Another Fake PhoneTranscript? FactCheck.Org Says It Is.

Everything in me wants to be offended. I want to be furious as I look at the transcript released just before today’s hearing began, Trump feverishly attempting to distract from the testimony that was about to come from former Ukrainian Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch.

I want to be mad that it’s fake, and I just can’t be. I mean, sure, on a superficial level, it’s another thing to be annoyed at — a bullet point on a litany of outrages that make up not just the impeachment hearings but the entirety of the Trump presidency.

But this whole thing is worthwhile at this point only as an exercise in reading items into the public record, and the struggle to enter the more believable position on those items.

Almost nothing that we’ve heard so far either on Wednesday from George Kent and Bill Taylor or today from Marie Yovanovitch is anything we — that is to say, wonks who have to watch all of this front to back and follow along — didn’t already know. So if it’s all already known (or at least knowable if you search for it), then these hearings are a matter of attempting to display for the public things that they might not seek out, or know to seek out, on their own.

Donald Trump was aware of that when he released the “transcript” this morning of his April 21st call with Volodymyr Zelensky: That this is a show. So it wasn’t so much a revelatory release of information as it was his contribution to the script of this show.

That means that either the White House lied about the content of the call — one that clearly WAS mostly just congratulatory — long before they knew anything about a whistleblower or that there was any attention at all being paid to Trump’s interactions with Ukraine’s president…

Or it means that today Trump decided that including the bit about mentioning corruption would tie the April call a little too closely to the June call. It means that he wanted to provide a phone call where he could establish that he just had a friendly relationship with Zelensky, that his calls were ALL just friendly and “perfect.”

To me, it looked a little like a bank robber giving a full account of a day when he didn’t rob any banks. Even that metaphor is flawed, though, because, in this scenario, the bank robber STILL talks about what the inside of a bank looks like.

Right now, in the background of writing this piece, I’m listening to Adam Schiff asking Marie Yovanovitch about the false transcript Trump released today, and I can’t help but just shrug.

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