Three of President Trump’s top advisers met with him in the Oval Office in May, determined to convince him that the new Ukrainian leader was an ally deserving of U.S. support. They had barely begun their pitch when Trump unloaded on them.... In Trump’s mind, the officials said, Ukraine’s entire leadership had colluded with the Democrats to undermine his 2016 presidential campaign. “They tried to take me down,” Trump railed.
Energy Secretary Rick Perry, the senior member of the group, assured Trump that the new Ukrainian president was different — a reformer in Trump’s mold who had even quoted President Ronald Reagan in his inaugural address, for which the three advisers had been present. But the harder they pushed in the Oval Office, the more Trump resisted. “They are horrible, corrupt people,” Trump told them....
“We could never quite understand it,” a former senior White House official said... “There were accusations that they had somehow worked with the Clinton campaign. There were accusations they’d hurt him. He just hated Ukraine.”....
Trump’s hatred, they concluded, was ingrained, irrational and possibly irreversible.
November 2, 2019
"A presidential loathing for Ukraine is at the heart of the impeachment inquiry."
According to The Washington Post:
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In Reality Ukraine’s entire leadership had colluded with the Democrats to undermine his 2016 presidential campaign. “They tried to take me down,” Trump railed.
fify!
I find these stories fly-on-the-wall stories unbelievable. Especially, when they try to convey that he's not up to the job mentally......unlike Slow Joe.
He seemed to be having a quite amenable conversation with the new Ukraine president. More bullshit from the wapo.
Nothing about Trump is irreversible. He is mercurial.
All of these insiders are Deep State/neocon criminals. Nothing they say can be trusted. All of them hate Trump, and are trying to destroy him. They all belong in cages in Gitmo.
Trump can only trust his own family. Everyone else is his enemy. They are our enemies, too.
This country is racing to catastrophe. Anyone who lives in a city (Madison counts) is a fool. Run away and hide in the woods.
When did we annex Ukraine? Why is it so vital for our national security?
If only we had a transcript of a phone call between the President and some elected leader of Ukraine, so we can see if the President is capable of dealing politely with one. If only.
Is it illegal to have a opinion that differs?
Impeachable?
I suppose yes. More skits on Maddow-Colbert-Pelosi-SNL
The Democrats are panicking.
Pretty soon hanging the lot of them will poll pretty well in real polls once everyone finds out how tied in to foreign money they all are.
Mitt Romney and the bulwark gang was on that gravy train too. They go first.
They don’t really understand the rage that is building though.
I don’t care if they impeach trump or not. What happens after they do is necessary to save the Republic.
in lieu of anonymous murmurings how about actual evidence:
https://www.glennbeck.com/glenn-beck/all-the-evidence-for-ukraine-the-scandal-explained
audio and text, now the so called whistleblower spent a great deal of time, trying to dismiss any contrary findings,
and yet - the phone call was very civil and cordial.
The inescapable fact is US Constitution states clearly that all D-candidates running for office are above the law. Any and all past administrations (D) who used corrupt connections and paid Steele dossiers and crowdstrike and foreign corruption - and bogus Fisa applications - and dirty donors inside the CIA and FBI - that's covered in the US Constitution as well.
It's all for you, Hillary.
now many of these officials, were involved back in the period of the previous administration, the one of tymochenko, or shepherded the monies that ended up being lost,
Trump tweeted a picture with Pelosi and the working dog that participated in the raid.
The tweet pointed out that the dog was briefed and Pelosi couldn’t be trusted to be briefed.
Nancy Pelosi is a piece of shit and thank god we finally have a leader who is on our side.
Ugh, movie trailers get worse every year.
oddly the last administration, was the one that deprived Ukraine of armaments, now maybe they were concerned about corruption, however they provided some 20 billion in economic, legal and other assistance, even through tax payer or imf,
Blogger mockturtle said...
Nothing about Trump is irreversible. He is mercurial.
You aren’t seriously taking something printed in the wapo at face value.
And Putin Smiles.
As someone on NPR said today, isn't it "odd" that Trump just wants to get along with Russia. I mean, why would anyone want to get along with another country that has 10,000 nuclear warheads? I mean, hey, its not like they're China.
So, that pretty much explains it. Thank you.
Yes, where did Trump get the idea that Ukraine was out to help Hillary?
Ukraine’s role in the 2016 race is undeniable: In the summer of 2016, Kiev’s release of the so-called “black ledger” resulted in Manafort’s ouster from the Trump campaign. The actions of foreign actors—however well-intentioned—directly impacted an American election.
