DONALD TRUMP, THE UKRAINE SCANDAL AND THE IMPEACHMENT INQUIRY: FACTS VERSUS FICTION (I)


(Note: This is a long piece, but it is only the first part of my view on the Ukraine scandal that led to the impeachment of President Donald Trump by the US House of Representatives. My intention is to conclude this with the actual impeachment hearings and Senate trial of President Trump, but I stopped writing this shortly after the impeachment inquiry started with the first appearance of Ambassador Kurt Volker on the Hill. It’s still a rough sketch, but I have decided to post it now because someone in an exchange with me believe I am criticizing Trump only because I have not read the transcript. Of course, I have and there’s enough proof here to show I have. Please, if you are interested, read, but you need not read it in one sitting. Hopefully, you can get through it before the New Year. Hehe! Thank you.)

(1) Introduction:

Let me start by introducing and explaining the purpose of this piece. It is not a “post” in the traditional sense. Consider it a ‘book’ or a small ‘pamphlet’ or anything just a little more substantial than a traditional Facebook post. That is why it is lengthy. My purpose is not to do a commentary on one or two aspects of the Ukraine issue. My purpose is to deal with it in reasonable detail, by way of accounts and analysis, with all the issues surrounding this affair. This is a very important period in human history and some of us are choosing to document it in our own way.

The impeachment inquiry is just the beginning of a long process that will depend on the facts presently available and some yet to be unearthed to reach a historic verdict either way. It is my belief that Americans and citizens of the world are under serious misinformation attack from Donald Trump and his rightwing supporters invested in muddying the waters on this issue with a view to ensuring that Donald Trump escapes accountability. I know that already, most Americans are in a spin following the fast-paced developments around the case, so one can imagine how much more difficult it is for an international audience. Yet, for Americans who look to reclaim their democracy and for the world that looks to America for inspiration, we need to sort out the facts from fiction. We cannot all allow ourselves to be swept along complacently in the Trumpian tide of lies and obfuscation because there are consequences for Americans in particular and the world at large because of the position America occupies in today’s world order.

I want to also say something here to my Nigerian readers. I know the mentality of a lot of Nigerians is that we shouldn’t bother with what is happening in the US. Some will go as far as saying we shouldn’t bother with what is happening in the US, but rather focus on Nigeria. For both classes of Nigerians, they need to appreciate that they are being intellectually lazy, uncurious and unrealistic. Two things they need to first appreciate are these: First, Nigeria is not an island. Its politics, economy, social conditions and general development are greatly impacted by what happens elsewhere because humanity flows into each other and we always learn from what’s happening elsewhere. Secondly, America is one of the most important countries today in the international system, if not the most important. In fact, for us as Nigerians, America should be seen as the most important country for us outside our own country if for nothing else, at least for the fact that America is the country with the highest number of Nigerians in the diaspora. A lot of them are contributing to development at home, either from their American base or upon return to Nigeria.
There’s also the fact that we, like a lot of people around the world, look to America for inspiration. Particularly, we have a political system largely modelled after the American system. Our practice of the system has been scandalously poor, but we are still sticking to it under the principle that we would make our mistakes but ultimately get it right through practice because it’s all about navigating the challenges of democracy and practicing it better. This is another example America has set for us through its history.

However, today, after almost two and half centuries of practice, American governmental institutions are facing a test from an exceptionally vicious class of political profiteers who have no regard for democracy and a rule-based system. The challenge is so bad that the survival of democracy in our world today now depends on what happens in America from here on. Despite all the eulogized signs of high civilization, humanity today has become as politically endangered as it was in primeval times. We have become so complacent about our freedom won with blood and sweat that we are now giving it back to philistines and sociopaths like Donald Trump and his brood of vipers. Indeed, whether we recognize it or not, we are all students of history now; thus, those of us who are conscious of this must begin to keep record.

