Trump's Ukraine involvement goes beyond a phone call

By David Ignatius / The Washington Post

A standard theme in detective thrillers is that the perpetrator feels compelled to return to the scene of the crime. It’s an irrational urge, and readers of such potboilers are often left wondering whether the protagonist secretly wants to get caught.

Perhaps we’re living a real-life version of this fictional plot in President Trump’s alleged solicitation of political help from Ukraine, which this week spawned a full-blown impeachment probe. Republicans question whether the Ukraine events have the weight of “high crimes and misdemeanors.” But when seen as part of a pattern of behavior, the gravity becomes clearer.

Trump survived his first effort to solicit foreign political help in his appeals to Russia for damaging information about Hillary Clinton during the 2016 presidential campaign. But soon after Trump was cleared of “collusion” by special counsel Robert Mueller, he seemingly went at it again — this time demanding political dirt from Ukraine’s new president Volodymyr Zelensky as a condition of delivering military assistance to Kyiv.

Trump evidently thought he’d been exonerated, too, of obstructing Mueller’s investigation (though Mueller’s report is ambiguous on that question). Perhaps emboldened, he has since appeared to deepen his obstructive behavior, trying to block witnesses from testifying before Congress about Ukraine or any other questionable presidential and personal behavior.

https://www.heraldnet.com/opinion/ignatius-trumps-ukraine-involvement-goes-beyond-a-phone-call/