Trump Pushed Ukraine’s President To Investigate Issues Of U.S. Public Interest

DISPATCHES FROM MOON OF ALABAMA, BY "B"

This impeachment witch-hunt may turn out to be as legally groundless as Russiagate. In all the Democrats noise no one is explaining exactly how Trump's actions, however improper, endangered "national security".

It alleges what was publicly known even before the phone call between Trump and the Ukrainian President Zelensky was published.

During the then still ongoing Mueller investigation Rudi Giuliani, as a private lawyer for President Trump, tried to find exculpating information which he hoped would debunk the allegations of collusion between Trump and Russia.

It was known that there had been involvement of Ukraine related people as well as of Ukrainian officials in Russiagate and the election campaigns:

Ukrainian government officials tried to help Hillary Clinton and undermine Trump by publicly questioning his fitness for office. They also disseminated documents implicating a top Trump aide in corruption and suggested they were investigating the matter, only to back away after the election. And they helped Clinton’s allies research damaging information on Trump and his advisers, a Politico investigation found.

How deep where these involvements? Are there Ukrainian sources in the debunked Steele dossier about Trump?

There was also the mysterious fact that just three weeks after the U.S. managed 2014 coup in Ukraine, in which Joe Biden as then U.S. vice-president was heavily involved, Joe Biden's son Hunter started to receive more that $50,000 per month for being on the board of a Ukrainian gas company even though he had no knowledge of the gas business or the Ukraine.

In April the then Prosecutor General of the Ukraine Lutsenko was quoted in The Hill mentioning the above allegations.

Giuliani hoped that the Ukraine would investigate both issues and would find facts that might help to exculpate Trump. He openly spoke about this in several TV appearances and interviews since at least March 2019.

On July 24 the Mueller investigation into Russiagate closed. On July 25 Trump had a phone call with Zelensky in which Trump mildly pressed for further Ukrainian investigations into both issues, the Ukrainian involvement in Russiagate and the U.S. election and the case of Hunter Biden. Zelensky responded that he would so. He later said that he found the telephone call "normal".

The whistleblower, presumably someone of medium to higher rank in the CIA, is concerned that Trump's request to Zelensky is a "serious or flagrant problem, abuse, or violation of law or Executive Order" that justify his action.

The Democrats in Congress will make similar claims. But there are reasons to see the issue completely differently.

Attorney General Barr has opened an investigation into the roots of the debunked Russiagate claims. An investigation on the ground in the Ukraine could surely help to find evidence proving or disproving Ukrainian involvement in it.

Biden had publicly bragged to have blackmailed the then Ukrainian President Poroshenko into firing the then Prosecutor General of the Ukraine Shokin. Shokin had at that time an open case against the owner of the Ukrainian company Biden's son worked for. Biden's intervention smells of corruption or at least undue interference by a U.S. official for personal reasons.

Trump can reasonable argue that investigations in the Ukraine into both issues are in the U.S. public interest.

Did Ukrainian officials interfere in the 2016 election by creating or hyping the debunked Russiagate affair and by supporting the Clinton campaign? Alleged Russian interference in the election was a big issue. Why is Ukrainian interference not of interest?

Did Joe Biden use his influence to get his unqualified son a high paying job in Ukraine? Did he use his official powers as vice president to the advantage of Hunter Biden's employer?

Has the U.S. public an interest in knowing the answers to these questions?

If it has such interest why shouldn't the president concern himself with pushing the Ukrainian president to investigate the issues?

The Democrats' Impeachment Attempt Against Trump Is A Huge Mistake

With this impeachment probe, Trump may have been given the presidency in 2020.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced on Tuesday that the House would initiate a formal impeachment inquiry against President Trump, charging him with betraying his oath of office and the nation’s security by seeking to enlist a foreign power to tarnish a rival for his own political gain.

Instead of running on policy issues the Democrats will (again) try to find vague dirt with which they can tarnish Trump. This is a huge political mistake. It will help Trump to win his reelection.

After two years of falsely accusing Trump of having colluded with Russia they now allege that he colludes with Ukraine. That will make it much more difficult for the Democrats to hide the dirty hands they had in creating Russiagate. Their currently preferred candidate Joe Biden will get damaged:

For the past two years, talk of impeachment had centered around the findings of the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, who investigated Russia’s interference in the 2016 elections and Mr. Trump’s attempts to derail that inquiry. On Tuesday, Ms. Pelosi, Democrat of California, told her caucus and then the country that new revelations about Mr. Trump’s dealings with Ukraine, and his administration’s stonewalling of Congress about them, had finally left the House no choice but to proceed toward a rarely used remedy.
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At issue are allegations that Mr. Trump pressured the president of Ukraine to open a corruption investigation of former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., a leading contender for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, and his son. The conversation is said to be part of a whistle-blower complaint that the Trump administration has withheld from Congress. And it occurred just a few days after Mr. Trump had ordered his staff to freeze more than $391 million in aid to Ukraine.

