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Home » Ukraine. Biden. Trump.

Ukraine. Biden. Trump.

The New Neo Posted on by

I utterly refuse at this point to write a big long in-depth post on this subject. Others have given their blood, sweat, and tears in such an effort, and I suggest you read what they have to say: for example, this as well as this.

To me, this tweet by Sean Davis sums it up:

Comments

Ukraine. Biden. Trump. — 23 Comments

  5. Justice for Corn-Pop ! (see Althouse’s post on this subject)

    Let’s all blow the whistle on Dr. Dementia and his crack addict son !

  6. I was watching a video at Conservative Treehouse last night where the reporters kept trying to trap Pres. Trump into saying “yes, the phone call was to Ukraine about Biden’s son” and he kept dancing around and never quite giving them what they wanted to hear.
    Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee.

    FWIW, leaking presidential phone conversations for anything short of “here are the missile codes, bro” are despicable and should be criminal.
    Not that I wouldn’t have liked some of Obama’s buds to rat him out a couple of times — those pallets of currency didn’t levitate onto the plane to Iran — but there are other avenues for getting information out about corruption or misfeasance.

    I linked this before, but it bears repeating:
    https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2019/09/19/phil-mudd-trump-communications-foreign-leader-dni-whistleblower-complaint-bts-cpt-vpx.cnn

    CNN analyst Phil Mudd responds following a report from The Washington Post revealing President Donald Trump’s communications with a foreign leader sparked the whistleblower complaint that has led the acting director of national intelligence to agree to testify amid a showdown with Congress.

    Mudd makes all the points Codevilla does about the impropriety of having anyone reveal Presidential phone calls, and then some.

    Interviewer: “Then, what is the mechanism for policing what is done in the White House?”
    Mudd: “Quit.”

  7. McCarthy: “While the media purport to be deeply concerned about Trump-administration law-breaking in classified matters, there is negligible interest in whether the intelligence officials leaking to them are flouting the law.”

    That has always been true of the Democrats.
    If the GOP has had the same modus operandi, I do not know any examples off the top of my head.

  8. All quotes from McCarthy.

    Conveniently omitted by the president are the facts that (a) the whistleblower has tried to comply with federal law and go through government channels rather than leaking information to the Trump-hostile media

    Why does the media even know a complaint was made?
    Who is leaking NOW about the complaint?
    The whistleblower? The IGIC or his staff? Someone else?

    As noted above, current and former intelligence officials continue to leak like sieves in their years-long campaign against the sitting president. Thus, the existence of the complaint, the report of it to the IGIC, and the acting DNI’s refusal to alert Congress became known to the media and to Chairman Schiff.

    If someone has laid out the details of whodunnit somewhere, I’ve missed it.

    ..an unidentified “whistleblower” … an unidentified foreign leader …a “promise” which is not further described to us…”

    The latest news to break suggests that the communications (there is more than one) relate, at least in part, to Ukraine.

    On what basis is the media speculating about the content of the phone call; nay, are so sure that they are correct? Who prompted them to ask about Ukraine in the first place, that is, who is the leaker? Has the IGIC even confirmed that was the subject of the call?

    Dems are never guilty of such bad conduct.

    Meanwhile, to my knowledge, there has not been much congressional interest in examining Obama-administration and Clinton-campaign dealings with Ukraine in 2016, when our government encouraged Kiev to investigate Paul Manafort, and a leak about a claim of lavish cash payments to Manafort resulted in his removal as Trump’s campaign chairman.

    Representative Schiff’s skepticism about Iran became muted when a Democratic president cut the deal. Yet these cloak-and-dagger arrangements with a jihadist regime that proclaims itself America’s mortal enemy, in which a U.S. president willfully end-ran the Constitution’s treaty provisions and congressional oversight, were and remain urgent concerns for millions of Americans and most members of Congress.

    So how should we evaluate the current controversy?

    For starters, we should recognize what is important and what is not.
    …
    The president has the power to conduct foreign policy as he sees fit. The Congress has the power to subject that exercise to thorough examination. The clash of these powers is a constant in our form of government. It is politics. For once, let’s find out what happened before we leap to DEFCON 1.

