Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) repeated a fake version of the infamous 2019 Trump-Zelensky phone call in the first impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden at the House Oversight and Accountability Committee Thursday.
Raskin, the ranking minority member of the committee, claimed in his opening statement that the entire inquiry was a recapitulation of claims of corruption made by Republicans in 2019, of which he said there was no evidence.
In the process, Raskin claimed that Trump associates traveled to Ukraine to dig up dirt on Joe Biden, which he said “culminated in the infamous phone call that then-President [Donald] Trump made to Ukrainian President [Volodymyr] Zelensky, in which Trump threatened to withhold hundreds of billions of dollars in economic, strategic, and military security assistance to Ukraine unless Zelensky embraced their ridiculous fabrication and falsely advertised to the world that Ukraine was investigating Joe Biden.”
Raskin’s version of events repeats a fake version of the phone call, which Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) performed when he conducted his 2019 impeachment inquiry into Trump, and which formed the basis for Democrats’ subsequent arguments for impeaching and removing Trump.
But the transcript of the call, declassified and released by Trump, did not include any threats to withhold aid at all. Nor did it include any “quid pro quo” in which the president made aid conditional on any investigation of Biden.
In fact, Ukraine did not know that any aid had been delayed at all until reports emerged in the American media, several weeks later. Ultimately, the aid — for the following year — was delivered. Military aid was never threatened, and Trump was, in fact, the first president to deliver weapons to Ukraine — unlike Barack Obama, who declined.
Legal expert Jonathan Turley also testified, saying that while there was not enough evidence to support an impeachment of the president, he did believe that there was enough evidence to support an impeachment inquiry.
Under questioning from Democrats, he agreed that he believed it would be better for the House to approve the impeachment inquiry by a formal vote before beginning — though Democrats did not wait for one in 2019.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the new biography, Rhoda: ‘Comrade Kadalie, You Are Out of Order’. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
