Telling eh?
Would it tell that I don't trust the fact Biden's son sitting on the board of a Ukranian energy company making good money while Ukraine is involved in a Western backed civil war doesn't involve corruption?
What does it say about everyone who is going to bat for this sort of arrangement? Yeah sure impeach Trump too and write letters to Nancy.
You guys are some real bonafide partisans though.

Nobody is "going to bat" for Hunter's position on the company's board. But it gave the company the look it wanted and Hunter got paid for providing the company with that look. This is not uncommon. This is part of the reason companies pay so much for high profile speakers. It burnishes their image.

Was Hunter reckless with the awkward position he put his father in? Yes. But Hunter's an American and America is a free country. Hunter could do what he wanted.


PairTheBoard

btw,

Considering the threat of the U.S. withholding military aid Ukraine desperately needs to defend itself from Russian aggression, I would not trust any "dirt" on Biden Ukraine might manufacture to appease Trump.

And I certainly wouldn't trust anything coming out of Giuliani's ultra partisan mouth.


PairTheBoard

I'm trying to get to grips with your position here, this a thread about Trump's actions after all.

Is your position is that the president suspected Hunter Biden of criminal activity, and therefore his response was to reach out to Ukrainian officials and ask them to investigate under threat of removing 400 million dollars worth of military aid if they did not?

If no, it would be nice if you explain what you think Trump did.

If yes, in what universe is this the action an American president should reasonably undertake? Why didn't he delegate to American intelligence and law-enforcement agencies?

For the record, I personally don't believe for a second that he suspected anyone of anything.

This Is Not Going To End Well ...

Consider this ... If this is indeed headed down the impeachment highway, Trump is in the fight of his life. Trump being Trump, he'll put up a scorched earth defense that he will probably survive. To be convicted in the Senate and removed from office will require the votes of all the Democratic senators and approximately 20-25 Republican senators in order to obtain the 67 vote majority needed to convict. Mitt Romney and a handful of Republican senators may vote to convict, but it's doubtful enough Republican senators will join them. In a war like this, Trump will make sure any Republican senator possessing the courage and temerity to vote against him will likely be voting him or her self out of office. (I'm not even sure my senator, Democrat Doug Jones who is up for reelection in 2020, would vote to impeach. He's running in a very red [pro Trump] state.) An impeachment battle in the Senate will be ugly. It will also be a waste of time as Trump is very unlikely to be convicted. (The only impeached President to ever come close to being removed from office was Andrew Johnson in 1868 and he survived by a single vote.)

The Democrats suffer too. Assuming that the impeachment trial happens in the December-January timeframe, Trump's fate is likely decided prior to the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary. In an impeachment trial Trump's defense team will make every effort to portray the [alleged] actions of Joe Biden and his son Hunter in as negative a light as possible. (Chief Justice John Roberts, presiding over the Senate trial, will have to make a number of controversial rulings as to what is - and what is not - permissible evidence. If he allows all the "evidence" - whatever it is - to come in with respect to Biden's son and the "corrupt" Ukrainian ex-prosecutor; that cannot be good for Joe Biden.) After all the smoke clears and Trump survives his impeachment, the end result could very well be a mortally wounded Joe Biden. The end result of an impeachment trial (for the Democrats) is that Joe Biden's candidacy crashes and burns. An impeachment trial will be the political equivalent of nuclear war: Mutual Assured Destruction.

So who wins in an impeachment scenario? Could this be the first time in American history that a serious [viable] third party candidate gets elected? (Michael Bloomberg and Howard Schultz have already intimated that they may mount a serious third party candidacy if the Democrats nominate a "too liberal" socialist candidate such as Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren.) Given a three-way choice between Trump, a "socialist" Democrat, and a Bloomberg-Schultz ticket, who knows how that turns out? (If those are the choices, I would vote third party without a moments hesitation.)

If the Democrat candidate "crashes and burns" because Trump had a fit of dementia and decided to blackmail Ukraine, one of the most delicate regions in the world right now, with 400 million dollars worth of military aid to persecute the son of a political rival...

... well, then I don't think it really matters who wins the election, as the US republic is officially not only a banana republic, it is on the scale of banana republics a very, very, very stupid banana republic.

The best advice to give the upcoming generation if such a scenario unfolds is "Learn Mandarin".

I have to rely on the same reporting everyone else relies on and so if they say that that Trump dangled Ukrainian aid over the Ukrainians in exchange for opening an investigation into Biden/Burisma then the two options are either 1) take that mostly at face value or 2) doubt it.
Right now I don't have much if any reason to suspect that phone calls didn't happen
This however does not mean that Trump suspected Hunter of wrongdoing. Trump may know for a fact there is wrongdoing or alternatively know for a fact that there isn't or that there isn't going to be any to find. What the case here is I don't know.
It is not my position that Trump's actions are "reasonable". I don't even know why that's a question.
I've said repeatedly that I think what's going on here is real life corruption meets political theater. The only thing "special" about this view is that I'm not taking the mystery whistleblower at face-value. I don't believe that the whistleblower is some anti-Trump patriot in the intelligence community but rather a Trump confederate. Rather I think that the whole entire thing is manufactured but still out of true facts (e.g. true events in Ukraine and true phone calls to them).

