What you need to know: An impartial impeachment guide
The photograph of the whistleblower complaint announcement in the Politico article that ignited the impeachment firestorm..
By Tatiana Prophet
Editor-in-Chief
Think back if you can to the utter firestorm that exploded during the annual United Nations General Assembly meeting in New York City, coming just four days after Adam Schiff dropped a huge bombshell in a letter to acting director of national intelligence Joseph Maguire. The letter accused Maguire of withholding a whistleblower complaint from Congress. The complaint had been reportedly submitted August 12 to the Intelligence Community Inspector General, who had deemed it credible and then sent it on to Maguire on August 26, Schiff said in a press conference.
The nation was still reeling from three mass shootings in a row and the violent death of Jeffrey Epstein in a Manhattan federal prison cell, either at the hands of himself or someone else.
And the United Nations General Assembly annual meeting was about to begin. As President Trump entered the UN building, he was mobbed with questions about this new probe.
The whistleblower complaint, addressed to Adam Schiff and Senate intel chairman Richard Burr, stated that multiple officials had come to him expressing concern about a July 25 phone call between President Trump and the newly elected president of Ukraine.
Read the whistleblower complaint here.
After a new president was elected to Ukraine in April 2019, he had two phone calls with President Volodymyr Zelensky. In the second phone call, after Zelensky’s Servant of the People party won a majority in the Verkhovna Rada (parliament), Trump and Zelensky had their second phone call. First, they discussed the upset victory by Zelensky’s newly formed party. Then, they discussed how much the United States has helped Ukraine, after which Trump mentioned that Germany should be helping Ukraine more than it is. Zelensky agreed.
Right after that, Trump pivoted to the 2016 election and the DNC server. He mentioned the cyber-firm Crowdstrike, a Sunnyvale, Calif.-based tech company that was co-founded by Ukrainian Dmitri Alperovich. Crowdstrike was the firm that had ruled that Russia hacked the DNC server, and the FBI took their word for it, never actually examining the DNC computer network. While Establishment media would call any mention of Crowdstrike’s involvement a “conspiracy theory,” it is rather odd the connections Crowdstrike has with the Washington, D.C., establishment.
For one thing, Alperovich is a fellow at The Atlantic Council, a “nonpartisan” D.C. think tank that was founded in 1961 by five former secretaries of state including Dean Acheson, Christian Herter and Theodore Achilles. The Council’s mission is “Shaping the global future together.”
When reporters need quick background on a region of the world, they go to research fellows at think tanks in Washington. One of those think tanks is the Atlantic Council. In fact, much of the recent coverage on Ukraine contains statements of fact and analysis by members of the Atlantic Council. Some of the advice urges multilateral cooperation and acceptance of Western and European advisers in the highest halls of Ukraine’s judicial system.
Former National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster gave the valedictory address at the Atlantic Council in 2018. Facebook has donated at least $1 million. George Soros’ Open Societies Foundation has donated roughly half a million dollars, and Burisma Group, yes THE Burisma Group at the center of the impeachment investigation, has donated roughly $250,000 to the Atlantic Council. Burisma is of course the natural gas firm owned by Mykola Zlochevsky, who from 2015 to 2019 lived in exile in Monaco while he was under investigation by the London Serious Fraud Office and the Ukraine Prosecutor General’s Office for money laundering and self-enrichment. During that period he also hired Hunter Biden and launched what Burisma called a “partnership” with the Atlantic Council to explore “energy security.” It was at this annual meeting in Monaco where Hunter Biden was able to fulfill his role as paid philanthropist, specifically to combat climate change.
Back to the phone call — President Trump asked Zelensky to “do us a favor though because our country has been through a lot.”
”And Ukraine knows a lot about it,” he continued. “I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine, they say Crowdstrike ... I guess you have one of your wealthy people... The server, they say Ukraine has it. There are a lot of things that went on, the· whole situation. I think you’re surrounding yourself with some of the same people. I would like to have the Attorney General call you or your people and I would like you to ·get to the bottom of it. As you saw yesterday, that whole nonsense ended with a very poor performance by a man named Robert Mueller, an incompetent performance, but they. say a lot of it started with Ukraine. Whatever you can do, ·it's very important that· you. do it if that's possible.”
Zelensky replied that cooperation with the United States was very important to him. He mentioned that he recalled Ukraine’s ambassador to the United States and was replacing him with a “very competent and very experienced ambassador.”
