Phone Call Showed Only a Slice of Trump’s Obsession With Ukraine
"The Realist Case for Impeachment"
Since the 2016 campaign, the president has had an intense fixation on the country, which he believes is tied up in the origins of the special counsel’s investigation.
Volodymyr Zelensky, the president of Ukraine, at the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday. Doug Mills/The New York Times
By Kenneth P. Vogel, Julian E. Barnes, Maggie Haberman and Sharon LaFraniere
Sept. 25, 2019
WASHINGTON — It was not a country that would naturally have seemed high on the priority list of a president who came to office relishing a trade clash with China, promising to reorder the Middle East and haranguing European allies to spend more on NATO.
But for President Trump, Ukraine has been an obsession since the 2016 campaign.
Long before the July 25 call with the new Ukrainian president that helped spur the formal start of impeachment proceedings against him in the House, Mr. Trump fretted and fulminated about the former Soviet state, angry over what he sees as Ukraine’s role in the origins of the investigations into Russian influence on his 2016 campaign.
His fixation was only intensified by his hope that he could employ the Ukrainian government to undermine his most prominent potential Democratic rival in 2020, former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.
His personal lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, has undertaken a nearly yearlong, free-ranging effort to unearth information helpful to Mr. Trump and harmful to Mr. Biden.
[...]
As Mr. Giuliani was pressing for discussions with Ukrainian officials, the American ambassador to Ukraine was recalled in May, two months before her term was to expire, amid growing attacks from conservatives in the United States who saw her as insufficiently supportive of Mr. Trump — an early public sign of American foreign policy being intertwined with Mr. Trump’s political priorities.
And even though the Defense Department certified in a letter to Congress in May that Ukraine was making sufficient progress in fighting corruption to justify the release of $125 million in military assistance, Mr. Trump subsequently froze that aid and more — not releasing it until this month, under pressure from both Republican and Democratic lawmakers.
Seth Abramson PROOF OF CONSPIRACY EXCERPT 1/ Trump and his team lied to America about their secret phone calls with MBS—which we now know were fraudulently placed in a classified archive to ensure no one would find them—in order to protect the man who had a Washington Post journalist executed: https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=151423488
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