One would imagine Washington media and lawmakers—who spent three years combing through every aspect of Moscow’s interference in our election—might direct similar attention to Kiev’s impact. Yet the Ukrainian angle barely made headlines. - The Nation
https://www.thenation.com/article/ukraine-elections-2016/
So you have Democrats leaning on Urkaine to not look into corruption by Democrats
Earlier this month, during a bipartisan meeting in Kiev, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) delivered a pointed message to Ukraine’s new president, Volodymyr Zelensky.
While choosing his words carefully, Murphy made clear — by his own account — that Ukraine currently enjoyed bipartisan support for its U.S. aid but that could be jeopardized if the new president acquiesced to requests by President Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani to investigate past corruption allegations involving Americans, including former Vice President Joe Biden’s family. - The Hill
What they don’t want looked into is this:
the Obama White House unexpectedly invited Ukraine’s top prosecutors to Washington to discuss fighting corruption in the country.
The meeting, promised as training, turned out to be more of a pretext for the Obama administration to pressure Ukraine’s prosecutors to drop an investigation into the Burisma Holdings gas company that employed Hunter Biden and to look for new evidence in a then-dormant criminal case against eventual Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, a GOP lobbyist.
https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/462658-lets-get-real-democrats-were-first-to-enlist-ukraine-in-us-elections
All of which resulted in this:
Mr. Manafort’s presence remains elsewhere here in the capital, where government investigators examining secret records have found his name, as well as companies he sought business with, as they try to untangle a corrupt network they say was used to loot Ukrainian assets
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/15/us/politics/paul-manafort-ukraine-donald-trump.html
Remember when we spent three years pretending that election interference from foreigners was treasonous? Manafort probably deserves to be in prison, but either it’s not OK for the Obama Administration to do this, or it’s OK for Trump to do it.
Hillary used her law firm. and the made the shit up! There is no suggestion that Trump was looking for made up dirt on anybody.
The fact is that Ukraine tried to get Hillary elected, It’s not even possible to question that.
The Ukraine guys are always playing Russia v. NATO chess in what amounts to a truce. So they plead for Globalist commitments, and until Trump came along they thought they had that from Obama and Clinton. So the entire sophisticated operation turned on Trump...and he remembers them helping destroy him and his family. As did the UK, Germany , France, Italy and Australia.
Lots of panic these days as the unforgiven Coup participants watch Bar and Durham prepare to carry out Trump’s revenge.
My grandmother, like Vindman not a real Ukrainian, felt similarly towards Ukraine. But then, she left as a teenager after seeing and perhaps experiencing some awful shit. She didn’t like talking about Ukraine. I once mentioned to an E. European girlfriend that my grandmother had come from Ukraine. The poor girl, in a thoughtful but misguided gesture, brought some Ukrainian folk art dolls as a gift when she met my grandmother. Like Trump with Zelensky, my grandmother managed to be perfectly civil and gracious in accepting the dolls, but I was unable to hold it together.
I love too how they can say that complaints about Biden firing that prosecutor are “baseless” He should not have teen allowing his son to collect graft, he shouldn’t have taken his son their on Air Force 2, and after his son took that job, which he knew about, he should have recused himself from dealing with Ukraine.
But his eyes got too big at three million+ dollars from that poor country.
Now the interesting details come with the good colonel vindman, who was lobbied by naftogaz, which is largely supplied by burisma, you would think that would fit somewhere in the 35 paragraphs of hagiography the times supplied, but they elided the three years of brutal fighting by the 'little green men' gru proxies, that had virtually no armed support, isn't that an interesting omission,
Crikey! Better go see the JCS about a coup!
Personally, I feel the same way about the Belgians. Who do they think they are? A bunch of nobodies, except for Peter Paul Rubens and J-C Van Damme.
A loathing for the Ukrainians! Sakes alive! And at the heart of the impeachment inquiry, too. Wait...what? I smell a rat. I think something else is at the heart of the impeachment inquiry, given that it’s obvious nonsense cooked up by the D-e-m-o-c-r-a-t-s.
Althouse, why do you blog stories like this? I already know WaPoop is deranged and stupid. Why not let this lie rotting in the Saturday edition where it belongs. Was this in the Style section?
I agree with Trump, Ukraine was pushing Hillary.
Good news is everyday more and more of the deepstate actions against Trump are being unveiled.
And Ukraine seems to have been a large part of it, I don’t know why...
You would think that if the Democrats are as shocked as the claim about Giuliani, who was preparing a defense for his client, BTW, that they would be horrified by what the Obama State Department did.
Obama State Department.... John Kerry.... Wasn’t his stepson also in the pay of Burisma? Weren’t many of the witnesses in the pay of Burisma through the “Atlantic Council.” Romney’s foreign affairs “guru”.... Also i the pay of Burisma.