Of course, there is the fact that there are those Nigerians who have no idea what democracy is and whose conflicted ideas of good governance and human development have them terribly mixed up with their personality cultism and social wickedness masquerading as conservatism. We encounter a lot of them everyday in the streets, in our communities, on our travels and online. They want to determine what is good or bad religion and how others must relate to God. They always see a snarling criminal berating the establishment as the messiah that has come to save the world from going to the dogs when in fact their messiah and them in tow are the ones really taking the world to the jackals with their attacks on others who are not like them, who do not think like them and who simply want to exercise their freedom without hurting anyone. They are the ones mocking the science of climate change as they eat the earth and the future to death in their insatiable greed. They are the worshippers of Mammon who think the size of their bank accounts is the size of their brains and the insurance against their conscience.

Their conflicted politics has no room for morality or character because all they worship is empty partisanship. For instance, I cannot understand how anyone who knows that Muhammadu Buhari is evidently destroying democracy and running a bad government in Nigeria would in the same breath be glorifying Donald Trump that is doing the same in America. I know they always manufacture silly criteria for contrasting them, but I think it’s a case of partisanship compromising good sense. Unfortunately, the world does not lack aggressively ignorant people stiffly committed to planting their ignorance as the universal creed. They are the ones who lack any moral scruples and who would do anything to ensure their warped vision prevails in national and international policy milieus. More unfortunately, a lot of them do not understand the difference between self-interest and enlightened self-interest. You might, for whatever personal gain, think or act conflicted in exercise of political morality, but history has consistently showed that such shortsightedness never ensures your safety, your community’s safety or the safety of humanity at large. But enlightened self-interest requires that you consider the best for yourself as the best for other people and, no matter what you think of that, it always has room to positively grow.
I believe there is a lot for Americans and people from all over the world to learn from what is going on in America right now. We all need to start keeping watch. I don’t know if this piece would be discussed by others or not, but I want to be able to return here from time to time during this impeachment inquiry to see how unfolding events are bearing out or upturning the analyses we are doing here. That is one reason it’s this detailed.
Please, there is no compulsion to read this. If you are not interested in American politics or in long reads, you can move on. If you are keen on it, you don’t have to read everything in one sitting. You can take your time to go through it a few minutes, a few lines at a time and contribute to the discussion whenever you are through or whenever you feel like. That may be today, tomorrow, next week, whenever. The idea behind this is that at the end of it all we all learn from each other and be better for it.
(2) A Russian bear hug:

Now, with this Ukraine matter, let’s start from what is looming in the background. Russia. Ukraine used to have a pro-Russian government headed by Viktor Yanukovych. In November 2013, the Ukrainians began what was called the Euromaidan, which was a nationwide protest against the pro-Russian government when it decided to suspend the Ukraine-European Union Association Agreement at the instigation of Moscow because Russia does not want the European Union’s influence extended to Ukraine, a territory of the former Soviet Union. By 2014, the protest became a full-scale revolution that saw to the ouster of Yanukovych. In February that year, parliament removed Yanukovych officially and fixed an election for the 25th of May to choose a president. Petro Poroshenko, a pro-Western businessman who ran on a pro-European Union platform won more than 50 percent of the vote and therefore avoided a run-off.

By this time, Vladimir Putin had started fomenting trouble in Eastern Ukraine obviously to punish Ukrainians for daring to remove his stooge. He annexed an area of Ukraine known as the Crimea and in March 2014 conducted a sham referendum in the region before proclaiming the place “Republic of Crimea.” But the international community was outraged. The United Nations General Assembly passed Resolution 68/262 invalidating the referendum and recognizing the territorial integrity of Ukraine. Russia continued to engage in more destabilizing gambits in the Luhansk and Donesk regions and, indeed, Poroshenko’s time in office was marked by this conflict with Russia. His attempt to negotiate peace with Russia was rebuffed and, as at today, more than 13,000 lives have been lost to the conflict. Amongst them are 298 innocent people killed when Russian-backed forces shot down a Malaysian passenger airliner over Ukraine in July 2014. But under Poroshenko, Ukraine ratified the Ukraine-European Union Association Agreement and continued its push towards aligning more with the West. He also revived Ukraine’s attempt to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), an attempt that was suspended by Yanukovych under the pretence of remaining non-aligned.

