U.S. President-elect Donald Trump stands with former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani before their meeting at Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey, U.S., November 20, 2016. REUTERS/Mike Segar
Last updated on July 18th, 2023 at 11:33 am
A new report details a “shadow foreign policy” that Donald Trump and his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani have been orchestrating since at least the beginning of this year to get political dirt on the Biden family while boosting their own business interests.
According to The New York Times on Saturday, “Over several weeks in March, the office of Ukraine’s top prosecutor moved ahead on two investigations of intense interest to Mr. Trump. One was focused on an oligarch — previously cleared of wrongdoing by the same prosecutor — whose company employed former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s son. The other dealt with the release by a separate Ukrainian law enforcement agency to the media of information that hurt Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign.”
The report notes that these investigations didn’t happen by accident. Instead, they were the results of “remarkable behind-the-scenes campaign to gather and disseminate political dirt from a foreign country, encouraged by Mr. Trump and carried out by his personal lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani.”
In fact, Giuliani’s meetings with Ukraine’s top prosecutor, Yuriy Lutsenko, started all the way back in January, just before Lutsenko “took procedural steps to advance investigations involving the Manafort records and the oligarch linked to Hunter Biden.”
More from The Times:
Backed by Mr. Trump, Mr. Giuliani, who once aspired to be secretary of state, sought to tar Mr. Biden with unsubstantiated accusations of impropriety, while he and associates working with him in Ukraine on the president’s agenda pursued their own personal business interests.
With the political landscape scrambled by Mr. Poroshenko’s defeat in April and the arrival of a new cast of Ukrainian officials, the approach pursued by Mr. Giuliani and Mr. Trump undercut official United States diplomacy.
And the signals sent by Mr. Trump — long skeptical of the strategic value of backing Ukraine against Russia, its menacing neighbor to the east — complicated efforts by the new Ukrainian government to fortify itself against Moscow.
There is no question that Donald Trump’s phone call with the president of Ukraine – as detailed in a memo released by the White House and the explosive whistleblower complaint – was damning, but his scheme was and is much more than just one phone call.
What The New York Times report shows is that Trump was actively spearheading a foreign policy that went against the best interests of the United States.
For Trump and Giuliani, their efforts in Ukraine essentially killed two birds with one stone. If successful, they would extort a foreign power into hurting one of Trump’s political opponents back at home ahead of the 2020 election and they would boost their business interests abroad.
As the Democrats move ahead swiftly on impeachment proceedings, the reporting continues to reveal what many of us already knew about this president: He has no problem selling out the United States to boost his own political and business interests.
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