    The Left is always at DEFCON1. It’s what they do.

  9. Ace nails it.

    September 20, 2019
    Joe Biden Bragged That, With Barack Obama’s Permission, He Threatened To Withhold Billions in Aid to Ukraine Unless They Fired a Prosecutor Investigating His Son’s Company.
    And Now, The Deep State Refashions This as a Trump Scandal …We just have to investigate the Trump Pressure part. The Biden Pressure part? That’s just good ol’ fashioned diplomatic log-rolling.

    The Left is always trying to convince us we live in Bizarro World.
    It’s what they do.

  10. Geraghty breaks down the Biden-Ukraine problem as well as putting Trump’s (alleged) calls for investigation into context.

    https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/trumps-whistle-blowers-complaint-is-probably-about-hunter-bidens-dealings-in-ukraine/

    Is the person giving out the information “no quid pro quos” the original leaker, or just “someone with knowledge of the situation”?
    Did anyone write a contemporaneous memo about their emotional upheavals during the call?

  11. https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/intelligence-whistleblower-didnt-have-direct-knowledge-of-the-communications

    An official who has been briefed on the matter, however, told CNN that the whistleblower “didn’t have direct knowledge of the communications.” The official said that the concerns and subsequent complaint came in part from the whistleblower “learning information that was not obtained during the course of their work.”

    That’s called “hearsay” and is inadmissable in courts.
    I would dearly like to know why the IGIC found it credible and alarming.
    AND how did this person not privy to the call learn about its contents, whatever that actually turns out to be?
    (What does it mean anyway, to be “briefed on the matter,” and who did the briefing to whom for what reason? None of that should be leaked to the press in any case.)

    The Ukrainians didn’t think it was any big deal — IF that was the phone call in the complaint.

    https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/ukrainian-foreign-minister-denies-trump-pressured-leader-during-phone-call

    Prystaiko, however, dismissed the claims in a Saturday interview, saying, “I know what the conversation was about, and I think there was no pressure. This conversation was long, friendly, and it touched on many questions, sometimes requiring serious answers.”

    We still don’t KNOW that the complaint was about the Ukraine phone call, but that isn’t stopping Biden from campaigning off of it (which I think is ill-advised considering his son’s connection to corruption in that country).

    https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/enough-biden-fundraises-off-claim-trump-asked-ukrainian-president-to-investigate-his-son

    Question: Was the complaint filed for the sole purpose of triggering speculation, knowing that the Dems could use planted leaks for blasting Trump with some kind of foreign collusion, since the Russian gig didn’t pan out?

    Even though IGIC Atkinson and acting-DNI Maguire and AG Barr know the facts (and they certainly do), I guess the rest of us have to wait until Maguire’s testimony next week to find out.

  12. Hah – I love it when I kinda sorta formulate an inchoate theory that J. E. Dyer then explains cogently, AND with data that I haven’t seen on the webz yet.

    Just some highlights and teasers. RTWT.

    https://libertyunyielding.com/2019/09/20/sudden-trump-phone-call-whistleblower-theme-looks-desperate-and-preemptive/

    To buy this as a controlling narrative for present and future actions, however, you have to completely ignore the history leading up to it. That history involves, at a minimum:

    The Obama administration sending Vice President Joe Biden to Ukraine in April 2014 ..
    Burisma … being investigated by the UK for money-laundering and corruption at the time Hunter Biden …being appointed to the board of Burisma …
    The UK probe of Burisma and Zlochevsky, …
    Much of a total of $3 billion in Obama-era aid disappearing mysteriously into the bank accounts of another Ukrainian,… who is thought to actually control Burisma through a parallel holdings structure
    Joe Biden later boasting in a speech in 2018 that he got Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin fired …
    The U.S. State Department in 2016 sending Ukraine a list of entities and people it didn’t want investigated by Ukrainian authorities (and yes, there’s paper on that); the list including an NGO funded by George Soros which was involved in the effort to dig – or create – dirt on Paul Manafort
    Shokin confirming to ABC News in 2019 that Biden had been behind getting him fired
    The extensive activity of Democratic operatives,…involving Ukraine during the 2016 election cycle (see here as well), …

    And that’s just a partial list. The volume at which the “whistleblower” case has been set indicates that there is clearly a lot to learn from the truth about the Obama administration’s and the Democrats’ dealings with Ukraine. This has the hallmark of a counter-operation being mounted at full blast. Google search results have already been massaged; unless you know you need to search at conservative websites, or include certain specific search terms besides “Ukraine, Biden, Trump,” you won’t find the links on the actual history cited above.

