Acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney’s comments to journalists last week somehow have become the moral equivalent of the Watergate break-in.
Democrats and their media sidekicks swung into a war dance as they convinced themselves that Mulvaney said, “We stopped military aid to Ukraine until they concocted enough dirt to sandbag the Biden campaign.”
While that’s what Trump haters heard, Mulvaney actually said: “Did he [the president] also mention to me in passing the corruption related to the DNC server? Absolutely. No question about that. But that’s it. And that’s why we held up the money.”
Mulvaney later clarified his off-the-cuff comment with this written statement:
“Let me be clear, there was absolutely no quid pro quo between Ukrainian military aid and any investigation into the 2016 election. The president never told me to withhold any money until the Ukrainians did anything related to the server…There never was any condition on the flow of the aid related to the matter of the DNC server.”
Democrats and liberal journalists now resemble those world-famous Chinese monkeys: See No Evil and Hear No Evil. (Their similarity to Speak No Evil is less convincing.) The Left clearly prefers that Joe and Hunter Biden’s unusual connections to Ukraine remain unscrutinized.
But what if a Ukrainian probe — especially under President Volodymyr Zelensky, who ran and won on anti-corruption promises — confirms that the Bidens are total crooks? Should Americans elect Joe Biden absent that knowledge?
Conversely, what if Kiev’s inquiry demonstrated, beyond a reasonable doubt, that the Bidens’ Ukrainian ties were even more legal than a bar exam? Should U.S. voters not know that?
And, perhaps more important, what about reports that Ukrainians hacked the Democrat National Committee’s server in 2016? What if this suspicion is not “debunked,” as the Left now insists?
Imagine that these same cybercriminals are waiting to chew their way into the DNC’s computers in, say, October 2020. Perhaps they aspire to go even further than e-thieves did three years ago and actually rig electronic voting machines during early balloting in Florida, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, and Wisconsin. Such sabotage could cripple Joe Biden’s, Elizabeth Warren’s, or Bernie Sanders’s efforts to achieve the Left’s paramount ambition: the president’s banishment to Trump Tower.
Trump haters idiotically reason that it would be better not to ask Ukrainian officials to look for these people and their malware and, if they exist, let them, in essence, vote early and often in America’s next presidential election.
But if Zelensky truly debunked this story, then everyone from Left to Right could relax and delete this from America’s long national to-do list. Is that so wrong?
What if Trump never told Zelensky by phone “I would like you to do us a favor” and review Ukrainian interference in 2016, including finding these alleged hackers? (News recordings confirm that Trump frequently and innocently asks, “Do me a favor,” much as he often says “incredible,” “beautiful,” “very special,” and “We’ll see what happens.”) If October 2020 found Kiev-based hackers gnawing like rats into U.S. election systems, the very same Leftist cobras who spit venom at Trump for seeking answers would spin 180 degrees and spew poison at him for precisely the opposite reason:
“It’s Trump’s fault,” they would hiss. “Why didn’t he ask Ukraine to help prevent this re-run of 2016? Zelensky is the puppeteer, and Trump is his loyal, colluding marionette. IMPEACH!”
For Trump haters, it makes no difference what Trump and his team say. They’re always wrong.
If Mulvaney had stood at the White House podium and presented journalists his recipes for Halloween treats, the deadly reptiles of the Old Guard media and their Democrat bosses would have slammed him — hard:
“Too orange!”
“Not orange enough!”
“Too much sugar!”
“You call this sweet?”
“Can Mulvaney even spell diabetes?”
It’s important to recall that Adam “Torquemada” Schiff’s illegitimate sham-Inquisition is built atop a Left-wing mirage: During a harrowing arm-twisting session, Trump blackmailed President Zelensky into trawling for dirt to destroy Joe Biden’s White House dreams.
This is light years from reality.
According to my inspection of the official, declassified transcript of Trump and Zelensky’s July 25 phone call, Trump spoke 294 words between telling Zelensky, “I would like you to do us a favor” and Trump’s first reference to “Biden’s son.” In between, Trump alluded to the roots of Russiagate and mentioned that fiasco’s possible Ukrainian fingerprints as well as Crowdstrike, “the server,” and Robert Mueller.
Zelensky replied at length, and then Trump talked again, citing various Ukrainians whom he called “bad news.” Trump eventually raises “Biden’s son” once and “Biden” twice. Here are Trump’s full, Biden-related remarks:
“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.”
Pressure? Quid pro quo? Both are both missing.
Trump’s tormentors also should remember this:
The DNC’s server got hacked. The eternally vigilant Republican National Committee’s computers remained unpenetrated. Thus, rather than relentlessly whine, Democrats, the Big Media, and other Leftist ingrates should thank Trump for asking Ukraine to examine the once and perhaps future hacking of the Democrats’ server and the presidential election they lost — and might lose again.
Mulvaney’s quid-pro-quo quasi mea culpa should have spanned two words:
“You’re welcome.”
Deroy Murdock is a Manhattan-based Fox News contributor and a contributing editor with National Review Online. He has been a media fellow with the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University. Read more opinions from Deroy Murdock — Click Here Now.
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