ajax18 wrote:This was a really good article. I still think that any future president who loses both the house and senate to the opposition party will be impeached and removed from office. It's just the partisan political status quo.
Well no wonder you think this was a good article, Ajax. It tells you what you want to hear. But did you take the few minutes needed to fact check it? Apparently not. Apparently you haven't even read the whistleblower complaint, as it doesn't say what the article says it says. So which do you really want to hear, Ajax? The truth or what you are comfortable already believing?
Here, I'll even do the work for you. All you have to do is read. Let's take the part of the article that purportedly presents facts.
The whistleblower told us Trump threatened to withhold military aid from Ukraine if that country’s president did not agree to dig up dirt on Joe Biden. We were told Biden would be mentioned eight times. We were told there would be a clear quid pro quo.
Here's the whistleblower complaint. It's been available for days now. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/201 ... laint.html Nowhere does it assert that "Trump threatened to withhold military aid from Ukraine if that country's president did not agree to dig up dirt on the Bidens." Nowhere in the whistleblower's description of the phone call does he mention Trump saying anything about military aid. He lists the suspension of military aid in a general outline of events for context, including the fact that no one seemed to know why the funds were being held up.
The whistleblower did not not claim that Trump mentioned Biden eight times. Here's what the complaint actually says:
Multiple White House officials with direct knowledge of the call informed me that, after an initial exchange of pleasantries, the President used the remainder of the call to advance his personal interests. Namely, he sought to pressure the Ukrainian leader to take actions to help the President’s 2020 reelection bid. According to the White House officials who had direct knowledge of the call, the President pressured Mr. Zelenskyy to, inter alia:
initiate or continue an investigation into the activities of former Vice President Joseph Biden and his son, Hunter Biden;
assist in purportedly uncovering that allegations of Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election originated in Ukraine, with a specific request that the Ukrainian leader locate and turn over servers used by the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and examined by the U.S. cyber security firm Crowdstrike,3 which initially reported that Russian hackers had penetrated the DNC’s networks in 2016; and
meet or speak with two people the President named explicitly as his personal envoys on these matters, Mr. Giuliani and Attorney General Barr, to whom the President referred multiple times in tandem.
That's a completely accurate description of the call, as shown by the memo of the call prepared by the White House. After an initial exchange of pleasantries, Trump spent the rest of the call pressing the Ukrainian president to investigate Crowdstrike and the Bidens. https://www.politico.com/story/2019/09/ ... df-1510770
The whistleblower complaint never says that the call would show an explicit quid pro quo.
Next claim by your "very good" article:
Right now this whole Ukraine thing is nothing more or less than a hoax. Already, we know the so-called whistleblower’s information is not only second and third hand, it is also falling apart once the facts are revealed — kind of like the Russia Dossier Hillary Clinton and the Democrats colluded with foreigners to manufacture.
We know that the whistleblower was not a first-hand witness to most of the facts in the complaint because he tells us that right up front. But the fact remains that the whistleblower was extremely accurate about the contents of the call and the fact that the "transcript" had been removed from the system where such transcripts were generally kept and placed on a server reserved for highly classified material.
The whistleblower complaint is not "falling apart" in the slightest. For second and third-hand information, it was surprisingly accurate.
None of that turned out to be true. Wisely, Trump released the transcript of the call and all we have is Trump asking Ukraine’s president to look into the very real corruption surrounding Biden and his son Hunter.
There has been zero evidence presented of "corruption" by either Biden. Joe Biden pressured the Ukrainian government to fire a prosecutor that was failing to prosecute corruption claims, including one against the president of the company Hunter Biden worked for. That's not corruption.
What’s more, there is nothing close to a quid pro quo.
Oh really?
First, no quid pro quo is needed for impeachment. Asking a foreign leader to interfere in a U.S. election by opening an investigation into his biggest obstacle to reelection is enough to warrant impeachment. But saying there is nothing close to a quid pro quo requires completely ignoring the context:
The U.S. promised to defend Ukraine in exchange for Ukraine giving up the nuclear weapons it possessed after the breakup of the Soviet Union.
Russia subverted elections in Ukraine.
Russia invaded Ukraine, seizing Crimea and militarily occupying other portions of Ukraine.
Congress voted military aid to Ukraine.
The President, for reasons still unknown, ordered the aid suspended.
The Russians stepped up military attacks on Ukraine, requiring Ukraine to withdraw from positions in their own country.
Now highlights of the phone call, stripped of its niceties:
Trump: I will say we do a lot for Ukraine. Much more than the European countries are doing and they should be helping you more.... [T]he United States has been very good to Ukraine. I wouldn't say it's reciprocal necessarily because things are happening that are not good but the United States has been very very good to Ukraine.
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 Javelins from the United States for defense purposes.
Trump: 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. [Says Ukraine has a Crowdstrike server] 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.... It's very important that you do that if possible.
The favors are look into the missing Crowdstrike server in the Ukraine and investigate the Bidens.
That's a quid pro quo. If you ask for missiles and I respond with "I want you to do me a favor, though," that's a quid pro quo. Especially if I've been holding up military aid that I've already been promised.
There are other things this fake whistleblower got wrong, like who was on the call with Trump at the time and that there was something suspicious about the transcript of the call being put in a secure server. Well, now we know, just as I predicted last week, that — surprise, surprise — Obama used the same secure server.
The whistleblower mentioned one name that she heard was on the call. We don't know yet who all was on the call, although Pompeo did his best to conceal the fact the he was on the call. But getting one name wrong does not change the fact that the whistleblower described the call and efforts to conceal the call correctly.
The "Obama did it too" is the most dishonest argument I've seen yet. Nobody is criticizing the White House for having the secure server, which was reserved for the most sensitive documents relating to national security. The criticism is that Trump and/or his lawyers misused the server as a dumping ground to hide evidence that Trump abused his presidential powers for personal gain.
So, the article is a shit-show when it comes to truth. The only thing that will destroy the Republican Party is if the Senate Republicans cower to thugs like the author of this article and put party before country. We'll see when they have to take a stand by voting.