Why should we take the word of people in the pay of Burisma that questions about Biden are “baseless”?
The Russian propensity, to try to conquer the land of the Hetman Cossacks, is an old story, to conquer the Eastern section, from the Turks, took at least two wars, and two to hold it, you might have heard of the first one, the Crimean war,
interesting there was a decision in a Delaware chancery, this week that involved the original owners of the privat bank, kolomoisky, but the post couldn't really look into that,
WaPo has challenged themselves to make every issue an issue of total lies. Every article. They started today.
Valeriy Chaly, the Ukrainian ambassador to the United States at the time, confirmed to me in a statement issued by his office that, in March 2016, a contractor for the Democratic National Committee (DNC) pressed his embassy to try to find any Russian dirt on Trump and Manafort that might reside in Ukraine’s intelligence files.
The DNC contractor also asked Chaly's team to try to persuade Ukraine’s president at the time, Petro Poroshenko, to make a statement disparaging Manafort when the Ukrainian leader visited the United States during the 2016 election.
This whole impeachment is a coverup for what the Democrats did in Ukraine in 2016. This is why the hearings are secret and Republicans are prevented from asking questions. There is some noise that the “whistleblower” worked with the DNC contractor who was pressing the Ukraine for dirt.
Imagine if they had the good on Trump like we have against the Democrats in plain sight.
"“They are horrible, corrupt people,” Trump told them"
Looks like the IMF agrees:
WSJ: "Ukraine Corruption Concerns Stall IMF Bailout. Fund wants president to recoup billions—including money that vanished from a supporter’s bank//The International Monetary Fund has put off a bailout for Ukraine because it is worried the country’s president won’t recoup billions of dollars allegedly looted from banks—including one once controlled by a close supporter—according to people familiar with the negotiations."
@Althouse, you still believe what you read in the New York Times and Washington Post? Well bless your heart.
Post-coup Kiev, yes. However, it seems that the state of Ukraine has improved with their current President and administration, and, for inexplicable reasons, Democrats fear and loath that change.
I'm hearing muchos $$$$ being thrown around and also Ukraine is poor orphan need help.
Are we talking :
So money laundering? Of USA taxpayers funds!
funny you mention john Kerry,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volodymyr_Groysman#/media/File:Secretary_Kerry_Shakes_Hands_With_Ukrainian_Prime_Minister_Groysman_Before_a_Meeting_at_the_Rada_in_Kyiv_(27870887100).jpg
what's mr. grossman, doing recently,
"you might have heard of the first one, the Crimean war”
"Into the breech rode the Congressional Democrats.
Ours is not to reason why, ours is but to do our die."
There will be a new theory Monday AM, introduced by Morning Joe who will receive his instructions and talking point memo by 2100 hours Sunday evening.
words to that effect, that's why it's unlikely the Russians would give it up, now the tin soldiers who effected much of the invasion were smashed outside deir er zour Syria, last February,
I doubt very much that Trump has a deep and intractable loathing for the Ukraine. I guess, like me, he's mostly ignorant. Who here has an intuitive hostility to Ukrainians? I vaguely know that they were screwed over by both Russian Imperialists and the Communists, but I wouldn't want to guess what their current attitude is towards Russia and America. I bet they're much nicer than the people Khazakastan, but who knows.....I did see part of that Zelensky sitcom. It's on Netflix. Some of the girls are hot, but there's no nudity and no big laughs either.
The claim that the Russians hacked the DNC remains supported only by the word of a Democrat paid private company with ties to Ukraine. Law enforcement never looked at the server.
There were emails in the leak that were dated after the time that Crowdsrike claimed to have booted the Russians out of the DNC network.
Skylark said...
"you might have heard of the first one, the Crimean war”
"Into the breech rode the Congressional Democrats.
Ours is not to reason why, ours is but to do our die
______
Charge of Dark Brigade
Big Mike—i think it’s clear that this article was blogged by our hostess to invite mockery of this sort of “reporting”. If ever there were page filler, it’s this story.
Trump is a NYC born and bred. He knows what foreign cultures bring with them. Thousands of years of brutal murder and revenge murder. If they keep it among themselves it is one thing. But if they go after Americans, that is time to teach them a lesson. Boundaries.
@Althouse, you still believe what you read in the New York Times and Washington Post? Well bless your heart.
I appreciate Althouse reading those rags because I want to know the most recent propaganda.
It's like the USSR where dissidents read Pravda to find out what their leaders were up to.
