So did you hear the story about the elected official that threatened to block foreign aid to Ukraine unless they did something to help their political prospects back in the United States? No… not that one. Of course, if you get all of your information from cable news, the Trump story is probably the only one you’ve heard about. But it turns out there are others.
Over at the Washington Post, Marc Thiessen has dug into a couple of different stories that sound eerily familiar. The first one has to do with three Democratic Senators who penned a love letter to the Prosecutor General of Ukraine, pressuring him to not drop four investigations that they felt were vital to the Mueller probe.
Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) and Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) wrote a letter to Ukraine’s prosecutor general, Yuriy Lutsenko, expressing concern at the closing of four investigations they said were critical to the Mueller probe. In the letter, they implied that their support for U.S. assistance to Ukraine was at stake. Describing themselves as “strong advocates for a robust and close relationship with Ukraine,” the Democratic senators declared, “We have supported [the] capacity-building process and are disappointed that some in Kyiv appear to have cast aside these [democratic] principles to avoid the ire of President Trump,” before demanding Lutsenko “reverse course and halt any efforts to impede cooperation with this important investigation.”
So, it’s okay for Democratic senators to encourage Ukraine to investigate Trump, but it’s not okay for the president to allegedly encourage Ukraine to investigate Hunter Biden?
Isn’t that interesting? They’re demanding that officials in that country “reverse course” and change their official decisions. And how is it that Bob Menendez always seems to show up in these dodgy stories? I wonder if he had any other doctor friends in Ukraine?
But Thiessen doesn’t stop there. He reminds us of a story that Joe Biden himself told not all that long ago. And it involved the Ukranian prosecutor who was looking into the affairs of the company where Joe’s son sat on the board of directors.
In 2016, the then-vice president threatened to withhold $1 billion in U.S. loan guarantees to Ukraine if the government did not fire the country’s top prosecutor, Viktor Shokin. According to the New York Times, “Among those who had a stake in the outcome was Hunter Biden … who at the time was on the board of an energy company owned by a Ukrainian oligarch who had been in the sights of the fired prosecutor general.”
Here’s the money quote from Biden himself when talking about the investigation into Burisma. “I looked at them and said, ‘I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money.’ Well, son of a b—-. He got fired.”
So Joe Biden was waving a billion dollars in aid in front of their noses and got a government prosecutor fired. And he bragged about it. But wasn’t he saying just this week that Donald Trump needed to be impeached over a very similar story?
I’m not saying that the revelations of how President Trump handled that phone call with a Ukranian official shouldn’t be looked into. We still don’t know enough to say whether or not there was some impeachable offense going on or if Trump was just playing hardball during negotiations. If there’s something fishy the public deserves to know. But if that question is fair game and meddling in the Ukranian government might rise to the level of High Crimes and Misdemeanors, the silence from most of the media over these two stories is rather deafening.
If the person who is currently President should be removed for that phone call, is there nothing of interest about the guy who is currently the frontrunner to replace him issuing threats to the Ukranian government and specifically threatening to withhold a billion dollars? Or is the media playing by two different sets of rules?
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