Western leaders under the leadership of the United States, the EU and some other international organizations decided to robustly support Ukraine against Russian aggression. This involves giving Ukraine military and economic aid. However, Ukraine has a notorious corruption culture dating back to the days it was under Russian influence. Western nations keen to help were also keen not to allow the money and aid they were sending Ukraine to go fund corruption. They therefore negotiated with the Ukrainian government strategies to fight corruption and set up international monitoring machineries to ensure that aid money is spent for what it is meant for. The Obama-led US government was leading this effort on behalf of the international community in Ukraine and Joe Biden, the then US Vice President was designated as the lead go-to person for this policy within the US government.

Thereafter, in 2015 a fellow known as Viktor Shokin was appointed Ukraine’s Prosecutor-General. He had the power to initiate and prosecute corruption cases against private and public persons and entities. But soon, it became obvious that this chap wasn’t interested in fighting corruption. He was Poroshenko’s ally; in fact, he is a godfather to one of Poroshenko’s children. The international community became alarmed when he repeatedly ignored flagged up cases of corruption and then prosecuted and harassed his own officials who courageously attempted to prosecute some of these cases. After several backchannel efforts to get the Ukrainian authorities to act failed, the United States and the international community now sent Biden to Ukraine in December 2015 to make clear that no aid would be forthcoming any more until the compromised anti-corruption chief was removed. Eventually, the parliament voted to sack him and in March 2016, he resigned.
(3) Trump and Ukraine:

So, the above was all that happened before Trump came into office in January 2017. But at this juncture, it’s important to look back at Trump’s relationship with the Ukrainian government even before the election of President Volodymyr Zelensky. This is because we can deduce from reading the “transcript” of the 25 July conversation between Trump and Zelensky, the whistleblower’s complaint and now some text messages between diplomats released to Congressional Committees by Kurt Volker, the just-resigned U.S. Special Representative for Ukraine Negotiations that Trump has been in the business of pressuring the Ukrainian government long before Zelensky came on the scene.

Trump came into office with an albatross around his neck, which was the Russian intervention in the US election and his role and the role of his Campaign in that affair. We know that the US security and intelligence agencies all have said that Russia actually intervened on behalf of Trump. The Robert Mueller inquiry was all about this and we all read the report and know that many convictions have been obtained and many prosecutions are still ongoing. Now, Trump we know is not happy about all this. We know the many ways he tried to impede and obstruct Mueller, but what we didn’t know was what he was doing with other governments and in other countries to stop Mueller, especially with Ukraine which had a lot on his campaign Chairman, Paul Manafort. This was an area we knew Mueller was very much interested in.

In May 2018, the New York Times broke a story about Ukraine whose significance was not noted at the time because it did not receive much attention. The report centred around Trump’s meeting with the then Ukrainian president, Petro Poroshenko on 21 September 2017 on the sidelines of the 72nd United Nations General Assembly in New York. Shortly after the meeting, some strange things began to happen in Ukraine and Democrats wanted to know if Donald Trump pressured Poroshenko because of these events.

First, Ukraine’s then Prosecutor-General, Yuri Lutsenko halted cooperation with Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Trump-Russia investigation abruptly without giving any reason. Four Ukrainian criminal inquiries related to Mueller’s work were shut down. These four Ukrainian investigations that were shut down concerned Paul Manafort, Trump’s former campaign chairman, who had made millions in Ukraine as a consultant for the corrupt and ousted President Viktor Yanukovych and his political party. As part of the effort to stop the investigations, Ukrainian officials also let a Russian Ukrainian business partner of Manafort, Konstantin Kilimnik to leave Ukraine before Mueller’s investigators could question him. He was a key potential witness for Mueller.

