An Overview of the Recent U.S.-Ukraine Timeline

For those who don’t have time to dig in and digest the avalanche of news in the past week, in this post I will attempt to highlight only the high-level key points you need to know, based only on public statements (no
unnamed source accounts are necessary). To take some of the emotion out of it, let’s imagine that this is a fictitious President of the US (I’ll call him POTUS), a Potential Opponent (PO), the President’s personal Lawyer (the Lawyer), and the Vice President (VP).

-Our elected representatives in Congress have allocated millions of
dollars in aid for Ukraine, as that country fights Russia (in 2019,
the amount budgeted was $250 million). These are our tax dollars being
used to protect what Congress feels is our national interest. Ukraine
is desperate for this money, as most believe it’s helping stave off a
full Russian invasion.

-In the spring, the US media began reporting that the Lawyer was
pressuring Ukraine to investigate PO’s son, and whether the PO did
anything improper when he was VP. The Lawyer publicly stated he was
going to Ukraine, and said: “I’m going to make sure that nothing
scuttles the investigation that I want.”

-A member of Ukraine’s parliament, who is an ally of its president,
publicly said the country was being pulled into a “dangerous game.”

-POTUS’ Lawyer then cancelled the trip, saying “the president [of
Ukraine] is surrounded by people who’re enemies of POTUS.”

-On July 25, POTUS had a call with the president of Ukraine.

-Seemingly out of the blue, POTUS publicly ordered a
review of Ukraine’s funding, thereby slowing it down/putting it on
hold. Congress, including usually loyal members of POTUS’ own party,
was unhappy about this.

On 9/1- the VP of the US met in person with the president of Ukraine.

On 9/2- the VP was asked at a news conference “can you assure Ukraine
that the hold-up of money has absolutely nothing to do with efforts,
including by The Lawyer, to try to dig up dirt on the PO family?” To
which he responded that he and the Ukrainian president did not talk
about PO specifically, but that “we discussed America’s support for
Ukraine and the upcoming decision the President will make on the
latest tranche of financial support in great detail.”

-Meanwhile, a whistleblower filed a secret report with the Inspector
General (IG) of the Intelligence Community. As promised, I won’t go
into what’s been reported about what it said, but we do know that the
POTUS-appointed IG felt it met the “urgent” and “credible” standard
and forwarded it to the Acting Director of Intelligence. There’s a lot
that happened in this 2–3 week timeframe that can be seen as
disturbing, but we actually don’t even need to focus on all of it.
Only this:

-On Sept 9, members of the House became aware, and three House
committees opened public investigations.

-Two days later the White House announced it was relinquishing its
hold on the $250 million in military aid to Ukraine. And then the next
day, the president of Ukraine publicly stated they were being given
an extra $140 million — on top of the $250M that had been allocated by
the US Congress.

-On 9/19, in a press interview the Lawyer states (clearly) that he has
been asking Ukraine to investigate the PO and his son.

-Yesterday (9/23), the POTUS mentioned the money for the first time,
saying “why would you give money to a country that you think is
corrupt?”

So, let’s say just for argument’s sake that our fictitious PO and his
son are completely crooked — it’s my argument that this actually
doesn’t even matter. People are trying to get us to argue about that,
but it’s actually beside the point. If POTUS was truly worried about
“corruption” in Ukraine, why would he wait until our election season
starts to withhold funds, when we’ve been sending them money for
years? And why the extra $140 million payment now?

Even if you generally support the current president, we need to think about the fact he won’t be in office forever — what does it mean for the future if we collectively decide this is ok?

This was written on Spetember 24, 2019, at 3:00 p.m.