Writing in The Hill, John Solomon demonstrates that it is Democrats who first sought to intimidate Ukraine for their own political ends and who continue to do so.

Earlier this month, during a bipartisan meeting in Kiev, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) delivered a pointed message to Ukraine's new president, Volodymyr Zelensky.

While choosing his words carefully, Murphy made clear — by his own account — that Ukraine currently enjoyed bipartisan support for its U.S. aid but that could be jeopardized if the new president acquiesced to requests by President Trump's lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, to investigate past corruption allegations involving Americans, including former Vice President Joe Biden's family.

Murphy boasted after the meeting that he told the new Ukrainian leader that U.S. aid was his country's "most important asset" and it would be viewed as election-meddling and "disastrous for long-term U.S.-Ukraine relations" to bend to the wishes of Trump and Giuliani.

"I told Zelensky that he should not insert himself or his government into American politics. I cautioned him that complying with the demands of the President's campaign representatives to investigate a political rival of the President would gravely damage the U.S.-Ukraine relationship. There are few things that Republicans and Democrats agree on in Washington these days, and support for Ukraine is one of them," Murphy told me today, confirming what he told Ukraine's leader.

The implied message did not require an interpreter for Zelensky to understand: Investigate the Ukraine dealings of Joe Biden and his son, Hunter, and you jeopardize Democrats' support for future U.S. aid to Kiev.

As with Joe Biden's public boast to the Council on Foreign Relations that he threatened to withhold a billion dollars unless Ukraine fired prosecutor Viktor Shokin, who was investigating the company that employed his son as a board member for $50,000 a month, Democrats believe that they have immunity for the very acts they now accuse President Trump of carrying out (though there is no public evidence of any such Trump acts).

Solomon goes on to show that "since at least 2016, Democrats repeatedly have exerted pressure on Ukraine, a key U.S. ally for buffering Russia, to meddle in U.S. politics and elections."

For instance:

Nazar Kholodnytsky, Ukraine's chief anti-corruption prosecutor, told me that, soon after he returned from the Washington meeting, he saw evidence in Ukraine of political meddling in the U.S. election. That's when two top Ukrainian officials released secret evidence to the American media, smearing Manafort. 

The release of the evidence forced Manafort to step down as Trump's top campaign adviser. A Ukrainian court concluded last December that the release of the evidence amounted to an unlawful intervention in the U.S. election by Kiev's government, although that ruling has since been overturned on a technicality.

Read the whole thing.

The accusations against Trump are based on hearsay, evidence that no court in the United States would accept.

This is going to blow up in Democrats' faces even bigger than I believed yesterday.