Impeachment Day 10: Trump's Ukraine and China Fixations
The straw that broke the camel’s back on impeachment for Individual #1 has something to do with the former Soviet Republic of Ukraine. That much we can all agree on. This morning he added China to the mix.
Once you get beyond that, things get muddy quickly. Today, I’ll give some pointers on understanding what happened and is happening. Follow the embedded links if you’re searching for details; the explanations are long and sometimes confusing.
For those of the Trumpian persuasion, no amount of explaining will suffice. Moses could come down from Mount Sinai with Stone Tablets detailing what happened, and it would still be labeled as “fake news.”
For the rest of us, it’s confusing mostly because of the barrage of contradictory stories being peddled by a (sometimes) lazy news media.
First off, some entertainment. Explainers don’t have to be boring.
I’ve long been a fan of gonzo journalism, and Never-Trumper Rick Wilson (who will direct the same sort of invective at progressives once this is over) has been doing a fine imitation of Hunter Thompson’s work.
Since the President had a full-blown meltdown on Wednesday, this seems like an apt time to borrow Wilson's words.
From the (paywalled) Daily Beast: Trump Is Going to Burn Down Everything and Everyone, and Republicans, That Means You
Donald Trump’s Oval Office performance-art masterpiece Wednesday was one for the ages, a pity-party, stompy-foot screech session by President Snowflake von Pissypants, the most put-upon man ever to hold the highest office in the land. If you watched his nationally televised press conference, Trump’s shrill, eye-popping hissy fit scanned like the end of a long, coke-fueled bender where the itchy, frenzied paranoia is dry-humping the last ragged gasps of the earlier party-powder fun.
Between calling Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) a panoply of Trumpish insults (and for the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee to be held for treason), engaging in his usual hatred of the press, talking about Mike Pompeo’s intimate undergarments, and quite obviously scaring the shit out of Finnish President Sauli Niinisto—who looked like he was the very unwilling star of an ISIS hostage video—Trump spent the day rapidly decompensating, and it was a hideous spectacle. All the Maximum Leader pronunciamentos won’t change the reality that Donald John Trump, 45th president of the United States, has lost his shit.
Politifact checked the claims made yesterday at a press scrum in the Oval Office and at a news conference with the Finnish president in the East Room and found nine bullshit biggies, lest you wonder about Mr. Wilson’s claim about a President of out control.
The best explainer of the origins of the Joe Biden is a crook because his son did [insert something here] story I’ve seen is by Joshua Green at Bloomberg.
The irony of President Trump’s sudden impeachment peril is that it’s the unintended result of an effort to help him: a political hit job aimed at a likely opponent (Joe Biden) and funded by a major right-wing donor (Rebekah Mercer) that Trump and his lawyer (Rudy Giuliani) impatiently hijacked, with consequences that could turn out to be disastrous for them.
To understand how Trump wound up the target of a House impeachment inquiry, it’s first necessary to understand why he was so obsessed with finding dirt on Biden that he pressured Ukraine’s president in a July 25th phone call to “do us a favor” and investigate Biden and his son, Hunter. The notion that Hunter Biden and his father could be complicit in Ukrainian corruption was first aired in a 2018 book, Secret Empires: How the American Political Class Hides Corruption and Enriches Family and Friends, by conservative author Peter Schweizer. The book and its author had a purpose and a lineage.
Schweizer, an editor at Breitbart News, is the president of the Government Accountability Institute (GAI), a nonprofit group whose board chairwoman and major donor is Rebekah Mercer, a prominent Trump supporter and benefactor of right-wing causes.
These are the same folks, shepherded by Steve Bannon, behind Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich.
The assertions and assumptions presented in this first effort made it into the mainstream media, in particular the New York Times. And although they were found to be lacking substance--lots of facts were presented in a manner leading to unprovable conclusions-- the story had enough legs to sully Hillary Clinton’s reputation to the point were “what aboutisms” were an acceptable retort to Donald Trump’s verifiable history of misdeeds.
As with Clinton Cash, Schweizer didn’t allege in his book on the Bidens that any laws were broken. Instead, his reporting laid out a suggestive timeline that led readers to the inescapable conclusion that what had transpired reeked of influence-peddling and moral, if not legal, corruption—the sort of self-dealing voters despise. While Ukraine’s prosecutor general told Bloomberg News he found no evidence of wrongdoing, the facts surrounding Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings prompted the mainstream media, including the New York Times, to take notice.
The book on Biden was a dud, at least as far as the mainstream media was concerned. It circulated within the conservative news silo… until Rudy Giuliani told Donald Trump about it.
The President’s unpaid attorney learned more about the Ukraine connection via an article in The Hill by John Sullivan. The author, long a trumpeter for right wing gossip and foreign disinformation campaigns, is no longer with the Hill. His predilection for political fantasy-fiction finally caught up with him a few weeks ago.
