“I would like you to do us a favor,” President Trump said to Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky in a July 25 phone call.
You’re supposed to believe that Trump, in asking the Ukraine president for a favor, is not evidence of anything resembling a quid pro quo.
Despite the fact that, according to a memo describing the call released by the White House on Wednesday, the request for a favor came immediately after Trump and Zelensky had just talked about U.S. aid to Ukraine.
“I think it’s something you want to look at, but the United States has been 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,” Trump said.
“The United States is a much bigger partner than the European Union, and I’m very grateful to you for that, because the United States is doing quite a lot for Ukraine,” Zelensky replied.
Did the two explicitly talk about how Trump, days earlier, had told his chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, to put $391 million in aid to Ukraine on hold?
No.
But … what was all that about, if it wasn’t about the aid that was on hold?
Moving forward, to the favor that Trump wanted from Zelensky, actually, two.
First, Trump wanted Zelensky to have his top prosecutor track down the far-right conspiracy theory that Ukrainians had had some murky role in emails stolen from the Democratic National Committee in 2016.
“The server, they say Ukraine has it. There are a lot of things that went on, the whole situation,” Trump said.
Then, second, he wanted help investigating Hunter Biden, the son of former Vice President Joe Biden, who is now running for the Democratic Party presidential nomination, regarding Hunter Biden’s position on the board of Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian energy company.
“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,” Trump said.
There is, of course, no evidence, beyond right-wing wet-dream conjecture, that Joe Biden stopped any investigation in Ukraine, or that there was an investigation specifically into Hunter Biden’s activities involving his work with Burisma Holdings to even stop.
There was a push from the U.S. and several U.S. allies to Ukraine to fire its then-top prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, in 2016, because of a feeling among Western leaders that Shokin, a crony of then-Ukraine president Petro Poroshenko, was soft on corruption in the country.
Poroshenko, incidentally, was swept out of office earlier this year, receiving only 24.5 percent of the vote, on the strength of repeated criticism that he had not lived up to 2014 campaign promises to stamp out government corruption.
The Ukraine Parliament ultimately voted to remove Shokin in 2016, and Biden did, later, and quite awkwardly, even for Biden, try to take no-doubt undue credit for getting him removed from his office, touting the move as a win for anti-corruption forces in the country.
The investigation into Burisma Holdings and its oligarch owner, Mykola Zlochevsky, into allegations that Zlochevsky had illegally issued oil and gas licenses to companies that belonged to him while he also served as ecology minister in the government of then-Ukraine president Viktor Yanukovych, between 2010 and 2012, had been dormant for more than a year before the push from the West to have Shokin removed.
You may have heard the name Viktor Yanukovych, incidentally. Viktor Yanukovych had employed as a lobbyist one Paul Manafort, the now-disgraced one-time Trump presidential campaign manager, now serving time in prison for corruption.
Truth, stranger than fiction.
Following the removal of Shokin, those investigations have continued, with a court in 2018 acting to annul an earlier ruling from 2017 that had closed criminal proceedings against Zlochevsky.
So, what you have here: there was no prosecution specifically involving Hunter Biden to stop, and Joe Biden didn’t do anything to stop prosecution of Burisma Holdings, which continued after Biden had left office.
Joe Biden was among a chorus of Western leaders advocating for a change in who should be Ukraine’s top prosecutor, a change that it appears the people of Ukraine, and certainly its Parliament, wanted for themselves.
And Joe Biden, being Joe Biden, took credit for something that he had little to do with.
What you also have here: Trump, pressing the issue, holding taxpayer dollars over the head of a foreign leader to try to kneecap a domestic political rival.
After Zelensky promised to have his top prosecutor, who at the time of this phone call in July was still not in office, “look into the situation,” Trump told Zelensky that he would have his personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, “give you a call, and I am also going to have Attorney General Barr call, and we will get to the bottom of it.”
“I heard the prosecutor was treated very badly, and he was a very fair prosecutor, so good luck with everything. Your economy is going to get better, I predict,” Trump said.
Yes, “your economy is going to get better, I predict.”
Because Zelensky just promised to do Trump’s bidding for him.
Quid. Pro. Quo.
Story by Chris Graham
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Chris Graham