    Most of the information comes from MSM sources – but Google won’t present it to you in a generic search. You have to already know what you’re looking for. /b>Otherwise, you’ll get page after page of themed search results informing you that Rudy Giuliani is a very bad man who’s trying to meddle-smear 2020 candidate Joe Biden on behalf of the Trump administration (that theme ramped up in May 2019), and in the last 24 hours it just got terribly, terribly worse.

    The “whistleblowing” path was presumably selected by the accuser to frame an allegation about the president in such a way that publicizing it would meet the maximum institutional resistance, while also endowing it with a superficial aura of legitimacy.

    “Whistleblowing” always sounds more righteous than “leaking to the media” or “telling the Democrats (or Republicans) in Congress things you’re not supposed to disclose.”

    But calling it “whistleblowing” when all you’re doing is second-guessing the president – and using your purported confidential knowledge of his phone calls to foreign leaders as your calling card – is disingenuous, to put it mildly.

    We’ll see if we are afforded reliable information about any of this in the next few days. Continued stalling, rumor-mongering, caterwauling, and orchestrated releases of theme-bites will be a sign that this is all a hysterically urgent snow job.

  13. Bottom line (same as McCarthy’s I think):

    Given the very real concerns about how the Obama administration comported itself with Ukraine from 2014 to 2016, including strong-arming Ukraine over its domestic investigative and judicial activities, with some of those activities affecting the 2016 election and the Russiagate operation, it cannot be evil for the Trump administration to demand information about that.

    If Trump has had to use as strong an arm to pry information out of Ukraine as the Obama administration’s figures used to keep information sealed in Ukraine – I don’t have a problem with that. People who defend the Obama figures and insist that they must not be investigated have no credibility in attacking Trump. And to the extent that Ukrainian entities have been implicated in Spygate — a massive attack on U.S. institutions and the very existence of our constitutional government as we know it — the American people’s need to know supersedes all else.

  14. When you lose the New York Times…

    https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/more-to-be-told-new-york-times-reporter-says-ukraine-story-a-significant-liability-for-joe-biden

    Vogel’s reporting, which includes a May 1 story that helped generate renewed scrutiny of Hunter Biden’s ties to an energy company owned by a Ukrainian oligarch, also flies in the face of Joe Biden’s dismissal of the controversy on Friday when he said “not one single credible outlet has given any credibility” to Trump’s claims of possible misconduct.

    The situation involving Biden’s son working for Burisma Holdings “is a significant liability for Joe Biden,” Vogel said during a panel led by MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace. “There is a story here. We’ve told some of it. There is more to be told. We are going to continue to sort of pull that back.”

    …and you can’t make this stuff up.

    “The fact that the NYTs acted as a willing agent for the Trump White House’s lies and defended the paper’s publishing of them, makes this even more eyebrow raising. Have folks learned ANYTHING from the last presidential election?” Symone Sanders tweeted in June.

  15. A new theory about why this “scandal” had to hit the news just now.
    Lots of people have claimed the whistleblowing will backfire on Biden; this is the first allegation I’ve seen about that being a feature, not a bug:

    https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/09/soros_and_the_whistleblower_nonscandal.html

    September 21, 2019
    Soros and the ‘whistleblower’ non-scandal
    By Thomas Lifson
    Oh, boy, hold onto your hats. The latest propaganda campaign to discredit President Trump has Soros roots, according to someone in the know that I trust.

