Trump accused of 'stunning abuse of power' for firing Ukraine ambassador who objected to his 'illegal' quid pro quo scheme

On Saturday's edition of MSNBC's "Up," former Obama Administration official Ben Rhodes suggested that the reason President Donald Trump has failed to convince the public he did nothing wrong in the Ukraine scandal is that there is a dearth of civil servants willing to lie for him.

"What I think people need to understand is, this doesn't happen," said Rhodes. "This is not how it works. We heard from a career ambassador yesterday. Career foreign service officer, been in government for decades, who was fired from her job as ambassador to a very important country because she wouldn't participate in an illegal scheme to pressure the president of that country to investigate the political opponents of the president of the United States. That doesn't happen. That is an astonishing abuse of power and corruption of our foreign policy. Using taxpayer money, hundreds of millions of dollars in badly-needed assistance for Ukraine as leverage. Using career officials of the U.S. government whose salaries are paid by you and me, not by Donald Trump, to help Donald Trump's political campaign. It doesn't get clearer than that."

"And now Trump wants to do say, everybody does it, everybody's corrupt," said Rhodes. "No. This has never been done. I'm not familiar of this ever being done in American history. And he can stand there and say, they're corrupt, and they do this, and everybody does this. People just need to keep stepping back and say no, it is not common to have people like Rudy Giuliani running around interfering in the affairs of other countries and American foreign policy to help the president commit crimes."

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