You guys are all haggling back and forth on this, and the bottom line is that you like Trump, you'll assume the best of him (meaning read every ambiguity in the transcript in his favor and assume Giuliani's involvement was no big deal) and the worst of the whistleblower (meaning you'll dismiss his complaint as unverified hearsay by a political hack) and Joe Biden (that he intervened in Ukraine to protect his sleazy-*** kid).
If you don't like Trump, you'll do the reverse. You'll infer that everything in the transcript meant something worse than the literal terms of it, or you'll adopt an extremely high standard to which no one would ever hold a politician that he liked - basically that Trump shouldn't be allowed to even mention Biden to a foreign government. You'll assume that the whistleblower was a perfectly honest, well-meaning patriot with no political agenda at all. You'll assume that Biden was a totally honest guy and that he did nothing shady. His kid just happened to get a very high-paying job with a Ukrainian energy company and that his dad had nothing to do with it and didn't even know about. After all, sometimes a company just really, really needs a guy with no experience and who got shitcanned from the Navy for cocaine use, so they had to pay him $50K per month. That just the going rate for guys like that.
Here's where I am. I don't friggin' know. The transcript can be read lots of different ways - a little like the comment to James Comey about Michael Flynn. I don't see it as dispositive either way. Here's the problem for Trump. First, the transcript isn't verbatim, so if you're trying to read a lot of nuance into it in either direction, you're pulling things out of your ***. That means we can't convict or exonerate him based on it. Other extrinsic information is necessary to know what was actually happening, and yes, it's reasonable to want to discover that information.
Second, though I can accept that Biden should be looked into and don't think Trump just mentioning it or even casually saying to look into it is automatically impeachable, the actual task of looking into it is the job of the Justice Department with perhaps the involvement of the State Department if Ukrainian authorities are part of the investigation. There's no reason for Rudy Giuliani or anyone associated with the Trump campaign or Trump personally to be involved, and that sparks more suspicion for me than anything Trump said. Does that make his involvement per se inappropriate? No, but it is suspicious and definitely invites scrutiny.
As for Biden, of course his son's involvement with Ukraine stinks. Does that mean there was criminal activity? No, but it smells terribly. He didn't get hired for his experience in the Ukrainian energy industry. He got hired because his dad was Vice President of the United States. Did Biden intervene to make that happen? Very good chance that he did either directly or indirectly. Is that illegal? Nope. Ever wonder why politicians and their families always seem to get rich even though their salaries from the public aren't that high? Well, **** like this is why. It happens all the time. It makes Biden dirty, but it doesn't make him a crook.
Does that mean Biden is clean as the wind-driven snow? No. We don't have proof one way or the other, but it looks bad like Giuliani's involvement with Ukraine looks bad. Biden was VP, so he has a plausible defense, but he also had a conflict of interest, because of his kid. so he should have stayed out of it. Obama could have put the squeeze on Ukraine himself. John Kerry certainly could have done it as Secretary of State. Instead, Biden jumped into it. Was his kid on his mind when he was threatening to pull the $1B? Who the hell knows? Is it crazy to assume that he was? Not at all.
