(10-01-2019 07:57 AM)Hambone10 Wrote:  

(09-27-2019 09:29 AM)RiceLad15 Wrote:  

(09-27-2019 09:18 AM)Hambone10 Wrote:  

(09-26-2019 08:10 PM)RiceLad15 Wrote:  The second biggest thing is that this confirms Trump cares nothing about maintaining the trust of the American people - if he did, he wouldn’t have come close to personally trying to convince a foreign power to investigate anything related to a political opponent.

by political opponent, you mean someone who may have engaged in quid-pro-quo for personal gain?

That's the problem with your position... same with the Russian emails... If Biden did nothing wrong, there is nothing to investigate. if there is, what is the difference, except party... and that Trump's inquiry doesn't exist without Biden's clear (under this assumption) crime.

Are you saying asking a foreign government to help us root out crimes that involved them is wrong?

No - I'm saying Trump shouldn't be directly involved in investigative matters that involve his political opponents.

If Biden truly did something wrong, we have non-partisan ways of handling investigations. If the Justice Department felt that whatever crime Trump and Giuliani are suggesting Biden committed was credible enough and serious enough to pursue, let them investigate and keep Trump out of it.

Are you saying you're fine with the president using his power and influence to push for investigations of anyone he is interested in pursuing, regardless of its influence on our national interest?

Wow... I love how even in your snarky response, you completely misrepresent the situation. So the son of a sitting Vice-President seeming to get paid millions because his father talked a foreign government into firing a prosecutor investigating him... is somehow NOT in our national interest? That's laughable. And it's not 'anyone'. You act like this is random... you know, like Obama did with the IRS. This is specific and targeted and while not demonstrably true, there certainly exists as much evidence of THIS as there was of 'collusion'. Biden bragged about doing it. His son profited significantly.

It should be obvious that the justice department has no jurisdiction in Ukraine. Trump and the Ukrainian president were both elected on the idea of 'draining the swamp'. They spoke about it on the call. This was directly related to that.

The biggest reason you're against his involvement here is that you and 'your side' are desperate to find a smoking gun. That's all. There is nothing illegal, or at its core, immoral about one president asking another to investigate corruption between the two countries. Trump's 'involvement' seems to be 'look into this, will you'? Oh the horrors.

Especially in that you seem to be forgetting that what Biden is being accused of is functionally the same thing.... directly encouraging a foreign government to investigate/throw out a corrupt prosecutor.... with the ADDITION of getting a very large payment for his son in exchange.

The problem is the money.... the personal gain... not the request to investigate corruption.

Maybe read a bit more about the Ukrainian prosecutor and don't rely on news sources parroting the Trump line... The firing of the prosecutor made it more likely that Biden's son's company was investigated, as the fired prosecutor basically stopped looking into issues with the company prior to being pushed out at the behest of the Obama admin, via Biden.

From Rice grad and eastern-European expert Casey Michel:

Quote:Others have rightly pointed out that, in reality, Biden was not simply relaying the message pushed by the Obama administration, but that his position was supported by Ukrainian anti-corruption activists, European allies, and even groups like the International Monetary Foundation (IMF). As Tom Malinowski, former assistant secretary of state under Obama, recalled this week, “All of us working on Ukraine wanted this prosecutor gone, because he was NOT prosecuting corruption. So did the Europeans. So did the IMF. This didn't come from Joe Biden—he just delivered our message...”

That reprehensible behavior could be seen, most pertinently, in the way Shokin treated an investigation into Burisma, the company on whose board Hunter Biden sat. Launched in 2014, the investigation focused specifically on the means and machinations of Burisma’s oligarchic owner, Mykola Zlochevsky. Initially, the investigation appeared a sign of Ukraine’s new ways, of a willingness to target all and sundry, regardless of political connection.

But it quickly became apparent that Shokin had little interest in actually uprooting any corruption percolating within Burisma, or within Zlochevsky’s network. According to former members of Shokin’s staff—including one, Vitaliy Kasko, who reiterated a few months ago that Biden never pressured anyone to avoid looking into his son’s company—Shokin ignored offers of aid from foreign partners to track Zlochevsky’s international financial network. In particular, Shokin effectively ignored the U.K.’s move to freeze tens of millions of dollars allegedly attached to Zlochevsky, identified during a money-laundering investigation directly tied to the ousted Ukrainian regime...

The case was as clear as any to come out of post-2014 Ukraine. And then it collapsed. An arrest warrant for Zlochevsky lapsed. The funds were eventually unfrozen, and allowed to seep back into the offshore networks linked to Zlochevsky, unseen since. All because Shokin, and his office, thought it better to allow the previous regime’s kleptocratic methods to flood back in...

And when it came to ousting a prosecutor who refused to do his job, it didn’t matter if his son’s company—a company Hunter Biden should, obviously, never have joined—got caught in the cross-fire.

Biden, as the messenger for demanding a new, and more effective, prosecutor, succeeded. That success meant that Ukraine would be more likely to investigate his son’s company. And in that success, a conspiracy theory—that Biden was actually trying to protect his son, rather than push Ukraine to a more democratic path, no matter who got caught in the middle—was born.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/trumps-big...alls-apart