The Ukraine scandal food fight is about to get a whole lot more interesting.
Tuesday, Trump announced via Twitter that he would release the “complete, fully declassified and unredacted transcript of my phone conversation with President Zelensky of Ukraine.” In this particular conversation, Trump has been accused of pressuring Zelensky to investigate former Vice President Biden, whose son’s company received favorable business dealings with Ukrainians while Biden was in office.
He added:
Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans have used the Ukraine allegations to bolster their case for impeachment, even though President Zelensky has said he was not pressured by Trump and up to this point, those calling for impeachment have no actual details about the conversation that remains (in their minds) an impeachable offense.
Professor Jacobson blogged:
We know almost nothing about the complaint or the conversation, but that has not stopped a full-blown “we’ve got him now!” type joyfulness throughout the mainstream media and Never-Trump-land.Lack of actual facts has not stopped Democrat candidates and various pundits from declaring that this is further ground for impeachment.The initial claim was that Trump threatened to withhold aid to Ukraine if it didn’t investigate the business dealings of Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, while Joe was Vice President. Then the story changed, and maybe there wasn’t a quid pro quo, and maybe the whistleblower never actually heard the conversation. And so on and so on, a classic case of how the media tries and convicts Trump based on anonymous, shifting, and usually misinformed leaks.The foreign minister of Ukraine is now on record that there was no pressure put on the Ukrainian president in the conversation.We’ve been here, done that, dozens of times. Is this time different? Will they “get” Trump on this? As with the Russia Collusion claims, I’ll take it seriously when there is actual evidence. Until then, it’s just politically driven mischief masquerading as news.As an aside, there is a pernicious effect to leaking conversations a U.S. president has with the leaders of foreign countries, something that has plagued Trump since the start of his administration. But that’s a post for another time.There is an important story here that may take down a candidate. That candidate isn’t Donald Trump, it’s Joe Biden.
And so, for better or worse, Democrats have doubled down on the impeachment narrative.
Given how things have done the last few years, namely the non-existent Russia scandal, I imagine this too will explode in their faces. Not that they’ll learn from it.
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