Then Zelensky brought up Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani, the former mayor of New York City who by all accounts dealt a death blow to the mafia’s grip on New York City in the 1980s.
“I· will. personally tell you that one· of my assistants· spoke with Mr. Giuliani just.recently and we are hoping very much that Mr. Giuliani will be able to travel to Ukraine and. we will meet once · he comes to Ukraine. I just wanted to assure you once again_that you _have nobody but friends around-us. I w.ill make sure -that-I surround myself with the best and most experienced people. I also· wanted to ·tell you that we are friends. We are great· friends and you Mr. President have friends in our country so we can continue our strategic·partnership. I also plan to surround myself with great people ·and in addition to that investigation, I guarantee as the President of Ukraine that all the investigations.will be done openly and candidly .. That I can assure you.”
Then Trump brings up “Biden’s son.”
“The other thing, there's a lot of talk about Biden's son, that Biden stopped the prosecution and a lot of people want to find out about that, so whatever you can do with the Attorney General would be great. Biden went around bragging that he stopped the prosecution so if you ·can look into it ... It sounds horrible to me.”
See video above where the former VP was discussing how he threatened to withhold loan guarantees if a certain prosecutor wasn’t fired. Biden never mentioned his son, or his son’s employer, as being the ones investigated. Most Establishment media state that the prosecutor Biden wanted fired had been sitting on several important cases (and it turns out, that case included the Burisma money laundering probe). But there is no evidence that the prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, was delaying any investigation. In fact, he said in a sworn affidavit, he was moving ahead with it. But between the three Ukrainian prosecuting agencies, someone dropped the case against Burisma founder Mykola Zlochevsky, turning it into a settlement out of court for tax evasion. Whatever the case, once Shokin was replaced at Biden’s admitted insistence, the new prosecutor, Sergey Lutsenko, closed all cases into Burisma in 2017. Yes, the replacement prosecutor stopped the probes. Doesn’t seem very anti-corruptiony.
Trump’s self-described “perfect phone call” seems to be pretty above board; he didn’t sound like a mafia boss as Adam Schiff had ad-libbed in committee; so why are the Democrats saying “this is a solemn moment for our country”? Ah. Well according to the Democrats, that “transcript” is not only incomplete, but it is not accurate either.
No, it isn’t verbatim; in fact there’s a note at the bottom of page explaining how the phone calls are “memorialized” — by staffers taking notes.
“CAUTION: A Memorandum of a Telephone Conversation. (TELCON) is not a verbatim transcript of a
discussion. The text in this document records the notes and recollections of Situation Room Duty “Officers and-NSC policy staff assigned to listen.and memorialize the conversation in written form as the conversation takes place. A number of factors can affect ‘the accuracy of the record, including poor telecommunications connections and variations in accent and/or interpretation. The word “inaudible” is used to indicate portions of a conversation that the notetaker was unable
to hear. ”
Many on the left believe that the real phone call was quite a bit more incriminating than the “transcript.” But according to testimony by the Democrats’ fact witness Colonel Alexander Vindman, the discrepancies in the transcript involved Trump mentioning the idea that Biden was on tape discussing getting a prosecutor fired, and Zelensky mentioning the name of “Burisma.”
The New York Times made a big to-do about these differences, running a headline saying the transcript omitted “key” details that Vindman tried and failed to correct. Whether they are key or not depends on your bias.
So the case against Trump about a phone call with the president of Ukraine, stands on state department and national security staffers giving their opinions on the reason for a delay in lethal aid to Ukraine ordered by Congress. See Back to Facts, “In Defense of Ukraine,” for background on Russia’s annexation of Crimea, the jewel of the Black Sea, and the declaration of autonomy by ethnic Russians in two eastern Ukraine provinces, plus the United States response.
Several key questions emerge from analyzing Establishment media coverage of this new snafu. First, why do they ignore the emphasis by Trump and Zelensky on a broader picture of cyber-security firm Crowdstrike and the DNC computer network, plus a reference to Joe Biden’s admission that he threatened to withhold aid from Ukraine if the prosecutor general was not fired?
NOTE: This video made a big splash in Ukraine. It did not go over well with the prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, who saw it as an admission of guilt in using the loan guarantees as leverage to get him fired.
This is the video you've been looking for. January 23, 2018: at the Council on Foreign Relations. Joe Biden talks about telling the leaders in Ukraine that because the United States deemed the Chief Prosecutor as "corrupt," as the U.S. representative he made the firing of this prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, a condition of providing a loan guarantee from the U.S.
