What we know … and don’t

This Ukraine matter seems com- plicated, but isn’t so much.

It’s about two vast human failings we already knew all about.

One is that Joe Biden talks too much and blows a lot of smoke. The other is that Donald Trump lacks public integrity or ethical restraint and makes everything, even our nation, about himself.

We’d be better off if neither of them was president. We’d also be better off if we had more reassuring alternatives.

The affair comes down to four questions or points:

1. Did Trump pressure the Ukrainian president to investigate Biden and his son, Hunter, in an old natural gas deal in Ukraine? Such pressure would be wrong and probably illegal.

2. Did Trump, if so pressuring, tie the release of congressionally approved military aid to Ukraine to such an investigation? That would clearly be a scandal and crime— using our government money to bribe a foreign leader to help him personally by damaging a domestic political opponent.

3. If Trump did nothing like that, as he says, then that would be largely supported by the release of the unredacted transcript of his July call to the Ukrainian president.

4. But beyond the transcript, release to Congress of a whistle-blower’s actual report alleging perhaps broader impropriety by Trump remains required by law.

It’s this way: If Congress sees the whistle-blower’s complaint and inspector general’s report on the complaint, it can set about determining whether the allegation is of a crime; but, if Congress is not allowed to see the complaint and report, then there’s no question but that there’s a broken law.

With all of that in play, this was the extraordinary sequence of events Tuesday afternoon:

First, Trump tweeted that he would authorize the release on Wednesday of the transcript of his call, which he said would prove his innocence and clear everything up.

Second, Democrats said they didn’t trust that transcript alone and that the whistle-blower’s full complaint was what they were insisting on and is required by law to be conveyed to Congress.

Third, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced House Democrats would begin an impeachment inquiry—which is not impeachment or an article thereof, but a formal probe—because Trump was flouting the law.

Fourth, the Senate announced that the national intelligence director and the inspector general would meet privately with the bipartisan membership of the Senate Intelligence Committee. That’s less than sharing the report itself, but it is interesting.

Fifth, a lawyer for the whistle-blower shared with Congress his client’s willingness to testify directly to House and Senate committees.

Sixth, the White House was said by Politico to have decided to release the whistle-blower’s complaint by the end of the week. The New York Times reported only an increment of that, which was that the White House was willing to let the whistle-blower testify as long as an arrangement could be reached by which certain intelligence secrets would be protected.

That all happened within five hours. Whether it meant the White House was boxed into a corner or anxious to be exonerated by the record was impossible to know.

One other possibility: The Trump administration wants to put out the transcript to advance a narrative of presidential innocence before letting the whistle-blower have his more damning say. That’s precisely what happened on the Mueller Report, with Attorney General William Barr whitewashing it before permitting its release.

Trump is said to believe the issue is a winner for him because it raises issues about Biden.

So what’s that all about? When Biden was vice president, his son, Hunter, went on the board of a Ukrainian gas company. Allegations were made against the company, and a prosecutor in Ukraine was looking into them. Biden, at a foreign-policy seminar in 2016, ran off at the mouth about having once told Ukrainian leaders to fire that prosecutor or they wouldn’t get any money, and about the Ukrainians obliging by the end of the day.

Assorted fact-check organizations have determined that there was no credible charge of misconduct against Hunter Biden, and that the prosecutor in question had his own failings and was going to be fired anyway.

When Trump rails about Biden corruption in Ukraine that ought to be investigated and is supposedly worse than anything that he’s accused of doing, he offers nothing substantive about the gas company or Hunter Biden. He merely is talking about Joe’s big talk.

But none of that has anything to do with a whistle-blower’s charge three years later that the sitting president of the United States called a foreign leader and wanted his possible opponent for re-election investigated by that country, maybe with American tax dollars dangled in the conversation.

Biden’s motormouth wouldn’t excuse Trump’s lawbreaking. Even a Biden crime, which has not been seriously suggested, wouldn’t excuse a Trump crime. The “what about him?” defense is playground-caliber rhetoric.

It will be healthier for the country—or less-unhealthy—if a decision on impeachment comes down to what we know from the record about what Trump said and did rather than what we don’t know because he illegally withheld information from Congress.

As of Tuesday night, it appeared we would get plenty of information, either because Democrats had smoked out Trump’s guilt or Trump was anxious to show there is nothing here. Or it could be something in between.

John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers’ Hall of Fame. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.