I don't believe this. Since I don't rely exclusively on the NYT, The New Yorker, and the Whappo for news and commentary, I have long since stopped giving the lot of them any benefit of the doubt. They have earned contempt, and they will have it from me at least.
Very nearly everything they say about Trump (and Republicans in general) is a lie, and the part that isn't technically a lie is carefully posed and edited to mislead. What they do is insidious and destructive, but I have to admit they're good at it.
I scoff at them. Althouse should too. Alas, though she's not stupid, she is stubborn.
There's plenty to criticize on the conservative side too, but there at least you stand a chance of making your case on the merits and getting a fair hearing. Just be prepared to defend your point of view through logical argument, like a grown-up. Few liberals are willing to do that; make if this what you will.
As someone on NPR said today, isn't it "odd" that Trump just wants to get along with Russia. I mean, why would anyone want to get along with another country that has 10,000 nuclear warheads?
Hear Hear! Why should anyone want to get along with a paranoid nation that has 10,000 deliverable nuclear weapons, pure madness.
Fear And Loathing In Ukraine
...but it's the Dems who are missing their adrenochrome fix
I believe that Trump loathed the kleptocrats in Ukraine who interfered in the election for Hillary, why shouldn’t he? How do you feel about somebody who kicked you in the balls to help your rival?
Yeah, I just don’t believe them. I believe Trump might have made some comment, and that that has been pretzeled into service, but do I believe yet another he’s foaming at the mouth I tell ya, FOAMING! tale? No I don’t.
Irrational.
The guy in charge of the nukes.
Trump is correct.
Why are so many politicians wrong so frequently?
The odds suggest they would accidentally be right.
But they are odd.
Trump is the one-eyed man in the world of the blind (D.C.).
Five Democratic Senators sent Ukraine a letter saying that they were going to be pissed if Ukraine didn’t help Mueller find dirt on Trump. Of course there was the implication in the letter that Ukraine would lose these Senators' support for foreign aid.
Bernie Sanders among them.
Funny how quickly the "Trump betrayed the Kurds" scandal of the century has been replaced by the "Trump quid pro quo'd Ukraine" scandal. With idiot stories like this one, Pelosi better hope she can hurry up impeachment before the media looses it entirely.
As for that Syria story, this by Caroline Glick makes clear how ludicrous the Kurds Betrayed saga was. http://carolineglick.com/al-baghdadi-and-trumps-syrian-chessboard/
Does anyone remember, or care?
He seems to have had a perfectly genial conversation with the head of Ukraine.
This is just battlefield prep. The thrust was Democrat senators who threatened Ukraine unless they dished dirt on candidate Trump. The Democrats don't brainstorm, they get actionable content by looking at what they are guilty of.
Honestly, I wouldn't have approved any aid to Ukraine, even if I thought the Ukrainian people deserved it. The money will just be stolen by the thieves in the government along with whatever it is used to buy. Some countries are just so corrupt there is nothing you can do, or should do. Trump should have withheld the aid and let the appropriation expire.
Why was it irrational to distrust Ukraine, ARM?
Trying to gin up war with Russia because you want to get rid of Trump is irrational.
everything they say about Trump (and Republicans in general) is a lie,
Including "and" and "the."
ARM says nobody should be scared of Warren, and now she wants people to pay 50% tax on unrealized capital gains. Refinance your home every year to pay taxes! Interest rates go up? Too. bad! Sell stock to pay taxes, then the stock goes down later when you sell what’s left and the capital gains never happened!
It’s a complete restructuring of our economy on a model that nobody has ever seen work.
“I will solve all of America’s problems by replacing them with worse ones” - Liz Warren.
Beloved Commenter AReasonableMan said...
Irrational.
The guy in charge of the nukes.
No, I think Putin is rational./ After all, he's got you lefties doing his bidding. The left wants to shut down fracking which has made us energy independent. Why wouldn't Putin love that ?
It's the telephone game. Networks amplify whatever there's a market for.
I was in Ukraine in 1999 for a UN Peace Keeping Exercise. What was notable was how corrupt the Government was.
They were also still very Soviet like. When we arrived, our official US Government passports were confiscated by Ukrainian Military officials and held by them until we departed. There was a Ukrainian uniformed agent of their intelligence Service at the airport when we departed, checking our faces directly with the passport photo before we got on the plane.
The fact is that Ukraine tried to get Hillary elected, It’s not even possible to question that.
Of course. A very profitable relationship was at stake.
I once had a boss who was sort of like Trump. I was a new guy at a daily meeting where yesterday's mistakes and short-comings were reviewed. He was chewing everyone out for what they might have done wrong. Everyone was looking at the slide on the screen, or their hands, or the table. No one was looking at him except me. He winked at me and went on chewing ass. He was one of the best bosses I ever had.
