Rudy Did A Perfect Call With Ukraine, And Now You Can Hear It!

Grandpa Huffing Paint really believes this shit! Both grandpas!

When Donald Trump made his perfect call to Ukraine's president — demanding Ukraine "do us a favor though" and announce bullshit investigations into the Bidens and into fake Ukrainian interference in the 2016 election in exchange for things like a White House visit between Trump and President Volodomyr Zelenskyy as well as the military aid Ukraine desperately needed from America to fight off Russia — Zelenskyy mentioned that his people had been talking to Rudy Giuliani "just recently." Oh really ? Why ever could that have been?

Trump's call was on July 25, 2019. We learned about parts of Giuliani's call with Zelenskyy's top adviser Andrey Yermak, which happened on July 22, 2019, back in the winter, as Donald Trump's second impeachment trial for trying to get people to help steal him an election from Joe Biden was getting under way. BuzzFeed got the READ TEH TRANSCRIPT!11!11!! in April.

Now CNN has gotten the audio. 

Never-before-heard audio, obtained exclusively by CNN, shows how former President Donald Trump's longtime adviser Rudy Giuliani relentlessly pressured and coaxed the Ukrainian government in 2019 to investigate baseless conspiracies about then-candidate Joe Biden.

The audio is of a July 2019 phone call between Giuliani, US diplomat Kurt Volker, and Andriy Yermak, a senior adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky .

During the roughly 40-minute call, Giuliani repeatedly told Yermak that Zelensky should publicly announce investigations into possible corruption by Biden in Ukraine, and into claims that Ukraine meddled in the 2016 election to hurt Trump. (These separate claims are both untrue.)

"All we need from the President [Zelensky] is to say, I'm gonna put an honest prosecutor in charge, he's gonna investigate and dig up the evidence, that presently exists and is there any other evidence about involvement of the 2016 election, and then the Biden thing has to be run out," Giuliani said, according to the audio. "... Somebody in Ukraine's gotta take that seriously."

Just need an "honest prosecutor," sir! To "dig up the evidence" that is very real and not a hallucination about how Ukraine was the one that really attacked the election, for HIllary Clinton! "And then the Biden thing has to be run out."

As CNN notes, this very much debunks what Trump was yelling at the time, about NO QUID PRO QUO! NO QUID PRO QUO! YOU ARE THE QUID PRO QUO! Evidence that came out surrounding Trump's first impeachment trial for trying to get people to help him steal the election from Joe Biden showed that, as Wonkette put it at the time, it was more like Quid Pro Qu-OOOOLY SHIT! 

With the benefit of a few years of recent history, CNN was able to type this astounding summation of everything we've been covering in the news since 2019:

The call was one of the opening salvos in the years-long quest by Trump and his allies to damage Biden and subvert the 2020 election process — by soliciting foreign meddling, lying about voter fraud, attempting to overturn the results, and inciting the deadly January 6 assault on the Capitol.

Truly everything Donald Trump has done the past several years is because he's afraid of Joe Biden, terrified of losing to Joe Biden, and became humiliated to the point of no return when he eventually did lose to Joe Biden (and lost hard) .

Giuliani is currently under criminal investigation by the Southern District of New York, which he used to run, for his own dealings in Ukraine, which appear to be related to Trump's sick need to beat Biden. Far as we can tell, the disease invades everyone Trump touches. (CNN is careful to note that we do not know if this specific PERFECT CALL! is part of that investigation. We will let SDNY tell us if/when it writes out a criminal indictment. Oh, what a narrative that would be.)

Over and over, Giuliani pressed for the investigations, according to the audio recording. Giuliani even said the US-Ukraine diplomatic relationship would improve if Zelensky launched the probes. Giuliani and [Trump special envoy to Ukraine Kurt] Volker suggested during the call that a public announcement could clear the way for Zelensky's much-desired visit to the US, or for in-person meetings with Giuliani.

