In case you missed it, the latest episode of Daily Wire Backstage, Ukraine in the Membrane is here. Find out if Trump and Biden can survive their Ukraine scandals, how the 2020 election is shaping up, and much, much more.
00:03:59.680Well, there was, and this is the only source I have to go on is the president. The most perfect phone call that ever occurred since Alexander Graham Bell was born. And that was between the president of Ukraine and the president of the United States, Donald Trump.
00:04:16.660This we'd heard for a week now through media leaks and reports. This was it. This was the end of the game for Donald Trump. It was all over. They were going to start an impeachment inquiry for it.
00:04:27.860President Trump, in a rare move, releases the transcript of the phone call, which raises a whole slew of other questions. So now we can read the transcript. We've got it today.
00:04:35.900It doesn't matter. The Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, has officially, formally declared an impeachment inquiry. And nobody really knows what that means. You know, when she's formal, she's...
00:04:46.940It's like Michael Scott's declaring bankruptcy.
00:05:17.640And the chyron for the entire hour that I was in my favorite breakfast restaurant said,
00:05:24.160Transcript reveals president pushed Ukraine to investigate Biden.
00:05:28.140And I thought, imagine back to the days of yesteryear when you had men like Walter Cronkite or Tom Brokaw or Peter Jennings flying the big desks, right?
00:05:40.040And I'm almost positive that at that time the chyron would have said, transcript reveals president asked Ukraine to investigate Biden.
00:05:48.640But the word asked, which is neutral and accurate, has been replaced in today's journalism with pushed, which is editorializing, right?
00:06:09.020The backstory to the backstory there is, of course, that President Trump is very concerned with the Joe Biden, Hunter Biden allegations circa 2016,
00:06:17.600in which Hunter Biden was working for a company called Burisma on the basis of his long history of being completely useless over the course of his life and being Joe Biden's son.
00:07:12.540And Viktor Shokin is widely believed to be corrupt by the EU, by the IMF, by the Obama administration.
00:07:18.440And he's investigating Burisma and then maybe not investigating Burisma.
00:07:21.840At a certain point, Joe Biden openly threatens, and talks about this, openly threatens to withdraw $1 billion in American loan guarantees unless Shokin is ousted.
00:07:30.360Now, people on the right make the connection, okay, maybe the reason why he's doing that is because Shokin was investigating Burisma.
00:07:36.240And the media basically said, no, no, no, no, no, it's not about that.
00:07:39.200He just, everybody wanted him out and Biden was in charge.
00:07:41.540Regardless of whether there was an actual corrupt nexus here, it's obviously a conflict of interest.
00:07:46.880I mean, there's no way that Biden should have been leading that up.
00:07:49.200Anyway, so Trump wants an investigation into that.
00:07:51.180The allegation, again, Joe Biden was leveraging American taxpayer dollars for his own personal benefit.
00:07:56.140And he does this, allegedly, by leveraging American taxpayer dollars for his own personal benefit.
00:08:02.120So the allegation is by the Democrats and by the media that President Trump withheld $400 million in Ukrainian aid in order to force them to investigate his chief political rival at this point, Joe Biden.
00:08:13.860Because there was no money going to the Cherokee tribe to investigate Elizabeth Warren.
00:08:18.300Because we've broken every treaty we have.
00:08:35.320I don't know if that was monthly or quarterly, but they were receiving it regularly for the first couple of years of the Trump administration.
00:08:40.140So that, in and of itself, was a change, right?
00:08:42.700So the Obama administration had not provided this sort of aid to Ukraine.
00:08:46.300They had just been giving them MREs, basically.
00:08:49.060And Ukraine was like, well, we need some weapons to fight off the Russian insurgents who are trying to murder us.
00:08:56.540Now we're providing them with javelin missiles, for example.
00:08:58.400And in July, mid-July, so here, I'm going to give you the Democrats' point of view, and then we can start working on debunking it or talking about what's wrong with it or where it's lacking.
00:09:07.100So I want to build up the strongest case for the Democrats, and then we can talk about the transcript and all of that, because we still like being honest.
00:09:16.820So in any case, the basic timeline is this.
00:09:21.600In mid-July, President Trump tells the head of the Office of Management and Budget, personally, apparently, Mick Mulvaney, he wants to stop the aid to Ukraine.
00:09:29.760A week later, he has this phone call with Zelensky, and that's what this transcript is that we're going to go through.
00:09:34.000A few weeks after that, he still has not opened up aid to Ukraine, and people are starting to ask questions, like, why the hell are we not providing the aid to Ukraine?
00:09:41.100In the beginning of September, you have the Washington Post runs a story September 5th about Ukraine aid being held up.
00:09:48.140September 9th, there is this whistleblower complaint.
00:09:50.400So somebody in the intelligence community files a whistleblower complaint with the inspector general of the intelligence community, saying that something untoward has gone on.
00:10:01.600But the notice goes to the inspector general.
00:10:04.020The inspector general says, yes, this is urgent, which means it has to now be reported to Congress.
00:10:07.280The director of national intelligence steps in and says, well, whatever the content is, it doesn't fulfill the statutory requirements of urgent, so it can't be turned over.
00:10:15.900So September 9th is when Congress finds out that this thing even exists.
00:10:19.480Two days later, Trump releases the aid.
00:10:21.460So the Democratic case is he was holding up the aid because he wanted to leverage the Ukrainians.
00:10:25.980And then as soon as it became public, he let the aid go because he didn't want the blowback.
00:10:30.360And the second part of their case is Rudy Giuliani, the president's personal attorney, has been spending the last two years basically going in and out of Ukraine, investigating this Biden stuff.
00:10:39.220And then Rudy being literally the worst spokesperson for anyone in the history of mankind.
00:10:44.860I mean, this guy makes Sean Spicer look like Jay Carney.