But there’s documentation in criminal investigations and in counterintelligence investigations to explain the predication for the opening of a file, that is, the basis for the opening of a file.
— James Freeman, WSJ, "The Unbelievable James Comey," 10 Dec. 2018
There's a lot of noise in the Trump Ukraine controversy. This always happens with these things because the guilty party will forever muddy the waters... to confuse you.
Here's the simplified version, first from 30.000 feet, and then from eye-level.
From 30,000 feet it looks like Donald Trump just did exactly what he's been screaming Obama and Clinton did to him; that is enlist foreign actors to dig dirt on a political opponent. And unlike Obama and Hillary who covered their tracks and were shielded by a complicit CIA, FBI, DOJ, etc., Trump was outed by his own CIA for making the request during a phone call with Ukraine's leader!
That's how it looks from 30,000 feet. It looks very bad. Maybe even impeachable. But a funny thing happens when the same events are examined at eye level in much higher resolution.
The detail that is missing from 30,000 feet and that is apparent up close hinges on one key word: predication. Was there a basis for what Donald Trump asked Zelensky?
Here's an analogy that explains predication: Consider the cases of two fatal shootings. In both cases the victim was shot at point blank range in the back. Are both shooters guilty of murder? Now consider that in the first case the victim had robbed the shooter and was fleeing. In the second case the victim had stabbed the shooter and was lunging with a knife for his child. Predication makes all the difference. One shooter had a basis for using deadly force and the other did not.
In the case of Obama and Clinton, the search for predication came up dry. In essence, their justification for spying on Trump in 2016 and 2017 boiled down to "orange man bad", and shut up.
In Trump's case, he not only had demonstrable predication, but he also prefaced his request with that very justification during the phone call. (Full transcript here)
This is exactly what Joe Biden bragged about doing in Ukraine during a Council on Foreign Relations event in 2018:
“I was supposed to announce that there was another billion-dollar loan guarantee, And I had gotten a commitment from Poroshenko and from [then-Prime Minister Arseniy] Yatsenyuk that they would take action against the state prosecutor. And they didn’t.
I said, ‘I’m telling you, you’re not getting the billion dollars. I said, ‘You’re not getting the billion. I’m going to be leaving here in, I think it was about six hours.’ I looked at them and said: ‘I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money.’ Well, son of a bitch. (Laughter.) He got fired.”
Mind you, the Ukrainian prosecutor that Joe Biden had fired, for $1 billion U.S. dollars, was investigating how Joe's son, Hunter Biden, came to be paid up to $8,000,000 by a Ukrainian energy company for sitting on it's board while knowing nothing about energy, Ukraine, or doing business in the region.
It is the constitutional responsibility of Presidents to hold government officials accountable for corruption, bribery, extortion and wrongdoing. Politicians are not exempt from investigation, especially when they admit to the behavior being investigated! Moreover, Ukraine and the U.S. have a treaty that requires cooperation for rooting out crime and corruption. In other words, Trump was just doing his job for which he had ample predication.
It all comes down to predication. Trump had it. Obama and Clinton did not. That makes all the difference. Everything else is just noise.
Will that stop Democrats from impeaching Donald Trump? Not a chance. They've been promising to impeach him since before he even took the oath of office. The Washington Post headline on January 20th, 2017, the day Donald Trump was inaugurated read, "The campaign to impeach President Trump has begun".
The impeachment of Donald Trump has always been predicated on "orange man bad" and shut up. It will proceed on that basis.
Here's predication in Joe Biden's own words:
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