Should be fun to see if or when you're called out for using the term "banana republic."

LA Times Op-Ed
See this is the sort of stuff that is just lol. I can be plenty gullible too. I'm not immune to it. Somebody tried to tell me the other day that the Chilton publishing company was actually Clinton and I went along with it even though deep down I knew it was wrong but didn't care enough.
But I won't ever believe that Biden traveled 12 or 13 times to Ukraine, never discussed business with Hunter, that the whole West really wanted the prosecutor gone because he wasn't doing his job properly, and that it didn't matter if the chips fell wherever. I can't ever think that.
The issue isn't that Biden was freelacing his foriegn policy it's why was his son on the board in the first place. PTB had a nice way of explaining it but it seems like hand-wringing to me. Does it make Trump trying to make it into a story acceptable? No obviously not. The media needs to do their own job.

The Flat Earth perspective on conventional science says that we can only trust that which we have personal experience with. It looks to me like you're applying a perspective something like this to news we receive from the media. All the news we receive through the media is being manipulated to energize the partisan divide. Like in Dylan's "Ballad of the Thin Man", "something is happening here but you don't know what it is
Do you, Mr. Jones?"

This would imply that "the entire thing is manufactured but still out of true facts." However, it would also imply that we can never know what those true facts are. But you seem to think you do know some of the true facts. So I don't think we can understand your position until you tell us, exactly what do you think are the true facts in this story and exactly what is being manufactured? And how do you arrive at that analysis given your view on the unreliability of media reports.


PairTheBoard

Not just to manipulate the divide. That is a big part of it but they are also pushing stories designed to narrow the divide, and frequently it's the same story that is doing both. Epstein for instance has the option of people believing all sorts of things but it also points to systemic corruption with the elite. Trump called him a great guy, hired Acosta. He's involved with Bill Clinton, royals.
This story too. Nothing is going to happen to Trump because there is enough "there there" behind the allegations that something is rotten that Republicans won't care. It points to some elite corruption. And it trashes Biden. And I've been saying that Warren would be the nominee for a long time now. She is a corporate tool but she plays anti-establishment. She's the perfect candidate for the democrats who still need to keep people in the fold.

I’m torn.

Luckbox is the Trump Administration’s two plus two mouthpiece.

The media is doing its job. You're just not reading it and instead relying on your priors. I already linked to the long investigative article on this from The Intercept (not a publication very friendly towards Biden). That article states:

The stupid thing about this story is that by the accounts I've read, the Obama administration policy was to force out Shokin because he wasn't doing enough to prosecute Burisma (along with other corrupt companies and officials). If Biden wanted to help his son, he would have been trying to protect Shokin.

I'll also say that it typically benefits US interests for other countries to be less corrupt. Corruption is typically more beneficial to domestic companies, and makes foreign investment less attractive.

No, you don't need a pause to consider if it is reasonable for an American president to turn a foreign government to investigate the son of a political rival under threat (veiled or not) of pulling back military support which they rely on.

Even in that weird parallel non-existent universe where Hunter Biden is a supervillain, the correct course of action for the American head of state is to inform his own intelligence agencies and law enforcement agencies.

What are you trying to say here? I don't see what this has to do with what I've posted.

Then I can only politely suggest that you try a bit harder.

Original Position......really now?

Ok. Maybe I see your point. That probably would not be the first course of action. I agree. It's "weird". It goes toward my argument that this is manufactured. Is that your point?

If they actually had anything and wanted to crush a political rival, they'd turn it over to American intelligence and law enforcement and leak some of it to American media.

I'll grant that this administration isn't that politically savvy, but I'm fairly sure even they would manage to figure this one out.

Yes. Look, I don't have your cynical view about politicians. Unlike you, I think Obama was both a good president and a good person. Clinton also seems to me to have been a good president, as well as George HW Bush. I also think the law and the bureaucracy constrains US political leaders so they don't just casually make important foreign policy decisions on the basis of personal venality in the way you are assuming here.

So yeah, it is possible of course that behind the scenes Joe Biden somehow did something to help his son here, but I see no evidence of this in what has been reported, nor does it seem likely to me. Merely pointing out that he had the opportunity to do so isn't persuasive to me.

I don't see Trump and Biden or Trump and the Democrats even as political rivals the way you do. They both are team mnc and a lot of what we see is theater. Democrats aren't trying to crush Trump and he isn't trying to crush them. It's just a play that is put on. That's how I can be reasonably confident that nothing will happen here. Perhaps it derails Biden’s campaign, Trump wins the election and the narrarive becomes how Trump craftfully took down Biden to face a too-left Warren that the general public wasn't ready for.

Somehow we've managed to have conversations but I don't know how. Our worldviews are so different that it will likely be impossible to ever come close to reconciling them.
We could start with George HW Bush as head of the CIA, the Bush family in general, Prescott Bush, Brown Brothers and Harriman and their connections to nazi money, Iran-Contra, 9/11 and the Bin Ladens.

Was in a rush to get that in before Biden was set to talk at 2:30