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am_Unition  ·  1887 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Nancy Pelosi Plans Formal Impeachment Inquiry of Trump

Here's where we're at, the first paragraph is all you need:

    President Trump’s attempt to pressure the leader of Ukraine followed a months-long fight inside the administration that sidelined national security officials and empowered political loyalists — including the president’s personal lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani — to exploit the U.S. relationship with Kiev, current and former U.S. officials said.

I'll bet you that WaPo has probably been in contact with the whistle blower since just around the time that it became clear Trump's acting DNI wouldn't be submitting the complaint to congress. So around or after September 5th, I'd guess. The WaPo article is not an opinion piece, and I really doubt it will be retracted or corrected. I could always be wrong.

It's hard to imagine an issue larger than the singularly most powerful person on the planet either implicitly or explicitly extorting Ukraine by withholding military aide while asking over and over for the Ukrainian government to investigate his biggest political rival in an upcoming presidential election. This, while his personal lawyer (Giuliani) attempts to meet with the Ukrainian president's personal lawyer. Giuliani now claims to have been asked by the state department to work with Ukraine on behalf of the United States. Do you think any of this sounds like how democracy works?

Please, investigate Biden all you want. It's super shady that some Ukrainian natural gas company (Burisma) put the VP's son on the board to score name recognition points, totally agree, but the existing evidence doesn't show that Joe made decisions with Hunter in mind. Applying pressure to fire the corrupt prosecutor (Viktor Shokin, you can read about it here) was something almost every EU member recommended, and furthermore, the prosecutor actually tried to terminate the investigation into Burisma. Rudy has been promising incredibly damning dirt on the Bidens' actions in Ukraine for like 5 months now, and all he's done is rearrange an existing timeline of events and then he points out that it looks pretty bad for someone with substance abuse problems to make a few million dollars for perhaps doing nothing. Yeah, it does, but it's not exactly a crime. Maybe Rudy tells us what really happened sometime tomorrow.

What kills me the most is that all of this immediately follows the end of the Mueller report, which investigated Trump for something far less serious: NOT using the powers of the presidency, but still trying to possibly coordinate with a foreign government in the hopes of influencing a federal election.

Can you please explain how any of Trump's behavior is justified?

I also want to remind everyone of a detail released in the original Washington Post article from last Wednesday night: The whistle blower's report cited multiple conversations/communications between Trump & Zelensky that the whistle blower considered problematic. The report also mentioned a "promise" made by Trump. I̶ ̶a̶g̶r̶e̶e̶ ̶w̶i̶t̶h̶ ̶o̶t̶h̶e̶r̶ ̶f̶o̶l̶k̶s̶'̶ ̶a̶n̶a̶l̶y̶s̶i̶s̶ ̶(̶e̶l̶s̶e̶w̶h̶e̶r̶e̶ ̶o̶n̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶n̶e̶t̶)̶ ̶t̶h̶a̶t̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶t̶r̶a̶n̶s̶c̶r̶i̶p̶t̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶p̶h̶o̶n̶e̶ ̶c̶a̶l̶l̶ ̶i̶s̶ ̶p̶r̶o̶b̶a̶b̶l̶y̶ ̶s̶o̶m̶e̶w̶h̶a̶t̶ ̶i̶n̶n̶o̶c̶e̶n̶t̶ ̶a̶s̶ ̶a̶ ̶s̶t̶a̶n̶d̶a̶l̶o̶n̶e̶ ̶p̶i̶e̶c̶e̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶e̶v̶i̶d̶e̶n̶c̶e̶. IMPORTANT EDIT: Nope. The transcript alone should be enough. But if only the transcript is released, and not the entirety of the whistle blower report, that's not going to satiate me, and hopefully not Pelosi either.