What's going on with this DNI Whistleblower ?

[jimmyjazz 45888]

It smacks of "The Bell Curve", so it will probably never be published, but I would truly like to see distributions of IQ among registered Republicans, Democrats and then independents/Libertarians/whatever.

There is no fucking way the median IQ of Republicans isn't a solid 2-3 points lower than that of the Democrats.  NO way.

[JimmyJames 12271]

4 minutes ago, Jack Straw said:

@Johnny Sack is proud to see the world through exactly the same prism as this guy - the pride of today's Republican party.

 

Trump and Moscow mitch gave the sack his tax cut, which at the bottom of it, is the only thing he gives a shit about. Trump delivered on his bottom line so the sack is satisfied. More trump sayeth the sack. Just gives us the Mooooney Lebowski!

[Jack Straw 2954]

Just now, JimmyJames said:

Trump and Moscow mitch gave the sack his tax cut, which at the bottom of it, is the only thing he gives a shit about. Trump delivered on his bottom line so the sack is satisfied. More trump sayeth the sack. Just gives us the Mooooney Lebowski!

well, sack also loves the fact that trump is a racist, just like he is.

[Hugo Stiglitz 23367]

3 minutes ago, jimmyjazz said:

It smacks of "The Bell Curve", so it will probably never be published, but I would truly like to see distributions of IQ among registered Republicans, Democrats and then independents/Libertarians/whatever.

There is no fucking way the median IQ of Republicans isn't a solid 2-3 points lower than that of the Democrats.  NO way.

While IQ isn’t the same as education, Democrats on the whole have a higher education level.  Republicans prey on the poorly educated.  That’s why they rail on those “evil liberal colleges” indoctrinating our youth with critical thinking skills.

[jimmyjazz 45888]

6 minutes ago, JimmyJames said:

Trump and Moscow mitch gave the sack his tax cut, which at the bottom of it, is the only thing he gives a shit about.

No, Johnny hates the brown people too.  It's like an added bonus with Trump.

[JimmyJames 12271]

Just now, jimmyjazz said:

No, Johnny hates the brown people too.  It's like an added bonus with Trump.

I’m not saying the sack doesn’t hate brown people, but if you gave him a choice of liking brown people with a hefty tax cut, or hating brown people without a tax cut, he would choose the liking brown people with a hefty tax cut option every time. 

[Nivek 16923]

While IQ isn’t the same as education, Democrats on the whole have a higher education level.  Republicans prey on the poorly educated.  That’s why they rail on those “evil liberal colleges” indoctrinating our youth with critical thinking skills.

There is a reason the talk radio format the republicans employ does not work on the Democratic Party supporters. We have our idiots, we just don’t celebrate them.

[JimmyJames 12271]

17 hours ago, Crusher said:

 OK.. So what does it mean? Tell me how Trump broke the law. Just once? What has Trump done that has broken the law, Not what you think , but what you can prove!!!

Ok so I think this was his last farewell post before gettin banned. Totally fitting that his last post was yet another troll post, just asking questions. 

What can you PROOOOOOOOOVE!!!!! You libtards!!!!

Like his Chrispy handle before him, he will be missed.

[triplehorn 2664]

Next Thurs Volker is making a "deposition" to Congress. 

Is that different from a hostile obstruction-y bitch fest "testimony" ? 

 

 

[Hugo Stiglitz 23367]

Oh boy

[Francisco 2.0 32387]

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/09/ukraine-scandal-trump-downfall-impeachment.html

 

Quote

History books will record Donald Trump as the first president of the United States to assume office without any previous experience in government. This is not a mere biographical detail but a skeleton key for understanding his methods of wielding power. Trump has never recognized any distinction between his public and private life. Extraordinarily, he didn’t divest from his businesses even while serving as president. Even worse, he treated the government as if it were his property. The Ukraine scandal is another case of Trump treating the executive branch as though it had been acquired by the Trump Organization. It may or may not be the worst of his many offenses, but it would be perfectly fitting if, as now seems possible, it is ultimately the instrument of his demise.

 

Quote

The scandal revolves around Trump turning American foreign policy toward Ukraine into an extortion scheme for his political benefit. The plot began as early as this spring and at first was mostly conducted in broad daylight. Trump deputized his lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, to undertake this mission.

