Ukraine: Russian collusion II

Let no one forget that high atop the list of reasons Donald Trump doesn’t deserve another term is that a duly elected House of Representatives found sufficient evidence that he committed a high crime or misdemeanor to warrant impeachment. That crime was Trump’s blatant abuse of power in attempting to shake down the Ukraine government into announcing a bogus investigation of Joe Biden heading into the 2020 election.

While Trump’s plot — which included blocking high-level U.S. officials’ visits to Ukraine and withholding congressionally authorized military support — went back months, it peaked in a July 25, 2019, phone call to Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky. Just one day after Robert Mueller testified before Congress about Trump’s corrupt interactions with Russia, Trump twisted Zelensky’s arm for a “favor” — to announce an investigation into Hunter Biden gaining a seat on the Ukraine company Burisma and to examine the bogus (Russia-pushed) theory that it was Ukraine that actually interfered in 2016.

Senate Republicans opted to ignore the evidence and acquitted Trump. But Trump’s complicity on the linked Ukraine and Russia mischief is transparent: Senate Homeland Security Committee Chairman Ron Johnson’s recent show-trial hearings to investigate Burisma’s “problematic” appointing of Hunter Biden to its board, and then-Vice President Biden’s removal of a Ukraine prosecutor, imploded when a star witness undermined the case. The committee’s purely partisan report, released Wednesday, establishes no wrongdoing by Joe Biden.

Trump’s own Treasury Department sanctioned one Johnson source, a Ukrainian lawmaker, as an “active” Russian agent. Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, who had pushed the Ukraine-Biden angle for months before Trump’s shakedown call, worked with the same lawmaker.