From a 2-and-a-half-year-old article in Politico — "Ukrainian efforts to sabotage Trump backfire/Kiev officials are scrambling to make amends with the president-elect after quietly working to boost Clinton" — which was linked to last night by Instapundit.
ADDED: I created a new tag just now — "Trump and Ukraine" — and then I searched the archive to see where it might need to be added. That got me back to some things that I'd lost track of. I'll put these in reverse chronological order. After you read the first 3, you'll see that everything we're getting excited about these past few days was already basically there in the news last April/May. For me, this reinforces the suspicion I aired yesterday, that the real motivation for surfacing this story now is to push Biden out.
From May 11, 2019:
"Facing withering attacks accusing him of seeking foreign assistance for President Trump’s re-election campaign, Rudolph W. Giuliani announced on Friday night that he had canceled a trip to Kiev in which he planned to push the incoming Ukrainian government to press ahead with investigations that he hoped would benefit Mr. Trump. Mr. Giuliani, President Trump’s personal lawyer, explained that he felt like he was being 'set up,' and he blamed Democrats for trying to 'spin' the trip. 'They say I was meddling in the election — ridiculous — but that’s their spin,' he said."From May 10, 2019:
The NYT reports.
“We’re not meddling in an election, we’re meddling in an investigation, which we have a right to do. There’s nothing illegal about it," said Giuliani. "Somebody could say it’s improper. And this isn’t foreign policy — I’m asking [Ukraine] to do an investigation that they’re doing already and that other people are telling them to stop. And I’m going to give them reasons why they shouldn’t stop it because that information will be very, very helpful to my client, and may turn out to be helpful to my government."April 2, 2019:
From "Rudy Giuliani Plans Ukraine Trip to Push for Inquiries That Could Help Trump" (NYT).
What is Ukraine currently investigating that Giuliani wants to encourage? According to the NYT, it's "the origin of the special counsel’s investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election" and "the involvement of former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s son in a gas company owned by a Ukrainian oligarch."
The investigations had been opened by Ukrainian prosecutors serving during the term of the country’s current president, Petro O. Poroshenko. He lost his re-election bid last month to Volodymyr Zelensky, a comedian and political newcomer....
Mr. Giuliani has been working on the effort with other allies of Mr. Trump whose involvement has not been previously reported, including Victoria Toensing, a lawyer who was named last year, along with her husband, as part of the legal team representing the president in the special counsel’s investigation. The appointment was rescinded less than one week later amid concerns about conflicts of interest, but Mr. Trump’s legal team suggested that Ms. Toensing and her husband, Joseph E. diGenova, would assist the president “in other legal matters.”
On social media and in regular appearances on Fox News, the couple advanced the theory that the special counsel’s investigation was the result of a Justice Department effort to frame Mr. Trump. They increasingly began pushing the claim that “the real collusion began in @Ukraine,” as Ms. Toensing put it in a post on Twitter in March....
"Joe Biden's 2020 Ukrainian nightmare: A closed probe is revived."March 31, 2019:
At The Hill.
In his own words, with video cameras rolling, Biden described how he threatened Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko in March 2016 that the Obama administration would pull $1 billion in U.S. loan guarantees, sending the former Soviet republic toward insolvency, if it didn’t immediately fire Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin.
“I said, ‘You’re not getting the billion.’ I’m going to be leaving here in, I think it was about six hours. I looked at them and said: ‘I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money,’” Biden recalled telling Poroshenko. “Well, son of a bitch, he got fired. And they put in place someone who was solid at the time,” Biden told the Council on Foreign Relations event, insisting that President Obama was in on the threat....
But Ukrainian officials tell me there was one crucial piece of information that Biden must have known but didn’t mention to his audience: The prosecutor he got fired was leading a wide-ranging corruption probe into the natural gas firm Burisma Holdings that employed Biden’s younger son, Hunter, as a board member....
"A comedian with no political experience has won the most votes in the first round of Ukraine's presidential elections, according to exit polls."January 29, 2018 (sorry, this is the one where it's all about me):
"They say Volodymyr Zelenskiy - who played the president on TV - received 30.4% of the vote, with current leader Petro Poroshenko second on 17.8%," BBC reports....
Zelenskiy's TV show is called "Servant of the People," and that's the name of his political party, Servant of the People — reported here, by WaPo, a few weeks ago.
... In “Servant of the People,” which premiered in 2015, the schoolteacher played by Zelensky becomes an overnight sensation after his impromptu rant against government corruption goes viral. He is elected president and goes on to fight the entrenched elites, refusing to be bought....
“We’re living in a parallel universe,” said a senior Western diplomat in Kiev who, like many colleagues, has been catching up on the show. “People are confusing what’s real and what’s fiction.”...
