So now we all think we know that the whistleblower thing was Trump pressing Volodymyr Zelensky, president of Ukraine, to find some dirt on Biden's lobbyist son. And maybe that's "all" it was; or maybe not. It's certainly bad enough-- despite Trump going from denying the whole thing as "fake news" to imbecilic protestations that the whistleblower is partisan. Even more Trumpoid is him demanding someone throw him a shovel so he could announce he's meeting with the Ukrainian guy at the UN next week. Presumably Trump told him he'd get him some aid if he came up with anything on Biden.The Washington Post had a 4-person team on the story-- Matt Zapotosky, Greg Miller, Ellen Nalashima and Carol Leonnig-- which wrote that on July 25 Trump pressured Zelensky "to more aggressively pursue an investigation that Trump believed would deliver potential political dirt against" Biden. It's hard to believe the reporting that there was no quid pro quo. But read this carefully because it leaves a lot unaccounted for: The call is part of a broader set of facts included in the whistleblower complaint that is at the center of a showdown between the executive branch and Congress, with officials in the Trump administration refusing to divulge any information about the substance of an Aug. 12 report to the inspector general of the U.S. intelligence community... The disclosure comes amid new details about the White House’s role in preventing Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire from complying with Congressional demands for the material in the complaint."We'll get to the Wall Street Journal follow-up in a minute, but it's worth taking a look at what Anna Nemtsova reported for the Daily Beast first, namely that Anton Geraschenko, a senior adviser to the country’s interior minister, said that Joe Biden's son Hunter had connections with natural gas company Burisma Holdings but that he sees no indication Biden or his son broke their laws and that if Trump wants them investigated, he'll need to say why and what for. He claims there is no official request for an investigation. 'Clearly,' said Geraschenko, 'Trump is now looking for kompromat to discredit his opponent Biden, to take revenge for his friend Paul Manafort, who is serving seven years in prison.' Among the counts on which Manafort was convicted: tax evasion. 'We do not investigate Biden in Ukraine, since we have not received a single official request to do so,' said Geraschenko."His remarks last week came amid widespread speculation that Trump "had made vital U.S. military aid for Ukraine contingent on such an inquiry, but had tried to do so informally through unofficial representatives, including his lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, and Giuliani’s adviser on Ukraine, Sam Kislin. But Geraschenko spoke before the appearance of a Washington Post story on Thursday that implied that an intelligence community whistleblower may have reported that the untoward quid pro quo was put forth directly by Trump in a phone call with Ukraine’s newly elected president last July.Geraschenko reconfirmed his statements in a phone call on Friday."OK, so it was the Wall Street Journal that broke this whole whistleblower story and yesterday, their team indicated that it was about Trump pressing Zelensky to dig up some dirt on Biden's son. [Do you recall that before Biden announced he would definitely run, he was always whining mysteriously about how he didn't want his family dragged through the mud? This was the mud he was whining about.]The Journal asserts that Trump's pressure on Zelensky wasn't just once or twice on that call. In the one phone call he brought it up EIGHT times, pressing him to work with Giuliani on the matter, presumably to concoct some evidence that Biden was on the take.
“He told him that he should work with [Mr. Giuliani] on Biden, and that people in Washington wanted to know” whether allegations were true or not, one of the people said...Mr. Giuliani in June and August met with top Ukrainian officials about the prospect of an investigation, he said in an interview. The Trump lawyer has suggested Mr. Biden as vice president worked to shield from investigation a Ukrainian gas company with ties to his son, Hunter Biden. A Ukrainian official earlier this year said he had no evidence of wrongdoing by Mr. Biden or his son.
Trump was subtle with his carrots and sticks, congratulating the new president on his election and expressing "hope that his government would push ahead with investigations and corruption probes that had stymied relations between the two countries. Yesterday, Trumpanzee "defended his July call with Mr. Zelensky as 'totally appropriate' but declined to say whether he had asked the Ukrainian leader to investigate Mr. Biden... 'It doesn’t matter what I discussed,' he said. At the same time, he reiterated his call for an investigation into Mr. Biden’s effort as vice president to oust Ukraine’s prosecutor general. 'Somebody ought to look into that,' he told reporters."
In recent months, Mr. Giuliani has mounted an extensive effort to pressure Ukraine to do so. He told the Wall Street Journal he met with an official from the Ukrainian prosecutor general’s office in June in Paris, and met with Andriy Yermak, a top aide to Mr. Zelensky in Madrid in August. Mr. Giuliani told the Journal earlier this month that Mr. Yermak assured him the Ukrainian government would “get to the bottom” of the Biden matter.The August meeting came weeks before the Trump administration began reviewing the status of $250 million in foreign aid to Ukraine, which the administration released earlier this month. Mr. Giuliani said he wasn’t aware of the issue with the funds to Ukraine at the time of the meeting.He said his meeting with Mr. Yermak was set up by the State Department, and said he briefed the department on their conversation later. The State Department had no immediate comment.The interactions between the president, Mr. Giuliani and Ukraine have come under scrutiny in recent days in the wake of a whistleblower complaint that a person familiar with the matter said involves the president’s communications with a foreign leader. The complaint, which the Washington Post reported centers on Ukraine, has prompted a new standoff between Congress and the executive branch.Separately, lawmakers have been investigating whether the president or his lawyer sought to pressure the Ukrainian government to pursue probes in an effort to benefit Mr. Trump’s re-election bid....Michael Atkinson, the Trump-appointed inspector general of the intelligence community, met Thursday morning with the House Intelligence Committee in a closed session to discuss the whistleblower complaint. Mr. Atkinson declined to tell lawmakers the substance of the complaint or whether it involves the president, but he did say it involves more than one episode and is based on a series of events, according to several people who attended or were briefed on the meeting.Joseph Maguire, a retired Navy vice admiral serving as the acting director of national intelligence, is to appear before both the Senate and House intelligence committees next week about the complaint, though it remains unclear if he will be willing to divulge details about its underlying substance.
