On Wednesday the White House released a rough readout of Donald Trump’s call with the president of Ukraine, in the hopes of proving that he had done nothing wrong, and that an “urgent” whistle-blower complaint filed on August 12 was much ado about nothing. Unfortunately for Trump, things didn’t exactly turn out that way! Instead the conversation, which was likely just one component of the complaint, clearly showed the U.S. president asking Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate Joe Biden—“I would like you to do us a favor”—and essentially tying the request to military aid that was, at the time, being “mysteriously impeded.” That the White House was fine releasing said readout suggests that the full story may be even worse, not to mention what is included in the contents of the full whistle-blower complaint.

Yet somehow, according to Trump and his biggest ally on Capitol Hill, today’s revelations actually exonerate him from any wrongdoing whatsoever. “I don’t mind the president bringing up the idea [that] maybe the guy was fired because of a conflict of interest,” Senator Lindsey Graham told reporters. “I think it’s very appropriate for the president of the United States to suggest that you’ve got a corruption problem and this prosecutor that was fired, maybe it was because he was corrupt, or maybe because he was looking at something close to America here.”

To be clear, the story that Trump and Rudy Giuliani have spun, including on the call with Zelensky, is that Joe Biden pushed to get a Ukrainian prosecutor fired because he was looking into corruption at Burisma, where Hunter Biden sat on the board for five years. It’s also entirely baseless. According to the Washington Post, the younger Biden was never accused of any wrongdoing, and, crucially, the probe had been shelved well before any action by the vice president. Then there’s the fact that “Biden’s efforts involved removing a prosecutor widely criticized by the West as failing to tackle corruption,” i.e. he wanted a tougher prosecutor in place. But Graham is unconcerned about the facts of the case, plus the minor matter of it being a colossal abuse of power for Trump to ask another country to investigate his political rival even if there were evidence of wrongdoing by Biden—which, again, there isn’t!

Meanwhile, Trump apparently believes that he’s been proven innocent because the readout didn’t show him saying, “You bring me the dirt on Biden, I give the money. No dirt, no money, capisce?”:

Trump on Wednesday sought to spin the release of a damning summary of his summer phone call with Ukraine’s leader as a win—despite having handed Democrats evidence of the alleged offense that provoked them to launch an official impeachment inquiry a day earlier.

“It’s the single greatest witch hunt in American history. Probably in history, but in American history. It’s a disgraceful thing,” Trump told reporters at a hotel ahead of meetings on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in New York. “The letter was a great letter, meaning the letter revealing the call.... It was a friendly letter. There was no pressure. The way you had that built up, that call, it was going to be the call from hell. It turned out to be a nothing call, other than a lot of people said, ‘I never knew you could be so nice.’”

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