via thefederalist:
If the latest media-manufactured hysteria over President Donald Trump’s interactions with the Ukrainian government looks familiar, it’s because it is. The same tired playbook is being run by the same discredited people with the same goal: get rid of Trump, by any means necessary.
Just as the Clinton campaign, Obama administration holdovers, and complicit media allies peddled lies about Russian collusion while engaging in literal Russian collusion during and after the 2016 presidential campaign, so too did Joseph Biden literally threaten to withhold money from Ukraine if it failed to fire the prosecutor investigating his son’s company.
To hear the media tell it, Trump committed treason. The walls are closing in. The end is nigh. Why? Well, the details there are a little fuzzy, as they always seem to be. Somebody heard it from a friend who heard it from a friend who heard it from another that Trump had threatened Ukraine that it must investigate Hunter Biden, the troubled son of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden…or else.
The media initially hyped their latest faux scandal by claiming a deeply connected “whistleblower” listened to a phone call between Trump and the head of Ukraine’s government, in which Trump allegedly threatened to withhold money if the Eastern European nation failed to investigate allegations of corruption by Hunter Biden. Then it morphed into the source reading a transcript or readout of the phone call. And eventually it was buried in the 22nd paragraph of a breathless CNN story that the alleged “whistleblower” hadn’t in fact directly read or seen or heard anything he or she was allegedly blowing the whistle on:
The whistleblower didn’t have direct knowledge of the communications, an official briefed on the matter told CNN. Instead, the whistleblower’s concerns came in part from learning information that was not obtained during the course of their work, and those details have played a role in the administration’s determination that the complaint didn’t fit the reporting requirements under the intelligence whistleblower law, the official said.
There’s burying the lede, and then there’s fitting the lede for cement boots, pushing it down an elevator shaft into a pool of bullets, and then tossing the remains overboard somewhere over the Marianas Trench. CNN opted for the latter. One man’s “whistleblower” is apparently another man’s rumor-monger or anonymous gossip columnist. The Wall Street Journal later disclosed that there was no quid pro quo and no discussion of U.S. financial aid during the call the whistleblower cum axe-grinder never even heard.
On Sunday, Trump did admit that he raised the topic of Biden and his son Hunter with the Ukrainian president within the context of needing to root out corruption in Ukraine, which raises all sorts of questions Democrats and their media allies would desperately like to avoid, such as: did Hunter Biden have sketchy business dealings in Ukraine? Did he benefit financially from those arrangements? Were any Ukrainian companies he worked for being investigated? Did his father, as the vice president of the United States, personally intervene to shut down Ukrainian officials who were investigating Hunter Biden’s Ukrainian business arrangements?
The answer to all those questions is a resounding YES. Despite being kicked out of the Navy for cocaine abuse and having no demonstrable business acumen, Hunter Biden nonetheless in 2014 landed a $50,000 per month gig on the board of Burisma, a Ukrainian oil and gas concern.
Coincidentally, the law firm that helped arrange the sinecure, Boies Schiller, previously hired Fusion GPS, the shady opposition research firm retained by the Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee to concoct the Russian collusion hoax, to run interference for Theranos, the infamous fake blood testing company whose founder was charged with wire fraud.
When Burisma later attracted the attention of Ukrainian law enforcement, Joe Biden personally intervened to make sure Viktor Shokin, the prosecutor looking into the company’s finances, was fired. You don’t have to take my word for this, because Joe Biden bragged about his efforts to fire the prosecutor investigating the company that paid Hunter Biden a $50,000 per month sinecure. On camera. In detail. Last year (the specific statement from Biden begins at 52:20 in the video):
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Wont see this in MSM: Democrats Wrote to Ukraine in May 2018, Demanding It Investigate Trump
Democrats wrote to the Ukrainian government in May 2018 urging it to continue investigations into President Donald Trump’s alleged collusion with Russia in the 2016 presidential campaign — collusion later found not to exist.
The demand, which came from U.S. Senators Robert Menendez (D-NJ), Dick Durbin (D-IL), and Patrick Leahy (D-VT), resurfaced Wednesday in an opinion piece written by conservative Marc Thiessen in the Washington Post.
Ironically, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) declared Tuesday that the mere possibility that President Trump had asked Ukraine to continue an investigation of former Vice President Joe Biden — even without a quid pro quo — was enough to trigger an impeachment inquiry. (Biden boasted in 2018 that he had forced Ukraine to remove its prosecutor by threatening to withhold $1 billion in U.S. aid; he did not tell his audience at the Council on Foreign Relations that the prosecutor was looking into a firm on whose board his son, Hunter Biden, was serving.)
Thiessen observed (original links):
It got almost no attention, but in May [2018], CNN reported that Sens. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) and Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) wrote a letter to Ukraine’s prosecutor general, Yuriy Lutsenko, expressing concern at the closing of four investigations they said were critical to the Mueller probe. In the letter, they implied that their support for U.S. assistance to Ukraine was at stake. Describing themselves as “strong advocates for a robust and close relationship with Ukraine,” the Democratic senators declared, “We have supported [the] capacity-building process and are disappointed that some in Kyiv appear to have cast aside these [democratic] principles to avoid the ire of President Trump,” before demanding Lutsenko “reverse course and halt any efforts to impede cooperation with this important investigation.”
The Democrats’ letter is available online here….