What Happened in Ukraine?

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6:00 AM ET
David A. Graham

... in spring 2014 .. Hunter Biden, then–Vice President Joe Biden’s son, took a seat on the board of Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian natural-gas company, not long after the fall of Kremlin-tied President Viktor Yanukovych. Burisma’s owner was Mykola Zlochevsky, who’d been a minister in the Yanukovych government. In February 2015, Viktor Shokin became Ukraine’s prosecutor general, and said he would investigate Burisma.

But the international community came to view Shokin as too weak on corruption, despite his promises to investigate wrongdoing. The United States, International Monetary Fund, and others pressured Ukraine to investigate corruption more thoroughly, but Shokin took no serious action. In March 2016, Biden was in Kyiv ...

... Biden threatened to withhold aid if the prosecutor wasn’t fired, and he was. Importantly, Biden was not freelancing, but was acting as a representative of President Obama. There’s no evidence that Biden was helping his son. Shokin’s former deputy, who quit in frustration over his boss’s intransigence, told Bloomberg in May that the U.S. wasn’t pushing to drop probes of Burisma. “There was no pressure from anyone from the U.S. to close cases against Zlochevsky,” he said. “It was shelved by Ukrainian prosecutors in 2014 and through 2015” ...

Hunter Biden seems to have been trading on his father’s famous name to make a buck—a common but distasteful practice familiar from Billy Carter to Roger Clinton, and indeed up to the Trump children today. He’s not exempt from criticism for this behavior, but that isn’t the same as producing evidence that Joe Biden did anything untoward, something that no one has done so far ...

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/09/biden-trump-corruption/598705/

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1. Giuliani pursued shadow Ukraine agenda as key foreign policy officials were sidelined

By Greg Miller, Josh Dawsey, Paul Sonne and Ellen Nakashima
September 24 at 8:30 PM

President Trump’s attempt to pressure the leader of Ukraine followed a months-long fight inside the administration that sidelined national security officials and empowered political loyalists — including the president’s personal lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani — to exploit the U.S. relationship with Kiev, current and former U.S. officials said.

The sequence, which began early this year, involved the abrupt removal of the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, the circumvention of senior officials on the National Security Council, and the suspension of hundreds of millions of dollars of aid administered by the Defense and State departments — all as key officials from these agencies struggled to piece together Giuliani’s activities from news reports.

Several officials described tense meetings on Ukraine among national security officials at the White House leading up to the president’s phone call on July 25, sessions that led some participants to fear that Trump and those close to him appeared prepared to use U.S. leverage with the new leader of Ukraine for Trump’s political gain ...

“An awful lot of people were trying to keep a meeting from happening for the reason that it would not be focused on Ukraine-U.S. relations,” one former official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive matter ...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/giuliani-pursued-shadow-ukraine-agenda-as-key-foreign-policy-officials-were-sidelined/2019/09/24/ee18aaec-deec-11e9-be96-6adb81821e90_story.html

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3. Trump to meet Ukraine's Zelensky at UN

Dave Lawler
1 hour ago


President Trump is set to meet face to face with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine for the first time today at the UN General Assembly — right as the House is launching an impeachment inquiry around his July phone call with Zelensky ...

Zelensky, a 41-year-old political neophyte best known until recently for playing the president on TV, surged to power in May promising to tackle corruption and seek an end to the war still smoldering in Ukraine’s east.

He probably didn’t expect to find himself in the middle of a U.S. political scandal involving the sitting president and the favorite to face him next November.

Asked Tuesday what Ukraine expects from the U.S., Zelensky answered: “we expect support” ...

https://www.axios.com/trump-meet-ukraine-zelensky-un-general-assembly-54791ec4-711f-47c5-a2cd-c8c8089d38b0.html

[gordianot]

6. He will be walking into the clutches of the new axis of evil.

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4. Trump's meeting with Ukraine's president a high-wire act

By John Hudson
September 25 at 5:00 AM

NEW YORK — President Trump meets with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Wednesday as he seeks to dispel concerns about his decision to temporarily hold nearly $400 million of military aid from the embattled country.

The meeting is a high-wire act for both leaders as Zelensky tries to avoid angering the U.S. president or his Democratic opponents while Trump tries to disarm allegations that have generated a formal impeachment inquiry by the Democrat-controlled House.

At issue is a July phone call between Trump and Zelensky in which Trump is said to have brought up investigating former vice president Joe Biden, a potential 2020 presidential opponent, and his son. Days before the phone call, Trump ordered a hold on the aid for Ukraine, which has been fending off Russian-backed separatists in the country’s east ...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/trumps-meeting-with-ukrainian-president-is-a-high-wire-act-for-both-leaders/2019/09/24/ad5f5e31-df3d-4367-874a-5dd8eb9371f9_story.html

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5. Some White House national security officials are blaming Giuliani

September 24, 2019

Several senior national security officials were so concerned that President Trump would push Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to give him damaging information on former Vice President Joe Biden and his son, Hunter, that they tried to keep the pair from meeting or having a phone conversation, several current and former U.S. officials told The Washington Post on Tuesday.

... Giuliani appeared to have some sort of hidden agenda when it came to Ukraine, several officials told the Post, and he worked to have the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine removed and sidelined national security officials. In May, he announced he was heading to Ukraine to start "meddling in an investigation" that could be "very, very helpful" to Trump, but he canceled after bizarrely claiming he had been "set up" ...

