Latest coup attempt is coverup of Democrat dirty tricks in the 2016 campaign

James Robbins:

Democrats are pinning their latest impeachment hopes on the theory that President Donald Trump tried to enlist Ukraine to dig up dirt on former Vice President Joe Biden to sway the 2020 election. But as the White House phone record release Wednesday shows, the issue is really about the dirty tricks that were being played in 2016.

Look at the full phone record. Trump’s critics have cherry-picked it to highlight the Biden content and twisted it out of context to make the case that the phone call was a criminal shakedown. But it was nothing of the sort.

Start with the rationale for the call on July 25, in which the president congratulated Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on his party’s July 21 parliamentary victory. Zelensky has much in common with Trump, being a former TV celebrity turned politician for whom the presidency is his entry-level job. The two obviously admire each other. And like Trump, Zelensky is a reformer; he said he “wanted to drain the swamp here in our country.”

The change in government is important, because as Trump told Zelensky, the United States “has been through a lot and Ukraine knows a lot about it.” This was soon after the president spoke of special counsel Robert Mueller’s “incompetent performance” before Congress the previous day, discussing the results of his investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. Trump said “a lot of it started with Ukraine.” Trump mentions the cybersecurity company Crowdstrike, which investigated the 2016 hacking of Democratic National Committee (DNC) servers and was the first source of the story that the operation originated in Russia.

The FBI was denied physical access to the DNC’s servers, and Trump told Zelensky that “they say Ukraine has it.” Who ”they” are and how the server would wind up in Ukraine is certainly a mystery, but this was the topmost thing on the president’s mind, the “favor” he asked for. The favor had nothing to do with Biden.

We also learned Wednesday that U.S. attorney John Durham, who is investigating the origins of the FBI’s probe into alleged ties between the Trump 2016 campaign and Russia, was already looking into whether the previous Ukrainian government led by then-President Petro Poroshenko was somehow involved in trying to undermine the Trump campaign. Maybe Durham’s team is the “they” who mentioned the server. But this is why Trump expressed concern to Zelensky that he is “surrounding (himself) with some of the same people,” i.e. Poroshenko’s deep-staters, and Trump’s request to the Ukraine leader that he “have the attorney general (William Barr) call you or your people and I would like you to get to the bottom of it.” Zelensky said that he will, and that “all the investigations will be done openly and candidly.”

And it is Zelensky — not Trump — who brings up the name of Rudy Giuliani and proposes a meeting. This was after Giuliani had cancelled a trip to Ukraine in May to investigate whether the previous government had aided the Clinton campaign by providing information concerning former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort’s work in the country. He was also seeking more information on why Ukraine fired Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin, who had been looking into Hunter Biden’s questionable business dealings. This nongovernment mission was all very public and was reported in detail last May.

This was how Biden’s name came up. President Trump, fully aware of the canceled Giuliani trip, noted that “Biden went around bragging that he stopped the prosecution” of his son, and “a lot of people want to find out about that so whatever you can do with the attorney general would be great.” He added, “It sounds horrible to me.”
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The Democrats are attempting to cherry-pick the conversation and take words out of context to push a false narrative about the President.  This coup attempt should meet the same fate as the one involving the Russian collusion hoax.  The fact that they are trying it again with an anonymous complaint based on hearsay like the Steele dossier shows a dishonesty that should not be allowed.