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President Trump did nothing impeachable in his phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, during which Trump asked for Ukraine’s help in exposing possible influence peddling in the country by former vice president Joe Biden on behalf of his son, Hunter Biden.
Indeed, Trump did what a president should have done.
That conclusion comes from former federal prosecutor Bob Barr (shown), who, as a congressman, ran the effort to impeach Bill Clinton. Writing for The Daily Caller, Barr concluded that Trump was duty-bound to ask Zelensky for the probe.
Message for the Democrats and NeverTrump nuts in the Republican Party: Trump did nothing wrong.
Trump’s Call: We Need Your Help
The Trump-Zelensky call of July 25 became the object of the latest impeachment hysteria after the hearsay account of an anonymous CIA whistleblower surfaced. Written after the whistleblower consulted with the staff of House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, which itself points to suspected wrongdoing, the account claimed that Trump sought “foreign interference” in the 2020 election.
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That “foreign interference” was Trump asking Zelensky to probe the Biden-Burisma scandal that has shaken the presidential candidacy of former vice president Joe Biden. He was President Barack Obama’s point man on Ukraine. A month after a visit there in 2014, Biden’s son, Hunter, an irresponsible dope fiend kicked out of the Navy for cocaine use, landed on the board of Burisma Holdings, an energy company. Young Biden was, of course, unqualified for the position. In March 2016, when Ukraine’s prosecutor general, Viktor Shokin, was investigating Burisma for corruption, Biden senior threatened to withhold $1 billion in U.S. loan guarantees from Ukraine if it didn’t fire the prosecutor. Shokin got the pink-slip.
Trump also told Zelensky he would order Attorney General Bill Barr to investigate Biden’s role in firing Shokin.
Such a probe might also uncover Ukrainian interference in the 2016 U.S. election and its connection to the “Russian collusion” hoax. As John Solomon of the The Hill and Lee Smith of Real Clear Investigations have reported, a highly-paid consultant for the Democratic National Committee sought dirt on Trump from Ukraine’s embassy, and a Ukrainian legislator provided anti-Trump dirt to Fusion GPS, the Clinton presidential campaign front group that paid Christopher Steele, a British spy, to concoct his notorious dossier. Steele’s claims proved false, but the Clinton campaign retailed them to the media.
Another item related to the Ukraine-Clinton collusion story is the Obama administration’s effort, through the embassy in Ukraine, to kill a corruption probe into a supposed anti-corruption outfit backed by leftist hate-Trump billionaire George Soros, a major financial backer of the American radical Left.
On that note, Trump also mentioned Obama’s ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Ivanovich, during the phone call. “She would not accept me as a new President,” Zelensky said.
In other words, the “collusion” in 2016 was not Trump-Russia. It was DNC-Clinton-Ukraine.
Thus, Trump’s request of Ukraine’s new president.
Removing Trump “Absurd”
Former federal prosecutor Bob Barr averred that “no federal laws were broken and nothing close to an impeachable offense took place,” and “in that call the president of the United States was doing precisely what a president should have been doing.”
Responding to Trump critics such Judge Andrew Napolitano, the Fox News talker who said Trump should be impeached, Barr wrote that not only was Trump well within his rights to withhold military aid to pressure Ukraine on Biden-Burisma, but also should have done so. Biden being a possible opponent in 2020 is irrelevant, Barr wrote:
To claim … it is a crime for Trump to insist that Ukraine investigate past corrupt acts involving the United States, and that the country stop doing so moving forward, simply because Joe Biden now has chosen to challenge Trump politically next year, undercuts the very power of a president to protect our country from foreign interference and to investigate corrupt acts by former U.S. officials. Biden is deserving of no such self-imposed immunity….
The executive branch (headed by the president) … investigates and prosecutes violations of federal law. It was clear in that July 25 call that President Trump was letting President Zelensky know that our attorney general — the head of our Department of Justice that is responsible for such investigations — would be doing just that. To now assert that for this President Trump should be removed from office and prosecuted criminally, is absurd.
Absurd, yes. But the hate-Trump Left and its media mouthpiece began talking impeachment before Trump even had the GOP nomination.
Trump’s real crimes?
Defeating Hillary Clinton and the Russian collusion hoax, which the media and Democrats concocted to reverse the result of that election.
Now, he’s about to uncover the real story about “collusion” and “foreign interference.”
Photo: AP Images
