Hi everybody Cheryl Ackison

Cheryl Ackison here with another Cheryl Ackison podcast.

Today I'm going to talk about something I wrote an article about in the hill called

Quid Pro Quo in Ukraine, no not yet.

Actually my title was shorter. The one I wrote was,

Quid Pro No. And I'm talking in this about the impeachment debate

and how it's being framed and what I learned

after speaking to current and former diplomats

and doing a little bit of research, stuff that

was not being reported on the news programs that I've been watching and in some of the articles

that I've been reading.

So I thought I would talk this through in case people want to know a little bit more about it.

First of all, let's talk about the term quid pro quo to begin with, because that's how the impeachment debate is being framed,

is if that's the bar that will determine whether

President Trump did something egregious or wrong or something impeachable

whether he committed a quid pro quo. But I think there are some big flaws with this framing that that's the bar that's been

set whether or not there was a quid pro quo. I'm not sure the terms being used properly

and I'm talking about by Democrats and Republicans and the media.

Diplomatic quid pro quo requiring certain actions, behavior, or conditions in return for USA.S. aid is common according to current and

former diplomats that I spoke with. In fact, that's basically the purpose of

foreign aid. The U.S. uses its foreign aid to influence other countries, to get them to commit to a certain

behavior or do certain things or spend the money a certain way or cooperate with an investigation.

...