Quote:
Originally Posted by Pete F.
No, very few
Ukraine got U.S. aid in 2017.
They got U.S. aid in 2018.
Then in 2019, Vice President Biden announced he was running for president, and all of a sudden President Trump held up the aid while asking Ukraine to investigate Biden.
This debunks the false argument that the president simply doesn't like foreign aid.
He gave Ukraine the aid before 2019.
He gave them the aid after getting caught.
The only difference earlier this year is that he knew he had leverage, and he used it for personal gain.
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You're assuming that he didn't have "leverage" before. If he didn't, it may well have been due to those in power not being amenable to more American interference in their affairs, and to the possibility that they were also linked to aiding the Clinton campaign against Trump. And he was dealing with a new President in 2019. A Ukrainian President who had run an anti-corruption campaign. The previous administrations had been riddled with corruption. A supposedly corrupt prosecutor had reluctantly been removed by the previous President by the quid pro quo pressure, demand, of Joe Biden. The newly appointed prosecutor, who was also known to be corrupt, stopped the investigation of Burisma, and we are supposed to assume that it was a mere co-incidence that Biden's son had unqualifiedly been hired by them with an unduly high salary. And there was no demand that the new prosecutor be fired even though he too was considered to be corrupt.
The meeting was a recognition of the new President, and it created the occasion to ask him to actually fulfill his promise to clean up the corruption in Ukraine.