Giuliani’s original goal was to prod Ukraine to turn over evidence that would exonerate Paul Manafort, the former Trump campaign manager. Manafort had worked in Ukraine for a pro-Russian party, then gone on to manage Trump’s campaign while maintaining secret contacts with a Russian intelligence officer, and he was helping Trump in 2018 by withholding cooperation from special counsel Robert Mueller. Giuliani was attempting to prove that Manafort had been set up by Ukrainians working with the Clinton campaign and that — even more bizarrely — Ukrainians had stolen Clinton’s emails.

 

Quote

If these theories sound fantastical, they are. But just as Watergate demystified the White House staff as bumblers, the Ukraine scandal has revealed Trump and his allies are suffering from Fox News poisoning. The bizarre conspiracy theories that the rest of us took to be devious propaganda had a profound impact on the president and his inner circle. They are not-very-bright guys who also happen to be genuinely nuts.

 

Spoiler

But the mission followed a coherent strategic goal. Trump thrives on cynicism, excusing his misconduct with the assumption everybody does it — simultaneously condoning his own failings while dragging his antagonists down to his level. His election required many Americans to believe his opponent had engaged in criminal behavior. He has instinctively replicated those conditions in his quasi-campaign against Mueller as well as against the Democrats in 2020.

In the course of his work, Giuliani made contact with Ukrainian prosecutors and hit upon yet another conspiracy theory. The story held that, during the Obama administration, Joe Biden had called for the firing of a prosecutor who was on the tail of a Ukrainian firm that had hired his son Hunter. This theory, too, was wrong. Hunter Biden had gone to work for a Ukrainian energy firm as part of a generally sleazy practice of trading on his father’s name. And it was true that Joe Biden spearheaded demands to fire a prosecutor. But the prosecutor was not investigating Hunter Biden’s firm at that time. And the vice-president’s call to fire the prosecutor, who was notoriously ineffectual at rooting out corruption, placed him squarely on the side of human-rights activists, democratic countries, the IMF, the World Bank, and other international do-gooders.

President Trump began to focus on the twin goals of pressuring Ukraine’s government to investigate his antagonists from the 2016 election and the leading contender to face him in the next one. He had the benefit of leverage: Ukraine was under military attack from Russia, which had seized a chunk of its territory five years before and was beginning a new offensive. Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s new president (and, like Trump, a straight-from-television political novice), desperately needed aid from the U.S. to fend off the invasion as well as a meeting with Trump to underscore Trump’s commitment and to discourage Russia from expanding its attacks.

Giuliani spearheaded the effort, holding numerous meetings with Ukrainians to demand the investigations. Far from disguising his role, Giuliani went out of his way to advertise it. “We’re meddling in an investigation … because that information will be very, very helpful to my client,” he boasted to the New York Times in May. The intended audience for his confession was likely Zelensky. The Ukrainian president, after all, needed to understand that this intermittently coherent cable-news shouting head, who did not hold a government job of any kind, did in fact speak on behalf of the world’s most powerful person.

In an April phone call, Trump urged Zelensky to coordinate with Giuliani. Zelensky dragged his feet, causing Trump to increase the pressure. According to the complaint of a CIA officer detailed to the White House, Trump ordered Vice-President Pence not to attend Zelensky’s inauguration (a snub celebrated by Russian television). Trump held up the military aid and withheld the cherished meeting, while Giuliani continued demanding the investigations. Trump reiterated the demands in a second call in July, in which the two presidents danced around each other while making their respective asks perfectly clear.

In recent days, Trump denied ever having made an explicit quid pro quo. “I did not make a statement that ‘you have to do this or I’m not going to give you aid,’ ” he told reporters. “I wouldn’t do that.” This is probably true. As Trump’s former fixer Michael Cohen testified, he “speaks in a code.” Trump makes it clear that he views relationships as transactional and lets counterparties know what he wants from them. Trump phrased his demands as rooting out “corruption” (i.e., “We’re giving a lot of money away to Ukraine and other places. You want to see a country that’s going to be not corrupt”), but nobody mistook him as a wide-eyed advocate of good government.

Trump’s salad days as a young builder working Mob contacts and crooked politicians left him with the belief that greasing palms is how business gets done. He has imported that style to the presidency, letting it be known that putting money in his pocket is the entry price to secure his favor.
(In their phone call, Zelensky mentions that he had stayed in one of Trump’s New York properties.) He has cozied up to a rogues’ gallery of the world’s most corrupt states (including Russia and the Gulf kingdoms). Trump believes in corruption at an almost ideological level. He is not only corrupt but a corruptionist.