"That would clear the air really well," Giuliani said, according to the recording. "And I think it would make it possible for me to come and make it possible, I think, for me to talk to the President (Trump) to see what I can do about making sure that whatever misunderstandings are put aside ... I kinda think that this could be a good thing for having a much better relationship."

All the things Ukraine wanted could be theirs! They could get the support they needed from America in their war against Russia, which Ukraine did not start, support that was a given in any other administration, especially during the previous administration, when Russia decided in 2014 to invade and start stealing parts of Ukraine. Ukraine could get the White House meeting with Trump, to show America was on Ukraine's side.

Trump just needed a couple tiny things in return, like for Ukraine to help him make up a narrative that Russia wasn't the real 2016 election-meddler, Ukraine was, and to dig up fake dirt on Joe Biden to help Trump steal the 2020 election.

For Wonkette's coverage of Rudy's many adventures in Ukraine, which started long before this phone call, click HERE and HERE and HERE and HERE and ... HERE and ... oh, just Google around. We have a thousand articles on it. As CNN notes, it was a big deal that in July, Giuliani was on the phone with the closest adviser to the new president of Ukraine, and not just the pro-Russia chucklefucks and literal actual Russian spies who went to literal actual KGB spy school that he had been dealing with up to then.

What it must have been to be on the Ukrainian side of that phone call, listening to grandpa huff paint about conspiracy theories:

"I got information from a reliable investigator, international investigator, that there was a certain amount of activity in Ukraine during the 2016 election," Giuliani said to Yermak during the call, pushing the false claim that US embassy officials tried to "produce dirt on then-candidate Trump and Paul Manafort."

"Another one was involved with (George) Soros ... Soros apparently is behind a lot of this," Giuliani said, referring to the liberal billionaire philanthropist who is the subject of many GOP conspiracies.

GEORGE SOROS IS IN MY UNDERPANTS, PLZ HAAAAALP!!!!!!

Giuliani also brought up the false claim that Biden acted corruptly as vice president when he urged Zelensky's predecessor, Petro Poroshenko, to fire the country's top prosecutor in 2016. (Multiple witnesses in the impeachment inquiry testified that Biden was simply following bipartisan US policy , and that the Ukrainian prosecutor needed to go because he was corrupt.)

 Yeeeeeeeah. 

"To me, as a lawyer, it sounds like a bribe," Giuliani said. "A bribe is offering something of value in exchange for official action. So, he offered Poroshenko a $1.2 billion loan guarantee, critical to Poroshenko's success as president, in exchange for getting rid of a prosecutor general."

That's the Opposite Day story they all wanted us to believe, that's for sure.

By the end of the call, it seemed clear to Yermak what needed to happen to get on Trump's good side. "I'm sure that Zelensky will say that," Yermak said, referring to the requests from Giuliani and Volker that Zelensky should mention the investigations during his upcoming call with Trump.

"Good," Volker said.

"Believe me, Andriy, that would be good for all of us," Giuliani replied. "That would move it along very fast. And I can assure you that, as far as I'm concerned, I think they should talk this week."

Volker said, "I will press that as well," referring to getting Trump to call Zelensky.

Three days later, Trump and Zelenskyy had their perfect call, and the rest is history, and it is breathtaking history.

CNN quotes Igor Novikov, a former adviser to Zelenskyy who heard the call, who put this call in its proper context:

"We're a country fighting an active war with Russia for many years," he said. "So, anything to do with swapping favors within our bilateral relationship in exchange for trying to get us involved in US domestic politics is just wrong, on many levels, morally, ethically and probably even legally."

In related news, President Joe Biden announced yesterday that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy will be coming to visit the White House this summer. They made sure to announce this literally right before Biden travels to Europe and meets with Vladimir Putin, just after Biden finishes at the G7, which Putin got kicked out of because he started a hot war with Ukraine and stole its land.

So that's a message sent.

[ CNN ]

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