White House aides stood by silently for months as Trump tried to strong-arm a foreign government to dig up dirt on a political rival and help his 2020 reelection campaign.
Soon after President Trump took office nearly three years ago, he demanded to know who would serve as his Roy Cohn, the infamous bare-knuckled lawyer who had once defended him, mob bosses and gossipy celebrities in New York.
The scandal — potentially the most dangerous of Trump’s tenure —is a vivid reminder of how he has bent the White House apparatus to serve him personally, much like the gilt-edged private company in Manhattan that bears his name and served as his launchpad into politics.On Thursday, an enraged Trump lashed out at the whistleblower, at Democrats, and at the media, even as he seemed to joke about his yearning to stay at the pinnacle of power, a forever fixture in the global spotlight.
Trump urged Zelensky to investigate CrowdStrike, a California-based cybersecurity company that had worked for Democrats in 2016, and Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, whose son Hunter had served on the board of a Ukrainian energy company.According to a White House account of the call, Trump urged Zelensky several times to deal with America’s top law enforcement official, Atty. Gen. William Barr, and talk to his personal lawyer, Rudolph W.
A career foreign service officer who had urged Ukraine’s government to crack down on corruption, Marie Louise Yovanovitch was ordered home in May. Giuliani told a Ukrainian journalist that she had been “part of the efforts against the president.” Kurt Volker, the top U.S. envoy for Ukraine, and Gordon Sondland, the U.S. ambassador to the European Union, “provided advice ... about how to ‘navigate’ the demands that the president had made.”
The whistleblower wrote it wasn’t the first time the White House had used the classified network “solely for the purpose of protecting politically sensitive — rather than national security sensitive — information.”
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