"President Trump personally ordered his staff to freeze more than $391 million in aid to Ukraine in the days before he pressed the new Ukrainian president to investigate the Democrats’ leading presidential candidate, two senior administration officials said Monday."The story, in a nutshell, is that Trump wants the new Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky to reopen an investigation into Burisma Holdings owner Mykola Zlochevsky. Zlochevsky paid Joe Biden's son Hunter -- what for is not clear -- but Trump implies that it was to get the vice president to sack the Ukrainian public prosecutor who was pursuing money laundering and other charges against Zlochevksy.
Last week's reporting on this was actually better than what has been reported this week (see "Acting Intelligence Chief Refuses to Testify, Prompting Standoff With Congress" by Julian Barnes and Nicholas Fandos). The Trump administration is refusing to turn over a whistle-blower complaint on the Ukrainian affair to Adam Schiff's House Intelligence Committee.
The law is clear on this. Congress is entitled to see the report. Congress has an oversight function. What Trump is doing is a violation of the separation of powers.
But Trump is playing Br'er Rabbitt here. He wants to be impeached. He'll split the careerist neoliberal Dems from the progressive Dems and highlight the party leadership's fecklessness -- something he has already accomplished. Plus, he'll spotlight Joe Biden's corruption, not to mention the coup swamp politics of the Obama administration in Ukraine.
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