Trump resumed his defensive tweeting tactics Friday morning as he slammed the “LameStream Media," invoked former President Barack Obama and, once again, took several social media swipes at California Representative and Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee Adam Schiff, who read aloud a “parody” of Trump's conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy at a Thursday intelligence hearing on Capitol Hill.
The US president also warned those supporting his impeachment on this issue that seeing it through would establish a dangerous precedent for future presidents seeking to have dialogue with other world leaders.
While some say Trump’s tweets concerning the investigation are signs of his own guilt, not everyone agrees that this case is as one-sided as it appears.
Aaron Maté, a journalist with The Grayzone and The Nation, joined Radio Sputnik’s Loud and Clear on Friday to discuss reports of Trump’s impending impeachment and offer a different angle at which to examine the current allegations against the president.
“The whistleblower had less information than we do now as the public, because the whistleblower did not see the transcript. The whistleblower’s complaint is based entirely on hearsay,” Maté told hosts Brian Becker and John Kiriakou.
While the isolated storage of the transcript is being lauded as a confirmation of guilt, the journalist said that what should also be taken into account is the series of leaks and other questionable activity from the US intelligence community that date back to Russiagate, one of which resulted in the release of the full transcript of the December 2016 conversation between former United States national security adviser Mike Flynn and former Russian Ambassador to the United States Sergey Kislyak.
“Trump was openly calling for improving relations with Russia, and that was seen as [an] awful thing by Ukraine at the time, as it was fighting a proxy war with Russia after the Maidan coup, which the US helped back, which overthrew [former Ukrainian President Viktor] Yanukovych,” Maté explained.
“Having a president who wanted to come in, who wanted to improve relations with Russia, that signaled to Ukrainians at the time that Trump would be … turning [his] back on them.”’
Maté added that within the narrative of Trump withholding US military aid from Ukraine exists an assumption that previous “US policy aims in Ukraine have been legitimate.” He argued that this inability to re-examine the US’ motivation for certain aid agreements leaves the door wide open for one-sided, partisan attacks.
“For many years we’ve been funding this proxy war in Ukraine which is just hopeless - it just leads to bloodshed … and there’s no effort to rethink that,” he asserted. “This also entails supporting far-right neo-Nazis who’re embedded inside the Ukrainian armed forces."