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What is happening with Trump, Biden and Ukraine?

2019-09-21T02:46:34.402Z


Until Friday, it was not exactly clear what led to a mysterious complaint filed by an informant against President Donald Trump who has taken Washington by storm, but he is c ...


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(CNN) - Until Friday, it was not exactly clear what led to a mysterious complaint filed by an informant against President Donald Trump who has stormed Washington, but it is clear that the US president. He wants to use Ukraine against former Vice President Joe Biden.

As with so much in the Trump presidency, it all starts with Hillary Clinton. This is what we know:

Giuliani's accusation

Rudy Giuliani, the president's lawyer and the political attack dog, told CNN on Thursday night that his continued efforts to persecute Clinton took him to Ukraine. First, she claimed, without evidence, that she and the Democrats were behind the effort to discredit Paul Manafort, who is currently in prison for, among other things, laundering money paid as a political consultant in Ukraine. Then things moved away from Clinton.

"In the course of the investigation, I discovered this incredible story about Joe Biden, who bribed the president of Ukraine to fire a prosecutor who was investigating his son," Giuliani said, claiming a cover-up of the media. "That is an amazing scandal of great proportions, which you have all covered for five or six months."

From there, CNN's interview with Chris Cuomo got out of the way and Giuliani finally admitted that he had asked the current Ukrainian government to investigate Biden.

"Of course I did it!" He said.

But the lawyer of the president trying to get action from Ukraine is one thing. It would be something completely different if the administration used official influence to get a foreign country to investigate a political rival of the United States, especially just a few months after special prosecutor Robert Mueller detailed multiple interactions between the Trump campaign in 2016 and Russia. , but found nothing that would rise to the level of coordination between campaign relatives and Russian government officials and officials.

Trump spoke with President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky on July 25 and that phone call may be part of what led to the complaint against Trump.

When he was asked on Friday about that July 25 call and if he mentioned Biden to the Ukrainian president, Trump tried to deviate against Biden. "It doesn't matter what I discuss," he said. "But I will say this: someone should examine Joe Biden's statement, because it was embarrassing, where he talked about billions of dollars he is not giving to a given country unless a certain prosecutor is removed from the case." On Friday afternoon, the Wall Street Journal reported that in that phone call Trump pressured the new president "about eight times" to work with Giuliani against Biden, citing people familiar with the matter.

Vice President Mike Pence recently met with Zelensky and was asked about Giuliani's efforts and whether the administration has withheld aid for Ukraine as a result.

REPORTER: Specifically, number one, did you talk about Joe Biden during yesterday's meeting with the president of Ukraine? And number two, can you assure Ukraine that the withholding of that money has absolutely nothing to do with efforts, even by Rudy Giuliani, to try to get dirty rags from the Biden family?

VICE PRESIDENT PENCE: Well, in the first question, the answer is no. But we, with President Zelensky yesterday, discussed, discussed the United States' support for Ukraine and the president's next decision on the last tranche of financial support in great detail.

Ukraine uses aid in its efforts against Russian separatists, part of a long-term conflict with Russia.

Biden's efforts in Ukraine

Despite Giuliani's accusation, there has been no cover-up of the media of the accusations against Biden. The New York Times wrote about Biden's son and his activities in May and made it clear that Trump's allies were pushing. The president tweeted about it at that time. Since then, Trump, Giuliani and others have repeatedly returned to history.

When asked about Trump's statement on Friday, Biden said that "not a single credible medium has given credibility to his claim."

"Not one, so I don't have any comments, except that the president should start being (the) president," Biden said.

The crux of Giuliani's accusation is that Joe Biden attempted to have the Ukrainian chief prosecutor expelled in 2016 due to an investigation into Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian natural gas company. At that time, Hunter Biden was serving in the Burisma directory.

But the reality is much more nuanced.

