More Details Emerge in Trump-Ukraine Scandal
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We ran the numbers: There are 3008 news articles covering this topic. 35% (1039) are left leaning, 48% (1440) center, 18% (529) right leaning.
On Monday, more details began to emerge about President Trump’s dealings with Ukraine. On Friday, the Washington Post reported that, according to a whistleblower complaint, Trump had pressured the Ukraine to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter and their financial dealings in the country. Trump’s call with Ukraine was an apparent attempt to find dirt on Biden, who is a frontrunner in the race for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination. As the story continues to circulate, the left has suggested that Trump curtailed aid to Ukraine in an attempt to pressure them to investigate the Bidens, while the right insists that the Bidens’ dealings in the Ukraine were in fact corrupt. In the wake of the story, more Democrats have expressed their support for impeachment proceedings against the president and Biden has called for Trump to release the transcript of his call with Ukraine.
Right-leaning sources such as Fox News focus on the Trump camp’s reaction to the Ukraine story. A right-leaning Fox article reports that Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani has accused Kiev of laundering $3 million to Hunter Biden and excoriated then-President Barack Obama for allowing such behavior. Giuliani tweeted "If Dem party doesn’t call for an investigation of Bidens’ millions from Ukraine and billions from China, they will own it. Bidens’ made big money selling public office. How could Obama have allowed this to happen? Will Dems continue to condone and enable this kind pay-for-play?" The article also reports that Joe Biden pressured Ukraine to fire a prosecutor who was investigating Hunter Biden when he was vice president.
In contrast, a left-leaning article from the New York Times focuses on potential wrongdoing by Trump, reporting that he froze aid to Ukraine before his call with the Ukrainian president. The article reports an account from two senior administration officials who said that the president ordered his staff to freeze $391 million in aid to Ukraine in the days before his call with the country in an apparent attempt to pressure Ukraine to investigate the Bidens. The article notes that seven freshman House Democrats with military and national security experience who were previously reluctant to call for impeachment penned an op-ed in the Washington Post arguing that Trump withholding aid in this manner is an impeachable offense.
The centrist NPR published an article explaining the state of the Ukraine affair and asking “what’s next?” The next step is on Thursday, when the House Intelligence Committee will hear from acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire. Maguire may present members of the committee with a copy of the whistleblower report that ignited this drama. The article notes that the Trump camp hopes to show corruption on the part of Biden and his son, while “For Democrats, Trump's actions in the Ukraine matter have amounted to an abuse of his office made all the more flagrant since it ignored months of back-and-forth about foreign influence in U.S. elections.”