Coming in the wake of President Trump’s election and the success of comedian Beppe Grillo’s populist Five Star Movement in Italy, Zelensky’s rise echoes that of other outsiders storming into politics....
What's up with Dnipro?
... Google Analytics shows... the audience for my blog today... 17.51% is from Ukraine.... Are these real readers?... I've narrowed it down and can see that the traffic from Ukraine began on January 26th. That was the day Trump spoke at Davos. There were a couple posts about that.....
Posts
39 comments:
Joe Biden and his son Hunter made out like bandits fleecing Ukraine.....can't WAIT until all those details come out.
MSM is holding that info in abeyance until it becomes clear that Harris or Warren cannot win the nomination with SlowJoe standing in the way.
The Ukrainian government also fired the prosecutor who was investigating the energy company that had hired Hunter Biden onto its Board of Directors.
There’s shooting yourself in the foot, an apt expression for a backfiring attacks. But this past week the press reminds of a suicide bomber exploding himself and a good part of his own cadre before even making it to the target. Couldn’t happen to a more deserving group of people.
The Dems are foaming at the mouth over this Ukraine thing. This is going to blow up in their faces.
China Joe is owned by China and the Ukraine. He was bribed!
Pot, kettle.
Trump was having a lot of fun with Ukrainian allegations during his press conference with the Australian PM and their wives. Worth a watch.
He seems less exasperated than in the past with the absurdity of being falsely accused of things that Hillary and the Dems actually did.
Is it a tempest in a teapot or a teapot dome?
Overnight NYT's front page email:
*****
Top News
Trump Pressed Ukraine’s Leader on Inquiry Into Biden’s Son
By JULIAN E. BARNES, MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT, KENNETH P. VOGEL, ADAM GOLDMAN and MAGGIE HABERMAN
Mr. Trump has been prodding the Ukrainian government to investigate Mr. Biden and his family, but the new whistle-blower complaint has drastically raised the stakes.
*****
It seems the NYT is a bit behind on the story. They must work a 9-5 schedule.
The public should be allowed to see all the US government documents related to the decision to pressure the Ukrainian government to fire that prosecutor. Who in the US government knew about and supported the decision?
In particular, did Vice President himself write any memorandas or reports about his actions? If so, the public should be allowed to see all such documents.
Also, did the US Government consult with or report to any other governments about Biden's actions?
Gropin' Joe must be destroyed. Bonus that Trump takes the early heat until the Biden crimes are revealed. Progressivism uber alles.
The key judgement we make about our corrupt politicians is how well they got away with it by hidden kickbacks laundered through loyal co-conspirators. The Dems and GOP in Congress all do that as a performance art. They know how to get paid advances to write Books and take campaign contributions and have nominees that invest secretly using inside info.
But Joe Biden was so slow that he just bragged in public with a simple reliance on the Obama's Protective Shield covering for him.
If Biden runs for the Dems,Trump will have a laugher.
Heh.
The antics of the press call into question the quality of an Ivy League education. They are lousy at propagation of propaganda.
A key thing here is to realize the big corruption money for Dem politicians is from foreigners. Lots of advantages. That’s why the Clintons setup their foundation.
Citizenship exam:
________ is the chief law enforcement officer of the United States of America.
What else would one expect from the Ukraine? After all, their current government came into power after the US and NATO funded a coup which forced out their elected President. And then they held the following election only in those areas that supported the current sewage!!!
My favorite part of the whole thing was Joe using the Obama dodge to say that he only read about his son working for that outfit in the newspaper, that he didn’t know before.
He is either lying, or a bumbling fool unaware of what is going on around him.
To a Democrat foreign “Interference in the election” means providing true information about Democrats to the American people.
When that Brit spy made shit up about Trump.... Not foreign interference!
There is one permanent rule in Calvinball, the current rule is whatever it needs to be to help Calvin win.
It almost looks like the NYT is trying to get Trump re-elected, although I'm doubtful that is their intention. It's hard to see how the MSM can keep the Biden story under wraps after this. Keep digging that hole!
More like keep plucking that chicken.
In support of Althouse’s hypothesis, there have been some articles tentatively raising issues confronting Warren in her campaign, from her questionable scholarship on medical bankruptcy to soft criticism for her elisions on the costs of her proposals. Almost like these issues are being raised as an invitation for her to respond to them now, establishing a response template the MSM can use in the future to bury these matters when raised by her opponents.
"Almost like these issues are being raised as an invitation for her to respond to them now, establishing a response template the MSM can use in the future to bury these matters when raised by her opponents."
-- She doesn't even need a good answer. Any answer so that people can use the "that's old news! We already discussed that," template of dismissing effective attacks against politicians news casters like.
These matters will soon be old news without ever having an impact.
