Ukraine is getting its turn in the impeachment proceedings and Democrats should be worried about it
It may have taken a few years, but the national media are finally getting around to sort of, kind of asking questions about what Ukraine did to try to help Hillary Clinton win in 2016.
Both CNN and BuzzFeed reported over the weekend on a “conspiracy theory” that President Trump’s 2016 campaign associates have been “pushing” since the election. Both reports, however, refused to touch on the legitimate questions here.
The White House transcript of Trump’s call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in July shows Trump asking Zelensky for “a favor” and telling Zelensky that he wanted him “to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine.”
It sounds very complicated because it is. And while lots of theories are floating around, it’s not a conspiracy theory that Ukraine got involved in the 2016 election. The one to break the news on Ukraine’s involvement in 2016 was none other than the New York Times.
In August that year, Ukrainian prosecutors revealed that Paul Manafort, who at the time was serving as Trump’s campaign manager, may have received millions of dollars in payments from Ukrainian companies and politicians who were believed to make up a corrupt pro-Russia network.
The prosecutors, along with the Ukrainian government’s National Anti-Corruption Bureau, gave interviews and materials to the Times so that it could run an extensive report on Manafort’s involvement in the matter.
Guess who was secretly investigating the Trump campaign at least one month before that Times story published? The FBI was, and we don’t really know why, or who initiated that effort.
The evidence connecting Manafort to the pro-Russia ring in Ukraine is out of a strange crime novel. It was a diary-like accounting book that had his name handwritten inside, along with other names and monetary figures. How was it found? “In the burned-out ruins” of an office building in Kiev, according to the guy who produced it, an anti-Russia politician in Ukraine. How did he get his hands on it? “An anonymous source,” he says. (The initials of that anonymous source wouldn’t happen to be “FBI” would they?)
In short, the FBI was covertly surveilling the Trump campaign and the Ukranian government just happened to find a book in a burned down building that directly links Trump’s top campaign official with a bunch of shady pro-Russia money.
During all of this time, Clinton’s campaign is paying a British spy to dig up dirt on Trump by giving money to anonymous Russians, who in turn made a bunch of wild claims about Trump and prostitutes. The result is a “dossier” that ended up where? In the hands of the FBI.
This should chill every American to his or her core because that’s a lot of evidence suggesting that our most powerful law enforcement agency was working with a foreign country to affect the outcome of a presidential election.
Trump wasn’t asking Zelensky on that phone call about anything out of the realm of possibility. We’re told that the diary that landed his campaign manager in prison literally surfaced after having been buried in ashes and no one bats an eye. After all, a book made of paper would be the most likely thing to survive a raging fire, right? On the other hand, Trump asks the president of Ukraine to maybe give that whole thing a second look and the media accuse him of “pushing a conspiracy theory.”
Democrats want to make this impeachment about Joe Biden and “abuse of power” but it’s not. It’s about Ukraine and all of the questions unanswered about their attempt to hurt Trump in the 2016 election.