Yesterday afternoon, a major tidbit in the Trump-Ukraine story dropped. Namely, that the Ukrainian government, at the time of the phone call with President Trump, didn’t even know anything about military aid being held up. We’ll get to that in a second, but first some background.

This detail is the key factor in everything. The idea is that Ukraine knew aid was being held up and that Trump was pressuring them with the understanding that they better help him. That is the entire basis for this “scandal.” It forms the supposition that even though there was no explicit quid pro quo, that “come on, of course we know what Trump and Ukraine meant!”

In fact, that supposition formed the groundwork for a lot of “true conservatives” to rush to Twitter and suggest or support impeachment of Trump, complete with snarky tweets about how crazy it is to not see a quid pro quo in the call.

Well, this latest news blows that up to a large extent.

This confirms the whistleblower report. Again, if the Ukrainians didn’t know that Trump was threatening aid, with what, precisely was he threatening them? More importantly, why haven’t the media been focusing on this angle? (I think we know the answer.)

— Ben Shapiro (@benshapiro) September 26, 2019

Why is this important? Because you can’t have an unsaid quid pro quo if the other party isn’t even aware of the quid. It’s illogical. For Ukraine to be winking and nodding about getting aid, and for Trump to be pressuring them over the aid, the cardinal bit of knowledge for everyone would have to be that the aid was temporarily held up.

This entire thing is ridiculous on its face. The idea that we’d impeach a President based on pure assumption of what a foreign country may have interpreted never made sense. Now that we find out they didn’t even know anything? What’s left? That Trump was holding his foreign phone calls on a more secure government server? Good luck with that line when the genesis for the setup was two majors leaks of calls with Mexico and Australia.

Once again, a lot of conservatives at certain outlets got way out over their skis. I get they don’t like Trump and see every “scandal” as hope they’ll get Pence and a fresh election in 2020, but how many times does this get to happen before it’s acceptable to acknowledge their game? And to be clear, I’m not talking about Ben Shapiro, quoted above, who actually took a wait and see approach on this from beginning. A lot of other conservatives in media could learn from that tact. You don’t have to rush to buy every left-wing premise the moment it drops, especially when doing so requires rampant speculation.

The truth is, Donald Trump is not getting removed from office and he will be the nominee in 2020. It’s time some deal with that reality.

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