Post #4380 Rant of the Day: Trump's Impeachable Phone Call With Zelensky

Mitt Romney had a reputation for drilling down deep into the details and footnotes of obscure financial statements. You cannot say the same thing about Trump; one of the constant gripes I had during the 2016 GOP Primary "debates" is that Trump rarely went beyond rehearsed soundbites and petty insults to other candidates. In fact, this wasn't an isolated incident; in Dec. 2015, Trump was stumped by a question involving the nuclear triad, i.e., our nuclear strategy by land, air, and sea. How someone could be running for Commander-in-Chief and not know a construct so basic to our national defense defies explanation; even routine preparation for a debate should have covered that and a lot more. It was no "trick question" or 101 other excuses Trump might come up with to rationalize his lack of preparation; for example, it could have been rephrased in another form: "how might you as Commander-in-Chief respond to a surprise nuclear attack?" You simply couldn't beg the question by saying you would consult with the Joint Chiefs; how would you decide whether to act on recommendations? You need to be able to talk knowledgeably about our military footprint, our infrastructure, weapons, resources, limitations, alliances, etc. I guarantee if Hewitt  had drilled on any of these things (over and beyond the triad), Trump's response would have been just as clueless. I'm not saying there would be a "perfect" answer, but I would know if he had done due diligence by the nature and extent of his response.

Now to understand how utterly immoral and deceitful Trump was in his unconstitutional extortion phone call to Zelensky, which I've quoted before in the blog, we need to do a deep background beyond Trump's "favor" ask from Zelensky:

The President: I will say that we do a lot for Ukraine. We spend a lot of effort and a lot of time. Much more than the European countries are doing and they should be helping you more than they are. Germany does almost nothing for you. All they do is talk and I think it's something that you should really ask them about. When I was speaking to Angela Merkel she talks Ukraine, but she ·doesn't do anything. A lot of the European countries are the same way so I think it's something you want to look at but the United States has been very very good to Ukraine. I wouldn't say that it's reciprocal necessarily because things are happening that are not good but the United States has been very very good to Ukraine.

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.

 The President: ...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.

Let's first discuss this debunked Crowdstrike nonsense in which Trump gets the facts totally wrong. His theory is that DNC gave the famous hacked mail server to a Ukrainian company Crowdstrike, that the FBI was denied access, that Ukraine was hiding Ukrainian (vs. Russian) involvement with the DNC server hack. (Apparently Trump is sensitive about alleged Russian links to his campaign and scapegoating Ukraine is politically convenient.)First, Dmitri Alperovitch, Crowdstrike's co-founder, is a Russian-born naturalized citizen. Crowdstrike is an American (California-based) company which was engaged to do a forensic analysis of the server, which they never took possession of but accessed; the FBI was fully involved in the server analysis and was given the forensic analysis. The Justice Department identified and indicted the Russian hackers.

Now let's deal with the Biden smear. Hunter Biden was recruited for the board of natural resource company Burisma, and Viktor Shokin is the prosecutor who Trump describes as a "very good prosecutor". Some very basic facts:

• It was not Biden who fired Shokin but the Ukraine parliament
• Burisma was not under investigation when Shokin was terminated. There was a prior investigation of Burisma, which predated Hunter Biden's recruitment by years, for which a company accountant was later fined. In fact, Shokin's office refused to cooperate with European prosecutors in an alleged money-laundering scheme tied to a Burisma executive.
• Shokin refused to prosecute corruption figures, and his own office was implicated in corruption. (See the cited source for more details.) Biden hardly acted on his own; Ukrainian anti-corruption groups agitated against Shokin; Biden put a hold on $1B in aid, and the IMF (with European involvement) threatened to withhold another $40B.

Hunter Biden has not been implicated in any wrongdoing, according to Lutsenko, Shokin's replacement. Burisma also recruited a past Bush Administration executive without natural gas experience. Now one could argue that given Joe Biden's position and role at the time, Hunter Biden should have wanted to avoid the appearance of a potential conflict of interest, but there's not a shred of evidence of wrongdoing.

In Trump's Alice in Wonderland world, his extortion of Zelensky was motivated by going after unspecified Ukrainian corruption. In fact, his own Defense Department concluded sufficient progress on corruption weeks before Trump's freeze, and here's the timeline over the hold and release of military aid. 

So here we're left with a Trump who claims to be fighting Ukraine corruption but who calls a former top prosecutor who everybody else in the Western world knows was blatantly corrupt a "very good prosecutor". He claims Shokin was terminated because Biden wanted to quash a nonexistent investigation into Burisma. There is no basis for Trump's allegations, he was not acting on his own administration's findings but put a hold on aid for totally political reasons, namely targeting his chief Democratic rival, Joe Biden.

Trump's abuse of foreign relations authority for self-serving political purposes violates the Constitution in the same way that the emoluments clause was designed to guard against conflict of interest. It warrants his impeachment.