UkraineGate Begins and Ends with CIA

1.  Zelensky himself says there was no quid-pro-quo, he wasn't aware of any linkage, etc.

2.  After some unimportant delay, he "aid" was delivered, in the meantime Kyiv had not been overrun by Russia, and still isn't.  It's not clear how much this military "aid" was even "needed."  Obama wasn't delivering any military aid, on his choice, he simply refused from the get go.

3.  Zelensky himself can read the tea leaves, he can see that Trump is not going to be removed from office until at least 2021, if then.  And he's never going to face the likes of Biden/Harris/Clinton--who would need him to collaborate against Trump to prove Trump "treasonous"--because Biden/Harris/Clinton simply could not defeat Trump otherwise because they have no new popular ideas like Sanders, Gabbard, and Warren.  So there's downside in playing against Trump, but no upside in playing for Democrats.

4.  Given that Zelensky knows that, how likely is it that he's going to go out of his way to trip up Trump to help Biden/Harris/Pelosi/Clinton?

5.  Still, he hasn't delivered any kind of thing that Trump wanted, even merely "announcing" an investigation into Biden son as Trump reported wanted (though, Trump never directly asked for that "announcement", nor would he be expected to, for deniability reasons that Trump is certainly smart enough to understand.)  Biden's son's corruption would have gone unmentioned by anyone, if CIA/Democrats had not decided to pursue this.  So Zelensky is playing a conservative nice guy to both sides, which is exactly what he could be expected to do.  Nice, but not so nice as to go out of his way to give them something the other guys wouldn't like.  He's certainly been smart enough to know to play this way from the beginning.  Therefore there was never any real "threat" of an investigation.  Meanwhile, it appears CIA/Democrats were willing to throw Biden under the bus without any real chance of winning the ultimate conviction of Trump in the US Senate, for some reason that's not directly visible.

6.  So it's much ado about an allegedly threatened quid-pro-quo, which is long since moot (no serious quo), and which the principals directly involved have no incentive to belabor, and which produced no quid either.  And to remove Trump from office, nearly half of Senate Republicans (as well as all Senate Democrats) would have to agree this was sufficiently disgusting.

7.  The CIA did get even the shadow of an investigation in Biden's son stopped, because it could have revealed the roots of how the CIA coup'd Ukraine.  They got what they wanted by starting the Impeachment Circus, and it's likely the fear of that will stick sufficiently so no actual investigation will ever be done, not that it ever would have been anyway.  Centrist Democrats were useful tools in CIA politics, rather than the reverse.  CIA's interests, even the paranoid shadow of a threat to their interests in the potential possible opening of an investigation in Ukraine, was more important than a supposedly "leading" Democratic candidate.

Conclusion: US politics is run for the benefit of the CIA.