Earlier, by Patrick J. Buchanan: Will 'Ukraine-Gate' Imperil Biden's Bid?

The transcript of President Trump’s phone call with Ukrainian President Zelensky is yet another illustration of the rule: Never ask a question you don’t know the answer to.

But on the basis of one drama queen’s overreaction to a rumor she’d heard about what was said on a phone call she didn’t hear (I'm assuming the whistleblower is Christine Blasey Ford), the Democrats have launched impeachment proceedings against the president.

I guess they figured it's easier than flying to South Dakota with picks and chisels and carving Trump into Mount Rushmore. But it will have the same effect.

Now that the transcript has been released, it’s the New York Times that doesn't want anyone to see it.

The transcript I'd like to see is the one of Nancy Pelosi reading the Trump transcript.

F@@@@@@CK! Whose f***ing idea was it to demand this goddamn transcript?

F@CK!

F@@CK!

F@@@CK!

The absolute worst version for Trump—i.e. the one being repeated non-stop on MSNBC—is that he did exactly what Obama and Biden were doing to Ukraine: intimidating an ally into giving us something in exchange for the foreign aid we were giving them.

Biden himself bragged about getting Ukraine’s prosecutor fired by threatening to withhold a big fat check from them.

The Democrats’ argument is: No, no, no! When WE were pressuring Ukraine, we were doing it for good! Don’t you understand? We’re good; they’re bad.

The other reason the media are going to have to bury this transcript is that Trump brought up a few items that the media have been hoping the public would never find out about.

Trump said: “There's a lot of talk about Biden's son, that Biden stopped the prosecution and a lot of people want to find out about that so whatever you can do with the attorney general would be great. Biden went around bragging that he stopped the prosecution, so if you can look into it ... It sounds horrible to me.”

Well, that’s something the media haven't mentioned before. Ninety-nine percent of Americans will be hearing about the funny business with Biden's son, Hunter, for the first time with the release of this transcript.

Why did Vice President Biden order the Ukrainian president to fire the prosecutor investigating the Ukrainian company paying his son millions of dollars? Are Democrats claiming that this company was clean as a whistle and it was an absolute OUTRAGE that it was being investigated?

Ukraine was looking into the company that conveniently placed Hunter Biden on its board long before Trump came on the scene. Something must have made the Ukrainian prosecutor want to investigate Biden’s company—and it sure wasn’t to curry favor with the Obama/Biden administration.

The second issue the media does not want anyone to think about is CrowdStrike.

What is CrowdStrike, you ask? That is the cybersecurity firm that is the sole source of the claim that the Russians hacked the DNC’s emails—which launched the conspiracy theories that tied our country in knots for the past three years.

The Russian collusion story was originally hatched by Hillary Clinton in the summer of 2016 to cover up the utter corruption revealed by the dump of Democratic National Committee emails on Wikileaks. As was her practice whenever a scandal threatened to engulf her, Hillary rushed out and told the press to investigate something else.

And “the great story” about the DNC email hack wasn’t about a “vast right-wing conspiracy”—as she claimed when the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke. No, this time, it was a vast Russian conspiracy!

At the time, the entire media laughed at Hillary’s Russian conspiracy nonsense—The New York Times, New York Newsday, the Los Angeles Times and so on. But then Trump won the election, and suddenly the Russia conspiracy seemed totally believable. What else could explain how Americans could put this boob in the White House?

The subsequent three years of breathless Russia coverage was based entirely on the word of one cybersecurity firm, CrowdStrike, that the DNC's emails had been hacked by Russia.

Recall that the DNC wouldn’t allow the FBI or any other U.S. government official anywhere near its computers. That’s precisely why so many cybersecurity experts doubted that it was the Russians: The FBI was never allowed to perform its own investigation.

CrowdStrike was founded by Ukrainian Dmitri Alperovitch (now an American citizen apparently—because who isn't?) and funded by the fanatically anti-Russian Ukrainian oligarch Viktor Pinchuk Foundation.

Talk about interfering with our democracy! Alperovitch and Pinchuk sent one political party and nine-tenths of the American media off on a wild goose chase into Russian collusion that, after years of accusations, investigations and embarrassing conspiracy-mongering ... turned up goose eggs.

The entire Russian insanity was launched by a couple of Ukrainians. I think a lot of us would like to get to the bottom of that.

This is why Trump said to President Zelensky: “I would like you to do us a favor though because our country has been through a lot and Ukraine knows a lot about it. I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine, they say CrowdStrike ... I guess you have one of your wealthy people ... The server, they say Ukraine has it.”

(How'd you like to be the Ukrainian translator for a Trump conversation?)

Trump has been justly criticized for hiring his daughter and son-in-law at the White House. But at least when he pressures a foreign leader for a favor, it’s to investigate corruption, not to get a prosecutor off his son’s back. Maybe Biden's son was guilty, maybe he was innocent. But it is a fact that Joe Biden held up foreign aid to a desperately needy ally in exchange for their halting prosecution that implicated his son. It's not Trump's fault that Biden is now running for president.

I'll give the Democrats this: They've gotten so good at trying to remove Trump from office that, instead of three years, their insane accusations blow up in their faces within a week.