Trump indeed withheld money from the Ukraine. But the Ukrainian president did not know that when Trump spoke with him:

Mr. Trump did not discuss the delay in the military assistance on the July 25 call with Mr. Zelensky, according to people familiar with the conversation. A Ukrainian official said Mr. Zelensky’s government did not learn of the delay until about one month after the call.

At that time Trump was withholding money from several countries. The money for the Ukraine was released in early September without any known conditions.

The immediate impulse to start an impeachment investigation came from some whistle blower in the intelligence community who claimed that Trump did something nefarious during a phone call with the newly elected President of Ukraine Zelensky.

The White House published a memorandum of the phone call. The call was made on July 25 2019, a day after the final Robert Mueller testimony in Congress. There are two passages which the Democrats will claim are damaging:

President Zelenskyy: [...] I would also like to thank you for your great support in the area of defense. We are ready to continue to cooperate for the next steps specifically we are almost ready to buy more Javelins from the United States for defense purposes.

The President: I would like you to do us a favor though because our country has been through a lot and Ukraine knows a lot about it. I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine, they say Crowdstrike ... I guess you have one of your wealthy people... The server, they say Ukraine has it. There are a lot of things that went on, the whole situation.. I think you're surrounding yourself with some of the same people. I would like to have the Attorney General call you or your people and I would like you to get to the bottom of it. As you saw yesterday, that whole nonsense ended with a very poor performance by a man named Robert Mueller, an incompetent performance, but they say a lot of it started with Ukraine. Whatever you can do, it's very important that you do it if that's possible.

President Zelenskyy: Yes it is very important for me and everything that you just mentioned earlier. For me as a President, it is very important and we are open for any future cooperation. We are ready to open a new page of cooperation in relations between the United States and Ukraine. [...]

Trump wanted Zelensky to look into the Ukrainian influence on the whole Russiagate campaign. There certainly was a lot of it. The three Ukrainian-American Chalupa sisters, Alexandra, Irena and Andrea, worked with the DNC and Ukrainian officials in Washington and Kiev to sabotage the Trump campaign. They are, together with other Ukraine affiliated persons like the Dimitry Alperovich, the CEO of the hacksat Crowd Strike, at the core of Russiagate.

The Mueller investigation closed a day before the phone call. It found that Trump had not colluded with Russia or the alleged Russian influence on the 2016 election. That Trump wants the new Ukrainian leader to investigate what Ukrainian officials did in support of a debunked campaign against him may be a wrong thing to do but it is certainly not criminal.

In another passage Zelensky says that he will soon meet Trump's lawyer Rudi Giuliani who wanted to revive an investigation into the Ukrainian company that hired Joe Biden's son Hunter Biden while vice-president Biden himself was running U.S. foreign policy with regards to Ukraine. Trump then asks for support for Giuliani:

President Zelenskyy: [...] I will personally tell you that one of my assistants spoke with Mr.Giuliani just recently and we are hoping very much that Mr. Guliani will be able to travel to Ukraine and we will meet once he comes to Ukraine. [...] We are great friends and you Mr. President have friends in our country so we can continue our strategic partnership. I also plan to surround myself with great people and in addition to that investigation, I guarantee as the President of Ukraine that all the investigations will be done openly and candidly. That I can assure you.

The President: Good because I heard you had a prosecutor who was very good and he was shut down and that's really unfair. A lot of people are talking about that, the way they shut your very good prosecutor down and you had some very bad people involved. Mr. Giuliani is a highly respected man. He was the mayor of New York City, a great mayor, and I would like him to call you. I will ask him to call you along with the Attorney General. Rudy very much knows what's happening and he is a very capable guy. If you could speak to him that would be great. The former ambassador from the United States, the woman, was bad news and the people she was dealing with in the Ukraine were bad news so I just want to let you know that The other thing, There's a lot of talk about Biden's son, that Biden stopped the prosecution and a lot of people want to find out about that so whatever you can do with the Attorney General would be great. Biden went around bragging that he stopped the prosecution so if you can look into it ... It sounds horrible to me.

