Listened to McCarthy Podcast

nationalreview.com/podcasts/the-mccarthy-report/episode-63

So this is an interesting listen. As usual, McCarthy remains fairly objective and will tell you where he believes Democrats are making mistakes, and where he believes the President (and his team) is making mistakes.

• His main criticism for the Democrats is that they are killing themselves with the closed door meetings. While he understands the appeal to maintaining a certain control over things, he feels that politically it is harming the credibility of the Democrats to be doing all of this behind closed doors. If they have an actual story to tell it should be told in open hearings. 
• His main criticism for Trump and his team is that he believes that they should have used the basic simple strategy that quid pro quo is not only legal, but that it is the general manner in which things are done in 99% of these situations. He feels by denying that there actually "was" quid pro quo, that it can lead to the conclusion (by the public) that it actually is wrong and leave him open to looking guilty if it is shown he did actually engage in quid pro quo.

McCarthy concentrates on the Taylor testimony and sort of drills into the nuts and bolts of it. If you filter everything that everyone is saying, and work under the assumption that most of what is being said by everyone has at least some semblance of truth, you start to see what McCarthy believes is the most likely set of events.

• That Trump was looking to garner concessions from Ukraine in regards to assistance with investigations into alleged 2016 issues and Burisma. This was not obvious (but could be implied) from this phone transcripts without too much imagination.
• That Trump was not necessarily willing to make these requests formal (which under our treaty with Ukraine would have required paperwork) or officially tie them to anything. 
• McCarthy believes that Ukraine may have (at some time) asked for such official formal request, and that none was produced.
• That Trump used the deadline (which would have rendered the aid dead unless renewed in the next congressional session) to put pressure on the Ukrainians. 
• That there was nothing formal or specific demanded of the Ukrainians. The President continued to claim that there was no quid pro quo, even as quid pro quo was being implied.
• McCarthy believes that it's dubious that Ukrainians were unaware that the aid was being held up (although McCarthy concedes that there really has been no evidence to show that the Ukrainians felt the aid was in jeopardy). 
• He believes that many long time State employees (such as Taylor) as well as some of Trump's closer advisers were against the President attempting to garner these concessions and hoped to talk the President out of it or otherwise prevent the agreement. 
• That eventually Trump made the decision to release the aid without garnering any official agreements on any investigations, either because the Ukrainians called his bluff or because he did not want to work against what was being recommended. 

A couple of notable points. The deadline that Democrats and their liberal MSM cronies suggested was a legal deadline for Trump to turn over the "congressionally approved aid" had nothing to do with any requirements for Trump to do anything. Trump could have legally withheld the aid till after the deadline (which was our fiscal calendar end) and at that point the aid would have no longer been available. That aid would have had to have been reissued by Congress had Trump allowed the deadline to pass. 

The fact still remains that according to our Treaty with the Ukrainians that there is specific paperwork that needs to be filled out to make a request to have the Ukrainians assist with any sort of investigation. Since that was never requested or obviously done, at best you have a situation where Trump was applying some unofficial pressure, rather than actually engaging in an official request for assistance that would otherwise been tied to aid. 

McCarthy continues to maintain that even had Trump when all the way to the degree of an official request for help in an ongoing investigation and officially tied it to the military aid, that it would still not constitute any sort of criminal activity. But he feels as a political process that Democrats will be able to make some headway if they can actually "prove" the quid pro quo (because of the fact that the Trump team has denied it). 

A fairly lucid take on things, which is very refreshing given the normal "all or nothing" manner in which nearly all of the pundits see this.