After a still-withheld complaint from a whistleblower and mounting pressure from congress to see it, president Donald Trump admitted Sunday that he asked Ukraine's new premier to "look into" Joe Biden, a likely challenger in the 2020 U.S. presidential elections. Trump did not admit to tying the release of aid money to the demand, another component of the reported complaint.
His admission about the phone call fuelled calls for Democrats to launch impeachment proceedings in Congress. Adam Schiff, a senior Democrat, said Mr Trump may have "crossed the Rubicon". Mr Schiff, the influential head of the House Intelligence Committee, had previously opposed impeachment. … It emerged last week that the Trump administration was blocking the whistleblower complaint from being handed over to Congress, despite the intelligence inspector general judging it to be "urgent".
Under US law, if a complaint is considered to be of "urgent concern", and if the inspector general considers the complaint to be "credible", then the department head is expected to share the information with Congress within seven days.
Much of the media is reporting this as a "doubts raised about Biden" story already, for some reason. The irony is that, however grossly corrupt Trump's misbehavior was or how hard it gets both-sidesed in the press, this is the best thing to happen to Biden's campaign in weeks because it shows who Trump is most afraid of.