Via the Daily Beast:
Solomon’s work has come under intense scrutiny following the revelation that a series of his stories about Ukraine may have helped spark events leading to Trump’s request that President Zelensky team up with Giuliani to investigate the Bidens.
On March 20, Solomon published an interview with Lutsenko in which the ex-prosecutor accused the former vice president of having pressured the then-Ukrainian president in 2016 to fire Lutsenko’s predecessor, Shokin. The insinuation, according to Lutsenko, was that Biden hoped to quash an investigation into a Ukrainian gas company connected to his son Hunter Biden. Despite Lutsenko’s retraction of some of the claims, and conclusion that Hunter Biden “did not violate any Ukrainian laws,” the incident was cited in a U.S. government whistleblower’s complaint as one of the circumstances that eventually led to Trump’s call with Zelensky.
The Washington Post’s fact check on the President’s claims about Biden and the Ukraine gives a definitive account of what actually happened.
Trump has falsely claimed that Biden in 2015 pressured the Ukrainian government to fire Viktor Shokin, the top Ukrainian prosecutor, because he was investigating Ukraine’s largest private gas company, Burisma, which had added Biden’s son, Hunter, to its board in 2014.
There are two big problems with this claim: One, Shokin was not investigating Burisma or Hunter Biden, and two, Shokin’s ouster was considered a diplomatic victory.
Biden was among the many Western officials who pressed for the removal of Shokin because he actually was not investigating the corruption endemic to the country. Indeed, he was not investigating Burisma at the time. In September 2015, then-U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt publicly criticized Shokin’s office for thwarting a British money-laundering probe into Burisma’s owner, Mykola Zlochevsky.
“Shokin was not investigating. He didn’t want to investigate Burisma,” Daria Kaleniuk, of the Ukrainian Anti-Corruption Action Center, told The Washington Post in July. “And Shokin was fired not because he wanted to do that investigation, but quite to the contrary, because he failed that investigation.”
https://twitter.com/kylegriffin1/status/1179803422922547200?s=20
Another part of the Trumpian fantasy is that it was the Ukraine, not Russia, behind the information warfare in the 2016 election cycle, in support of the Clinton campaign. You gotta give Putin credit; his chosen one is doing everything possible to end the sanctions on Russia.
One important aside here: like just about all of the former Soviet Republics, the Ukraine’s version of a “free” market economy involves rampant cheating. It’s more like what most people would imagine a Mafia enterprise looks like.
Since one set of lies isn’t apparently enough, the President has decided to go with two. This morning Trump called on China to look into former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter. It wouldn’t be too much of a stretch, given his past behavior, to say this is a signal to China urging them to throw an investigation into the mix to sweeten the trade talks.
From CNBC:
Trump pulled China into the brewing controversy just one week before a Chinese delegation was set to arrive in Washington to resume protracted trade negotiations. Administration officials have for many months signaled optimism about reaching a sweeping deal with China that addresses issues including trade deficits and intellectual property theft, and Trump told the U.N. General Assembly last week that he will not accept a “bad deal” with China.
“I have a lot of options on China, but if they don’t do what we want, we have tremendous power,” Trump said of the U.S.′ stance in the talks before he was asked about the Bidens.
Politifact also looked into the GOP mythology about the Bidens and China. They interviewed George Mesires, a lawyer for Hunter Biden, who gave them easily verifiable facts.
The Really Big Number being touted on the right wing misinfo circuit is $1.5 BILLION, with the implication being Hunter Biden got some or part of the dough.
A Wall Street Journal article about the firm published in July 2014 reported that the firm was "aiming to raise about $1.5 billion." This means that, a full six months after Hunter Biden left China, the $1.5 billion figure was aspirational, not confirmed. This undermines Trump’s version of events, which is that Biden quickly pocketed $1.5 billion after a meeting while the elder Biden was vice president.
Mesires said that, in any case, the $1.5 billion amount was never reached. The investment fund raised about $4.2 million "from various sources," Mesires said, without citing further detail. That would be a fraction of what Trump said.
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One other story to watch for is about another whistleblower & Trump’s tax returns.
From Courthouse News Service:
A whistleblower in the Trump administration stepped forward over two months ago to warn House Democrats that the Treasury Department is mishandling the president’s long-shrouded tax returns.
The House Ways and Means Committee included the explosive detail among dozens of exhibits to a lawsuit it brought in July, informing Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin that an unsolicited communication the committee received from a federal employee included “credible allegations” of possible misconduct including “inappropriate efforts to influence” the mandatory auditing of presidential income tax returns.
“This is a grave charge that appreciably heightens the Committee’s concerns about the absence of appropriate safeguards as part of the mandatory audit program and whether statutory codification of such program or other remedial, legislative measures are warranted,” Committee Chairman Richard Neal told Mnuchin in the Aug. 8 letter.
https://twitter.com/JuliaDavisNews/status/1179770558604558338?s=20
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Lead image via Pixabay