There aren't any facts that I've seen anywhere showing that either Hunter or Joe Biden did anything illegal in Ukraine. So: what 'wrongdoing', exactly? Obviously Hunter made a ton of money based on nothing else than his last name, as indeed he seems to have done for all his life, which is distasteful to most people regardless of what party they support. But when Burisma hired him, along with other high-profile names like Kwasniewski, they were deliberately making a splash and attracting international attention in order to show they were serious about ending corruption. That certainly isn't proof that Burisma wasn't involved in corruption anymore after that point, but it's still a significant enough step that you'd need serious evidence first about Burisma continuing corrupt activities afterwards, in spite of the increased international media glare they had deliberately put on themselves with these hires.

And while I don't disagree that Joe Biden would've done better to recuse himself from Ukraine policy after his son took that position, the fact remains that the ouster of that official was a shared goal of the wider international community, the EU as well as the US. It wasn't Biden who made the difference in that policy, even if he later boasted about having taken point on it.

Again, I don't particularly have a problem with the Senate declining to remove Trump from office. I have a problem with officials being able to do whatever they want, legal or not, just because they won an election and their party in the legislative doesn't have the guts to stand up to them when appropriate.

Not following you there - you're referring to local media in red states which would also attack them if they didn't vote Trump's way? Or what do you mean?

There's all sorts of ways, whether it's just paying the money directly to the end recipient instead of going through foreign governments, or making future aid dependent on various conditions about this year's aid. Though to be clear, I'm talking about foreign aid in general - not so much military aid like what was at stake here. Which in any case tends to be a gift to the donating nations' military-industrial complex as much as to the receiving nation...

Yes, there's a timetable: by the end of the fiscal year, Sep 30th. For the simple reason that after that, Congress's approval is no longer valid and needs to be done all over again. But considering the entire process, the Pentagon needed the green light a month or so earlier to make all the arrangements. In this case, since Politico released the story in late August and two weeks later the WH found itself forced to release the hold, part of the money was still paid to Ukraine before Sep 30th, but not all of it.

And again, it's not that the president has no ways of blocking such aid if he thinks it's going against his foreign policy objectives. But that requires going back to Congress and negotiating about it. If he doesn't do that and simply holds the aid until the deadline runs out without any discussion with Congress, he's acting illegally.

He was already the front-runner for the nomination last July. And see above re: 'highest profile example of corruption in Ukraine'. A high profile example of a politician's family member making big money from the family name, certainly, but corruption not so much until there's actual facts. And I'm sure Biden isn't the first American official to brag about bullying other countries into doing things, but brag as he may, it wasn't him personally who had determined that Shokin had to go.

Biden certainly did not boast of doing worse.

They did actually try and hack voting machines, as I recall. But I agree they didn't, in the end, change the actual votes cast.

538 was going by a model showing that Clinton was more likely to win than Trump, but it was close enough that a Trump victory was far from ruled out. I don't follow too many other media so I can't comment on the '& company', but if you read their forecasts properly, they were about as accurate as they reasonably could have been.

And of course the Russians didn't know it would work. If you view the Russian interference in the US elections in a broader view, considering also their interference in various elections in Europe, you'd have to conclude that the primary goal, ahead of any dreams of swaying the election one way or the other, is simply to set people against each other and delegitimize governments of all stripes. Putin may have preferred Trump over Clinton, but what he really wanted most was to turn Americans against each other, even more than they already were.

I think in the whole ultra-polarized political climate in the US, that point has kind of gotten lost, because the left finds it more convenient to spin the issue as simply 'Putin was trying to put Trump in the WH and succeeded', while the right counters by trying to cast doubt on the simple facts of the Kremlin's involvement in doubt, and to manufacture outrage about the FBI's surveillance of Papadopoulos.

You seem kind of confused about what Trump's request for investigations was about in the first place. It was about Hunter Biden and Burisma, not about the firing of Shokin or Joe Biden's role in that. The latter was in any case public knowledge and required no further investigation. And with regard to Hunter Biden, again, there wasn't any known wrongdoing, so Trump wanted to make Ukraine dig until it found some, or at least suggested that it had found some. Of course, in the meantime, Trump's own associates have actually been found guilty of crimes relating to Ukraine...

Also, unless you want to claim in the face of all known evidence that the Russian hackers were acting on their own volition without any Kremlin instructions, I have no idea what the point of your first sentence here was.

Impeachment doesn't require a crime - nor, conversely, does proof of a crime being committed force Senators to remove a president from office. It's a political judgement call, as both sides have said.

As long as he does so within the bounds set by the law, sure.

What, because Trump hasn't tried to distract from domestic problems with foreign adventures himself? But although it may be perverse, those things appear to be legal uses of the president's foreign policy powers, while this was not. Anyway, if I'm making such dire predictions, it's not because of Trump's actions in the Ukraine scandal, by themselves, which I agree aren't all that extraordinary in a wider historical view. It's because of the way he and his supporters are refusing to acknowledge any wrongdoing and rejecting the authority of any other branch of government to call him to account over it.


Again, that's not even what Trump actually asked.