The Right Side of the News

Politico gave no evidence that there was a top-down effort by the Ukrainian government to work with Hillary. Individual officials may have cooperated with a journalist who was acting on their own, but there is no government-wide effort to interfere in our elections. In fact, it was government policy to not do that:

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Chalupa said the embassy also worked directly with reporters researching Trump, Manafort and Russia to point them in the right directions. She added, though, they were being very protective and not speaking to the press as much as they should have. I think they were being careful because their situation was that they had to be very, very careful because they could not pick sides. It’s a political issue, and they didn’t want to get involved politically because they couldn’t.

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So it was the Ukrainian governments position to not get involved in American politics. Russia, on the other hand, made it their business to do just the opposite.Also, the people who did offer information were doing so with Chalupa, not at the behest of Hillary:

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A DNC official stressed that Chalupa was a consultant paid to do outreach for the party’s political department, not a researcher. She undertook her investigations into Trump, Manafort and Russia on her own, and the party did not incorporate her findings in its dossiers on the subjects, the official said, stressing that the DNC had been building robust research books on Trump and his ties to Russia long before Chalupa began sounding alarms. . .

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Chalupa left the DNC after the Democratic convention in late July to focus fulltime on her research into Manafort, Trump and Russia. She said she provided off-the-record information and guidance to a lot of journalists working on stories related to Manafort and Trump’s Russia connections, despite what she described as escalating harassment.

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Perhaps you should actually read the article.

Yes, they are denying it. Trump is denying it. That's what the whole Crowdstrike conspiracy theory is about. That is one of the investigations that Trump asked the Ukrainians to start, a debunked conspiracy theory that Ukrainians framed Russia for the DNC hacked emails. It is all Russian propaganda, and Trump is all to happy to repeat it. Why? Umm, yes. Legal is ok, while illegal is not. It's not that hard to figure out. When someone uses their public office to pressure a foreign government to announce investigations into their political rivals, that is illegal. When a private citizen pays a domestic investigation firm to do opposition research, that is legal. Laws matter. No, it isn't. That's a lie. The FBI gathered evidence outside of the dossier, such as Trump campaign officials bragging about the upcoming release of DNA emails before they were released.Edited by Taq, : No reason given.

Trump is denying Russian COLLUSION on his part and his campaign's part, he is not denying Russian interference. Or if he is confuswed about that, nobody else is.Apparently Trump believed what was said about Crowdstrike. In any case he was within his rights to ask it to be investigated as he was 3within his rights and his Presidential position to ask for investigation into any corruption by the Ukrainian government. What on earth are you talking about? Who cares if the dossier was legally purchased? It is a fraud, a lie, a made up attempt to destroy Trump and THAT is fraud and libel, both of which are illegal. And not only that but although it wasn't verified, and is known now not to be verifiable at all because it's all false, they got a FISA warrant on the basis of claiming it was verified. Fraud upon fraud, lie upon lie. And Trump did no such thing. And the evidence is that no investigation was announced, nor performed, and Zelensky has denied three times at least that there was any pressure exerted on the Ukraine do do any of that.ON THE OTHER HAND, Biden is on video record bragging about denying aid to Ukraine if the prosecutor was not fired who was investigating the company his son worked for. AND AGAIN, nobody cares that it was legally acquired, the point is that it's a bunch of lies she bought and used against Trump. Why can't you follow the logic here, it's very straightforward.The Russian-originated dossier was the excuse to get a FISA warrant to investigate the Trump campaign.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Trump is denying it by pushing the Crowdstrike conspiracy theory. The conspiracy states that Russia was framed for the hack into the DNA email server. Can you quote Trump as ever agreeing with the intelligence community that Russia interfered in the 2016 election? Law abiding citizens care. Don't you care if the law is followed? You need to evidence to back this up. You need statements from a judge stating that warrants were issued based on the dossier. That is what Trump is being accused of. Would you agree that if a public official did pressure a foreign government to open a baseless allegation into their political rivals, that this would be illegal and impeachable? Biden was acting in our national interest and on stated policy by calling for the firing a corrupt prosecutor. This is well established. It serves no national interest for Ukraine to pursue debunked conspiracy theories that would only benefit Trump's reelection campaign. That's the difference. The point is that Trump abused his office.

