Fox “straight news” anchor suggests entire Ukraine bribery scandal is just “Trump being Trump”
Martha MacCallum: “Is it the president pushing for a little bit more before he gets anything out of this Ukraine relationship? ... He has sought to create, you know, bilateral relationships with every single country”
Published
Citation From the November 13, 2019, edition of Fox News' Fox News Reporting
MARTHA MACCALLUM (FOX NEWS ANCHOR): One of the big takeaways today is going to be the question that's still out there, and how do Americans respond to what they saw today. Does it convince them one way or the other that this offense is impeachable? I think one of the things that comes through pretty clearly here is that if these witnesses are to be believed and the accounts that they present are to be believed, that it was obviously very important to the president that the Ukrainians promise that they would do these investigations and that they would investigate Joe Biden as well as part of that arrangement.
Now, the question that comes out of that is, is that, you know, Trump being Trump, so to speak? Is it the president pushing for a little bit more before he gets anything out of this Ukraine relationship? We know that from the very beginning of the Trump presidency he has sought to create, you know, bilateral relationships with every single country. And he has sort of started from square one at every opportunity, whether it be with trade, or whether it be with North Korea, or whether it be with Ukraine. He started really with a clean slate, and this was the new opportunity to do that with Ukraine. It also, I think, bears remembering that this phone call happened the day after the Mueller investigation ended with a big thud. And it is still clearly in this phone call transcript, which we all have -- you know, is very clear to everyone that the president wanted to continue to hammer home that it was not Russia that had caused this -- that had been behind all of this, and that he was elected free and clear without the meddling of any country, and that he wanted to press this idea that Ukraine needed to be looked into with regard to this. And that, unfortunately, has hung him up where we are today.