Live Free Or Die: America (and the World) on the Brink (19 page)

On July 25, 2019, President Trump called to offer Zelensky his congratulations on this “fantastic achievement.” The call transcript shows a conversation that from the first second focused on Ukraine's biggest problem: corruption.
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Zelensky promised Trump that he was working to “drain the swamp here in our country.” He said he'd “brought in many, many new people. Not the old politicians, not the typical politicians, because we want to have a new format and a new type of government.” He thanked Trump for U.S. assistance and for making available Javelin antitank missiles.

It's in the context of this corruption discussion that Trump asked Zelensky to “do us a favor.” He explained that “our country has been through a lot,” and “Ukraine knows a lot about it.” He mentioned the cybersecurity company CrowdStrike—which first linked Russians to the 2016 DNC server hack—and wondered if Ukraine might have a missing server. Trump asked if Attorney General William Barr could call to “get to the bottom of it.” Trump was clearly talking about both Russian and Ukrainian interference in the 2016 election (he at one point references the Mueller probe) and was asking Zelensky to cooperate with the Barr-Durham investigation.

Zelensky later brought up how much he also hoped to meet with former New York mayor and Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani. Giuliani
by this time had publicly announced he was investigating the Biden-Burisma corruption. Trump mentioned that Biden “went around bragging that he stopped the prosecution” of Burisma and said “it sounds horrible to me.” Zelensky assured Trump that he was appointing a new prosecutor who would be looking into the situation.

In an interview I did with President Trump on October 21, 2019, he laid out the simple reasons for this discussion. “When you look at what's going on, and then you see all this horrible stuff… I heard Clinton was involved. I heard—they got somebody who wrote the fake dossier. Was it out of—out of Ukraine?… I would like the attorney general to find out what's going on, because you know what? We're investigating corruption,” Trump said.
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None of this was wrong or scandalous—much less impeachable. Quite the opposite—it was necessary. The president of the United States has a sworn, constitutional duty to investigate crimes. The United States has a treaty with Ukraine, just like it has treaties with allies like Australia or Great Britain. Those documents require cooperation between countries in investigations.

And then there's the Constitution, which states that the president “shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” We also have the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which makes it illegal for a U.S. person to coerce or to influence foreign officials through extortion. And we have a bribery statute, which forbids corruptly giving offers or promises of anything of value to a public official in order to influence an official act.

It was Biden who had threatened Ukraine in 2018. He threatened to withhold a billion dollars from that country unless it fired the prosecutor who was investigating his son. Does that count as a corrupt practice or bribery? Do Democrats become immune from laws by virtue of running for president? Hillary Clinton got the same special treatment over her private server and her mishandling of classified information in 2016. Trump has a very different view: that the laws should apply equally to all Americans, even elitist Democrats.

Trump's call with Zelensky was routine; the president was asking lots of other world leaders to cooperate with Barr's probe. In fact, America would never have even heard about this nonissue were it not for the infamous “whistle-blower.” Eighteen days after the Trump-Zelensky call, an unnamed CIA officer filed a complaint with the inspector general of the intelligence community, accusing Trump of abusing his power for political gain by pressuring Zelensky to investigate the Bidens and 2016 election meddling.

By September, Democrats and the media had swirled this trivial call into a full-blown “scandal,” adding even more allegations. Trump had pressured Zelensky to dig up “dirt” on a rival! Trump had threatened to withhold aid to Ukraine unless he got his demands! Trump was hiding the evidence! Quid pro quo! Extortion! Foreign interference! Impeach!

It was a classic example of the Deep State at work, another instance of the intel world getting back at Trump “six ways from Sunday.” It turns out the “whistle-blower” was never a real whistle-blower. His own complaint acknowledged he hadn't been on the call—he had no direct knowledge of the conversation—and that everything he alleged was hearsay.
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Conveniently, shortly after receiving this complaint, Michael Atkinson, the intelligence community inspector general who was later fired by Trump, secretly changed the guidance language on whistle-blower submission forms to eliminate the ban on hearsay information.
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Of course, Atkinson should not have been advancing this complaint in the first place, since it had nothing to do with intelligence and was therefore outside his jurisdiction.

It's worth underscoring: the so-called whistle-blower was not a whistle-blower at all—he was a political saboteur, a partisan Trump hater, ground zero of the Democrats' new Ukraine hoax. The inspector general had to acknowledge the non-whistle-blower had a “political bias” in favor of Trump's Democratic rivals.
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Later reporting determined he was a registered Democrat who had worked in the Obama White House alongside then–vice president Joe Biden and then–CIA
director John Brennan.
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He also hired as his attorney Mark Zaid, a prominent Trump-despising political operative who had been ranting about impeachment since Trump's first days in office. Here's a Zaid tweet from January 30, 2017, just ten days after Trump's inauguration: “#coup has started. First of many steps. #rebellion. #impeachment will follow ultimately. #lawyers.” He kept it up, fantasizing for months about removing Trump from office.

It also turned out that this hearsay whistle-blower had plotted with Schiff from the start. In an obvious preemptive leak by Schiff's team, the
New York Times
reported that “the CIA officer approached a House Intelligence aide” days before he filed his official complaint. This allowed Schiff a head start on his impeachment march. The Schiff team even gave the fake whistle-blower advice on how to prepare the complaint and get a lawyer.
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Schiff would go on to lie about this, telling MSNBC on September 17, “We have not spoken directly with the whistle-blower.”
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All these damning facts explain why Schiff abandoned his demand that the whistle-blower testify to Congress. He knew Republicans would expose the political bias, the hearsay nature of the complaint, and the ties to Schiff's office. It would have early on exposed this as the latest Democratic scheme to bring down the president.