Both Ukrainians and American officials, the Times reported, understood his talking about the term “as code” — there’s the word Cohen used again — “for the Bidens and Ukrainians who released damaging information about the Trump campaign in 2016.” Trump has even translated the code himself. Asked by a reporter if he “raised Joe Biden or his son’s name with Ukraine,” the president replied, “Well, I don’t even want to mention it, but certainly I’d have every right to. I’d have every right to. If there’s corruption, and we’re paying lots of money to a country, we don’t want a country we’re giving massive aid to to be corrupting our system, and we don’t want it to be corrupt in any way.”

The Ukrainians “expressed concern to U.S. senators that the aid had been held up as a penalty for resisting that pressure” to investigate Biden, reported The Wall Street Journal. In an early-September press conference, a reporter asked Pence if the aid was being held up over Ukraine’s failure to open the investigations requested by Giuliani. Pence did not deny it. Instead, he reiterated the threat in the familiar code. After insisting that the U.S. stands behind Ukraine, he warned, “But as President Trump had me make clear, we have great concerns about issues of corruption.”

Trump’s diplomatic interactions have prioritized using foreign leaders to solicit endorsements. He regularly boasts that world leaders praise him and mock his enemies behind closed doors. Trump told reporters in May, “Kim Jong-un made a statement that Joe Biden is a low-IQ individual,” as if Americans should trust the assessment of a possibly insane dictator. His efforts with Ukraine took that tendency to an extreme, pushing for a formal investigation that he could brandish as evidence of guilt.

Trouble is, American foreign policy is not designed to jack up other countries to supply dirt on the president’s enemies. Trump had to jury-rig the system to run it through a non-diplomat without security clearance or even a government job, who represented not the U.S. government but Trump personally. And when American diplomats and members of Congress raised concerns, he engaged in a cover-up that recruited numerous officials, some of them high ranking, into the plot.

Pence and Mick Mulvaney, Trump’s acting chief of staff and budget director, were tasked with disseminating cover stories to explain the holdup with aid. (Pence, for one, almost certainly knew the real story.) White House officials hid the records of Trump’s phone calls with Zelensky on a classified system, fearing they contained incriminating evidence of Trump using the Ukrainian leader for domestic political gain. When the CIA operative filed an official complaint about the scheme, the Inspector General for the Intelligence Community deemed it credible, but the acting director of national intelligence didn’t send it to Congress, and the Department of Justice quashed a referral for a criminal investigation. Attorney General William Barr did not recuse himself, even though Barr himself is implicated. (On the second Zelensky call, Trump promises to put Barr on the Biden case, reflecting once again his faith in his AG’s subservience and total lack of professional ethics.)

Trump’s Ukraine policy was at best illegitimate and at worst illegal, so there was no way to operate it through normal channels. The cover-up rippled through the bureaucracy. Trump’s accomplices have already begun fingering each other. Giuliani waved around his phone on a Fox News segment, claiming it contained messages authorizing his actions from the State Department — which, if true, may implicate Mike Pompeo, who was just subpoenaed by three House committees. “I’m the real whistle-blower,” he later warned his co-conspirators. “If I get killed now, you won’t get the rest of the story.” Trump told reporters, “I think you should ask for Vice-President Pence’s conversations, because he had a couple conversations also,” a helpful reminder that if Trump goes down, his subordinate might, too.

The most committed of Trump’s defenders have insisted that he is the victim of smears or the usual litany of Fake News, radical socialists, and their allies in the intelligence community. A somewhat more sophisticated defense has emerged, predicated on the absence of an explicit statement by Trump that he would grant the aid and the meeting in return for the investigations. They are circulating the same pointillistic defenses of his statements and actions they used during the Russia scandal, analyzing each statement in isolation and in the most favorable light, ignoring the unmistakable context. The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page insists that in the second phone call, Zelensky brings up Giuliani and his investigative demands before Trump mentions them, as if Zelensky had thought up the idea of investigating Biden himself, rather than having faced months of pressure to do it.

