The amount of real information about the content of the whistleblower complaint about Donald Trump remains thin, but some details are beginning to emerge. And now The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Trump did, in fact, repeatedly pressure Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky to begin an investigation into former Vice President Joe Biden and his son, Hunter. In fact, the Journal’s source said that Trump repeated this demand “about eight times.”
The “request” from Trump wasn’t just that Zelensky open an investigation and look into things. That would not have done much to help Trump, since multiple prosecutors and investigators had already looked into the dealings of the company where Hunter Biden worked and cleared it of wrongdoing. Instead, Trump told Zelensky to “work with [his personal lawyer Rudy] Giuliani,” apparently to ensure that Ukraine would adopt the upside-down version of the story that Giuliani has been telling.
In addition to at least two trips to Ukraine focused on trying to kickstart this smear against Biden, Giuliani waylaid an official from the Ukrainian prosecutor general’s office in Paris, then pressured one of Zelensky’s aides in Madrid. That second meeting came shortly before Trump’s call to the new president.
The Wall Street Journal’s source indicated that Trump did not directly mention “a provision of foreign aid” during the call. However, Trump did say that “investigations and corruption probes ... had stymied relations” between the U.S. and Ukraine. Since Trump had placed a hold on the military aid package targeted for Ukraine at that point, this would not be a difficult sentence for Zelensky to parse.
And delivering the threat in this way would be perfectly in line with the way Michael Cohen and others have described Trump’s phrasing when delivering illegal orders.