At the time, the issue came up in parliament in Ukraine and the consensus was that the Ukrainian government took these steps in order not to upset Donald Trump and jeopardize a deal that would supply Ukraine Javelin anti-tank missiles for its ongoing conflict with Russia. In any case, Donald Trump did not approve the sale of the Javelin anti-tank missiles to Ukraine (which was why Zelensky was flattering Trump during their 25 July conversation to get him to sell them the anti-tank missiles). But at the time, several US Senators were wondering if the Ukrainian investigations had been sidelined as an act of Trump-Ukraine collusion.

Senators Patrick Leahy, Dick Durbin, and Robert Menendez wrote a letter to Yuri Lutsenko, expressing their “great concern about reports that your office has taken steps to impede cooperation” with Mueller’s investigation. They asked Lutsenko to explain these moves. They also raised the issue of whether Trump and his people had pressured the Ukrainians to quash these probes. They asked: “Did any individual from the Trump Administration, or anyone acting on its behalf, encourage Ukrainian government or law enforcement officials not to cooperate with the investigation of Special Counsel Robert Mueller?” They also asked if there had been any discussion of the Mueller probe between Ukrainian and US officials when Trump met then-President Petro Poroshenko during the UN meeting. Basically, the Senators were asking if there had been some quid pro quo underhanded collusion requiring the blocking of the Mueller inquiries in Ukraine before they, the Ukrainians, can get the anti-missiles system. But Lutsenko stonewalled and didn’t respond. Now, the same Lutsenko is at the centre of the present Trump-Ukraine scandal following revelations that Rudy Giuliani had recruited him into the conspiracy against Biden before he seemingly had a change of mind. He recently toldthe Los Angeles Times that he has repeatedly turned down demands from Giuliani to provide dirt on the Bidens because he has seen no evidence that they engaged in any wrongdoing.

In the light of the present revelations, the Senators’ letter to Lutsenko has become an issue because it raises the question whether Trump in any way tried to pressure the Ukraine government to impede Mueller a year before Trump phoned Zelensky and asked for the “favor” he asked for on July 25 this year in that telephone conversation. It is noted that reading the transcript, he asked for this personal favour as a condition before he could consider the sale of the Javelin anti-tank missiles which the Ukrainian leader expressed interest in buying. There’s every possibility that the House Intelligence Committee now investigating Trump and Giuliani’s actions in Ukraine would want to hear from Lutsenko on that 2018 episode and his latter interactions with Giuliani.

It is no surprise that a jittery Trump has typically been trying to twist the old Senators’ letter into some kind of evidence that he’s saying exonerates him. He has zeroed in on a line in the letter the Senators wrote Lutsenko which pointed out that blocking cooperation with Mueller “sends a worrying signal—to the Ukrainian people as well as the international community—about your government’s commitment broadly to support justice and the rule of law.” Trump claims this is proof that the Democrats have been the ones threatening the Ukrainian government all along and not him, Trump.
Of course, this claim is evidently false because the Democrats sent their letter in May 2018, long before Zelensky’s defeat of Poroshenko in April 2019. There was no threat in the letter against Poroshenko or Zelensky who hadn’t even come on the scene. The line Trump is zeroing on was simply reminding the Ukrainian authorities that impeding these investigations would cause the international community to question the government’s commitment to fighting corruption, which was and still is a critical issue for Ukraine, as it seeks aid from Western nations.

PLEASE FINISH READING ON OUR WEBSITE... ARTICLE TO LONG FOR THIS FORUM... THANK YOU!