It's the Democrat witch hunt that is abusing power, not Trump.

Maybe they were representing the government, maybe they weren't. Not everything a government official says is the policy of or the orders of the government. The evidence from your beloved article indicates that it's quite possible they were not acting for the government:

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There’s little evidence of such a top-down effort by Ukraine. Longtime observers suggest that the rampant corruption, factionalism and economic struggles plaguing the country not to mention its ongoing strife with Russia would render it unable to pull off an ambitious covert interference campaign in another country’s election. And President Petro Poroshenko’s administration, along with the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington, insists that Ukraine stayed neutral in the race.

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But we cannot be sure either way. Biden was explicitly acting as a government representative speaking official government policy, as were the many other government's representatives saying the same thing. The complaint was not that an investigation was going on, but that investigations were not going on. No such thing happened, and irrelevant anyway. The evidence is overwhelming that he did. Denying the existence of the evidence does not change reality.

It was investigated. There's nothing there except a abysmal misunderstanding of servers. He didn't care about "corruption", he cared about what would help his re-election. In his first congratulatory phone call to Zelensky, his advisers told him to talk about corruption. He didn't. He's never mentioned corruption in the many other places where it's a problem for US interests. Some of it is not true. Some of it is. Hillary's campaign broke no laws. The dossier was not the main basis for the FISA warrant and there were no claims that it had been verified. Here's what the FBi actually said:

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Source #1 {Steele - JonF}, who now owns a foreign business/financial intelligence firm, was approached by an identified U.S. person, who indicated to Source #1 that a U.S.-based law firm had hired the identified U.S. person to conduct research regarding Candidate #l's ties to Russia (the identified U.S. person and Source #1 have a long-standing business relationship). The identified U.S. person hired Source #1 to conduct this research. The identified U.S. person never advised Source #1 as to the motivation behind the research into Candidate #l's ties to Russia. The FBI speculates that the identified U.S. person was likely looking for information that could be used to discredit Candidate #l's campaign.

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Source #l tasked his sub-source(s) to collect the requisite information. After Source #1 received information from the sub-source(s), described herein. Source #1 provided the information to the identified U.S. person who had hired Source #1 and to the FBI

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Notwithstanding Source #l's reason for conducting the research into Candidate #1's ties to Russia, based on Source #1's previous reporting history with the FBI, whereby Source #l provided reliable information to the FBI the FBI believes Source #l's reporting herein to be credible.

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And Sondland and others testified that there was pressure. The announcement was all set to go with air time reserved when the poopies hit the fan. Zelensky is deathly afraid of saying anything that would make Trump mad, for fear of losing the aid he desperately needs. No, he is on video saying that the prosecutor who wa refusing to prosecute corruption should be fired, as did representatives of many other governments. At the time there was no investigation into Hunter Biden or Burisma. From https://www.washingtonpost.com/...7e-d2026ee0c199_story.html:

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7. What evidence suggests that was Biden’s motive?

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Pretty much none. The problem with Shokin -- in the eyes of U.S. leaders, their Western allies, the International Monetary Fund and many Ukrainians -- wasn’t that he was being too aggressive about corruption, but that he was being far too lax. In May, Bloomberg News reported that prosecutors in Ukraine had shelved the investigation into Zlochevsky by 2015, meaning Hunter Biden didn’t stand to benefit from the prosecutor’s ouster. Vitaliy Kasko, who pursued the case against Burisma’s owner as deputy prosecutor and is now first deputy prosecutor in the new government, told Bloomberg News that there had been no U.S. pressure to close that case. Former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko also told Bloomberg News that Biden never asked him to close any cases.

