Rachel Rose Withers

Strange things happen when Donald Trump gets on a call with an Australian prime minister.

As the New York Times reported on Monday, Trump called up his buddy Scott Morrison last month to ask for help with his Justice Department’s partisan attempt to discredit the Mueller inquiry—“another instance of the president using American diplomacy for potential personal gain,” as the Times put it. We don’t yet know what was requested of Australia other than cooperation with the investigation into its own role in Russiagate—presumably, looking into the actions of Alexander Downer, Australia’s former ambassador to the United Kingdom whose diplomatic reporting of George Papadopoulos’ barside boasts sparked the FBI inquiry and earned him the epithet “Clinton errand boy.” The White House has dismissed claims the request was inappropriate, but, as with the impeachment inquiry–prompting call between Trump and Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, there is clear acknowledgment of impropriety: access to the Trump-Morrison transcript was limited to a small group of aides, in an unusual restriction similar to that undertaken for the Zelensky call.