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We’re all still trapped in Democrats’ Russia delusion nypost.com/2019/10/03/wer… via @nypost
In its report on Trump’s call with the Australian prime minister, The New York Times says — in a news report, mind you — that the call “shows the president using high-level diplomacy to advance his personal political interests.”
Trump is pleased with Barr’s investigation and would be even more pleased if it unearthed anything untoward. That doesn’t make it merely a pet political project or mean that there isn’t genuine public interest in knowing in greater detail how & why the Russia story got started.
The Times of London reported of Trump’s call to British PM Boris Johnson that he wanted “to gather evidence to undermine the investigation into his campaign’s links to Russia.” There’s not really anything to undermine, though — the investigation has been over for months.
Trump is basically being accused of the entirely new offense of obstruction after the fact. There were many novel theories of obstruction advanced during the special counsel probe, but this is the most creative.
Even the framework of the Ukraine matter reflects the Russia story. Trump’s critics say he was asking for Ukrainian “interference” in our elections, when what was really going on was that he and Rudy Giuliani were interfering in Ukrainian politics.
They were pushing the Ukrainians to undertake investigations, including, of course, into Joe Biden’s actions in the country.
If you accept the premise that any information developed in a foreign country and used in American politics is election interference, then Trump’s opponents themselves were masters at leveraging Ukrainian interference during the 2016 election.
As Politico reported in 2017, Ukrainian government officials “helped Clinton’s allies research damaging information on Trump and his advisers.”
The Russian story contributed to and fed off this feverish atmosphere. For the longest time, it offered Democrats the hope of deliverance from a president whose election they never accepted.
When Robert Mueller didn’t have the goods, House Democrats were at sea for a while, until Trump’s call and the whistleblower complaint brought impeachment deliciously back into play.
Ukraine is more an epilogue of the Russian investigation than the beginning of a new book.
Ukraine is more an epilogue of the Russian investigation than the beginning of a new book.
