Trump Says No Quid Pro Quo Because OH RATS, IT APPEARS HE'S LYING AGAIN

Oh FIDDLESTICKS, another lie bites the dust!

Donald Trump got excited this week, because he was watching the show with the Fox and the Friends, and they were giving him sweet butterfly kisses through the TV screen, and well, he had a stiffy (allegedly) because known moron GOP Rep. John Ratcliffe was on there making a BRILLIANT ARGUMENT about how Trump couldn't have done anything wrong with Ukraine. In fact, it was such a BRILLIANT ARGUMENT Trump decided to turn it into a beautiful and perfect tweet!

Neither he (Taylor) or any other witness has provided testimony that the Ukrainians were aware that military aid wa… https: //t.co/hWjKgcVDz2

— Donald J. Trump (@Donald J. Trump) 1571830336.0 

DEAD! he says, DEAD!

Because, you see, if Ukrainians didn't know we were extorting them, how could we be extorting them? Tell us that one, SHIFTY SCHIFF and NERVOUS NANCY!

As with so many dipshit Trump tweets that are wrong/lies, therein lies a confession, because here is Trump admitting that he was withholding military aid from Ukraine that Congress had already appropriated.

Of course, putting aside the fact that, despite how Republicans think they can disprove a quid pro quo ( there was a quid pro quo ), the central crime here is that Trump was hitting up a foreign country for an assist in his 2020 re-elect (NO COLLUSION! JUST LIKE LAST TIME!), it turns out that this, too, is a lie.  

Can you believe it? And if you don't believe it, we got a freshly constructed Mexican border wall in Colorado to sell you!

Because it turns out that Ukraine did indeed know, shortly after Trump's infamous July 25 crime call with President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, that the aid was being withheld. In Ambassador Bill Taylor's testimony and in the State Department texts, it appears that they found out a bit later that the aid was for sure being withheld. There's a text exchange between Ukraine special envoy Kurt Volker and Zelenskiy adviser Andrey Yermak on August 28 where Yermak is like "um we need to talk," accompanied by a Politico link that confirms Trump has the aid on hold. Bill Taylor seems to have figured it out around September 1, coinciding with Mike Pence's trip to Warsaw to meet with Zelenskiy, which Trump couldn't go on because he had to stay home and draw important dicks on hurricane maps. (#NeverForget that that shitshow was happening at the same time as this shitshow.)

But mere hours after the Trump tweet above, the New York Times   came out with a report that says yep, Ukraine knew long before then that the aid was being withheld, in early August, which means another dumbass Trump "defense" of his crimes just broke a land speed record for biting the dust.

[W]ord of the aid freeze had gotten to high-level Ukrainian officials by the first week in August, according to interviews and documents obtained by The New York Times.

The problem was not bureaucratic, the Ukrainians were told. To address it, they were advised, they should reach out to Mick Mulvaney, the acting White House chief of staff, according to the interviews and records.

"Not bureaucratic." It wasn't just Trudy in accounting at the OMB who went for a smoke break and came back and totally forgot she was doing "Ukraine aid" before her smoke break and started a new project entirely. It had to do with conversations between somebody from the Pentagon and somebody in the Ukrainian government. They were told Yermak should go to Mick Mulvaney, who, remember, had personally ordered the aid on hold by decree of Big Treason, and who was "skeptical" of Ukraine in the first place.

So, to recap, the Ukraine crime call happened July 25, and on that call, Trump said he needed a "favor though" right after Zelenskiy mentioned that he was almost ready to buy some new Javelin anti-tank missiles from the US and A. By the first week of August, the Ukrainians knew the aid was being withheld. NO QUID PRO QUO! NO QUID PRO QUO! Just kidding, here is some quid pro quo! It's notable that just a week later on August 2, Rudy Giuliani went to Madrid to meet with Andriy Yermak, to follow up on Trump's crime call about all the Biden investigations Trump wanted Ukraine to do.

And for the rest of August, Giuliani and the two of the Three Amigos who aren't Rick Perry (Gordon Sondland and Kurt Volker) -- whom Taylor referred to in his testimony as the improper "informal channel" of Ukraine foreign policy -- tried to pressure President Zelenskiy to make a statement on CNN saying that Ukraine would do fake investigations of the Bidens and Trump's pet conspiracy theories about the 2016 election. All that time, Ukraine knew.

Of course, this new Times account actually corroborates the whistleblower complaint:  

As of early August, I heard from US officials that some Ukrainian officials were aware that US aid might be in jeopardy, but I do not know how or when they learned of it.

EARLY AUGUST.

But that's not all! Because the AP followed up with another report yesterday that suggests Volodymyr Zelenskiy knew he was going to get squeezed by Trump to do sham investigations and help Trump get re-elected before Zelenskiy was even inaugurated. Here's the lede:

Volodymyr Zelenskiy gathered a small group of advisers on May 7 in Kyiv for a meeting that was supposed to be about his nation's energy needs.Instead, the group spent most of the three-hour discussion talking about how to navigate the insistence from Trump and his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani for a probe and how to avoid becoming entangled in the American elections, according to three people familiar with the details of the meeting. [...]

[T]heir accounts all show the Ukrainian president-elect was wary of Trump's push for an investigation into the former vice president and his son Hunter's business dealings.

Emphasis ours.

MAY 7! On MAY 7, Zelenskiy and his advisers knew Trump and Giuliani were breathing down their necks specifically for investigations into the BIDENS.

The AP piece is weedsy, but you should know that the folks Zelenskiy was meeting with that day included some of the same characters Rick Perry and Rudy Giuliani's indicted Chucklefucks were trying to push out of Naftogaz, Ukraine's state-owned natural gas company, so that they could be replaced with people who do corruption the way Trump and pals like it.

Totally normal.

In conclusion, Trump lied again, oh how shocking, time to impeach the motherfucker.

[ New York Times / AP ]

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