Who stiffed the Ukraine?

Miranda Devine tries to sort out how Trump became the big meanie in Ukrainian-U.S. relations:

[T]here was something missing in [the two House Intelligence Committee witnesses’] description of “alarm” at the withholding of US military aid to Ukraine.

For all their concern about Ukraine’s ability to defend itself against Russia, they were remarkably sanguine about the Obama administration’s inaction after Russia annexed Crimea and began aggressing into eastern Ukraine.

Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko went to Washington and begged for military assistance but the Obama-Biden administration refused, out of deference to Moscow.

Poroshenko complained at the time: “one cannot win a war with blankets.”

This was surely the low point of Ukrainian-US relations, not Trump’s phone call in July.

Despite the witnesses’ dissatisfaction with President Trump’s Ukraine policy, it was President Trump who approved the supply of weapons to Ukraine.

So if concern for Ukraine is not the real motivation behind the diplomatic community’s alarm about Trump, all that’s left is protecting the Bidens.

Without a real whistleblower we can only think the worst.

It's conceivable that the quid pro quo Biden bragged about on video had to do with concern over corruption that a Ukrainian prosecutor was failing to investigate, not corruption that he was threatening to investigate.  It's even possible that Biden didn't think any of the un-investigated corruption involved his family, though the second part at the very least paints him as oblivious. If that's the case, though, what I'm seeing is Trump jumping to a fairly natural conclusion after seeing Biden's videotaped statement, and wishing someone would look into it long enough to give us a clue what was going on.

That's not "digging up dirt" on a political rival or anyone else. That's following up on an obvious red flag, in this case one pertaining to the actions of someone who at the time was serving as vice president of the United States. If the Ukrainian government had come back with a credible explanation that exonerates Biden, that should have been the end of it. Instead we have a lot of hysterical shrieking that amounts to saying the chief executive of the United States is not even justified in asking the question.

It's not exactly the GPS Fusion approach, is it? Trump didn't hint around that he'd be pretty happy if someone cooked up a bogus dossier and leaked it to a compliant media.  "Will no one bring me dirt on this turbulent candidate?" Instead, Trump said someone ought to ask a question about the backdrop to a public statement by a then-high-ranking U.S. official.  Frankly, someone still should.  If it happened the way Biden and his surrogates claim, it should pretty easy to establish with witnesses and documents.