New revelations emerged Monday that President Donald Trump asked the Australian prime minister to work with the Department of Justice to investigate Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election.
In a recent phone call, Trump requested his Australian counterpart provide assistance to Attorney General William Barr in an investigation to hold nations that fed the conspiracy theory accountable, according to The New York Times.
The call draws striking similarities to the July phone call between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Trump also asked that foreign leader to aid U.S. authorities in investigating Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election. The two-year, unlimited-resources U.S. special counsel probe ultimately found no collusion between the Russian government and the Trump campaign in the 2016 election.
The news about Trump’s outreach to Australia comes on the heels of reportsfrom the Washington Post that Barr has been privately meeting with foreign intelligence officials to seek information regarding the Justice Department’s probe into foreign peddling of the Russian conspiracy theory.
Trump has been quite public about his intent to investigate other countries for their role in promoting the Russia hoax.
Democrats and many in the media will still use the latest round of reporting as further ammunition to fuel fresh calls for the president’s impeachment centered on an anonymous whistleblower complaint about the phone call between Trump and the president of Ukraine.
Last week, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., joined the rest of her caucus to endorse impeachment proceedings against the president, announcing the official opening of an impeachment inquiry. While some Democrats have been pushing to impeach the president starting at least as soon as two weeks after Trump took office in 2017, now a majority of Democrats support attempting to remove Trump from office prior to next year’s election.
The whistleblower complaint at the heart of the current Democratic impeachment inquiry relies entirely on hearsay. Its claims have also been outright contradicted in several key areas by the declassified and unredacted transcript of the call between Trump and Zelensky released to the public.
The complaint alleges that Trump pushed for Zelensky to investigate 2020 Democratic frontrunner and former Vice President Joe Biden and his son, Hunter, for their dealings with a Ukrainian energy company. In overseeing the Obama administration’s policy towards Ukraine while vice president, Joe Biden played a role in firing the Ukrainian prosecutor investigating Burisma, a Ukrainian natural gas company on whose board Hunter sat for $50,000 a month despite no previous experience in the energy industry.
The transcript of the call however, reveals no such request from Trump to Zelensky. The American president suggested that Ukrainian officials investigate the Biden’s dealings with the Ukrainian company to weed out corruption in their own country.