    Victoria Toensing is not given to empty charges (or empty threats).
    …
    There is a conspiracy theory that has occurred to a number of conservatives: that this is really an operation meant to drive Biden out of the race because his corruption in Ukraine will torpedo him if he becomes the Democrat nominee. The theory is that only by first seeming to implicate Trump would the media leap onto the subject of Ukraine. Once the story is on the table, it will backfire as Biden’s corruption becomes undeniable.

    I don’t think it would work though, because we already know Democrat’s don’t have a problem with corruption. Any political party willing to overlook Clinton’s operations won’t balk at Biden’s, although his competitors might make some hay out of it.
    Who among the Dem movers-and-shakers is most likely to want Biden out (is anyone besides Soros a contender?), and in whose favor?

  16. New news to me, from John Solomon.

    https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/462422-missing-piece-to-the-ukraine-puzzle-state-departments-overture-to-rudy

    The coverage suggests Giuliani reached out to new Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s team this summer solely because he wanted to get dirt on possible Trump 2020 challenger Joe Biden and his son Hunter’s business dealings in that country.

    Politics or law could have been part of Giuliani’s motive, and neither would be illegal.

    But there is a missing part of the story that the American public needs in order to assess what really happened: Giuliani’s contact with Zelensky adviser and attorney Andrei Yermak this summer was encouraged and facilitated by the U.S. State Department.

    Giuliani didn’t initiate it. A senior U.S. diplomat contacted him in July and asked for permission to connect Yermak with him.

    Then, Giuliani met in early August with Yermak on neutral ground — in Spain — before reporting back to State everything that occurred at the meeting.

    Almost every story I read highlights the “eight times” — which sounds like a series of arm-twisting communications — but only a few clarify (rather than leaving it to the reader to infer) that all 8 occurred in a single phone call. If you have ever watched a Trump presser, he repeats himself all the time — it’s a verbal tic, not significant.
    Plus, in light of State’s connection, since he is only asking them to work with Giuliani, did someone at State ask him to “vouch for” the attorney-to-attorney connection discussed in the above post? Or did Trump ask State to intervene?
    Chickens and eggs.
    https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/462378-trump-asked-ukraine-president-to-investigate-bidens-son-eight-times

    President Trump reportedly pressured the president of Ukraine during a July phone call to investigate the son of Democratic presidential candidate and former Vice President Joe Biden.

    The Wall Street Journal first reported Friday that Trump told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky roughly eight times to work with his personal attorney, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, on the matter.

    “Pressured” is a loaded word.
    Are the Democrats going to subpoena the Ukrainian president to clear this up?
    https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/462479-ukrainian-official-denies-trump-pressured-president

    Ukrainian Foreign Minister Vadym Prystaiko has denied reports that President Trump pressured Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden’s son.

    “I know what the conversation was about and I think there was no pressure,” Prystaiko was quoted as saying in news outlet Hromadske.

    “There was talk, conversations are different, leaders have the right to discuss any problems that exist. This conversation was long, friendly, and it touched on a lot of questions, including those requiring serious answers,” he added.

    The deep dive by Jonathan Turley.
    https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/462445-ukraine-could-badly-damage-both-donald-trump-and-the-democrats

    First, to state the obvious, if the president used his office to force another country to investigate a political opponent, it is just as serious as Trump previously described. That is why it was important to investigate the Obama administration allegedly targeting Trump associates, while also supporting the special counsel investigation of Trump.

    This latest allegation could be the basis for an impeachable offense as an abuse of power, as was done in the second article of impeachment against President Nixon. Yet much has to be established and, as usual, many in the political arena are dispensing with the need to see actual evidence,
    …
    There is no allegation of an express promise of money in exchange for such an investigation. Such a quid pro quo could be the basis for a criminal charge, but the current allegations are short of the “quid” in the “pro quo.”

