Let’s clear something up first of all, if you dial the clock back to Thursday.
Play this exchange between you and Chris Cuomo on CNN in which you appear to at first say
you didn’t ask Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden and his son and then you seem to change
your mind.
Listen here.
Did you ask the Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden?
No, actually I didn’t.
You never asked anything about Hunter Biden?
You never asked anything about Joe Biden?
The only thing I ever asked about Joe Biden is to get to the bottom of how it was that
Lutsenko who was appointed dismissed a case against--
So you did ask the Ukraine to look into Joe Biden?
Of course I did!
You just said you didn’t!
All right, so which is it?
Did you ask Ukraine to look into it or not?
I clarified it immediately.
He said to me, did you ever talk about Joe Biden.
I said no.
Then I said, I did say that you should investigate Joe Biden and Hunter Biden.
The “no” was obviously wrong, I corrected it immediately.
I corrected it before he corrected it.
The reality is, the distinction is this.
What they’re trying to say is I went there for a political mission to kind of get Joe
Biden in trouble.
Ridiculous.
I went there as a lawyer defending his client.
I’ve known about this for 5 months.
I’ve been trying to get people to cover this for 5 months, so I knew it would be very,
very hard to get this out.
And what I’m talking about, this is Ukranian collusion, which was large, significant and
proven with Hillary Clinton, with the Democratic National Committee, a woman named Chalupa,
with the ambassador, with an FBI agent who’s now been hired by George Soros who was funding
a lot of it.
Republican talking points now are basically just a madlibs of blaming random conspiracy
theories on Hillary Clinton, George Soros, and Joe Biden.
Right off the bat, Giuliani claims that the very notion of him going to Ukraine on a political
mission to get Joe Biden in trouble is just utterly absurd.
Yup, totally.
This was definitely just a thing that Rudy Giuliani, who just so happens to be the president
of the United States’ personal attorney, is doing on his own and has nothing to do
with the fact that it centers on the current frontrunner for the Democratic nomination
in 2020, who according to polling is the biggest threat to Trump getting re-elected.
I’m sorry but who is Rudy Giuliani actually trying to fool?
This is just performative partisan hackery.
And to make things worse, it’s not even unprecedented for this administration.
We JUST finished an investigation into the LAST instance of the Trump campaign cooperating
with a foreign power to interfere in our election.
And I know that the White House has been engaged in a nonstop gaslighting campaign to convince
us that Trump was totally and completely exonerated, but we know that Don Jr, Kushner and Manafort
met with a Kremlin-linked lawyer in Trump Tower after being promised dirt on Hillary
Clinton.
That is colluding with a foreign power to influence our election.
Period.
And now, the Trump camp is back at it, only with a different cast of characters.
Because season 2 features Joe Biden instead of Hillary Clinton, we find ourselves in Ukraine
instead of Russia, and the plot isn’t Hillary’s emails, it’s the dismissal of a prosecutor
who was looking into a natural gas company linked to Joe Biden’s son.
And so now the White House is going all in on its messaging that the media SHOULD be
focusing on this Hunter Biden story, despite the fact that the reason we’re talking about
it in the first place was that Trump has yet again embroiled himself massive international
scandal.
Trump just illegally solicited foreign campaign donations from Ukraine, as dirt on a political
opponent is a campaign donation or a “thing of value” in the eyes of the law.
He’s likely guilty of conspiring to commit bribery (by leveraging military aid on the
promise of an investigation into Biden) and he’s likely guilty of aiding and abetting
bribery, which we’ve seen from him pushing Giuliani to pressure Ukraine into opening
that probe in exchange for aid.
But on top of all of that, he’s also obstructing justice by keeping his Director of National
Intelligence from releasing the contents of the whistleblower complaint to Congress.
And, again, we know that the complaint meets the statutory definition of “serious”
and “urgent,” according to the Inspector General, who by the way is a Trump appointee.
I mean this is like OJ Simpson trying to convince the country that we should really be looking
into Nicole Brown Simpson’s improprieties that might have warranted her inexplicable
death in the first place.
If the media actually takes the bait on this, then it’ll completely validate Trump’s
strategy of breaking the law, of using his office to commit bribery and extortion and
obstructing justice, to control the narrative.
To say that this is a dangerous precedent is the understatement of the century.
The glaringly obvious solution to all of this is that, first, Trump’s DNI needs to release
the whistleblower complaint.
And if Trump is as innocent as he claims, he should have nothing to worry about.
And then, Congress needs to perform their constitutional duty of oversight and use the
tools available to them to ensure that there is accountability for the criminal activities
that the president has engaged in.
This isn’t about making sure public opinion for impeachment is on your side or talking
into account that it’s an election year or looking at polling in the Midwest.
This is about whether we’re still a country that values the rule of law.
Period.
And if we are, then we need to take action immediately, because it shouldn’t matter
who it is, it shouldn’t matter if we’ve grown numb to the deluge of scandals, it shouldn’t
matter what other political calculations are being considered, if someone breaks the law,
they should be held accountable.
Even if that person is the President of the United States.