Rick Perry just told Donald Trump it’s over

| 5:58 pm EDT October 17, 2019
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First Secretary of Energy Rick Perry announced he would cooperate with the House impeachment inquiry in the Ukraine scandal. Then it was reported that he would resign. Then Donald Trump tried to scapegoat him for the scandal. Then Perry announced that he would not resign. Then Perry’s alleged co-conspirator Gordon Sondland testified today. Now Rick Perry really is exiting the building.

Rick Perry told Donald Trump today that he’s resigning, according to reporting this evening from Bloomberg and the New York Times. The timing here can’t be ignored. Gordon Sondland’s opening statement from his testimony this morning has been publicly released. In it, Sondland paints himself, Rick Perry, and Kurt Volker as having tried to talk Trump out of the Ukraine extortion deal, even as Trump insisted on running things through Rudy Giuliani. It’s safe to assume that Volker said something similar during his earlier testimony. This means Perry is very likely to do the same, and in fact he has no real choice.

So it’s not shocking that Rick Perry took one look at Gordon Sondland’s opening statement, realized he was going to have to join Sondland in flipping on Donald Trump, and concluded that he was better off resigning before he does it. We expect Perry to go ahead and give cooperative testimony to the House impeachment inquiry, because it’s the only play he has left. If Perry were planning to stonewall the impeachment probe in the hope of a Trump pardon, he wouldn’t be resigning.

This doesn’t mean that Rick Perry is necessarily going to tell the whole truth when he testifies to the House impeachment inquiry. There are glaring questions about whether Sondland admitted to the full extent of his own culpability during his testimony. But Sondland threw Trump under the bus, and now Perry is doing the same. By telling Trump that he was resigning, Perry was effectively telling Trump that it’s over. Trump should now consider cutting a resignation plea deal of his own.