Will Trump Be Impeached? The Ukraine Scandal Explained For Brits

So, was it Russia again?

No, not this time.

In a phone call in July with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, Trump is said to have asked for help investigating former vice president Biden and his son Hunter.

Ukraine has long been plagued by corruption, and Hunter served on the board of a Ukrainian gas company at the same time his father was leading the Obama administration’s diplomatic dealings with Kiev.

Trump appears to have believed he could implicate Hunter, and his father by association, in some of this corruption. 

Adding to the potential seriousness of the allegations, in the days before the call, Trump ordered advisers to freeze $400 million in military aid to Ukraine.

The timing of Trump’s decision to block the aid has raised suspicions that the president of the United States could have been using the millions of dollars as leverage, in order to convince a foreign power to dig up dirt on a political rival.

Trump has admitted discussing the Bidens in the July phone call but has denied pressuring Zelenskiy.

How do we know about this call?

The story blew into the open last week when news reports revealed that a whistleblower inside the US intelligence community was so alarmed by Trump’s actions that they went outside regular channels and reported it directly to the intelligence community’s inspector general, Michael Atkinson.

Trump announced on Twitter on Tuesday that he would release a transcript of his telephone call with Zelenskiy. He said the call was “totally appropriate”. On Wednesday, the White House released a summary of the call – but not a copy of the whistleblower complaint that set the ordeal in motion.

The summary shows Trump repeatedly prodded Ukraine’s new leader to work with Rudy Giuliani and the US attorney general to investigate Democratic political rival Joe Biden.

“There’s a lot of talk about Biden’s son, that Biden stopped the prosecution and a lot of people want to find out about that,” Trump told Zelenskiy.

The topic of Biden only came up during the call after Zelenskiy said his country was “ready to buy more Javelins [portable anti-tank missiles] from the United· States for defence purposes”.