OPINION

The defense of Trump's Ukrainian phone call misses an important point, as does the whitewash of the unseemly situation with the Bidens in the country.

Robert Robb | The Republic | azcentral.com

Just the FAQs, USA TODAY

For the slender segment of the metro Phoenix electorate that is not immovably entrenched in the pro-Trump or anti-Trump camps, here are some observations:

The Republican defense of Donald Trump’s phone call, in which he asked Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate Joe Biden and his son, has become: There was no quid pro quo. Specifically, Trump didn’t explicitly make military aid to Ukraine contingent on the investigation taking place.

Arizona Rep. Andy Biggs — who has become one of Trump’s staunchest, and most effective, defenders — makes the case for the absence of any quid pro quo in a recent column for the American Greatness website.

Quid pro quo? That misses the larger point

Now, impeachment-minded Democrats have certainly asserted that there was a quid pro quo, explicit or implied. But this quid-pro-quo dispute misses the larger, and more important, point: What Trump did was wrong, and an abuse of his power as president, irrespective of whether there was a quid pro quo.

Trump did not ask that Ukraine get tougher on corruption in general. He asked that a specific investigation be conducted into Joe Biden, a political rival, and his son.

This wasn’t a request to advance the foreign policy objectives of the United States. It was to improve Trump’s odds of winning re-election in 2020.

Any doubt about that was removed by his request that Ukraine work with Rudy Giuliani in the investigation of the Bidens. Giuliani isn’t a foreign policy official representing the U.S. government. He is Trump’s personal lawyer. He was representing Trump the candidate, not Trump the president.

It is inappropriate, and an abuse of power, for a president to ask a foreign government specifically to investigate a political rival. That is what Trump asked of Zelensky privately. And he compounded it by making a similar request to China publicly.

Either way, it's an abuse of power

Hannah Gaber, USA TODAY

Such a request is inappropriate, and an abuse of power, irrespective of whether there is a quid pro quo expressly or implicitly involved. Or whether the foreign government feels pressure to conduct the investigation. Or whether the foreign government would have conducted the investigation anyway.

Now, the abuse is even greater if there was a quid pro quo, and Congress should be investigating the extent to which there was one.

But it might be looking in the wrong place regarding the military aid, although acting Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney acknowledged that it was held up, in part, over Ukrainian cooperation in a separate probe into the 2016 election. He later backtracked.

Unelected bureaucrats, unmatched power: The Trump administration's successful war against bureaucratic bullies

The quo for the Biden investigation may have been a meeting between Zelensky and Trump, which the Ukrainians wanted even more than the aid, as a signal that the U.S. still stood behind Ukraine and its new, inexperienced president.

State Department officials working on setting up such a meeting certainly believed that there was a connection. They drafted a statement announcing both a meeting and a Ukrainian investigation into Burisma Holdings, the energy company on whose board Biden’s son, Hunter, served. The Ukrainian government wisely rejected it.

But quid pro quo or no quid pro quo, what Trump did was wrong and an abuse of his position as president.

What the Bidens did was inappropriate

On the other hand, Democratic efforts to whitewash what the Bidens did in Ukraine also misses an important point.

The whitewash, repeated frequently in the traditional media, takes this kind of formulation: There is no evidence of wrongdoing by either of the Bidens.

Don't dismiss this as a conspiracy: Pursuing impeachment is unwise, but that doesn't justify dishonest defense of Trump.

It would be accurate to say that there has been no evidence of criminal violations of either U.S. or Ukrainian law by the Bidens. But that doesn’t mean that what occurred wasn’t wrong and inappropriate.

Hunter Biden was receiving, according to the Wall Street Journal, $50,000 a month to serve on the board of Burisma, at the time that his father was serving as the Obama administration’s point man for Ukraine. That included pressuring Ukraine to get tougher on corruption generally.

While it is unclear the extent to which Burisma was under investigation, there’s no question that its principal, Mykola Zlochevsky, was, from a stint in which he held government office.

In that part of the world, having a Biden on the board conveyed the message of having sway with the Obama administration. That could influence events, including the course of investigations, without either Biden doing anything directly to cause it.

Trump’s claims of corruption are irresponsible. But it was an unseemly situation that compromised the effectiveness of U.S. policy in the country.

Robert Robb is a columnist at the Arizona Republic, where this column originally appeared. Follow him on Twitter @RJRobb.

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