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Try summarize

I

chizgold80:
DONALD TRUMP, THE UKRAINE SCANDAL AND THE IMPEACHMENT INQUIRY: FACTS VERSUS FICTION (I)


(Note: This is a long piece, but it is only the first part of my view on the Ukraine scandal that led to the impeachment of President Donald Trump by the US House of Representatives. My intention is to conclude this with the actual impeachment hearings and Senate trial of President Trump, but I stopped writing this shortly after the impeachment inquiry started with the first appearance of Ambassador Kurt Volker on the Hill. It’s still a rough sketch, but I have decided to post it now because someone in an exchange with me believe I am criticizing Trump only because I have not read the transcript. Of course, I have and there’s enough proof here to show I have. Please, if you are interested, read, but you need not read it in one sitting. Hopefully, you can get through it before the New Year. Hehe! Thank you.)

(1) Introduction:

Let me start by introducing and explaining the purpose of this piece. It is not a “post” in the traditional sense. Consider it a ‘book’ or a small ‘pamphlet’ or anything just a little more substantial than a traditional Facebook post. That is why it is lengthy. My purpose is not to do a commentary on one or two aspects of the Ukraine issue. My purpose is to deal with it in reasonable detail, by way of accounts and analysis, with all the issues surrounding this affair. This is a very important period in human history and some of us are choosing to document it in our own way.

The impeachment inquiry is just the beginning of a long process that will depend on the facts presently available and some yet to be unearthed to reach a historic verdict either way. It is my belief that Americans and citizens of the world are under serious misinformation attack from Donald Trump and his rightwing supporters invested in muddying the waters on this issue with a view to ensuring that Donald Trump escapes accountability. I know that already, most Americans are in a spin following the fast-paced developments around the case, so one can imagine how much more difficult it is for an international audience. Yet, for Americans who look to reclaim their democracy and for the world that looks to America for inspiration, we need to sort out the facts from fiction. We cannot all allow ourselves to be swept along complacently in the Trumpian tide of lies and obfuscation because there are consequences for Americans in particular and the world at large because of the position America occupies in today’s world order.

I want to also say something here to my Nigerian readers. I know the mentality of a lot of Nigerians is that we shouldn’t bother with what is happening in the US. Some will go as far as saying we shouldn’t bother with what is happening in the US, but rather focus on Nigeria. For both classes of Nigerians, they need to appreciate that they are being intellectually lazy, uncurious and unrealistic. Two things they need to first appreciate are these: First, Nigeria is not an island. Its politics, economy, social conditions and general development are greatly impacted by what happens elsewhere because humanity flows into each other and we always learn from what’s happening elsewhere. Secondly, America is one of the most important countries today in the international system, if not the most important. In fact, for us as Nigerians, America should be seen as the most important country for us outside our own country if for nothing else, at least for the fact that America is the country with the highest number of Nigerians in the diaspora. A lot of them are contributing to development at home, either from their American base or upon return to Nigeria.
There’s also the fact that we, like a lot of people around the world, look to America for inspiration. Particularly, we have a political system largely modelled after the American system. Our practice of the system has been scandalously poor, but we are still sticking to it under the principle that we would make our mistakes but ultimately get it right through practice because it’s all about navigating the challenges of democracy and practicing it better. This is another example America has set for us through its history.

However, today, after almost two and half centuries of practice, American governmental institutions are facing a test from an exceptionally vicious class of political profiteers who have no regard for democracy and a rule-based system. The challenge is so bad that the survival of democracy in our world today now depends on what happens in America from here on. Despite all the eulogized signs of high civilization, humanity today has become as politically endangered as it was in primeval times. We have become so complacent about our freedom won with blood and sweat that we are now giving it back to philistines and sociopaths like Donald Trump and his brood of vipers. Indeed, whether we recognize it or not, we are all students of history now; thus, those of us who are conscious of this must begin to keep record.

