Attempting to extort one Ukrainian president may be regarded as a misfortune, Mr. Worthing..

...attempting to extort two Ukrainian presidents looks like carelessness.

David Suchet as Lady Bracknell at the Cambridge Arts Theatre, 2015.

Here's Junior:

🚨🚨🚨 We should impeach them all. That's how this works, right? Given their rules its a no brainer since there's an actual ask, unlike anything they're coming up with.

Their rules not ours! https://t.co/tHVArf1sq0

— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) September 25, 2019

Actually there's a bit more here going on here than just laughing at Junior for thinking it's a thing that you can impeach senators; something that sheds a good bit of light on the current case (of which I was reminded a day or two ago by our friend Boswood).

Not that the allegation he's retweeting is true. The letter of 4 May 2018 from Senators Menendez, Durbin, and Leahy to the Ukrainian prosecutor general Yurii Lutsenko did not ask him to "investigate Trump"; it asked him not to stop its cooperation with the Mueller investigation in its investigation of the criminal Paul Manafort, as they appeared to have done "to avoid the ire of President Trump":

The Times article is here. The military aid mentioned in the second paragraph consisted of Javelin anti-tank missiles Ukrainian forces believed they needed in defending themselves from Russian forces occupying parts of eastern Ukraine, and local officials didn't mind telling the Times that they were shutting down the investigation because they believed Trump wanted them to:

Volodymyr Ariev, a member of Parliament who is an ally of President Petro O. Poroshenko, readily acknowledged that the intention in Kiev was to put investigations into Mr. Manafort’s activities “in the long-term box.”

“In every possible way, we will avoid irritating the top American officials,” Mr. Ariev said in an interview. “We shouldn’t spoil relations with the administration.”

The Ukrainian part in the investigation involved tracing payments figuring in the tax evasion and money laundering charges against Manafort. Also,

In another move seeming to hinder Mr. Mueller’s investigation, Ukrainian law enforcement allowed a potential witness to possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia to leave for Russia, putting him out of reach for questioning.

Heh. That's our friend Konstantin Kilimnik, Manafort's flunky in Kiev, who was in constant touch with Manafort during the Trump campaign, the guy who transmitted the Trump campaign's internal polling data to Oleg Deripaska for reasons that have never quite been explained. When Manafort's chargesheet came out, and ever since, Trumpers have enjoyed taunting us with the fact that everything he's charged with is unrelated to the Trump campaign; but that doesn't mean Manafort didn't commit any crimes in the Trump campaign—it means the Mueller investigators couldn't get access to the best witness, who had escaped to Moscow, apparently with help from Ukrainian cops who turned a blind eye.

And at the end of their letter the senators asked some questions:

To which I don't know whether any answers have been provided. But now that we have a certified record of the way President Trump talks to President Poroshenko's successor, I think I can hazard a guess as to what the answers would be. Especially since Rudolph Giuliani met twice with Poroshenko in 2017, and

After being named an “informal” Cybersecurity Advisor to President Trump in January 2017, Giuliani entered into a “cybersecurity” contract with the Ukrainian government — personally enriching himself while appearing to use his position of influence to help advance Ukraine’s foreign policy goals....

According to investigative journalist Paul Wood, who famously reported on the Steele dossier in January 2017, a Ukrainian intelligence source disclosed that President Poroshenko had paid Michael Cohen a $400,000 bribe during the spring of 2017. The bribe was allegedly paid to get “face time” with President Trump on his first state visit later that June. Recently, we also learned that after more than a year of negotiation, Ukraine received its long-sought Javelin weaponry in April 2018. In turn, they reportedly ended their investigations into Paul Manafort and fully stopped cooperating with the U.S. Special Counsel’s investigation.

I think we have a pattern here, with Giuliani and Trump anxiously trying since Zelenskyy's election to renew the comfortable relationship they used to have with the old president, Javelins and all, only it's not going very well because—who would have thought?—the comedian is less corruptible than the chocolate billionaire, or whatever.

Remember the Biden story is like an afterthought in the Zelenskyy call, where the initial favor Trump asks has to do with reinforcing (1) the crazy story that the DNC emails were stolen not by Russia but by the CrowdStrike firm which is said (falsely) to be under Ukrainian ownership etc. etc., and (2) the conspiracy theory that Ukrainian prosecutors investigated Manafort in the first place because of evidence that had been fabricated in some way that involved Hillary Clinton and the DNC.

And then consider this thought:

The real villains are Biden, Clinton, whoever. Someone other than Putin and Trump.

— John Stoehr's Editorial Board (@johnastoehr) September 26, 2019

And check this, too:

.@murraywaas on Giuliani: "The Ukrainian initiative appears to have begun in service of formulating a rationale by which the president could pardon Manafort, as part of an effort to undermine the special counsel’s investigation." Wow. https://t.co/LrBOcAxgo9 @nybooks

— Josh Rogin (@joshrogin) September 26, 2019