What the Press Doesn’t
Know About Ukraine
Reporters will have to ask a lot more questions to understand the missing context of the Trump call.
In his now-famous transcript, Mr. Trump mainly presses Ukraine’s new president for dirt not on the Bidens but on the known unknowns of 2016. “I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine,” he says. “There are a lot of things that went on, the whole situation.”
Yes, Mr. Trump’s musings about the Democratic National Committee’s server may be deluded, though it remains true that the FBI never directly examined the server. His next reference, however, begins “I think you’re surrounding yourself with some of the same people.” Here he may be referring to Ukrainian legislator Serhiy Leshchenko, who injected into the U.S. race a secret document on Paul Manafort’s finances that later became a major factor in the Mueller investigation. Only intermittently have outlets like Politico and the Hill ever shown interest in the alleged pro-Clinton efforts of the previous Ukrainian government. Ukraine at the time was pell-mell becoming a U.S. client. Billions in civilian and military aid were starting to flow from the Obama administration. Vice President Joe Biden was dispatched to help clean up Ukraine’s reputation and make it an acceptable partner.
This was the moment when Hunter Biden, with no relevant expertise, and last seen being booted from a short-lived career in the Navy Reserve because of a failed drug test, received a lucrative role with a Ukrainian company. Where might Mr. Trump have gotten the idea there was something fishy about this? From the U.S. media of course:
“Was Hunter Biden profiting off his dad’s work as vice president and did Joe Biden allow it?” asked an ABC News “investigation” just weeks before Mr. Trump’s call with the Ukrainian president. A lengthy account in the New Yorker quoted a 2017 divorce allegation that Hunter spent his considerable earnings on “drugs, alcohol, prostitutes, strip clubs and gifts for women with whom he has sexual relations.”
As recently as this week, the New York Times allowed only that there is “no evidence so far to support Mr. Trump’s claim that Mr. Biden improperly intervened to help his son’s business in Ukraine” (emphasis added).
And simply fraudulent are news reports insisting that Mr. Biden wasn’t influenced by his son’s presence on the Burisma board, because it’s impossible to know. Mr. Biden, instead of insisting that Ukraine’s chief prosecutor be fired, might have insisted he prove his bona fides by reopening his dormant Burisma investigation. We just can’t know. This is why the mere “appearance” of a conflict of interest is rightly considered compromising to U.S. policy (as the vice president’s own aides reportedly tried to warn him).
But all such questions now are illegitimate in a rush to paint Mr. Trump as impeachable. MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough quotes the White House transcript until its words no longer suit him and then invents his own to portray Mr. Trump as asking for information to “smear an opponent.”
The transcript says no such thing. Mr. Trump certainly has political motives, as all politicians do, but asking a foreign government what it knows about a story that fills the U.S. media (the New Yorker’s extraordinarily detailed report had appeared that very month) simply may not be the unprecedented act that some assume. (They haven’t seen transcripts of other presidents’ calls.)
OK, you aren’t shocked that much journalism is conducted not in a spirit of inquiry, but to realize the desired talking points. Everything in the Ukraine call is ignored that doesn’t fit the reductionist trope of “inviting foreign interference” in a U.S. election. I get it. Journalism is a business. The “talent” is rewarded for bringing in the desired demographic. But if we really want to restore measured discourse, let’s go back to being reliable arbiters of fact and reason, rather than producing home pages designed as clickbait for target audiences (the Washington Post is an especially ignominious showpiece in this regard).
More than anything, today’s coverage dumbifies everything it touches in our interesting country, in our interesting time.
A final point: A consensus has formed that Joe Biden will be collateral damage in the Democrats’ desired Ukraine-related impeachment spectacle, with some progressives seeing this as a feature and not a bug. Mr. Biden never struck me as presidential material but he might well be the best we can do in 2020. He doesn’t think America wants a socialist revolution. He’s old. He might decide he doesn’t care about a second term. He’d be free to enter office with a mandate from himself to govern from the middle, to work with the GOP regardless of his party’s Twitter shriekers.
That possibility, which might look pretty good a year from now, is likely disappearing fast in the media’s latest half-cocked frenzy.