officials conspired with Clinton and the DNC in 2016 “for the express purpose of finding negative information on then-candidate Trump in order to undermine his campaign.” With irony thick enough to cut with a knife when a White House transcript shows Trump pressuring Ukraine to interfere in the 2020 election, Johnson and Grassley wrote:

“Ukrainian efforts abetted by a U.S. political party to interfere in the 2016 election should not be ignored. Such allegations of corruption deserve due scrutiny, and the American people have a right to know when foreign forces attempted to undermine our democratic processes.”

Trump defends the crimes exposed in the transcript the same way he defends all his actions: by lying about them. He keeps repeating his actions were “perfect” as if saying it makes it true. Republicans try to suggest Trump’s plea for China to investigate Biden was a joke. Attempting to pass off an angry, red-faced Trump shouting on the White House lawn as a light-hearted jokester is doomed to failure.

Trump predicts Republican senators will exonerate him, and just in case any of them are thinking about doing otherwise, he advocates impeachment for Utah Sen. Mitt Romney, the party’s previous presidential nominee, for criticizing Trump’s calling for Chinese and Ukrainian interference in a U.S. election as “wrong and appalling.” Many other Republican senators know that privately. Lots of other bizarre actions by Trump before the impeachment vote will determine how many can actually work up the courage to say so publicly.

Don’t count on Johnson being one of them.

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Comments (2)

Comment Feed

I don't trust Ron Johnson any more than I trust Trump

1) The fact that the released transcript and the whistleblower's complaint matches "perfect" only tells me one thing... Trump's team only released that portion of the transcript that did match, his team is not stupid enough to bring out anything else on that phone call. -- when being interrogated or audited, tell only what you were asked, offer nothing more than that, do not give the questioner an opening.

I am sure the whistleblower knows a whole lot more, but has strategic reasons to not reveal what else was said that may be National Security related. Perhaps that is why the whistleblowers view was "quid pro quo", it probably indicates something that cannot be said.

2) "High Crimes and Misdemeanors" are realistically only when the office holder goes against the wishes of the people who voted for him... such as upholding anything Obama wanted, or enacting anything that smacks of racial equality or socialistic "tax the rich, spend on the people who should be KEPT poor."

I believe the Republicans, Corporations, the right wing, and white nationalists have had it in for the Democrats ever since they made their "unholy alliance" with non-whites and the rest of the working poor to strengthen their vote in the face of shrinking Labor Union representation.

3) I never liked people like Ron Johnson. When he ran PACUR, he was using Wisconsin prison labor instead of exclusively hiring law abiding people. My guess is he was getting some kind of government subsidy, it probably let him have labor at less than minimum wage. (I really do not know how that program worked, but I do know that the trend of government assistance was to pay some kind of surplus to get people to work with those who previously were denied opportunity.)

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At the end of the day, I think even decent Republicans fear what could happen if Democrats got into the White House and took the majority of the Senate. Once the huge majority of 5-figure income families get voting control over the 7-figure and higher class, the wealthy know their game is over. Those that serve and protect the wealthy know that they will be as hated by the working class as the plantation overseers were hated by the plantation slaves.

I think the wealthy used to fear a revolt by the impoverished poor, but now I think they fear the revolt by the more talented people that have been falling out of the Middle Class.

Even Mitt Romney saw this coming at the time he once gave his "bottom 47% who don't pay taxes" speech. His main topic was really about the shrinking Middle Class, the very Middle Class who were not positioned to stop taxes on the wealthy from being moved down onto them.

Perhaps that is why Mitt is not a Trump fan. He knows that private loans taken out by a healthy Middle Class is the only thing that really allows the wealthy to have their high incomes. If that Middle Class borrowing slows down, so does the income for the top.

SE Wisc. Citizen more than 5 years ago

Stunning dishonesty

Dear Joel McNally, I am visiting Milwaukee from Chicagoland and read your October 10 article. Accustomed to the shoddy liberal reporting in Chicago, by default I have the journalistic bar set pretty low. Your article nonetheless failed to clear it. You either are badly misinformed, or just a bald faced liar. First you reference the transcript of President Donald J. Trump’s phone call with Volodymyr Zelensky, which you suggest “confirm[ed] nearly every detail in the whistleblower’s complaint.” What factual basis do you have for that statement? The whistleblower reported that your President offered a quid pro quo to Zelensky, extorting him into investigating Joe Biden in exchange for the release of military aid to Ukraine. The transcript clearly showed no such thing happened. Even Adam Schiff reacted to the transcript by changing his tune and suggesting that Trump “didn’t have to say it expressly” - that Zelensky got the message. Yet, Zelensky himself stated 1) he did not feel pressured or extorted in the slightest, and 2) he was not even aware that the military aid was being withheld. How can someone be extorted into acting in order to receive a benefit when he is not aware that the benefit was missing in the first place? You offer no explanation for that, because there is none. Further, the premise underlying this entire farce is meritless. Does the fact that someone is a candidate for office immunize them from investigation? Of course not. Candidates are precisely the people who should be investigated. Remember the FISA warrants the FBI conned a judge into issuing against members of Trump’s campaign team? Remember the 2 year investigation into Trump’s 2016 campaign, the one that found not one scintilla of evidence of “collusion?” So what motivates a journalist to engage in such dishonesty? My guess is that you can’t deal with the fact that America simply does not want the asinine liberal agenda you and those of your ilk propose. So, you lie, cheat, and steal at every opportunity to try to get your way (see: Christine Blasey Ford). But, normal people simply do not care about nor buy into your nonsense. The title of the section under which your article appears is apt - the only thing you are “Taking Liberties” with is the truth. Despair, my little snowflake, and despair well, for we will see you at the polls in 2020.

Matt Nagle more than 5 years ago