"The coverage suggests Giuliani reached out to new Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s team this summer solely because he wanted to get dirt..."

"... on possible Trump 2020 challenger Joe Biden and his son Hunter’s business dealings in that country. Politics or law could have been part of Giuliani’s motive, and neither would be illegal. But there is a missing part of the story that the American public needs in order to assess what really happened: Giuliani’s contact with Zelensky adviser and attorney Andrei Yermak this summer was encouraged and facilitated by the U.S. State Department. Giuliani didn’t initiate it.... So, rather than just a political opposition research operation, Giuliani’s contacts were part of a diplomatic effort by the State Department to grow trust with the new Ukrainian president, Zelensky, a former television comic making his first foray into politics and diplomacy. Why would Ukraine want to talk to Giuliani, and why would the State Department be involved in facilitating it? According to interviews with more than a dozen Ukrainian and U.S. officials, Ukraine’s government under recently departed President Petro Poroshenko and, now, Zelensky has been trying since summer 2018 to hand over evidence about the conduct of Americans they believe might be involved in violations of U.S. law during the Obama years....."

Write John Solomon in "Missing piece to the Ukraine puzzle: State Department's overture to Rudy Giuliani" (at The Hill). I'm just seeing this now, after writing 2 posts quoting an article Solomon wrote last April (and prompted by the commenter minnesotafarmguy).

I've only quoted a part of "Missing piece..." — please read the whole thing. This story is complicated!

"Ukrainian government officials tried to help Hillary Clinton and undermine Trump by publicly questioning his fitness for office. They also disseminated documents..."

"... implicating a top Trump aide in corruption and suggested they were investigating the matter, only to back away after the election. And they helped Clinton’s allies research damaging information on Trump and his advisers, a Politico investigation found. A Ukrainian-American operative who was consulting for the Democratic National Committee met with top officials in the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington in an effort to expose ties between Trump, top campaign aide Paul Manafort and Russia, according to people with direct knowledge of the situation. The Ukrainian efforts had an impact in the race, helping to force Manafort’s resignation and advancing the narrative that Trump’s campaign was deeply connected to Ukraine’s foe to the east, Russia...."

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."

The NYT reports.

From May 10, 2019:

“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."

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....