In 2016, Donald Trump conspired with a foreign government to become President of the United States.

 On July 25, 2019, with the 2020 election around the corner, he decided to do it again.

The first time around, it was collusion, aiding and abetting Russia’s attack on American democracy. This time, it was extortion, demanding the Ukrainian government manufacture dirt on Trump’s political opponents in exchange for help the country needs to fend off a Russian invasion and chart a democratic future free of Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin. 

But then, a whistleblower inside Trump’s own government sounded the alarm. The White House tried to cover it up, but Democrats called out Trump’s extortion scheme and moved to impeach him. And Trump did the unthinkable: He confessed.

How did we get here? We will provide the backstory to the scandal that launched the impeachment proceedings, from the original efforts by Ukraine and its former president Petro Poroshenko to cozy up to Trump’s inner circle, to Rudy Giuliani’s efforts to manufacture dirt on Trump’s political opponents, to the whistleblower complaint that blew the whole thing open. Join host Max Bergmann, the Director of the Moscow Project at the center for American Progress Action Fund and a veteran of the State Department under Secretaries of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and John Kerry, for season two of “The Asset.”

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