“Gropin' Joe must be destroyed. Bonus that Trump takes the early heat until the Biden crimes are revealed. Progressivism uber alles.”
Hence my suggestion that this was done to help Warren. She is awfully close these days with Crooked Hillary. Someone knew where the body was buried and dug it up. Which is why I suspect the Clinton organization, working to clear the field for their candidate, who at this point has to be Warren, since Sanders slowed her down in 2016, and Biden was Obama’s VP, after be took the 2008 nomination away from her. No one else has really gotten any momentum, any traction, so Biden is now the one the Clinton people need to clear for their favored candidate, very likely Fauxhauntis Warren
Putin's poutin'.
He was really starting to think Trump might be the one. Now it turns out Trump was two timing him with the Ukrainians.
"No one else has really gotten any momentum, any traction, so Biden is now the one the Clinton people need to clear for their favored candidate, very likely Fauxhauntis Warren"
They can always deny traction for Warren later, to clear for their real favored candidate.
“In support of Althouse’s hypothesis, there have been some articles tentatively raising issues confronting Warren in her campaign, from her questionable scholarship on medical bankruptcy to soft criticism for her elisions on the costs of her proposals. Almost like these issues are being raised as an invitation for her to respond to them now, establishing a response template the MSM can use in the future to bury these matters when raised by her opponents.”
Again, I think that this is the Clinton organization. It isn’t the Obama organization, because they seem to be supporting more his VP, Biden. And it seems way too well organized for it to be spontaneous or happenstance. The timing is wrong for it to be from Biden/Obama people. They would probably have waited on the Warren stuff until shortly before the first primary this spring. The timing does appear to be an attempt to bury the bad stuff on Warren through early disclosure.
Mike Sylwester said...
The Ukrainian government also fired the prosecutor who was investigating the energy company that had hired Hunter Biden onto its Board of Directors.
And So, then
Howard said...
Is it a tempest in a teapot or a teapot dome?
Howard thinks he's a wit (he's half right, too!)
teapot dome was a Petroleum Scandal, with the Government illegally releasing Petroleum reserves. You DO see that mentioning Teapot Dome doesn't help Jo Biden, don't you?
Fun fact i was 20 miles from Teapot rock (well, What's Left of Teapot rock) last week. I fish in Natrona county all the time
You know, Ted Kennedy knew Corn Pop too, but he called him Kawn Pop. Joe introduced them when he learned Corn Pop had also once crashed an Oldsmobile Delta 88.
“They can always deny traction for Warren later, to clear for their real favored candidate”
That might work on the Republican side, but the Dems are too top down for that. They seem to much prefer using the nomination process as a coronation. Warren has positioned herself close to the Clintons, which means that the Clintons would have to be the ones to disavow her, and thus kill her candidacy. By delivering the nomination to her, she will be indebted to her. If anyone else, besides the big three were gaining serious traction, the Clintons might be playing them off against each other, but with the big three being Biden, Sanders, and Warren, I see the latter as their only real choice (see my argument above). And this way, they can be the kingmakers.
This debacle smells of Clinton...
Bill had a quote, about if you have a fist in an opponents mouth, they can’t badmouth you.
There seems to have been attempts to get evidence from the Ukraine to the us, but it’s been blocked.
Despite Warnings Media Steps on a Rake With “Whistleblower” Story – Ukraine Government Initiated Contact – Giuliani Engagement Was Requested by State Dept. Officials…
Which is why I suspect the Clinton organization, working to clear the field for their candidate, who at this point has to be Warren,
I still wonder if, after Biden is destroyed, Warren will also be forced out as too extreme. Pat Buchanan's book, "Nixon's White House Wars" which I have been listening to again, describes the 1972 strategy against McGovern. It is a natural for use with any of the 2020 Democrat candidates.
Then comes the theme that Hillary is the only "Moderate" available.
Doesn’t the US government do this all the time? If an embassy is bombed don’t they ask the host country to investigate? Don’t drug enforcement agencies pass information and suggestions regularly? Isn’t an extradition request a request for the other country to investigate and act?
Out there idea: Clinton supports Warren because she really doesn’t want Michelle to come in as a savior for the party at the last minute. It was supposed to be Bill and Hillary as the 1st husband and wife Presidents. She will do anything to make sure it doesn’t happen for Barack and Michelle. Supporting Warren is a way to thwart that possibility.
Warren supported her in 2016, they are both grofters married to more accomplished persons
"What else would one expect from the Ukraine? After all, their current government came into power after the US and NATO funded a coup which forced out their elected President. And then they held the following election only in those areas that supported the current sewage!!!"
Yeah, because them Ukrainians are just stupid hicks who would never have noticed that their corrupt president was in Putin's pocket. God, I despise putinistas.
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