Quote:
Originally Posted by Jim in CT
Well I'm not a lawyer, but I did hear Biden brag that he threatened to withhold monetary aid to Ukraine, unless they did what he (and the US state department, Congress, the IMF, the EU etc.) wanted. I hear a lot of people saying Trump should be impeached for essentially doing the same thing. Of course, that's after years of them saying he should be impeached just because they didn't like him, so the threshold is somewhat nebulous and flexible, for what constitutes an impeachable offense. Apparently it all depends on whose ox is getting gored.
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Not the same thing at all.
Asking a foreign country to investigate an American, when there is no domestic criminal investigation into him and no predicate is a non-starter.
We have domestic law enforcement avenues for that.
If Floridaman really wanted to root out corruption there are US government processes to do that.
State Department bureau—the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement (INL)—focused on law enforcement efforts overseas, including investigating corruption.
For 2020 the Trump administration proposed cutting the budget for this by 40%, what does that say about the concern with corruption?
Alert the Ukraine ambassador, and let him deal with it
Ambassadors can’t interfere in a corruption investigation or direct that one be opened, but they can pass information along to experts at the embassy—including INL experts and Department of Justice personnel.
Request cooperation (officially)
If there were an actual U.S. government investigation into alleged criminal activity by Americans in Ukraine, or foreigners suspected of violating U.S. laws, a request for cooperation could have been made through a formal process that’s run by DOJ’s Office of International Affairs. Once MLAT requests are vetted by the DOJ, they are transmitted to a foreign country’s “central authority”—in this case, Ukraine's Ministry of Justice. If granted in the foreign country, this arrangement could allow the DOJ to obtain documents, locate people, take testimony, request searches and seizures, freeze assets and more. If the United States were actually pursuing criminal investigations into corruption in Ukraine, U.S. officials would have made a request under our MLAT for cooperation.
So was Trump's goal to investigate corruption and as Lindsey Graham suggests he is either too incompetent or too stupid to do it correctly or was his goal to get dirt on Biden and as Putin and Orban suggested to him, prove that Ukraine, not Russia was responsible for interference in the 2016 election.
Either way he is unfit for office.