Not that Americans ever needed to hear the wild speculations of a partisan non-whistle-blower. Within days of the media mob latching on to the complaint, the Trump White House decided to set the record straight. On September 25, it released the full, unredacted transcript of the president's call with Zelensky, allowing Americans to see for themselves the absurdity of the left's claims.

The hyperpartisans on the left were so alarmed by this transparency that their first reaction was to deny the transcript's authenticity—they argued it was only a “rough” or “reconstructed” version.
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And Schiff the next day felt compelled during a televised congressional hearing to “read” a purely fabricated, fictionalized version of the transcript, disingenuously saying it was the “essence of what the president
communicates.” This is what the biggest liar in Congress claimed the president said on the call: “We've been very good to your country, very good. No other country has done as much as we have. But you know what? I don't see much reciprocity here. I hear what you want. I have a favor that I want from you, though. And I'm going to say this only seven times, so you better listen good: I want you to make up dirt on my political opponent, understand?”
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The actual transcript was so exonerating, Schiff had to make up an entirely different version to keep his narrative.

The transcript, coupled with several other realities, blew the Democratic accusations out of the water. Ohio representative Jim Jordan made a point throughout the impeachment saga of repeating four basic facts. Those four truths were clear, irrefutable, and unchanging—and they obliterated all the Democrats' claims. Let's go through them.

Fact #1:
The transcript proved there was no “quid pro quo.” The president asks Zelensky to “do us a favor.” That's a phrase President Trump has used hundreds of times since taking office; it's how he talks. Moreover, he asks the favor for “us”—we, the people—not for him personally. Most important, at no point in the transcript does the president ever demand something in return for that “favor” or threaten to withhold anything unless he gets it. He laid out no conditions whatsoever.

Not in that call—and not in any other. In November, the White House released the full, unredacted transcript of the president's previous conversation with Zelensky—which followed Zelensky's presidential election in April 2019. The president asks for nothing, threatens nothing. He instead goes out of his way to offer: “When you're settled in and ready, I'd like to invite you to the White House.”
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The clear words of these transcripts demolished the central Democratic claim in impeachment. No quid pro quo.

Schiff, whom I like to call Corrupt Compromised Schiff, claimed he didn't need transcripts and that the administration's brief summer hold on foreign aid to Ukraine was itself evidence of extortion. But
there were many reasons for the White House to delay the aid, none of which had anything to do with requests for investigations.

Trump has never made any secret of his dislike for foreign aid. He has slowed or blocked financial assistance to many countries, demanding to know whether it is being spent wisely. Trump was hugely concerned about corruption in Ukraine and was trying to assess if Zelensky was the real deal. He was also annoyed that Europeans weren't providing their fair share of financial help to Ukraine. This was a point he made to Zelensky on the July call. Trump may well have been negotiating to get the Europeans to step up more. The Office of Management and Budget explained in December 2019 that it had temporarily paused the aid while the administration engaged in a “policy process” over Ukraine and that this was a common occurrence before aid went out the door.
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Democrats spent weeks secretly interviewing witnesses, auditioning them for later congressional hearings. Yet not one of the Deep State actors they dragged on national television could provide a shred of quid pro quo evidence. State Department official George Kent. Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman. U.S. diplomat William Taylor. Former ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch—remember these characters? Americans were forced to listen to their Trump smears for hours. But in the end, the only thing they all said that mattered was this: none had ever spoken to Trump about his Ukraine decisions. They had no knowledge of his thinking and zero evidence he'd withheld the aid in order to pressure Ukraine into doing investigations. It was all hearsay, opinion, speculation, and gossip.

Even the Democrats' supposed “bombshell” witness bombed. Democrats hyped the testimony of former European Union ambassador Gordon Sondland, who
had
spoken with Trump about Ukraine. And they were gleeful when in his opening statement he declared there
was
a quid pro quo and that “everyone was in the loop”—Schiff even paused the hearing to hold a press conference in the hallway to brag about Sondland's supposed smoking gun. But during Republican
questioning, Sondland admitted that he simply
presumed
this without evidence. Sondland was asked, “So the president never told you about any preconditions for the aid to be released?” He replied, “No.”
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Sondland admitted again and again that his nefarious beliefs about Trump's motivations were all “presumption” and “my own personal guess.” In fact, Sondland testified, Trump told him directly that he wanted “nothing” from Ukraine and specifically “no quid pro quo.”
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Fact #2:
The only other person on the call with Trump was Zelensky. And he, too, confirmed there was no pressure, no threats, and no quid pro quo. Speaking at the United Nations General Assembly in New York on September 25, Zelensky said, “We had, I think, a good phone call. It was normal. We spoke about many things. And so, I think, and you read it, that nobody pushed—pushed me.”
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In a December interview with Germany's
Der Spiegel
magazine, Zelensky again affirmed the straightforward nature of the call. “I did not speak with U.S. President Trump in those terms: you give me this, I give you that,” he said.
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Ukraine's foreign minister also rejected Democrats' impeachment theory. “I know what the conversation was about and I think there was no pressure,” Vadym Prystaiko said in September.
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And this wasn't the Zelensky administration just trying to play nice with the Trump White House after everything exploded. During his impeachment testimony, Ambassador Taylor admitted that he'd asked Zelensky about the call not long after it happened and that Zelensky had said even then that “the call was fine.”
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Fact #3:
At the time of the July call, Ukraine had no idea that aid had been withheld. It's impossible to extort or threaten a person who isn't aware there is a threat or extortion. Zelensky himself made this point in an October interview. “There was no blackmail. I had no idea the military aid was held up,” he said.
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