The Ukraine whistleblower shows why the Mueller report still matters
I spent the morning combing through the whistleblower complaint and Iâm here to tell you, the press corps is not reporting the fullness of its shocking contents.
Yes, the president asked a foreign leader to interfere in the 2020 election, according to the complaint. Yes, White House White House appear complicit in covering up Donald Trumpâs abuse of power and lawlessness. But thereâs something lurking here the Democrats must not overlook as they game out a plan for an impeachment inquiry.
This article was originally published at The Editorial Board
The whistleblower complaint suggests that thereâs more at stake than a presidential election, and more involved than systemic corruption thatâs rotting the administration. The president appears to be rewriting, as it were, what happened in the 2016 presidential election by writing Russiaâs role out of the story. Not only that, heâs attempting to frame his enemies for Vladimir Putinâs crime, transforming himself in this storyâs hero and erasing any doubt that heâs a legitimate American president.
The Democrats have been struggling with a familiar problem. What to focus on, and why, when thereâs so much complexity. Nancy Pelosi believed Robert Muellerâs report, as damning as it wasâit outlines at least 10 times in which the president broke the lawâwas too complicated to be the basis for an inquiry. Using the powers of the presidency to solicit foreign assistance in maintaining power at home, however, is as clear as can be. âThis one is the most understandable by the public,â Pelosi said.
Thus, the Democrats, in organizing themselves, have been moving away from the abstract to the concrete. Roll Callâs Lindsey McPherson wrote: âFindings of obstruction of justice âŠ, Trumpâs alleged violation of the emoluments clause in driving government spending at his personal business properties and his role in hush money payments made during the 2016 election to quiet allegations of extramarital affairs have all been pushed to the back burner.â In their place, she wrote, is the allegation that Trump asked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate into Joe Biden and his son, Hunter. In advance of asking for a âfavor,â the complaint said, Trump refused to meet with Zelensky until it was clear how he âchose to act.â
The basis for such an investigation appears to be trash. Hunter Biden sat on the board of a Ukrainian energy company around the time his dad was the vice president. Barack Obama sent Joe Biden to pressure the Ukrainian president at the time to oust two of his prosecutors who were in Putinâs pocket. One of those was Yury Lutsenko.
Trump gushed about Lutsenko in his July 25 phone call. Trump said: âI heard you had a prosecutor who was very good and he was shut down and that's really unfair. A lot of people are talking about that, the way they shut your very good prosecutor down and you had some very bad people involved.â As with all things Donald Trump, he has things backwards. The âvery goodâ guy was corrupt while the âvery badâ people were patriotic reformers trying to clean house of corrupt officials like Yury Lutsenko.
That doesnât matter to Trump. What matters to him is the alternative history Lutsenko came up with to exonerate himself but as a result frame Trumpâs enemies for Putinâs crime of sabotaging 2016 and thus cleanse Trump of the stench of illegitimacy.
In a series of articles he wrote for The Hill, Lutsenko said the Ukrainians interfered with the 2016 election in collaboration with the Democratic National Committee. He alleged that Biden pressed for the firing of Lutsenkoâs peer, Viktor Shokin, to stop an investigation into an energy company on whose board sat Hunter Biden. Again, all of this is backwards. Biden did press for his firing, but not to stop the investigation. He press for his firing because he was in Putinâs pocket. And as Robert Mueller made conclusive, the Russians attacked our national sovereignty, not the Ukrainians.
This context is important to understand what appears to be a mishmash of conspiracy theory in that July 25 call. âThe server, they say Ukraine has it,â Trump told President Zelensky. âThere are a lot of things that went on, the whole situation I think you are 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.â
The whistleblower says he or she does not understand why Trump referred to Hillary Clintonâs private email server, but itâs not a stretch to imagine him getting that mixed up with Russian theft of DNC computer files. (After all, he does not use a computer or email.) My point is he could be hinting at Lutsenkoâs claim that it was the Ukrainians who attacked the US in 2016 with the help of his enemies: Clinton, Biden, whoever.
My other point is that the White House cover up is leading the news right now, but the Democrats should not leave the Russia story behind. Trump isnât. On one end, Rudy Giuliani is pushing for Zelensky to dig up dirt on Biden. On the other end is Attorney General William Barr. He has opened an investigation into the âoriginsâ of the Russia investigation. In a footnote to the complaint, the whistleblower cites Giuliani saying that Barrâs prosecutor is spending a lot of time in Europe âinvestigating Ukraine.â
The July 25 call revealed âthat Trump asked Zelensky to help undermine the widely accepted conclusion that Russia was responsible for the hack of the DNC in 2016, referencing a debunked conspiracy about the company that fingered Russia in the hack,â wrote the Wall Street Journalâs Rebecca Ballhaus. Todayâs complaint provides a glimpse of where that came from, and why the Democrat mustnât leave 2016 behind.
