The Republican betrayal of Ukraine

[Pete F.]

Putin's Puppet is making his payments for the last election and the Trumplicans are cosigning the note

Not so long ago, congressional Republicans strenuously opposed the Russian conquest of Crimea, saw an urgent need to help Ukraine fight back and castigated the president of the United States for withholding the military aid it needed. What ever happened to those guys?

Donald Trump’s July 25 phone call has ignited a controversy over whether he abused his office by trying to coerce the president of Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden. A whistleblower reported getting “information from multiple U.S. government officials that the president of the United States is using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country in the 2020 U.S. election.”

Trump’s effort to obtain incriminating material about Biden does not seem to concern GOP members of Congress. That isn’t surprising. What is surprising is how indifferent they are to Trump’s betrayal of a country whose territorial integrity and independence they once championed so fervently.

Since Vladimir Putin’s troops seized and annexed Crimea in 2014, fighting has gone on in eastern Ukraine between the Ukrainian military and Russian-supported separatists. The long-simmering conflict has left some 13,000 dead and put heavy pressure on the Kyiv government. On Tuesday, Ukraine and Russia reached an agreement to hold an election in the contested area, which critics in Ukraine denounced as capitulation and which may or may not lead to a peace settlement.

At the outset, Republicans pushed to provide Ukraine with the weapons it needed to fight back. Barack Obama was willing to provide an assortment of equipment and supplies but balked at delivering “lethal aid” — rifles, ammunition, mortars, grenade launchers, anti-tank missiles and the like. He was of the view that such aid would only increase the bloodshed of a war that Ukraine couldn’t win.

For his policy, Obama was pilloried on Capitol Hill. Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina said Obama was “afraid of confronting the Russians.” Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell said, “I would be sending arms to the Ukrainian army.” Sen. Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire described Obama’s refusal as “shameful.”

In 2014, when the GOP controlled the House, Speaker John Boehner invited President Petro Poroshenko to address a joint session of Congress, where he pleaded for lethal military aid. “One cannot win the war with blankets,” he said. “Even more, we cannot keep the peace with a blanket.”

Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas, who blamed Putin’s invasion on “President Obama’s trembling inaction,” was among those urging lethal aid to Kyiv. When Trump approved the shipment in 2017, Cotton praised this “break from the failed Obama era policies to make Russia pay a cost for its aggression.”

By that logic, Trump’s suspension of military aid to Ukraine (which he finally allowed in September) was a revival of Obama’s failed approached and a gift to the Kremlin. It deprived the Ukrainians of help they were expecting and put in doubt our future willingness to help.

But the heartfelt sympathy for this beleaguered country has somehow dried up. The once-fierce Cotton has gone soft, ignoring the needs of the Ukrainian military so he can obsess over bogus allegations. On Sept. 26, his office put out excerpts of his remarks in radio and TV interviews. They were all about the Bidens — with not a single expression of concern for the Ukrainians on the receiving end of Russian bombs and bullets.

If congressional Republicans were not shocked by the administration’s reversal, Ukrainians were. “It was a total surprise,” Pavlo Klimkin, who was foreign minister when word reached Kyiv in August, told The New York Times. They were also mystified. “If the United States harbored concerns about any misuse of the aid by Ukraine,” reported the Times, senior Ukrainian officials “said they had never heard about them.”

In fact, they and everyone else had heard just the opposite. The Department of Defense recently made a full examination of Ukraine’s efforts to combat corruption and other ills, and gave the government a seal of approval. In May, the department formally certified that progress. In August, a senior Pentagon official told Politico, “The department has reviewed the foreign assistance package and supports it.”

Corruption in Ukraine did not suddenly become known in July. It has been present and well-known all along. Yet GOP members (and many Democrats) favored lethal aid for its war with Russia anyway. For Trump to suddenly make it a litmus test was totally at odds with the long-standing position of most congressional Republicans.

When Obama resisted, they accused him of undermining Ukraine to appease Putin. Today, we find, they are willing to turn their backs on Ukraine to appease Trump.

Steve Chapman is a columnist and editorial writer for the Chicago Tribune. His twice-weekly column on national and international affairs, distributed by Creators Syndicate, appears in some 50 papers across the country. Chapman has been a member of the Tribune editorial board since 1981. A native Texan, he has a bachelor's degree from Harvard.

Copyright © 2019, Chicago Tribune

[Sea Dangles]

Trump 2020
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[Nebe]

Originally Posted by Sea Dangles

Trump 2020
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20 years solitary confinement/20 years parole.
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[Pete F.]

If you're a Republican who hung your hat on "no quid pro quo!", what do you do tomorrow?

The texts make 100% clear:

1. Our top diplomat in Kiev says there was an "investigation for aid" quid pro quo.

2. Everyone knew there was a "investigation for meeting" quid pro quo.
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[Pete F.]

Text messages between US diplomats and a senior Ukrainian aide released by the House Intelligence Committee show how a potential Ukrainian investigation into the 2016 election was linked to a desired meeting between Ukrainian President and President Trump
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[Sea Dangles]

🍔
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[Pete F.]

Read the texts



https://foreignaffairs.house.gov/_ca...s-10-03-19.pdf
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[Jim in CT]

Originally Posted by Pete F.

If you're a Republican who hung your hat on "no quid pro quo!", what do you do tomorrow?

The texts make 100% clear:

1. Our top diplomat in Kiev says there was an "investigation for aid" quid pro quo.

2. Everyone knew there was a "investigation for meeting" quid pro quo.
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If "quid pro quo" is wrong, how did Biden get away with doing it, and then bragging about it? Are you going to deny that Biden engaged in quid pro quo to fire the prosecutor? Would you like to see the video of his bragging about it?

[scottw]

Originally Posted by Jim in CT

If "quid pro quo" is wrong, how did Biden get away with doing it, and then bragging about it?

cuz that's just crazy ole' Joe and he's a democrap

[Jim in CT]

Originally Posted by scottw

cuz that's just crazy ole' Joe and he's a democrap

That's the funny thing here, once again Trump will get them to help him. There is zero chance Trump gets removed from office, but there's a good chance that this puts the final nail in Biden's coffin, and he likely had the best chance to beat Trump.

Trump will not only not get removed, he will be proud to say he was impeached by a Pelosi-led house, it will be a badge of honor for him and his base, and he will rightly use it to tell voters that democrats won't abide by elections that they don't win.

I don't think Liz Warren's sneering "if YOU have a business, remember that YOU didn't build the tools that got it for you, we all did" plays well in NC, FL, or OH.

Whatever she says, all any man hears is his wife shrieking, "take out the garbage!!" You can't fail to clench your butt cheeks when she's shrieking and shaking about how Mao was too conservative.

[Sea Dangles]

Originally Posted by Jim in CT

If "quid pro quo" is wrong, how did Biden get away with doing it, and then bragging about it? Are you going to deny that Biden engaged in quid pro quo to fire the prosecutor? Would you like to see the video of his bragging about it?

Don’t ask him any questions that deserve honesty or integrity. He is nothing but a bloated spin master.
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[wdmso]

Jim again claiming quid pro quo .. that never happened .he cant prove has no documents to stand behind but it happened .only in his mind.. and scott and dangles wind him up like a toy .and watching him go...to funny
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