For weeks Democrats have been hell-bent on impeaching President Donald Trump over allegations he abused his power by threatening to withhold military aid from Ukraine unless that government agreed to launch an investigation into former Vice President Joe Biden, his son Hunter Biden, and 2016 election interference.
But none of those allegations are valid based on a rough transcript of a July phone call between President Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
Democrats didn’t expect the White House to release the transcript, mind you. They were prepared for Trump to do what every other president would have done: Claim executive privilege and withhold the transcript, giving them the opportunity to then accuse the president of a “cover-up.”
He outsmarted them, in other words, which he does all the time. But that hasn’t stopped Democrats from continuing to claim that Trump abused his office so they could justify launching an ‘impeachment inquiry’ in order to satisfy their perpetually deranged and angry voter base.
Now, however, one senator has turned the tables on Democrats: Lindsey Graham.
The South Carolina Republican is demanding that transcripts between Joe Biden and Ukraine’s former president be released so Americans can see whether he threatened the Ukrainians in any way while serving as Obama’s point man for that country.
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham, (R-SC) confirmed in an interview with Sean Hannity on Fox News that he is sending a letter to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo requesting the transcripts of three phone calls the senator said then-Vice President Joe Biden had with then-Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko.
Graham said the phone calls coincided with the time frame in which a Ukrainian prosecutor, once praised for going after the head of natural gas company Burisma Holdings – a person Graham said was known as the “dirtiest guy in Ukraine” by one top American official – was fired.
We know from previous reporting that Hunter Biden was employed as a member of the board of Burisma Holdings. And we also know from video evidence that Joe Biden bragged about doing exactly what Democrats are accusing President Trump of doing: threatening the Ukrainians in exchange for something, a quid pro quo. (Related: Scandal: Joe Biden’s son Hunter landed sweet big money deals in Ukraine while VP dad was threatening its government.)
Criticizing Ukrainian corruption probes made no sense
Joe Biden, at an event sponsored by the Concil on Foreign Relations, claimed he told Poroshenko either he fires the prosecutor or the U.S. would withhold $1 billion — at a time when Ukraine was under attack by Russian-backed separatists and Russia had already annexed Crimea, which was a part of Ukraine.
“I want to know are there any transcripts or readouts of the phone calls between the vice president and the president of Ukraine in February [2016] after the raid on the gas company president’s house,” said Graham.
“After this raid, Hunter Biden kicks in. Hunter Biden’s business partner meets with [then-Secretary of State] John Kerry, and Vice President Biden on three occasions makes a phone call to the president of Ukraine and goes over there in March and they fire the guy, and this is the same man that the ambassador wanted investigated in 2015.”
Graham went on to note that he found it “odd” Biden was pushing for the prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, to be fired for investigating corruption when official U.S. policy regarding Ukrainian aid requires the Executive Branch to certify that Kiev is indeed combating its endemic corruption.
And he said that President Obama’s ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt, said in a speech he wanted Shokin to be more aggressive in his investigation of domestic corruption.
And of course, none of this even addresses the fact that Democrats and the Hillary Clinton campaign were imploring Ukrainian officials in 2016 to dig up political dirt on the Trump campaign, as POLITICO reported in January 2017.
It’s not clear that the State Department will provide Graham with transcripts of Biden’s Ukraine calls. Then again, it’s not like we need them; Biden has admitted what he did.
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