Democrats and most of the national media are acting in bad faith in the impeachment fix. If they were forthright, they’d be able to hear the words “Ukraine” and “2016” in the same sentence without locking up in a seizure.
Even some Republicans feel queasy addressing the subject, presumably because they’re wary of being called conspiracy theorists, despite it being a well-documented fact that Ukraine was all over 2016.
During a wide-ranging interview with the Washington Examiner on Monday, I asked GOP Rep. Will Hurd of Texas if he believed President Trump had a legitimate reason to ask the newly elected leader of Ukraine to investigate the extent of his country’s involvement in our election. Hurd replied by doing what Democrats and the media do: He started talking about Russia.
“The concern that I have is trying to say that Ukrainian activity and Russian activity are equal,” he said. Of course, most people who bring up Ukraine are not trying to say that.
He went on, “They are not, right? And so while there were players within the Ukrainian government [who were critics of Trump], to assume in any way that it’s on the same scale as what the Russians did on the 2016 election …”
No one is assuming that.
To acknowledge that Ukraine did meddle in our election is not to deny that Russia did anything. We know what Russia did. That story has been told a billion times.
It’s the Ukraine story that most people still don’t know and that the national media have tried to memory hole once Trump showed interest.
Kurt Volker, the former U.S. special envoy to Ukraine, testified last month that in a conversation with Trump earlier this year about Ukraine, he recalled Trump saying, “They tried to take me down.”
Yes, they did.
The New York Times reported in 2016, just after Trump was officially nominated by Republicans, that Ukraine’s “newly formed National Anti-Corruption Bureau,” which worked in conjunction with America’s FBI, was in possession of a mysterious, handwritten diary. The document purported to show that Paul Manafort, who was serving as the head of Trump’s campaign at the time, was receiving millions of dollars in payments from one of the country’s pro-Russian politicians. “Investigators assert,” the Times reported, “that the disbursements were part of an illegal off-the-books system whose recipients also included election officials.”
I’m sure all of that was by coincidence that Ukraine’s most consequential government agency suddenly came into possession of evidence against the head of a major-party U.S. presidential campaign. It was purely a matter of fate that that government agency then went to America’s most important paper to share the details. Surely none of that was a form of retaliation against Trump, who had been saying positive things about Russia, which remains actively engaged in a yearslong war with Ukraine.
Yeah, I don’t buy that it’s a coincidence, and no one else should, either.
In the interview, Hurd suggested he wasn’t aware of any of it, saying that he couldn’t “support or dispute” the fact that a government agency in Ukraine targeted the top figure in a major presidential campaign.
To be fair, why would he be? The Times itself has tried to rewrite history to fit their new narrative that Russia and only Russia thrust itself into our last presidential election.
An article in the Times last month said that the “charges” over Ukraine’s election meddling originated with — where else? Russia.
The story said that “American intelligence officials informed senators and their aides in recent weeks that Russia had engaged in a yearslong campaign to essentially frame Ukraine as responsible for Moscow’s own hacking of the 2016 election.”
But what if Moscow is responsible for Moscow’s hacking, and Ukraine is responsible for Ukraine’s meddling? Isn’t that a possibility?
If all the business about Manafort and Ukraine is nothing more than a Russia-backed fantasy, why is Manafort in prison right now?
Ukraine did interfere in the election. It’s okay to say that without having to apologize or immediately changing the subject to Russia.
