Trump's call with the Ukrainian president should seal his fate
by Jennifer Rubin
Media pundits and national security experts had cautioned that release of a rough transcript of the call between President Trump and Ukraine’s president was unlikely to be conclusive. If Trump was willing to give it up, it could not have been that damning, right? Wrong. Not only does it reveal the president anxious to gather dirt from a foreign leader and requesting that he contact Trump underlings, but we now know that Trump’s Justice Department blessed a plainly illegal effort to secure something of value from a foreigner.
The Post reports:
President Trump told his Ukrainian counterpart to work with the U.S. attorney general to investigate the conduct of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden and offered to meet with the foreign leader at the White House after he promised to conduct such an inquiry, according to a newly-released transcript of the call.
Those statements and others in a July 25 phone call between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky were so concerning that the intelligence community inspector general thought them a possible violation of campaign finance law. In late August, intelligence officials referred the matter to the Justice Department as a possible crime, but prosecutors concluded last week that the conduct was not criminal, according to senior Justice Department officials.
Trump might have never explicitly said in so many words that there would be no aid without dirt on Biden. But that is not required to make out a case that he improperly and unconstitutionally sought a foreign government’s help for political advantage and, in any case, he leaves little doubt that there is a connection between the two. When Trump reminds the Ukrainian leader of the importance of U.S. aid and in the same call brings up Biden’s name, it is hard to miss the implication that Trump is tying the two together.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/trumps-call-with-the-ukrainian-president-should-seal-his-fate/ar-AAHPTAM?li=BBnb7Kz
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