Trump is Pressuring Ukraine to Smear Clinton and Biden

[dajoki]

Trump is Pressuring Ukraine to Smear Clinton and Biden
http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/05/trump-giuliani-ukraine-smear-biden-russia.html

In 2016, Donald Trump’s campaign learned Russia was working to help him win, and many of its members actively sought to exploit that assistance. In 2020, now possessing the powers of the Executive Branch, it’s pressuring a foreign government to assist Trump’s reelection campaign. The effort consists of Trump’s agents lobbying Ukraine to smear his political rivals.

The smear campaign is being run by Rudy Giuliani, who — perhaps operating on the theory that a massive scandal boasted about the media by its perpetrators is less damaging than one uncovered by investigators — is broadcasting his scheme. “There’s nothing illegal about it,” he tells the New York Times. “Somebody could say it’s improper.”
Well, yes, they could. It’s grossly, terrifyingly improper.

Giuliani is trying to get Ukraine to pursue two investigations: one against the last democratic presidential nominee, and another against the leading candidate to be the next one. The first is based on murky charges that have circulated on the right that Hillary Clinton’s campaign conspired with Ukraine to gin up the Russia investigation. (This presumes that without Clinton starting it, there was no serious evidence to investigate Trump’s connections to Russia, which is absurd on its face.)

The second is based on charges that, during his time as vice-president, Joe Biden improperly used his power to benefit his son, Hunter. The Times laid out this accusation in a lengthy report last week. The charge is that Hunter Biden was working for a Ukrainian energy company that was being threatened with prosecution, and Joe Biden demanded Ukraine fire the prosecutor.

But Bloomberg News investigated this claim and thoroughly debunked it. Bloomberg reveals that the prosecution of Hunter Biden’s client had already been shelved at the time Joe Biden was calling for the prosecutor to be removed. And, as the Times acknowledges, the prosecutor Biden called to be fired was widely considered to be corrupt, and the Obama government supported the prosecution of Hunter Biden’s client anyway. There is no quid, no pro, no quo in this story. Biden acted completely in line with administration policy, and his actions had no bearing on his son’s interests.

<<snip>>

[Gothmog]

1. Washington Post-Opinion: Why the alleged Joe Biden "Ukraine conspiracy" doesn't hold up

Link to tweet

The trouble began when right-wing bloggers sought to meld these two points into a single conspiracy in which Joe Biden had the prosecutor sacked to protect his son’s business interests. I may be an outsider to the bewildering mess that is Ukrainian politics, but, on this particular issue, I have a genuine insight into what happened, having written extensively about Hunter Biden’s ex-employer, Mykola Zlochevsky.

As a result, when journalists seek the fire behind the smoke in the Biden-Ukraine tale, they often call to ask my opinion. Many are eager to flesh out what seems a satisfyingly simple conspiracy, but I have to tell them: It isn’t true. The timeline doesn’t work. The investigation into Burisma, Hunter Biden’s employer, had ground to a halt long before the prosecutor was sacked. A subsequent probe into the company’s owner was opened because of a request from Ukrainian legislators, not because of prosecutorial initiative. There is, in short, no there there; the bloggers are putting two and two together — and coming up with 22.

Hunter Biden should not have taken the job; Joe Biden should probably not have boasted about bullying the president of another country. But those are judgment matters for them personally, not proof of conspiracy, and certainly not an affair worth destabilizing the fragile democracy of a new U.S. ally.

But that has not stopped Giuliani, who tweeted last week: “how deep and how high did the alleged Ukraine conspiracy go?” He was responding to a story in the New York Times (the Times apparently not “failing” on this occasion, since Trump retweeted the paper’s story), which analyzed the theories around the Bidens’ Ukraine connection. The article ticked all the journalistic boxes, giving father and son space to deny wrongdoing, but still raised a cloud of smoke for those shouting “fire.” If a major newspaper devotes 2,500 words to conflict-of-interest questions, then those questions presumably exist. How often do you beat your wife?