The Best People: White House Emailed Talking Points Meant For Surrogates To Dems, Tried To Recall Email Afterwards

from the heads-up-everyone dept

At the time of this writing, I’ll go ahead and assume that anyone reading this is now fully immersed in Ukraine-Call-Gate or whatever we’re calling this potentially impeachment-inducing scandal Donald Trump has managed to build for himself. What started as a murky story surrounding the administration flatly ignoring the law in handling a mysterious whistle-blower complaint has since been clarified in the extreme. What happened essentially is that the whistle-blower raised alarms over several occurrences, one of which was a call that occurred between Trump and the recently elected Ukrainian President in which Trump reportedly pushed his counterpart to investigate Hunter Biden, the son of his potential 2020 rival. Then, for reasons that are beyond me, Trump released an unredacted “rough” transcript of the call, which demonstrates that he did that very thing. You’re going to hear a great deal of obfuscation over the next days and weeks about what the transcript shows. Go read it for yourself. Trump asked Ukraine, while withholding aid money at the time, to investigate the Bidens.

In the wake of the outrage over the transcript, the White House obviously went into damage control. That’s to be expected. As part of any scandal, talking points are developed for surrogates to use when talking on any of the insanely stupid 24 hour news channels. That’s also to be expected. But once those talking points are in written format, it’s not customary to send them out to the opposing party’s Congressional members.

The White House on Wednesday sent out talking points on how to spin the release of a summary of President Trump’s phone call to his counterpart in Ukraine — but emailed them to House Democrats, apparently by mistake.

Here’s the goods, should you want to see them for yourself.

Now, look, I’ve made this mistake in my own professional life. That said, I’m not one of the “very best people” working for a White House embroiled in a full on scandal of its own making, so there’s that. When you’re trying to sow confusion and intrigue around what appears for all the world to be a really simple example of abuse of Presidential power, you really have to be careful about who is in that “To:” field.

And, even when I have made this mistake, I was smart enough not to frantically send out one of those useless “recall email” requests to those very same rivals I had accidentally emailed.

Now, I know some of you are thinking that this really isn’t a laughing matter. And you’re right, but you’re also wrong, because this is fucking hilarious. One is forced to imagine Stephen Miller himself furiously sending out recall requests to Nancy Pelosi having just realized what he’s done.

Will this inadvertent transparency matter? Probably not. If you’re the sort that spends any calories watching cable news, this will all probably fly right over your head. Meanwhile, partisanship has so infested Washington that one of the truest things Donald Trump has ever said is probably that he could shoot someone on 5th Avenue without consequence. So at least we can have a laugh at the very best people’s use of email, instead.

Filed Under: donald trump, hunter biden, impeachment, nancy pelosi, recall, talking points, transcript, ukraine, white house