Acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney didn’t admit to a quid pro quo with the Ukrainian government last week, LevinTV host Mark Levinexplained on the radio Friday night, but it wouldn’t matter if he had.
Last week on his radio program, Levin addressed a White House press conference Mulvaney held, after which the chief of staff was accused of admitting that the Trump administration engaged in a quid pro quo with Ukrainian officials.
During the briefing, Mulvaney explained that foreign aid to the Ukraine was held up over the summer in order to see if the country would commit to cooperate with an ongoing Department of Justice investigation regarding potential corruption in the 2016 election. Several in the media said that the acting chief admitted to a “quid pro quo” with Ukrainian officials, which is central to Democrats’ and the media’s Trump impeachment narrative.
But while Mulvaney, President Trump, and the president’s lawyers have since clarified Mulvaney’s initial comments and said that that’s not what happened, Levin said, it doesn’t matter if it did.
“It doesn’t matter if it did happen,” Levin said, explaining that there’s nothing wrong with leveraging the Ukrainians to participate in a Department of Justice investigation. “If the United States, the president, his top staff, his surrogates, are looking into what happened in 2016, it’s publicly known, it’s an official investigation, and they’re talking to a number of governments — Australia, Italy, others, Ukraine — it’s perfectly fine to say that ‘we need your help in looking into this.’ Doesn’t mean they’re looking into a Democrat. The word ‘Biden’ never came up. But it’s perfectly legitimate.”
Levin referred to a story from January 2017 at Politico that outlines the Ukrainian government’s efforts to boost Hilary Clinton during the 2016 election.
“Ukrainian government officials tried to help Hillary Clinton and undermine Trump by publicly questioning his fitness for office,” the story reads. “They also disseminated documents implicating a top Trump aide in corruption and suggested they were investigating the matter, only to back away after the election.”
Levin criticized the Republicans who have nonetheless begun to turn against the president after accepting Democrats’ and the media’s narrative on the matter.
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