Why Is No One Talking About The Most Crucial Part Of Trump’s Call With Zelensky?

DNC Chairwoman, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla., speaks during a Florida delegation breakfast, Monday, July 25, 2016, in Philadelphia, during the first day of the Democratic National Convention. (AP Photo/Matt Slocum)

Impeachment mania continued to dominate the national news this week. Democrats are telling anyone who will listen, “Trump threatened to withhold aid from Ukraine unless the country would agree to investigate the Bidens. He tried to get a foreign power to dig up dirt on his political opponent. Trump is unhinged. He’s vulgar. He’s doing tremendous damage to the country.” Their rhetoric, however, has conspicuously ignored the great white elephant in the room.

None of them have mentioned the “favor” Trump had requested early in his call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. After Trump had congratulated Zelensky for his party’s victory in the parliamentary elections, Trump noted that member countries of the EU, especially Germany, were not doing enough to help Ukraine and suggested that Zelensky speak with them about it.

Then Trump abruptly changed the subject. He asked Zelensky for a favor, the only “favor” he asked for on the call. President Trump said:

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. There are a lot of things that went on, the whole situation. I think you’re surrounding yourself with some of the same people. I would like to have the Attorney General call you or your people and I would like you to get to the bottom of it. As you saw yesterday, that whole nonsense ended with a very poor performance by a man named Robert Mueller, an incompetent performance, but they say a lot of it started with Ukraine. Whatever you can do, it’s very important that you do it if that’s possible.

Clearly, this was a priority for him. Once that topic had been discussed Trump turned to the Bidens. He said:

Good because I heard you had a prosecutor who was very good and he was shut down and that’s really unfair. A lot of people are talking about that, the way they shut your very good prosecutor down and you had some very bad people involved. Mr. Giuliani is a highly respected man. He was the mayor of New York City, a great mayor, and I would like him to call you. I will ask him to call you along with the Attorney General. Rudy very much knows what’s happening and he is a very capable guy. If you could speak to him that would be great. The former ambassador from the United States, the woman, was bad news and the people she was dealing with in the Ukraine were bad news so I just want to let you know that. The other thing, 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.

One of the most intriguing parts of the Democrats’ reaction to this call was that they ignored Trump’s request for a favor to learn more about CrowdStrike, the American computer security company that performed a forensic examination on the DNC’s server after they claimed they’d been hacked. CrowdStrike determined that the server had been hacked by the Russians and issued a report stating their conclusions.

Oddly, the DNC had refused to allow the FBI or the Department of Homeland Security to conduct their own analysis of the server. The FBI was forced to accept the report from CrowdStrike.

Michael Mukasey, who served as Attorney General for the last two years of the George W. Bush administration, published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal last week. He had noticed another strange thing. On the same day Trump released the transcript of his call with Zelensky, the DOJ issued a press release which said that Trump had never spoken with Attorney General William Barr “about having Ukraine investigate anything relating to former Vice President Biden or his son or asked him to contact Ukraine on this or any other matter.” It also said Barr has had no contact with Ukraine.

In addition, the press release said:

A Department of Justice team led by U.S. Attorney John Durham is separately exploring the extent to which a number of countries, including Ukraine, played a role in the counterintelligence investigation directed at the Trump campaign during the 2016 election. While the Attorney General has yet to contact Ukraine in connection with this investigation, certain Ukrainians who are not members of the government have volunteered information to Mr. Durham, which he is evaluating.

The American Spectator’s George Parry believes the “reference to CrowdStrike indicates that the Justice Department’s investigation of the counterintelligence operation against candidate and president-elect Trump may be hot on the trail of exposing what could well be a seminal lie that the Democratic National Committee’s computer server was hacked by Russian operatives.”