Of course, there is the fact that there are those Nigerians who have no idea what democracy is and whose conflicted ideas of good governance and human development have them terribly mixed up with their personality cultism and social wickedness masquerading as conservatism. We encounter a lot of them everyday in the streets, in our communities, on our travels and online. They want to determine what is good or bad religion and how others must relate to God. They always see a snarling criminal berating the establishment as the messiah that has come to save the world from going to the dogs when in fact their messiah and them in tow are the ones really taking the world to the jackals with their attacks on others who are not like them, who do not think like them and who simply want to exercise their freedom without hurting anyone. They are the ones mocking the science of climate change as they eat the earth and the future to death in their insatiable greed. They are the worshippers of Mammon who think the size of their bank accounts is the size of their brains and the insurance against their conscience.

Their conflicted politics has no room for morality or character because all they worship is empty partisanship. For instance, I cannot understand how anyone who knows that Muhammadu Buhari is evidently destroying democracy and running a bad government in Nigeria would in the same breath be glorifying Donald Trump that is doing the same in America. I know they always manufacture silly criteria for contrasting them, but I think it’s a case of partisanship compromising good sense. Unfortunately, the world does not lack aggressively ignorant people stiffly committed to planting their ignorance as the universal creed. They are the ones who lack any moral scruples and who would do anything to ensure their warped vision prevails in national and international policy milieus. More unfortunately, a lot of them do not understand the difference between self-interest and enlightened self-interest. You might, for whatever personal gain, think or act conflicted in exercise of political morality, but history has consistently showed that such shortsightedness never ensures your safety, your community’s safety or the safety of humanity at large. But enlightened self-interest requires that you consider the best for yourself as the best for other people and, no matter what you think of that, it always has room to positively grow.
I believe there is a lot for Americans and people from all over the world to learn from what is going on in America right now. We all need to start keeping watch. I don’t know if this piece would be discussed by others or not, but I want to be able to return here from time to time during this impeachment inquiry to see how unfolding events are bearing out or upturning the analyses we are doing here. That is one reason it’s this detailed.
Please, there is no compulsion to read this. If you are not interested in American politics or in long reads, you can move on. If you are keen on it, you don’t have to read everything in one sitting. You can take your time to go through it a few minutes, a few lines at a time and contribute to the discussion whenever you are through or whenever you feel like. That may be today, tomorrow, next week, whenever. The idea behind this is that at the end of it all we all learn from each other and be better for it.
(2) A Russian bear hug:

Now, with this Ukraine matter, let’s start from what is looming in the background. Russia. Ukraine used to have a pro-Russian government headed by Viktor Yanukovych. In November 2013, the Ukrainians began what was called the Euromaidan, which was a nationwide protest against the pro-Russian government when it decided to suspend the Ukraine-European Union Association Agreement at the instigation of Moscow because Russia does not want the European Union’s influence extended to Ukraine, a territory of the former Soviet Union. By 2014, the protest became a full-scale revolution that saw to the ouster of Yanukovych. In February that year, parliament removed Yanukovych officially and fixed an election for the 25th of May to choose a president. Petro Poroshenko, a pro-Western businessman who ran on a pro-European Union platform won more than 50 percent of the vote and therefore avoided a run-off.

By this time, Vladimir Putin had started fomenting trouble in Eastern Ukraine obviously to punish Ukrainians for daring to remove his stooge. He annexed an area of Ukraine known as the Crimea and in March 2014 conducted a sham referendum in the region before proclaiming the place “Republic of Crimea.” But the international community was outraged. The United Nations General Assembly passed Resolution 68/262 invalidating the referendum and recognizing the territorial integrity of Ukraine. Russia continued to engage in more destabilizing gambits in the Luhansk and Donesk regions and, indeed, Poroshenko’s time in office was marked by this conflict with Russia. His attempt to negotiate peace with Russia was rebuffed and, as at today, more than 13,000 lives have been lost to the conflict. Amongst them are 298 innocent people killed when Russian-backed forces shot down a Malaysian passenger airliner over Ukraine in July 2014. But under Poroshenko, Ukraine ratified the Ukraine-European Union Association Agreement and continued its push towards aligning more with the West. He also revived Ukraine’s attempt to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), an attempt that was suspended by Yanukovych under the pretence of remaining non-aligned.

