The NY Times has helpfully published the entire unclassified (by the president) memo of Trump's call to the Ukraine. They even highlighted certain passages they felt are important.
Here is the 3rd passage highlighted:
(S/NF) The President: I would like you to do us a favor though because our country has been through a lot and Ukraine knows a lot about it. I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine, they say Crowdstrike... I guess you have one of your wealthy people... The server, they say Ukraine has it. There are a lot of things that went on, the whole situation. I think you're surrounding yourself with some of the same people. I would like to have the Attorney General call you or your people and I would like you to get to the bottom of it
Note there is no mention of Biden anywhere in this paragraph. In fact, up to this point in the call, at least in this memo, there is no mention at all of Joe Biden or his son, Hunter.
Yet the Times, in their sidebar, interprets this section of the call thusly:
3 Mr. Trump said Attorney General William P. Barr would call the Ukrainian president about another investigation. Mr. Trump appears to be referencing an unsubstantiated conspiracy theory pushed by Rudolph W. Giuliani, the president's personal lawyer, that Ukraine had some involvement in the emails stolen from Democratic National Committee.
This is a strange redirection to a very material couple of points by the president. Trump is referring to the DNC server (Hillary Clinton had a separate server with her emails on it too, but that does not seem to be the one in question here) and to Crowdstrike, which did research for both the Democratic National Committee, first, and then the Republican National Committee. If the server did indeed wind up in war-torn Ukraine, especially back shortly after the 2016 hack (which many, including jailed Julian Assange and The Nation magazine, believe was really a leak by an insider), it would be both curious and alarming. Why hasn't the Times, or any media outlet, drawn attention to this aspect, choosing instead to frame the story about Biden and his son?
Indeed, the president does not bring up Biden until much later in the conversation:
The other thing, 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 so whatever you can do with the Attorney General would be great. Biden went around bragging that he stopped the prosecution so if you can look into it... It sounds horrible to me.
Trump clearly refers to "The other thing," meaning Joe and Hunter Biden. They are separate topics to Trump. Why are they being treated as if it was the same topic? Why is only Biden and his son fair game for news coverage, and now, impeachment proceedings?
I wrote to the NY Times Reader Center about this in the online form for that purpose. The Times states explicitly that, due to the volume of mail they receive, I should not expect an answer (it apparently doesn't matter that I've been a paid subscriber since they started charging for access nearly a decade ago). It'll be interesting to see if they cover this additional aspect in future articles. Someone should. The fate of the DNC server has been a nagging mystery ever since the investigation of it. If it is truly in the Ukraine, or even if the president had reason to think it was, it should raise a number of questions, some of which may be even more important to the future of the country than the Biden affair, if there even is one.
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