Not true, it was a clear quid pro quo (fire the prosecutor - who was also investigating his son - or you don't get the aid). He's on video saying it. It far more egregious than what the Dems accuse Trump of.
All the factual news sources I have seen have said that the prosecutor Biden was pressuring the Ukrainian government to fire was
not investigating his son. The only ones saying that prosecutor was are right wing news sources with sketchy records with factual reporting.
Right, so we are supposed to take Biden and his son's word for it, but not Trumps? Again, being held to a double standard. If we impeach Trump for his comment (note, not actions), then we should investigate Biden and his son for their ACTIONS.
I sit on corporate boards, Hunter Biden has ZERO skillset to justify his sitting on the board of a Billion+ dollar energy company. He got that spot because of his dad, and because of the access to his dad that it affords.
In normal diplomatic missions (the way these things were done pre-Trump), nobody ever meets with any significant foreign governmental leader alone and everybody who was there files a contact report immediately after. Every member of the team with Biden would have filed a report and if there was anything at all that was sketchy, Trump's people have full access to all those records and would have trotted them out by now.
On the other hand a significant number of people who were connected with Trump's phone call have already testified to Congress. The reason the initial testimony was behind closed doors was so nobody would know the details of what any other witness said so stories could be cross checked. This is the way grand juries work. Because the DOJ, which should do this sort of investigation refused, the House had to do their job.
The details have not come out, but what has come out indicates that most of the stories correlate with one another and all are damning of Trump to some degree.
We have the presidential records of Biden's visit which have not been revealed to the public, but Trump and the DOJ have full access to them and the Trump administration is dead silent about anything because there is nothing to find. Biden did everything according to Hoyle and the silence out of Trump about facts is screaming it.
On the other hand we have a slew of witnesses who saw Trump commit crimes who have testified to Congress.
This is the way Trump always tries to distract from his scandals: make something up and blame them for it. There is not a single shred of factual evidence anyone has produced that Biden did anything illegal. We only have dribs and drabs of facts about Trump's behavior with the Ukraine and what I've seen so far is damning. And the public part of the impeachment is just about to start. We will all see the testimony of several people live on CSPAN.
I can only be blackmail if the person being held over a barrel knows they have to do something to release the funds. The Ukranians have stated they didn't know the funds were withheld. And even though Congress authorizes the funds, the law is clear: the executive branch can withhold them (for pretty much any reason) until they feel that criteria have been met to release them. Ukraine is one of the most corrupt countries in the world, holding things up for a month is a nothing-burger. Heck, most in Congress wanted it held up (at a different time - in the spring IIRC).
FYI, according to reports there have not been "recordings" of presidential phone calls since Nixon. That's why there are only transcripts available and that is why everyone is bickering about the exact wording of the transcript.
What is used today is a real time text to speech algorithm. After the call various experts who were on the call listening in go over the transcript to fix errors that the algorithm got wrong like people's names or place names for the most part. That was Alexander Vindman's job listening in on the call. He knows the names of all top Ukrainian officials and most other proper names that would have come up with the call, so he could correct a city name that shows up in the transcript as "Kevin" to "Kiev" and things like that.
Publicly the Ukrainians are trying very hard not to be drawn into the middle of an American political mess. So they are making the most innocent remarks publicly. There are reporters who have said that off the record a number of Ukrainian government officials have said they felt they were being blackmailed. But what the Ukrainians say is irrelevant compared to the evidence gathered and stored in the US with many US witnesses.
