January 16, 2020

Ukraine Opens Investigations Into Ukrainegate

Nancy Pelosi seems pretty happy to be finally signing articles of impeachment against President Trump.Michael Brochstein/ZUMA

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President Trump did his best to force Ukrainian leaders to open an investigation of Joe Biden. They never did. But today, Trump finally got his investigations:

Ukrainian authorities announced a probe Thursday into possible surveillance of U.S. Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch before she was dismissed from her post by the Trump administration. The statement by Ukraine’s Interior Ministry followed the disclosure of new documents related to the impeachment case against President Trump.

….In a separate probe, Ukraine investigators said they were looking into a suspected Russian hack into computers at Ukrainian gas company Burisma, which is at the center of the impeachment inquiries….Interior Minister Arsen Avakov met Thursday with an FBI representative based in Ukraine and officially requested U.S. assistance in the two cases, according to a Ukraine government official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss ongoing investigations.

These are not the investigations Trump wanted, but hey, beggars can’t be choosers.

In related news, the inspector general for the GAO says Trump broke the law by withholding aid to Ukraine last year. “Faithful execution of the law does not permit the president to substitute his own policy priorities for those that Congress has enacted into law,” the IG wrote. “The withholding was not a programmatic delay.”

That’s a lot of shit hitting the fan on the same day that articles of impeachment were finally transmitted to the Senate. Coincidence?

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We have a considerable $390,000 gap in our online fundraising budget that we have to close by June 30. There is no wiggle room, we've already cut everything we can, and we urgently need more readers to pitch in—especially from this specific blurb you're reading right now.

We'll also be quite transparent and level-headed with you about this.

In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

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