Zelensky then again assures Trump that the incoming prosecutor general will look into the issue.

Trump asks for investigations and Zelensky assures him that those will happen. Trump applied no open pressure. There is of course always implicit pressure any time a U.S. president utters a wish to the president of a country that needs U.S. good will and money to survive.

As for the Biden case it was Joe's Biden big mouth that brought the issues back into light. In January 2018 he gave a talk at the Council of Foreign Relations and explained how he directly threatened (video) to withhold money to blackmail the Ukraine into firing a prosecutor general who was seen as corrupt:

And I went over, I guess, the 12th, 13th time to Kiev. And I was supposed to announce that there was another billion-dollar loan guarantee. And I had gotten a commitment from Poroshenko and from Yatsenyuk that they would take action against the state prosecutor. And they didn’t.

So they said they had—they were walking out to a press conference. I said, nah, I’m not going to—or, we’re not going to give you the billion dollars. They said, you have no authority. You’re not the president. The president said—I said, call him. (Laughter.) I said, I’m telling you, you’re not getting the billion dollars. I said, you’re not getting the billion. I’m going to be leaving here in, I think it was about six hours. I looked at them and said: I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money. Well, son of a bitch. (Laughter.) He got fired. And they put in place someone who was solid at the time.

Biden did that at a time when his son lobbied for the Ukrainian company Burisma who the prosecutor he wanted fired investigated (or maybe blackmailed):

U.S. banking records show Hunter Biden’s American-based firm, Rosemont Seneca Partners LLC, received regular transfers into one of its accounts — usually more than $166,000 a month — from Burisma from spring 2014 through fall 2015, during a period when Vice President Biden was the main U.S. official dealing with Ukraine and its tense relations with Russia.

The general prosecutor’s official file for the Burisma probe — shared with me by senior Ukrainian officials — shows prosecutors identified Hunter Biden, business partner Devon Archer and their firm, Rosemont Seneca, as potential recipients of money.

There is no direct evidence that Joe Biden told the Ukrainians to stop the investigation into Burisma. But it was not difficult for the Ukrainians to figure out that ending the investigation into the company that Joe Biden's son worked for would help them with further requests to him.

How the Democrats want to construct an impeachment out of this is beyond me.

Trump is the president. Foreign policy is his constitutional prerogative. He used his power to ask the Ukraine to open investigations into two issues. He withheld money but not to achieve that. The Ukrainians did not even know at that time that the money was blocked.

Biden used his power as vice-president to ask the Ukraine to fire a prosecutor he didn't like and who (by chance?) was going after the company which enriched his son. He openly withheld money to achieve his aim.

How will the Democrats explain that what Trump did was wrong or even criminal while insisting that what Joe Biden did was normal business?

They can't.

Pelosi knows that there is no case to impeach Trump. That's why she does not have a plan how to do proceed with it:

Although Ms. Pelosi’s announcement was a crucial turning point, it left many unanswered questions about exactly when and how Democrats planned to push forward on impeachment.
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And Ms. Pelosi said she had directed the chairmen of the six committees that have been investigating Mr. Trump to “proceed under that umbrella of impeachment inquiry.” In a closed-door meeting earlier in the day, she said the panels should put together their best cases on potentially impeachable offenses by the president and send them to the Judiciary Committee, according to two officials familiar with the conversation. That could potentially lay the groundwork for articles of impeachment based on the findings.

Pelosi has nothing. Six committees have investigated Trump issues but so far found nothing to charge him with. Neither did the Mueller investigation find anything damaging. How will combining all those nothing-burgers make an impeachment meal?

Trump should be impeached for his crimes against Syria, Venezuela and Yemen.

But the Democrats will surely not touch on those issues. They are committing themselves to political theater that will end without any result. Instead of attacking Trump's policies and proposing better legislation they will pollute the airwaves with noise about 'crimes' that do not exist.

There is no case for impeachment. Even if the House would vote for one the Senate would never act on it. No one wants to see a President Pence.

The Democrats are giving Trump the best campaign aid he could have wished for. Trump will again present himself as the victim of a witch hunt. He will again argue that he is the only one on the side of the people. That he alone stands with them against the bad politicians in Washington DC.  Millions will believe him and support him on this. It will motivate them to vote for him.

Why is it so hard for Democrats to understand this?

Posted by b on September 25, 2019 at 18:03 UTC | Permalink

This article is part of an ongoing series of dispatches from Moon of Alabama