Western leaders under the leadership of the United States, the EU and some other international organizations decided to robustly support Ukraine against Russian aggression. This involves giving Ukraine military and economic aid. However, Ukraine has a notorious corruption culture dating back to the days it was under Russian influence. Western nations keen to help were also keen not to allow the money and aid they were sending Ukraine to go fund corruption. They therefore negotiated with the Ukrainian government strategies to fight corruption and set up international monitoring machineries to ensure that aid money is spent for what it is meant for. The Obama-led US government was leading this effort on behalf of the international community in Ukraine and Joe Biden, the then US Vice President was designated as the lead go-to person for this policy within the US government.


Thereafter, in 2015 a fellow known as Viktor Shokin was appointed Ukraine’s Prosecutor-General. He had the power to initiate and prosecute corruption cases against private and public persons and entities. But soon, it became obvious that this chap wasn’t interested in fighting corruption. He was Poroshenko’s ally; in fact, he is a godfather to one of Poroshenko’s children. The international community became alarmed when he repeatedly ignored flagged up cases of corruption and then prosecuted and harassed his own officials who courageously attempted to prosecute some of these cases. After several backchannel efforts to get the Ukrainian authorities to act failed, the United States and the international community now sent Biden to Ukraine in December 2015 to make clear that no aid would be forthcoming any more until the compromised anti-corruption chief was removed. Eventually, the parliament voted to sack him and in March 2016, he resigned.


(3) Trump and Ukraine:

So, the above was all that happened before Trump came into office in January 2017. But at this juncture, it’s important to look back at Trump’s relationship with the Ukrainian government even before the election of President Volodymyr Zelensky. This is because we can deduce from reading the “transcript” of the 25 July conversation between Trump and Zelensky, the whistleblower’s complaint and now some text messages between diplomats released to Congressional Committees by Kurt Volker, the just-resigned U.S. Special Representative for Ukraine Negotiations that Trump has been in the business of pressuring the Ukrainian government long before Zelensky came on the scene.

Trump came into office with an albatross around his neck, which was the Russian intervention in the US election and his role and the role of his Campaign in that affair. We know that the US security and intelligence agencies all have said that Russia actually intervened on behalf of Trump. The Robert Mueller inquiry was all about this and we all read the report and know that many convictions have been obtained and many prosecutions are still ongoing. Now, Trump we know is not happy about all this. We know the many ways he tried to impede and obstruct Mueller, but what we didn’t know was what he was doing with other governments and in other countries to stop Mueller, especially with Ukraine which had a lot on his campaign Chairman, Paul Manafort. This was an area we knew Mueller was very much interested in.

In May 2018, the New York Times broke a story about Ukraine whose significance was not noted at the time because it did not receive much attention. The report centred around Trump’s meeting with the then Ukrainian president, Petro Poroshenko on 21 September 2017 on the sidelines of the 72nd United Nations General Assembly in New York. Shortly after the meeting, some strange things began to happen in Ukraine and Democrats wanted to know if Donald Trump pressured Poroshenko because of these events.

First, Ukraine’s then Prosecutor-General, Yuri Lutsenko halted cooperation with Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Trump-Russia investigation abruptly without giving any reason. Four Ukrainian criminal inquiries related to Mueller’s work were shut down. These four Ukrainian investigations that were shut down concerned Paul Manafort, Trump’s former campaign chairman, who had made millions in Ukraine as a consultant for the corrupt and ousted President Viktor Yanukovych and his political party. As part of the effort to stop the investigations, Ukrainian officials also let a Russian Ukrainian business partner of Manafort, Konstantin Kilimnik to leave Ukraine before Mueller’s investigators could question him. He was a key potential witness for Mueller.

