The whistleblower's account of Trump's behavior is, not surprisingly, incredibly damning. It lays out the context of the withholding of aid to Ukraine with Trump's requests for help in the 2020 election. It also talks about how the Trump White House tried to bury this from Congressional oversight. My guess is that the release of the damaging transcript yesterday was thought to inoculate Trump, because it ended the efforts by his team to actively obstruct the lawful requirements of the whistleblower law. They ended the "cover up" but exposed the crime.
What's significant is that this wasn't just Trump making an off the cuff strong-arm request of Zelensky. This involved not only Trump and Giuliani, but also - at the very least - Attorney General Bill Barr. With the usual "if true" caveat, this calls into question just how much work Barr has been doing to prevent other illegal acts from seeing the light of day. Because this leak came from the national security apparatus, it came with momentum that Barr and Trump couldn't contain. The other corrupt acts - and we can be certain there are many more - may have been quashed.
We already know there is a whistleblower surrounding Trump's taxes. Depending on what happens over the next couple of weeks, we might see more and more of these allegations from whistleblowers throughout the bureaucracy.
In some ways, if this does happen, it strengthens Elizabeth Warren's case to be the Democratic nominee. Biden is basically running as the antithesis of Trump. But Warren (and Sanders) has been running against the "culture of corruption" at the heart of the government.
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