President Trump pushed the Australian prime minister during a recent telephone call to help Attorney General William P. Barr gather information for a Justice Department inquiry that Mr. Trump hopes will discredit the Mueller investigation, according to two American officials with knowledge of the call.

The White House restricted access to the call’s transcript to a small group of the president’s aides, one of the officials said, an unusual decision that is similar to the handling of a July call with the Ukrainian president that is at the heart of House Democrats’ impeachment inquiry into Mr. Trump.

In making the request, Mr. Trump was in effect asking the Australian government to investigate itself. The F.B.I.’s counterintelligence investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election began after Australian officials told the bureau that the Russian government had made overtures to the Trump campaign about releasing political damaging information about Hillary Clinton.

pompeo was on the ukraine phone call too says the WSJ....

I’m honestly starting to wonder who the Republican ticket will be in 2020.

Barr has already made overtures to British intelligence officials, and last week the attorney general traveled to Italy, where he and Durham met senior Italian government officials and Barr asked the Italians to assist Durham, according to one person familiar with the matter. It was not Barr’s first trip to Italy to meet intelligence officials, the person said. The Trump administration has made similar requests of Australia, these people said.

$10 says Pompeo sings like a bird. He's a Tea Party Republican, former US Army officer, and late-career intelligence hawk. Unlike most of the cronies surrounding Trump, I don't think he's been on board so much for his own benefit, but rather for his own sense of patriotism and duty. He's now like the babysitter who got busted sleeping on the job, and he's got everything to gain by turning on Trump.

This is getting real

Fat Mike is not going to do the honorable thing here. Get real.

well it's not about honor, it's about protecting humongous strides he made in his career over the last 20 years. He went from owning a successful aviation parts company to serving in the KS legislature, to running the CIA, to SoS in a relatively short time. And I'm skeptical he deserved those last couple titles, and he probably knows it. He's got way more influential people in his world than Trump, and he's got some years left yet to cement his legacy. He'd be a damn fool not to roll over.