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ABE: The investigation into Burisma (not Hunter Biden) was shelved in 2015. iden spoke on Shokin's ouster in 2017. The dossier did not originate in Russia, some of the information in it did. It was gathered by a British citizen in the employ of a US company. It was part of the FISA application but not a major part.Edited by JonF, : No reason given.

But it was scheduled:

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CNN host was set to interview Ukrainian President until scandal took shape

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CNN host Fareed Zakaria said on Thursday that he had been set to interview Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky before news about the Ukrainian's call with President Donald Trump broke.

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The New York Times reported on Thursday that Zelensky had planned to announce an investigation into Trump's political rivals during a September interview on CNN, but those plans had been scrapped once Trump released promised security aid. Zakaria told CNN's Brooke Baldwin on Thursday that the interview had been months in the making, but it fell apart when the Ukraine scandal began to unfold -- though CNN did not cancel it.

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"We had been negotiating with President Zelensky and his office for a while, for months, to try to get an interview with him anyway, ever since he was elected President," Zakaria, host of "Fareed Zakaria GPS," told Baldwin.

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Once news of the whistleblower's complaint surfaced, "it became clear to us that the interview was off," he continued.

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The Times reported that the decision to unfreeze the aid to Ukraine erased the need for Zelensky's televised appearance.

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Almost all of Zelensky's aides supported the planned announcement on the show, one of the officials who debated the issue told the Times. They agreed that American military aid and diplomatic support during upcoming peace talks were worth the risk of seeming to support Trump in the American political process, the paper reported.

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It was cancelled by Zelenski after news broke, just like the aid was mysteriously, suddenly and without explanation or ceremony released.Connect the dots, Faith.EnjoyEdited by RAZD, : .

Impeaching a corrupt President is what Congressional powers are all about.

Funny thing about that idiom in English.When they find actual witches and turn up plenty of evidence of actual witchcraft, then it's not really a "witch hunt".

How many people have you heard saying "us" to mean 'the US"?

The articles of impeachment included charges of obstruction of justice: Impeachment of Bill Clinton - Wikipedia This has been explained to Faith many times. It seems nothing will persuade her that the US was working with the EU to influence the Ukraine to remove Prosecutor General Shokin because of his investigatory inactions, and that Biden was the US point man in this effort.--Percy

it is surprising especially as she did accept this explanation way back in message 3008 of this very thread.Edited by Adminnemooseus, : Added link to message 3008.

One of the republican interrogators at the impeachment hearings made that point too. Wish I could remember his name. There were a lot of strong republican speeches against that travesty of a legal proceeding, that Stalinist star chamber as many have been describing it. Well sometimes pertinent anyway, but in this case there is no corrupt President and what is being called an impeachment hearing is a charade of opinion, hearsay, presumption, denial of due process, a tyrannical partisan moderator, violation of Constitutional principles, all masquerading as legal. Destruction of the institutions of the government, possibly destruction of America in the end.

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One of the republican interrogators at the impeachment hearings made that point too. Wish I could remember his name. There were a lot of strong republican speeches against that travesty of a legal proceeding, that Stalinist star chamber as many have been describing it.

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Yes, the Republican Party is firmly anti-American, spitting on the Constitution in the name of retaining power. And you support that.Let us note that these accusations lack any factual basis and even misrepresent the very nature of the proceedings. And it comes from someone who wants Stalinist show-trials of political opponents.

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Well sometimes pertinent anyway, but in this case there is no corrupt President and what is being called an impeachment hearing is a charade of opinion, hearsay, presumption, denial of due process, a tyrannical partisan moderator, violation of Constitutional principles, all masquerading as legal.

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And more false accusations all in the name of protecting a president who’s been shown to be corrupt.

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Destruction of the institutions of the government, possibly destruction of America in the end

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That’s exactly what the Republicans are doing. And you’re all for it.