Donald Trump may have just done something far worse than his first impeachment. In fact, he went back to the scene of the crime. And there may be a phone call to prove it.
At three in the morning on Tuesday, Russian ballistic missiles started landing on Ukraine, and for the first time in a very long time, nobody in the United States warned Ukraine they were coming.
America has a system for this. U.S. satellites reportedly spot Russian launches and pass the data to Kyiv in time to switch on air defenses. This week, Ukrainian officials say, the system went dark. When they asked why, American officials told them the system had failed because of “bad weather.” The Ukrainians didn’t buy it. They told CBS News the U.S. was “playing” with the system.
The following night, something else went dark. Starshield, which is the military version of Elon Musk’s Starlink — which Ukrainian troops use to fly drones and intercept Russian attacks — was suddenly throttled without warning. Ukrainian President Zelenskyy was furious and warned that “people will die.”
Surprisingly, Musk himself pointed the finger at the White House. “Any limits on speed or usage are decided by the U.S. military and ultimately POTUS,” he wrote, referring to the President of the United States, Donald Trump. Most damningly, the White House has not denied it.
Are we to believe this was a coincidence? Missile warnings and battlefield communications all coming down at the same time? Was it all “the weather”?
Not even a fool would accept that conclusion. Look at last week, and you can surmise exactly what happened. And it may well be criminal.
On Friday, Trump spoke with Russian President Vladimir Putin, and something about that call is very suspicious. Because Trump subsequently announced a deal to buy millions of tons of Russian diesel, waiving sanctions he had signed into law a month earlier. Even GOP Senators have warned this may be an act that broke U.S. law and gave a financial gift to America’s enemy. That very same day in Florida, Trump’s envoys told Ukraine that if Kyiv didn’t stop hitting Russian oil refineries, Washington would cut off intelligence. Then on Saturday, after Russian glide bombs killed 20 people in Ukraine, Trump said the words Putin has been dreaming of him saying: “It’s time for Ukraine to get a new president.”
It doesn’t stop there. On Sunday, Trump announced an “energy ceasefire” neither side had agreed to, basically pressuring Ukraine not to attack Russian energy infrastructure (even though Russia bombed a Ukrainian power station within hours). And by Tuesday, the intelligence warnings and internet connections for Ukrainian forces had gone dark, and the missiles started flying in from Russia. Then last night, the FBI director responded to reports that he’s planning to visit Moscow to meet with the FSB, the successor to the KGB, with a gloating tweet: “From Russia, with Love…”
There are very serious questions here, with very serious implications for the Trump presidency. What did the president know, and when? What did Putin ask of Trump in that phone call? Did Donald Trump agree to give Putin a financial boost and buy his oil? Did Putin suggest it might help Trump in the midterms by lowering gas prices? Did Trump offer to weaken Ukraine’s defenses for Putin? Did Trump then personally order the Pentagon to restrict Ukraine’s satellite communications while Ukrainian cities were under attack? Did he order American agencies to sit on intelligence about incoming strikes? What, exactly, did the two men say to each other on Friday?
And here I suppose is the most glaring question: Does Donald Trump remember that he was investigated for two years over Russia, and impeached over Ukraine, on almost this exact subject? The parallels are uncanny. The first impeachment, in 2019, was about how he had withheld military support from Ukraine in order to extract a political benefit for himself in a “perfect phone call” with the Ukrainian leader. Back then, he froze foreign aid that was supposed to go to Ukraine in order to get leverage over them to help his re-election.
Seven years later, he’s evidently doing it again, but this time it’s far more serious. After a very suspicious phone call with Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump may have shut down early warning systems and battlefield communications — by literally switching them off while civilians slept in their apartments in Ukraine, in the crosshairs of Russia — in order to pressure Ukraine into a bogus “energy ceasefire” in order to herald lower gas prices before the U.S. midterm elections.
There’s a provision in the Constitution about treason, though it’s too narrow to apply directly to this situation. Yet a president who puts his allies in mortal danger with favors to an enemy and for personal benefit has essentially done what treason describes. And impeachment doesn’t require a statute. Indeed, the words “high crimes and misdemeanors” were written to allow Congress to impeach a president for abuses of the public trust, and there’s no clearer abuse than a commander in chief using American intelligence as leverage against the people it was built to protect, on behalf of the dictator trying to kill them.
Vladimir Putin is unleashing hell on Ukraine, and the question our country must confront is whether the leader of the United States lowered the shield so that Putin could carry out murder and so that he could secure some political wins. In 2017, it took a special counsel to find out what Trump and Russia were doing together. In 2026, it might get blown open over an alleged lie about a weather report.
The collusion is real. While the FBI won’t do anything about it, Congress should reopen the Russia investigation. This time, they may have a smoking gun.
Your friend, in defiance,
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