It was not a "one-off" telephone call with a possible quid pro quo.

[kentuck]

It was a planned and long-running operation.

The assistance for Ukraine was passed by the Congress in February of this year and was supposed to have been released to the Ukrainians at the end of February. But Trump did not release it. Why?

He held up the military assistance for about seven months. It helped no one except Russia.

Trump set up a shadow operation, headed by Rudy Giuliani in Ukraine, and led by Mick Mulvaney out of the White House. Mulvaney recruited Rick Perry, Gordon Sondland, and Kurt Volker to assist Giuliani in the shadow operation. They insisted that the new Ukraine president speak on television about opening an investigation on the Bidens. The money was going to be held up until it happened.

Then the whistleblower blew up all the plans, A few Senators began pressuring Trump to release the funds. Trump finally released the money to Ukraine, 7 months late.

It was far from a "one-off" phone call. This was a continuing operation, left over after Manafort went to jail. The roots are very deep in this scandal.

[guillaumeb]

1. Iran Contra was the model.

It worked for Reagan, and there was no reason for the GOP to think it would not work again.

[dalton99a]

2. It fits the repertoire of a career criminal.

[Hermit-The-Prog]

3. Traitor Trump had no thought about the lives lost while he 'negotiated'

[bluecollar2]

6. I wonder how many did die

Or were otherwise affected by the delay?

[Mc Mike]

4. It's not a one off phone call, or even just one continuing op.

It's business as usual, what we see here is how they're operating on every front, in every area, on every policy, all the time.

[Karadeniz]

5. Remember Prince's Seychelles mtg...more shadow channels. Kushners efforts to set up a

Unsupervised channel to Putin...in the Russian embassy, for goodness sake! Remember the mysterious computer in Trump tower, connected only to Russia's Alfa Bank? I've read that it was passing along information originating from a computer in Betsy Devos' husband's business. I also read that after the inauguration, Eric Prince approached Trump about setting up an alternative CIA/FBI, supervised only by Trump and cohorts.

I really, really would like to see Eric Prince receive the justice he deserves.

[kentuck]

7. It may have been very disruptive when they shut down the Alfa Bank computer in Trump Tower?

As I recall, it was done rather quickly?

[dalton99a]

9. Mueller should have investigated the Alfa Bank angle

https://time.com/5592739/donald-trump-petr-aven-alfa-bank/
Questions Remain About Putin's Request for a Back Channel to the Trump Transition
By Eric Lichtblau | May 21, 2019

A few weeks before Donald Trump became president, Russian banker Petr Aven, a billionaire oligarch with Moscow’s Alfa Bank, pulled aside Washington lobbyist Richard Burt at a corporate meeting in Luxembourg with a sensitive request.

Aven told Burt that “someone high in the Russian government” wanted “a communications channel between the Kremlin and the Trump Transition Team,” according to Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s recently released report. Aven wanted Burt, a former ambassador who had helped Trump’s campaign, to work on setting it up.

Burt later told Mueller’s team that the request was, in the words of the report, “outside the normal realm,” even for Burt, a well-traveled Washington insider who had worked with Aven for years. It looks even more remarkable now.

The “high” Russian official was none other than President Vladimir Putin, Mueller’s team would later learn. Amid what Mueller called a “flurry of Russian activity” during the Trump transition, the Aven outreach is the only publicly known instance in which Putin, a onetime KGB spy, was personally involved in directing Russia’s clandestine efforts with the incoming administration.

The surreptitious contacts involving Putin, Aven and Burt as described in the Mueller report contradict repeated assertions by Alfa Bank that it had no contacts with Trump or people around him. At the time of Trump’s election, Alfa Bank was at the center of a mystery over an unexplained surge in computer traffic from Moscow to the Trump Organization in the midst of the 2016 presidential campaign. Computer analysts concluded that Alfa Bank had developed a covert communications channel to the Trump Organization.

Mueller did not address the cyber-traffic one way or the other in his report. That has left some Democrats on Capitol Hill unsatisfied. “Even in the wake of the Mueller report, we don’t know the meaning of the 2016 communications between Alfa Bank and Trump Organization servers, nor do we even know whether the FBI has fully investigated those links,” says Rhode Island Democratic Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, a member of the Judiciary Committee.

[LiberalLovinLug]

13. Mueller it turned out was just another Republican coward

Purposely not investigating areas that could be a real problem for Trump. Including Don Jr.'s role in collusion. And then, in a Pilot like manner, washed his hands of it and gave the deciding decision to indict or not to Trump's personal AG Barr, who then further edited and twisted the report as 'nothing to see here'. To which Bob didn't complain much. Bob was a good Republican soldier who followed Ronnie's 11th commandment to a tee.

[Hestia]

8. Now, to bring down Stephen Miller - THEN we're talking...

I refuse to believe he doesn't have any skeleton's in his closet, other than the trashing of the band instruments in high school and the school had to hold fund raisers to get the money to replace all the instruments. Parents couldn't pay for them.

[struggle4progress]

10. GOP Gang of Putinists

[dalton99a]

11. +1

[MartyTheGreek]

12. And Trump has been pushing the Ukraine DNC server hack for two years.

He's doing nothing but paying back Putin for helping him get into office and for future real estate ventures.