It is absolutely true that at the same time that Burisma was being investigated, Western governments, including the Obama administration, wanted the prosecutor to retire due to concerns about corruption in their own office. Biden also opposed the prosecutor in Ukraine, Viktor Shokin, and threatened to withhold $ 1 billion in Ukrainian loan guarantees. He really boasted about it. In telling a trip he made to Kiev in 2016, he said he showed that the United States was able to get Ukraine to take corruption more seriously.

“I looked at them and said: I'm leaving in six hours,” Biden said during an event at the Foreign Relations Council in 2018. “If the prosecutor is not fired, he will not get the money. Well, son of p ***. He was fired. And they put in their place someone who was solid at that time. ”

None of this is a particularly good aspect for the Bidens, but there is no evidence or suggestion of any real crime.

READ : Donald Trump's rejection of the mystery of the intelligence informant literally makes zero sense

At least one former official from the prosecutor's office said the investigation into Burisma had already been filed when Joe Biden threatened to withhold financial aid unless Ukraine replaced its chief prosecutor. It is also not clear if Hunter Biden was the focus of that investigation when it was happening.

In an interview on May 14 published on Facebook by his assistant, the Ukrainian attorney general Yury Lutsenko said that Burisma paid an entity connected to Hunter Biden “millions,” but added, “from my point of view, a member of the board can receive any payment the company decides… they did not violate any Ukrainian law. ”

He said he said it was an issue that United States law should consider, not Ukrainian researchers.

Lutsenko in May said he was looking to "revive" an investigation into Burisma, the former employer of Hunter Biden, but apparently that never happened. Lutsenko left office in August after the new administration of Zelensky took office.

Giuliani himself went to meet with a Zelensky representative after the president's call with Trump in July.

According to Democratic Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut, Ukrainian officials understand that there is a link between what Giuliani was asking Ukrainians to do and obtaining US military aid.

Murphy met with the Ukrainian president a few weeks ago and described the scene on Twitter.

“Zelensky did not explicitly connect the two at our meeting, but he was VERY worried about the help cut and VERY aware of the conversations Rudy Giuliani was having with his team. I told him it was better to ignore the requests of Trump's campaign operatives. He agreed, ”Murphy explained in a series of tweets.

Zelensky did not explicitly connect the two in our meeting, but he was VERY concerned about the cut off of aid, and VERY aware of the conversations that Rudy Giuliani was having with his team. I told him it was best to ignore requests from Trump's campaign operatives. I have agreed.

- Chris Murphy (@ChrisMurphyCT) September 20, 2019

Trump's playbook

Fostering conspiracy theories about his rival was a strategy that worked for Trump in 2016, as he used decades of conservative conspiracy theories about Hillary Clinton to label her as "crooked" and suggest that she should be in jail instead of the White House .

READ : Hillary Clinton criticizes Trump for falsely claiming that Google "manipulated" millions of votes in 2016

Biden, however, is not followed by the same political stain as the Clintons and the efforts of Trump and his allies may now have led a whistleblower to sound the alarm under a law designed to protect intelligence officials from discovering inappropriate activities. .

The details of the reporting of informants remain a mystery and could continue to be so, since Trump's new interim director of National Intelligence refuses to share information about the complaint with Congress. The Inspector General of the Intelligence Community has alarmed by publicly saying that he is prevented from doing his job.

Father and son

Hunter Biden's personal life and substance abuse problems have already caused the former vice president anguish.

The overlap between the political and commercial interests of the father and son has fueled the Republican attacks that Biden is little more than an interested politician. If the facts fully support that case, it seems to be a late occurrence for its critics.

Republican Party investigators have been investigating the history of Hunter Biden's career, as well as the points where he seems to intersect with his father's, particularly with regard to Ukraine and China, another issue that Giuliani raised during his interview with Cuomo .

Sara Murray and Nathan Hodge of CNN contributed to this report.

Intelligence

Source: cnnespanol

All news articles on 2019-09-21

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