    While one could legitimately say that an express promise was hardly necessary, with a quarter of a billion dollars on the table, it still is not a crime for a president to ask a foreign leader to investigate crimes in another country.
    …
    While the inspector general concluded that this allegation fell within the whistleblower law, the Justice Department has a good faith basis to reject his interpretation. That law is intended to address mismanagement, waste, abuse or a danger to public safety by intelligence officials. The president is the ultimate intelligence authority, and there is little support to argue that a discussion between world leaders should be viewed as a subject of this law. After all, any intelligence official could claim that a president undermined national interests in discussions with another world leader. Trump has been denounced, perhaps correctly, for disclosing classified information to foreign figures, but he has total authority to declassify information for a good reason, a bad reason, or no reason at all.

    Even if the law is viewed as covering these allegations, there would be a massive potential court fight over executive privilege. A conversation between two presidents is the ultimate example of a privileged communication.
    …
    Congress should be able to read such a transcript in light of the serious allegations. Ironically, the best hope for Trump remains the Democrats and, specifically, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

    Ever since before the 2018 midterm election, I have written that the impeachment push was a bait and switch on voters. Democratic leaders never had any actual intent to impeach Trump. They wanted him anemic but alive for the election. However, I noted that the great danger of pretending to want to impeach is that they accidentally stumble into an actual impeachment. Now, they may have stumbled over precisely such an offense while continuing to reassure their voters that, if they only had a clear case, they would move forward aggressively.

    It is a nightmare for Pelosi. The only thing worse would be succeeding in such an effort. A removed Trump would leave millions of enraged and energized Trump voters and an undamaged Republican nominee for the 2020 presidential election. To make matters worse, any impeachment proceeding would highlight the dubious business deals of Hunter Biden, reportedly had a penchant for making huge profits in countries where his father was conducting official government business.

  17. Turley continued:

    In fairness to Biden, the United States and many countries were clamoring for Ukraine to act on its rampant corruption, including the need for a more aggressive prosecutor. Yet many experts, even the New York Times, have agreed that the business dealings of Hunter pose a serious conflict of interest for his father. Few people believe the Chinese or Ukrainians embraced Hunter because of his financial brilliance.

    Nevertheless, media interest has been remarkably light compared to the interest in Trump family dealings. Democratic leaders have to deal with the misfortune of stumbling upon the very thing they claimed to be desperately seeking. A trial featuring Hunter Biden and windfall business agreements is hardly enticing. That is the problem with playing a shell game with voters. Occasionally, someone turns over the right shell.

  18. Pingback:True but Forbidden #43: T Boone Pickens Is Moving On

  19. This is mostly an anti-Biden operation using Trump to get headlines.

    Once Flynn agrees to plead guilty, his son stops being investigated.
    Oh, wait.
    Once Joe Biden stops running, his son stops being investigated.

    Maybe.
    It might take so much publicity to get Joe to stop running, that there is too much momentum to fully stop the investigation. But to Dem DeepStaters, it’s not so hard to say “not enough evidence for any reasonable prosecutor” to continue.

  20. Rather curious (amazing? amusing?) that the Democratic front-runner is a lying thug with dementia. (Terrific smile, though.)

    (And that the other front-runner is a lying, manipulative law professor with wacky economic “ideas”.)

    Or maybe it’s not so curious, given the shambles that Obama “his” party in. (The MSM was supposed to do its darned best to ensure that these shambles remained invisible; and having done their absolute very best, and then some, they cannot be faulted…. since—gosh, who knew?—reality will out.)

    As for the Flynn-Hunter Biden comparison, it’s not really apt. Flynn’s conviction has already been shown to be sham (for anyone willing to open their eyes); while for the Biden’s, there’s a whole lotta criminality out there.

    And Biden’s not Clinton.

  22. I kept telling Americans that instead of getting upset and triggered over people using “Trum” to refer to their President, that they should be more concerned about what’s going on in DC and who is gonna backstab, JFK style, Trum.

    But Americans are exceptionally prideful. They don’t take advice if it doesn’t mix well with their preconceptions and beliefs.

    Then there is the issue of people who think the minority and individual who refuses to bow the knee to the State Consensus Majority view, that they think the minority and individuals are arrogant.

    How Dare this one person refuse to Obey and Believe as the Majority has consented to what the Consensus is, they are so arrogant!

    Who exactly is the arrogant one, is an interesting topic for discussion.

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