At the time, the issue came up in parliament in Ukraine and the consensus was that the Ukrainian government took these steps in order not to upset Donald Trump and jeopardize a deal that would supply Ukraine Javelin anti-tank missiles for its ongoing conflict with Russia. In any case, Donald Trump did not approve the sale of the Javelin anti-tank missiles to Ukraine (which was why Zelensky was flattering Trump during their 25 July conversation to get him to sell them the anti-tank missiles). But at the time, several US Senators were wondering if the Ukrainian investigations had been sidelined as an act of Trump-Ukraine collusion.

Senators Patrick Leahy, Dick Durbin, and Robert Menendez wrote a letter to Yuri Lutsenko, expressing their “great concern about reports that your office has taken steps to impede cooperation” with Mueller’s investigation. They asked Lutsenko to explain these moves. They also raised the issue of whether Trump and his people had pressured the Ukrainians to quash these probes. They asked: “Did any individual from the Trump Administration, or anyone acting on its behalf, encourage Ukrainian government or law enforcement officials not to cooperate with the investigation of Special Counsel Robert Mueller?” They also asked if there had been any discussion of the Mueller probe between Ukrainian and US officials when Trump met then-President Petro Poroshenko during the UN meeting. Basically, the Senators were asking if there had been some quid pro quo underhanded collusion requiring the blocking of the Mueller inquiries in Ukraine before they, the Ukrainians, can get the anti-missiles system. But Lutsenko stonewalled and didn’t respond. Now, the same Lutsenko is at the centre of the present Trump-Ukraine scandal following revelations that Rudy Giuliani had recruited him into the conspiracy against Biden before he seemingly had a change of mind. He recently toldthe Los Angeles Times that he has repeatedly turned down demands from Giuliani to provide dirt on the Bidens because he has seen no evidence that they engaged in any wrongdoing.

In the light of the present revelations, the Senators’ letter to Lutsenko has become an issue because it raises the question whether Trump in any way tried to pressure the Ukraine government to impede Mueller a year before Trump phoned Zelensky and asked for the “favor” he asked for on July 25 this year in that telephone conversation. It is noted that reading the transcript, he asked for this personal favour as a condition before he could consider the sale of the Javelin anti-tank missiles which the Ukrainian leader expressed interest in buying. There’s every possibility that the House Intelligence Committee now investigating Trump and Giuliani’s actions in Ukraine would want to hear from Lutsenko on that 2018 episode and his latter interactions with Giuliani.

It is no surprise that a jittery Trump has typically been trying to twist the old Senators’ letter into some kind of evidence that he’s saying exonerates him. He has zeroed in on a line in the letter the Senators wrote Lutsenko which pointed out that blocking cooperation with Mueller “sends a worrying signal—to the Ukrainian people as well as the international community—about your government’s commitment broadly to support justice and the rule of law.” Trump claims this is proof that the Democrats have been the ones threatening the Ukrainian government all along and not him, Trump.
Of course, this claim is evidently false because the Democrats sent their letter in May 2018, long before Zelensky’s defeat of Poroshenko in April 2019. There was no threat in the letter against Poroshenko or Zelensky who hadn’t even come on the scene. The line Trump is zeroing on was simply reminding the Ukrainian authorities that impeding these investigations would cause the international community to question the government’s commitment to fighting corruption, which was and still is a critical issue for Ukraine, as it seeks aid from Western nations.

PLEASE FINISH READING ON OUR WEBSITE... ARTICLE TO LONG FOR THIS FORUM... THANK YOU!

READ MORE: https://ikengachronicles.com/donald-trump-the-ukraine-scandal-and-the-impeachment-inquiry-facts-versus-fiction-i/

Whoever wrote above crap is starkly ignorant and bought into the goofy crap the liberals and their idiotic lame media is feeding him/her. I guess it is good not to investigate the Bidens but Trumps. Good logic indeed.