You can’t have a quid pro quo without the other party being aware there’s a quid and reports indicated the Ukrainian government was unaware that aid was allegedly being withheld to pressure them to dig up dirt on Trump opponent Joe Biden. And the aid wasn’t really aid, but was additional Javelin anti-tank missiles bought and paid for by Ukraine with its own money. But as long as we are on the subject of whether or not President Trump was jeopardizing U.S. national security by withholding military aid for political purposes, consider that almost as soon as Trump took office he had restored lethal aid to Ukraine that the Obama-Biden administration had cut off.
Flash back to 2012 when President Obama promised Russian President Dmitry Medvedev at the Nuclear Security Summit in Seoul, South Korea that after his re-election he would have more “flexibility” to weaken missile defense and otherwise weaken U.S. resistance to Russian ambitions and aggressions,
In March, 2009, Hillary Clinton had presented Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov with that infamous red “reset button” to symbolize improved ties, but the gift drew smiles as the word “reset” was mistranslated into the Russian for “overcharge” Something else was lost in the translation as well, apparently, as Russian, belligerence and intransigence continued.
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s seizure of the Crimean Peninsula from Ukraine in early 2014 was the direct result of Obama’s promised flexibility. The Obama-Biden administration effectively did nothing in response. That didn’t jeopardize U.S. national security? As the Washington Examiner reported:
Following Russia’s annexation of Crimea, Putin escalated support to separatists in eastern Ukraine that resided in areas with a majority of ethnic Russians. Reserve officers in the Russian military, who also had ties to the Russian military intelligence agency known as the GRU, commanded the rebels in attacks. By June 2014, the Ukrainian military said that Russia had massed more than 40,000 troops on Ukraine’s border and deployed about 7,000 to 10,000 Russian soldiers inside Ukraine.
Again, the Obama-Biden administration did nothing in response, in fact less than nothing as it denied lethal aid Ukraine was begging for. In 2017, Trump announced plans to reverse the policy of the Obama administration, which stood by silently when Putin’s Russia annexed Crimea and attacked Ukraine, and sell the Ukrainians lethal defensive weaponry, including anti-tank missiles designed to destroy Putin’s Russian tanks in the hands of separatist rebels:
President Donald Trump is expected to announce his approval of a plan to sell anti-tank missiles to the Ukrainian government, a move that would mark a significant escalation in lethal U.S. military support for Ukrainian forces battling Russian-aligned forces in the border region, four State Department sources tell ABC News…
The sale of anti-tank missiles, which could possibly include the U.S.-made Javelin system, provoked a strong reaction from Russia on Saturday, saying it “crossed the line,” and could threaten to derail Trump’s calls for better relations with Moscow.
This hardly fit the narrative of a Trump administration in thrall to the Kremlin. If anyone had been “colluding with the Russians,” it was the Obama-Biden-Clinton administration. President Trump, unlike President Obama, was well aware that it was Russian President Vladimir Putin’s expressed the view that the demise of the Soviet Union was one of the greatest disasters of modern times. His actions in Ukraine in conjunction with massive Russian rearmament showed his desire to reassemble the old Soviet Union:
In his annual address to parliament in 2005, old KGB boss emeritus Putin made the grotesque claim that the “demise of the Soviet Union was the greatest political catastrophe of the century,” demonstrating a nostalgia for what he considers the good old days.
Isn’t it interesting how the facts keep getting in the way of a perfectly useful lie?