WaPo projecting again.
I’d say a loathing of Trump “is at the heart of the impeachment inquiry”.
Ken in tx: Somewhere I read that there are two kinds of bosses: The one who lets you know from the start that he is a sonofabitch and the kind of whom you find out later. I prefer the former.
The people writing these articles, and in this case the folks that leaked the behind-the-scenes anecdotes, have never been a leader, have never had to make a difficult and complex decision. They are more similar and familiar with an Obama or Bush who surround themselves with sycophants and boot lickers.
Trump takes an extreme and adversarial position in a discussion and then demands that the others in the discussion prove him wrong, argue against him. In this case what was the result? Clear and close engagement with the new Ukraine leader - after he tested him a bit on the phone too.
The opponents of Trump do not know anything about the man they wish to challenge and unseat. So they will fail.
en in tx said...
I once had a boss who was sort of like Trump. I was a new guy at a daily meeting where yesterday's mistakes and short-comings were reviewed. He was chewing everyone out for what they might have done wrong. Everyone was looking at the slide on the screen, or their hands, or the table. No one was looking at him except me. He winked at me and went on chewing ass. He was one of the best bosses I ever had
************
Were the two of you both gay?
SGT Ted said...
I was in Ukraine in 1999 for a UN Peace Keeping Exercise. What was notable was how corrupt the Government was.
They were also still very Soviet like. When we arrived, our official US Government passports were confiscated by Ukrainian Military officials and held by them until we departed. There was a Ukrainian uniformed agent of their intelligence Service at the airport when we departed, checking our faces directly with the passport photo before we got on the plane
***********
OK.
Are you asserting that because the Ukraine was then still-anti American, they are necessarily so now? Have you not seen the turmoil in that country as they have broken free from the Russians?
And, thirty years later, are American officials and civilians still treated the same way?
What's yer effin POINT?
p,s, you must be a complete rube not to know that the Soviets always looked intensely at you and your passport photo before letting you IN/OUT of their socialist paradise. Did you ever go to any of the other republics? I suspect not.
@Amadeus, Althouse fell for Christine Blasey Ford, did she not? Is the reason she dislikes reading conservative news sources because the writing at the Times and the Post is better (the accuracy is certainly much lower), or because reading conservative sources would challenge her long-held beliefs?
Your interpretation is plausible; I find mine moreso.
I concluded, the Times hatred of Trump was ingrained, irrational and possibly irreversible.
I imagine the source of this story is another career staff member who is a lot smarter and more moral than everyone else in the room.
I see that "Trump hates Ukraine" is today's theme. Do the journalists have Apple Watches that give them the theme of the day?
Ken,
Were the bosses initials TB?
I worked for him too. One of only 2 really good bosses in my life.
John Henry
Again with Manafort and Trump all roads lead to Putin and the handlers who played them.
Irrational.
The guy in charge of the nukes.
Yet you’re still here....hmmmm.
Trump takes an extreme and adversarial position in a discussion and then demands that the others in the discussion prove him wrong, argue against him
___'''''
Ha ha : Trump is Socrates or early adapter / progenitor of *Change My Mind* meme - game.
Emerita: how much would college experience improve if this game was played in all classes all the time.
Further Q: how many professor able to play?
It's like the USSR where dissidents read Pravda to find out what their leaders were up to.
_____&&
It's like Cuba where cigar rollers had Granma read to them to find out what they should not know - what their leaders were up to.
It's fun to watch leftists have no problem with 8 years of Obama + Putin.
Eric said...
I see that "Trump hates Ukraine" is today's theme. Do the journalists have Apple Watches that give them the theme of the day?
11/3/19, 5:52 AM
Chips implanted in their skulls, a la Kingsman, I wot.
Irrational.
The guy in charge of the nukes. - ARM/Chuck
You imbeciles screamed the same thing during the 1980s when Ronny Raygun was going to kill us all!!!!
Why in the hell should we listen to you now?
"Again with Manafort and Trump all roads lead to Putin and the handlers who played them.”
Ha ha ha ha! Yes, do not believe the evidence of your eyes, but trust your faith in Hillary’s accusations!
Anyway, an elite loathing for Trump is at the heart of the impeachment inquiry, as has been the case since the 2016 election.
The MaGuffin changes but the story line never does.
oesch/voltaire said...
Again with Manafort and Trump all roads lead to Putin and the handlers who played them.
I thought R/V was just a lefty professor who actually knew stuff, like Math or Physics.
I guess not. Another nGender Studies prof,.
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