Why are they not curious about these matters? Why do they repeat over and over that Trump was looking to help his re-election campaign, when motives cannot be unveiled through a phone call transcript? Most of the coverage in The New York Times and Washington Post has been laced with red flags showing bias, as in “Internal State Department emails and documents released late Friday further implicate Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in a campaign orchestrated this year by President Trump and his personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani to pressure Ukraine for political favors. That doesn’t sound like factual reporting.
t sounds like one of two things: the reporter relied on the conclusions of the nonprofit think tank that sued for the documents, American Oversight, which announced on its web page a similar message; or the reporter is pushing a narrative that the President is guilty of orchestration, rather than acknowledging that there could be several reasons why he brought up the former vice president. One of the reporters, though, is Kenneth P. Vogel, formerly of Politico who wrote the now-famous article in January 2017 about then-president Petro Poroshenko worried that Trump would retaliate for his alleged efforts to help Hillary Clinton get elected. This wouldn’t be the first time that a reporter who used complete facts in recent years about Ukraine is now backpedaling and spinning his own story. James Risen, who was famously prosecuted by the Obama administration for his revelations on Iran, wrote a piece for The New York Times in 2015 exposing the hiring of Hunter Biden by Ukraine gas company Burisma. Now writing for Glenn Greenwald’s progressive outlet The Intercept, Risen made sure everyone knew that crackpot Rudy Giuliani was trying to use his 2015 story to “help Trump.”
And that’s where the witnesses come in. A parade of current and former state department staffers and career diplomats testified before Schiff’s Select Committee on Intelligence what they believed was Trump’s motivation in delaying aid to Ukraine ordered by Congress in the John S McCain National Defense Authorization Act for FY 2019. One cannot help but notice that the alleged shadowy dealings in Ukraine seem to elude provability by direct evidence. And oddly, this elusive evidence is very much like the idea of Trump colluding with Russia to “steal” the election by helping Wikileaks to publish actual e-mails sent by the Clinton campaign to the DNC and vice versa.
That’s where the cover-up comes in. Democrats in Congress accuse Trump of a cover-up, and the American public thinks: “See? It’s just like Nixon.” The feckless Republicans, who bow to President Trump’s every whim, flout Congressional subpoenas, and refuse to testify before Congress, threatened by Trump and his own team into silence. Those of us attempting to be impartial in this shadowy mess have been wondering: if Trump is innocent, then why has he, and his attorneys, instructed witnesses not to comply with Schiff’s subpoenas for them to testify? Specifically, why won’t he “let” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and former National Security Adviser John Bolton testify?
Hear it from Trump’s own mouth. Executive privilege. As the Guardian quoted:
“Trump claimed in an interview with Fox News host Laura Ingraham on Friday night he would “love everybody to testify”, including Bolton, the secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, and acting chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney. But he went on to say “there are things that you can’t do from the standpoint of executive privilege”. “Especially a national security adviser,” Trump added. “You can’t have him explaining all of your statements about national security concerning Russia, China and North Korea, everything. You just can’t do that.” Asked if that meant he would invoke executive privilege to prevent Bolton from testifying, Trump said: “I think you have to for the sake of the office.”
Executive privilege may sound like a way for a President to protect itself, and it could be. But when executive privilege has been invoked in the past, the judicial branch usually gets involved and decides what the President may be compelled to reveal. That’s what happened with Nixon in Watergate.
Supporters of the President say he is concerned with future Presidents and with weakening the Article II powers vested in the office. Which is obviously a big joke to his detractors. Because, everybody knows he doesn’t care about anything but enriching himself. Right?
Now the question is, why did Adam Schiff not hold Bolton and Pompeo, who missed their dates to testify, in contempt of Congress? Because it would take too long. Yes. After Bolton’s attorney threatened to take the matter to court, Schiff withdrew the summons for him, and his aide, saying they didn’t want to tie up the process in court when impeachment was so urgent. Before House Speaker Nancy Pelosi delivered the articles of impeachment to the Senate, Schiff stated he was more interested in having Bolton testify before the Senate.
Then came a leak in The New York Times in late January about Bolton’s book manuscript. “Multiple people familiar with the manuscript” stated that it contained an admission by Bolton that Trump was withholding aid to Ukraine in exchange for a political investigation into his rival, Joe Biden.
And the beat goes on.
