Today our criminal president is babbling incoherently about “corruption,” by which he means other people’s corruption, especially the Bidens, not his corruption because he’s the least corrupt person in human history. Many people are saying it. Well, actually, only him.

Trump says “this is about corruption” or a close variant six times in less than 40 seconds pic.twitter.com/EPVrWWe4RR

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) October 4, 2019

Why is Trump blathering like this? Because House Democrats released the motherlode of smoking guns last night — a batch of text messages in which State Department officials discuss Trump’s efforts to extort Ukrainian President Zelensky into “investigating” Joe Biden.

Kurt Volker, the special representative to Ukraine who recently resigned, provided the texts to Congress in advance of his closed-door testimony Thursday. The texts were Volker’s exchanges, or exchanges he was copied on, with State Department officials, Giuliani, and an adviser to the Ukrainian president. The House Intelligence Committee released them Thursday.

The texts get even uglier in late August and early September. That’s when Trump’s decision to hold up $400 million in military aid for Ukraine entered the discussion. One State diplomat, Bill Taylor, twice raised concerns that this was connected to Trump’s demands for investigations and with US politics. And, twice, Ambassador Gordon Sondland responded by urging him to talk on the phone rather than by text message.

“Are we now saying that security assistance and WH meeting are conditioned on investigations?” Taylor wrote on September 1. “Call me,” Sondland answered.

Eight days later, Taylor wrote: “As I said on the phone, I think it’s crazy to withhold security assistance for help with a political campaign.” Sondland responded by denying that this was the case — and urging him not to text about the matter anymore.

It’s now clear that everyone in the diplomatic chain knew what was going on here, and some of them were very uncomfortable with it. But apparently not uncomfortable enough to go public, until now.

Here are the text messages: