…appears to be in this Ukraine thing up to his eyeballs. How can someone who was a federal prosecutor become so alienated from the basic principles of inhabiting a position of public trust, as this article in The Washington Post suggests?

The article also makes me think that John Bolton may have actually had something to be angry about prior to his departure from Trumpworld, and wasn’t just letting his moustache run wild about the West Wing, as everyone knew he would when he became National Security Advisor. Somebody needs to get that bro into a hearing room.

 Several officials described tense meetings on Ukraine among national security officials at the White House leading up to the president’s phone call on July 25, sessions that led some participants to fear that Trump and those close to him appeared prepared to use U.S. leverage with the new leader of Ukraine for Trump’s political gain.

As those worries intensified, some senior officials worked behind the scenes to hold off a Trump meeting or call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky out of concern that Trump would use the conversation to press Kiev for damaging information on Trump’s potential rival in the 2020 race, former vice president Joe Biden, and Biden’s son Hunter.

Go back and read it again: “several officials.” Not just one whistle blower, not Nancy Pelosi (who has been spending half her time talking her caucus out of hte impeachment tree), but a number of officials, close to Trump, who observed this.

The spin machine is working overtime, and I see a number of my conservative Twitter friends think this is just another chapter of “the left’s” Trump hatred, but I don’t think so. If this happened, it is, in fact, a mirror image of Fox News’s explanation for the origins of the pee dossier: that Hillary Clinton used her political and economic connections in Eastern Europe to manufacture it, with the sole purpose of dealing a knock out blow to Donald Trump’s reputation.

Except that this time, it looks like it seems likely to be real.