WSJ: Trump colluding with Ukraine

It doesn’t matter - President is within his right to demand investigation.
If Biden used $1B of taxpayers money to bail out his son from criminal investigation while he was the Vice President of the United States, Trump sure as hell can use temporary restriction on $250M for investigation or information about Biden’s actions.
Plain and simple!

 

Your unsubstantiated belief that Biden committed a crime is a typical characteristic of Trump cultists. It seems to help them ignore the crimes and abuses of power having been committed by the Obstructor-in-Chief.

 

The rights of the president have nothing to do with anything. This is about politics.

 

Because two wrongs don't make a right. And, it doesn't explain the question of why the administration is trying to block the whistleblower's complaint from reaching Congress, which is probably a violation of law.

 

But.........you do recognize it's unconstitutional, right? Whether you like it or not Congress has the right to get documents and have witnesses testify in fulfilling their oversight role in checking the power of the executive.

 

Perhaps you should provide a credible source proving the crime you allege was committed actually happened.

See post #168. The US was not alone in seeking Shokin's dismissal for suspected corruption and misuse of funds.

 

It's about breaking the law. The whistleblower's complaint should go to Congress. Why is the administration attempting to block it?

 

Unsubstantiated belief?
Are you serious?
Biden himself admitted his own actions! He bragged about it! He used $1B of the US taxpayers money (money approved by Congress!) to force Ukraine to stop investigating his son for criminal activities. This is like the obstruction of justice of the highest order! Is your hate for trump so strong that you can’t call things the way they are?

 

That is a purposeful distortion of the events involving Shokin's dismissal. Gee, I wonder why you would do that?

"The United States and other Western nations had for months called for the ousting of Mr. Shokin, who was widely criticized for turning a blind eye to corrupt practices and for defending the interests of a venal and entrenched elite. He was one of several political figures in Kiev whom reformers and Western diplomats saw as a worrying indicator of a return to past corrupt practices, two years after a revolution that was supposed to put a stop to self-dealing by those in power.

As the problems festered, Kiev drew increasingly sharp criticism from Western diplomats and leaders. In a visit in December, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. said corruption was eating Ukraine “like a cancer.” Christine Lagarde, the managing director of the International Monetary Fund, which props up Ukraine financially, said last month that progress was so slow in fighting corruption that “it’s hard to see how the I.M.F.-supported program can continue.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/30/...-balance-as-ukraine-ousts-top-prosecutor.html

IOW, the US (Biden being the US front man on the issue) was part of a group of western nations who were calling for Shokin to be dismissed.

 

We can get to the "Biden investigation" later. The question now is what was said by the President to the new leader of the Ukraine. What was the substance of the whistleblower's complaint and why is the administration blocking Congressional access to it?

 

I do not know why. Sometimes I agree with Trump and sometimes I don’t.
But this is a clear case of liberals crying Trump “committed a crime” when he actually tries to get info about Biden’s real criminal act.
That’s a very low level hypocrisy.

 

Trumpists would rather deflect attention away from the matter at hand. I don't blame them.

 

Answered that one already. Why do you think the President is blocking the whistleblower's complaint from reaching Congress (and through them, the American people)?

 

What you just described is an abuse of presidential power since the motivation is political gain for Individual 1. Do you honestly think the Briber-in-Chief would be strong arming the leader of Ukraine if Biden wasn't running for prez?

 

Who knows.
We all know Trump can’t negotiate - look at Greenland fiasco. Maybe he tries to cover it up because he did something embarrassing, which is not necessarily criminal. In my opinion Greenland was the most embarrassing moment in Trumps presidency so far, if he tried to approach Ukraine in similar fashion I’d be concerned if I were in Trumps administration. Concerned not because of crime, but with the way Trump does things.
Did you notice that he eventually released the funds? Something definitely happened.

 

When?
When he is the POTUS?

I wasn’t born yesterday!

 

It's an apples and oranges comparison. The Ukraine bribery was an abuse of power and impeachable. The Greenland fiasco was just classic Trump idiocy.

 

No one knows any of that. They do know that there was no hack. The speed of transfer of the files Wikileaks posted was too high for the internet. Those files were down loaded to something like a thumb drive. The transfer happened on the East Coast. Seth Rich paid with his life in the 40th suspicious murder of people close to the Clintons.

The only criminal conspiracy involving Russia was that between the Clinton campaign, FusionGPS, Christopher Steele, and the Kremlin in creating the Dossier.

 

He works for us. And, it would ld seem that he's compounding his own mistake. We don't know if the whistleblower's complaint involved knowledge of a criminal act or not. That's the purpose of making it available to Congress. In the words of Harry Truman: "If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen."

 

The Steele Dossier is a red herring. And, you haven't read the Mueller Report.

 

Trump has done plenty to warrant impeachment. But the Ukraine allegations are over the top.

"So it appears that the president might have used his official powers — in particular, perhaps the threat of withholding a quarter-billion dollars in military aid — to leverage a foreign government into helping him defeat a potential political opponent in the United States.
If Trump did that, it would be the ultimate impeachable act."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opin...eff90c-dbf1-11e9-bfb1-849887369476_story.html

 

I couldn't agree with you more.

"Among the most delicate choices the framers made in drafting the Constitution was how to deal with a president who puts himself above the law. To address that problem, they chose the mechanism of impeachment and removal from office. And they provided that this remedy could be used when a president commits “Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.”

That last phrase — “high Crimes and Misdemeanors” — was a historical term of art, derived from impeachments in the British Parliament. When the framers put it into the Constitution, they didn’t discuss it much, because no doubt they knew what it meant. It meant, as Alexander Hamilton later phrased it, “the abuse or violation of some public trust.”

That trust includes having faith the prez will not use his office for personal or political gain.

 

Agree. The only two things keeping Trump in office at this point are 1) the DoJ policy on not indicting a sitting president (which I consider unconstitutional) and 2) Mitch McConnell.

 

Politics. You don't blame them do you?

 

But he is the only one that benefited personally from it. Isn't that what the media is alleging about Trump?