I simply haven’t seen anyone get this right, even though the facts are public record. I’m going to make only one short leap, and I’m going to explain that former President Donald Trump was part of the plan to invade Ukraine.
This goes back to the phone call that got Trump impeached. What everyone remembers is that Trump tried to extort Ukranian President Zelensky for an investigation into Joe Biden that had no foundation but would have cast doubt. And sure, Trump did that.
But it wasn’t his first request. Trump’s first request was this:
I would like you to do us a favor though because our country has been through a lot and Ukraine knows a lot about it. I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine, they say Crowdstrike… I guess you have one of your wealthy people… The server, they say Ukraine has it.
So Crowdstrike is a cybersecurity firm that provided evidence that Russian hackers were behind the DNC hack, which the FBI investigation later confirmed. There was a conspiracy theory that Crowdstrike was hiding evidence about the election on a server, and that server was hidden in Ukraine.
This theory is crazy. Crowdstrike is an American firm that both Republicans and Democrats have contracted with. It has the same Mad-libs nature of later Qanon conspiracy theories. “CIA director Gina Haspel sprained her ankle in Germany trying to hide a server that has voter fraud evidence.” “Italian satellites altered ballots for the DNC.”
By the way, where did that theory come from? Here’s Fiona Hill from the impeachment hearing:
Based on questions and statements I have heard, some of you on this committee appear to believe that Russia and its security services did not conduct a campaign against our country — and that perhaps, somehow, for some reason, Ukraine did. This is a fictional narrative that has been perpetrated and propagated by the Russian security services themselves.
So, Trump withheld $214 million in funding (illegally, the funding had been assigned by congress), and his first condition was that Ukraine open an investigation incriminating Ukraine itself.
Where was this supposed to go? After Ukraine opened the investigation, Trump was going to deny funding because there was now suspicion that Ukraine meddled in the 2016 election. I can’t prove that for a fact. I can just point to decades of financial negotiations that Trump has had with lenders, employees and federal agencies. Trump always withholds payment whenever possible.
Trump didn’t succeed, though. A group of whisteblowers testified about the call. Trump fired them and slandered them. They left government and spent the last few years being chased by death threats from Trump’s most active supporters for their substatial role in thwarting Putin’s advance.
Trump’s attorney general said that he planned to leave NATO in his second term. If he had his way, Ukraine would have lost its funding, NATO would have loast its biggest partner, the Trump administration would have continued its constant fight against sanctions against Russia. Trump would have dismissed the brave Ukranian resistance like he did our Kurdish allies he also abandoned, “They’re not angels”.