"Rudy — he did all of this," one U.S. official told the Post. "This s---tshow that we're in — it's him injecting himself into the process" ...

https://theweek.com/speedreads/867481/some-white-house-national-security-officials-are-blaming-rudy-giuliani-trumps-ukraine-scandal

[Hermit-The-Prog]

9. so they're throwing the Ghoul under the bus

Don't think that will work; this has the smell of TrumPutin all over it. It's as smelly of trump as his repeated calls for NATO to pay more and Japan and others to pay more for defense.

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7. US ambassador roped ito quest to smear biden

Erin Banco
Asawin Suebsaeng
Adam Rawnsley
Updated 09.25.19 3:22AM ET
Published 09.24.19 9:06PM ET

... This summer, Giuliani briefed U.S. diplomats, including special representative for Ukraine Kurt Volker, on his work in Ukraine and his efforts to convince the administration of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate the Bidens. But Giuliani confirmed to The Daily Beast that he also briefed another diplomat: U.S. Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland. President Trump’s lawyer said he briefed both Volker (whom he referred to as the “main one” in terms of his State contacts) and Sondland on multiple conference calls earlier this year about his progress in pursuing a Ukraine investigation.

It wasn’t exactly an unknown topic for Sondland. The ambassador was also closely involved with the Trump phone call to Zelensky in which Trump repeatedly pressured the Ukrainian president to investigate the Bidens.

“I spoke with both of them before and after this conversation,” Sondland told Ukraine’s state-run news agency after the phone call. “The conversation was very successful. They found a common language immediately.” The two leaders discussed Ukraine’s civil war, energy security, and “the rule of law,” Sondland said in July ...

According to The Washington Post, Trump ordered Mick Mulvaney, his acting chief of staff and director of the Office of Management and Budget, to hit pause on hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid for Ukraine—just days before a now-infamous July phone call between Trump and Zelensky. Mulvaney’s OMB deputies then directed officials at the Departments of Defense and State not to distribute the military aid ...

https://www.thedailybeast.com/impeachment-inquiry-us-ambassador-roped-into-rudy-giulianis-quest-to-smear-biden

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8. Trump faces impeachment

By Robin Wright
September 24, 2019

On Tuesday morning, President Trump stepped through the doors of the United Nations to speak about the weighty woes of the world to his peers from across six continents. His appearance at the General Assembly was supposed to be a diversion from the turmoil engulfing his Administration. Instead, before he even got to the cavernous chamber, Trump offered reporters a strange new narrative — and a less-than-credible alibi — for why he withheld military aid to Ukraine. The blame, he said, lay with Germany, France, and other countries that, according to Trump, should have “put up money” for Ukraine. “I’d withhold again, and I’ll continue to withhold,” he told reporters, “until such time as Europe and other nations contribute” ...

... the President’s explanation of the phone call, that he was simply fighting corruption in Ukraine, runs counter to the emerging timeline—and the facts. On July 18th, the Pentagon and the State Department were informed that the President had decided to suspend almost four hundred million dollars in aid to the new government of President Volodymyr Zelensky, who took office in May. On July 25th, Trump called Zelensky and, as he admits, discussed former Vice-President Joe Biden, whose son Hunter had done business in Ukraine. Trump also urged the young Ukrainian leader—eight times, according to the Wall Street Journal—to investigate the Bidens for corruption. In early August, Rudy Giuliani, the President’s personal lawyer, met with a representative of Zelensky’s government in Spain and, according to the Times, again urged an investigation of the Bidens. Three weeks after Trump had frozen the funds, the aid had still not been released. On August 12th, an anonymous whistle-blower in the U.S. intelligence community filed a complaint involving communications between Trump and Zelensky. On September 9th, members of Congress were notified of the whistle-blower’s complaint and demanded that it be released. Finally, on September 11th, the Administration released aid to Ukraine, which faces existential military challenges from Russia.

Trump vowed to release the full transcript of his July 25th conversation with Zelensky. But Larry Pfeiffer, a former C.I.A. chief of staff and former senior director of the White House Situation Room, questioned whether there is an actual tape of the call. “Unless this administration has changed procedures in place for many years, there are no WH tapes of this phone call. As I used to say, the WH became averse to taping Presidential phone calls in about 1974,” he tweeted. U.S. law also forbids intelligence agencies to tape Presidential calls. The White House Situation Room and the national-security-council directorate instead monitor calls and develop transcripts, but a memcon—or memorandum of conversation—can “vary greatly from a lightly edited full transcript to a vaguely worded summary of the call.”

William Burns, the former U.S. Ambassador to Russia and now the president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said that Trump may have gone further than any previous President in abusing both executive power and the tools of American diplomacy. “If it’s true that President Trump leveraged U.S. assistance to get Ukraine’s leadership to go after a political opponent, it would be an unprecedented abuse of power and an enormous blow to American diplomacy—which is premised on advancing the national interest, not the individual interest of our President,” he told me ...

https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/trump-faces-impeachment

[Hermit-The-Prog]

10. recordings should be required by law

Maybe a President would be more interested in serving the people and their Constitution if he or she knew we are listening.

The NSA records all of us. The President's calls are much more important and should be preserved just in case we get another rogue in the office.

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11. I don't believe everything I read..

Miss a few things though..