What almost none of the Republicans have dared offer is a positive defense of his actions. Their shyness reflects a surprising consensus that withholding military aid to force Ukraine to investigate Biden — i.e., exactly what Trump did — is deeply improper. A September 24 YouGov poll asked: If Trump “suspended military aid to Ukraine in order to incentivize the country’s officials to investigate his political rival, Joe Biden,” is impeachment warranted? Fifty-five percent supported impeachment, with only 26 percent opposed. No wonder Trump’s defenders have concluded their only viable defense is to dispute the factual premise.

The public remains divided on impeachment, reflecting the fact that the scandal remains unfamiliar to many. Democrats must prove their case to the public, but if they do, they have a path to a solid majority. They have weeks of hearings to drive home the known facts and produce additional evidence. The cynical and historically correct assumption is that Republicans will rally around the president who boasted he could shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue without losing any support.

Yet there is at least some reason to suspect this episode might play differently. The customary phalanx of Republicans has failed to materialize. “I want to say to the president, ‘This is not okay,’ ” scolded Ohio Republican Mike Turner. “I think it’s disappointing to the American public when they read the transcript.” Mitt Romney said he was “deeply troubled” by Trump’s behavior. Ben Sasse, who has curried Trump’s favor, said his party “ought not just circle the wagons.” Dozens of Republicans either refused to comment or said they needed more information.

Most of the holdouts will hop back on the Trump train eventually. But their lack of vocal support creates a favorable asymmetry for Democrats as the impeachment process begins. Democrats are unanimous in their condemnation of Trump’s behavior, while Republicans are divided, giving Democrats an opportunity to split wide open the crack in the Republican wall. The appearance of more evidence against Trump might conceivably cause them to defect. It is, at least, no longer unimaginable.

Trump responded to the threat of impeachment by reaffirming why he deserves it. He told reporters that impeachment (a mechanism in the Constitution) “shouldn’t be allowed. There should be a way of stopping it.
Maybe legally through the courts.” And he told a private audience that the media reporting the story were “animals” and “scum” and said the CIA officer who filed the complaint (through approved legal channels) committed “treason” and implied that he should be executed. L’état, c’est Trump, as always.

Part of Trump’s rage stemmed from what appeared to be genuine surprise that the record of him pressuring Zelensky failed to win the approbation he expected. Hadn’t Zelensky flattered him and noted his great electoral victory? Didn’t his counterpart meekly submit to Trump’s demands? How could this be received as anything other than the “perfect” conversation Trump had promised it would be?

Representative Mark Meadows, one of Trump’s more slavish followers, observed in the president’s defense, “He didn’t see anything wrong with the conversation he had with a foreign leader.” That is probably accurate. Trump has a finely honed antenna for assessing winner versus loser, or loyal versus disloyal. But the formulation of moral concepts is not a function he can perform. His brain is no more capable of distinguishing right from wrong than your microwave oven can tell you what’s on Netflix. No American president has more richly deserved impeachment.

 

Edited September 29, 2019 by Francisco 2.0

[Hugo Stiglitz 23367]

29 minutes ago, Francisco 2.0 said:

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/09/ukraine-scandal-trump-downfall-impeachment.html

 

 

 

 

  Hide contents

But the mission followed a coherent strategic goal. Trump thrives on cynicism, excusing his misconduct with the assumption everybody does it — simultaneously condoning his own failings while dragging his antagonists down to his level. His election required many Americans to believe his opponent had engaged in criminal behavior. He has instinctively replicated those conditions in his quasi-campaign against Mueller as well as against the Democrats in 2020.

In the course of his work, Giuliani made contact with Ukrainian prosecutors and hit upon yet another conspiracy theory. The story held that, during the Obama administration, Joe Biden had called for the firing of a prosecutor who was on the tail of a Ukrainian firm that had hired his son Hunter. This theory, too, was wrong. Hunter Biden had gone to work for a Ukrainian energy firm as part of a generally sleazy practice of trading on his father’s name. And it was true that Joe Biden spearheaded demands to fire a prosecutor. But the prosecutor was not investigating Hunter Biden’s firm at that time. And the vice-president’s call to fire the prosecutor, who was notoriously ineffectual at rooting out corruption, placed him squarely on the side of human-rights activists, democratic countries, the IMF, the World Bank, and other international do-gooders.

President Trump began to focus on the twin goals of pressuring Ukraine’s government to investigate his antagonists from the 2016 election and the leading contender to face him in the next one. He had the benefit of leverage: Ukraine was under military attack from Russia, which had seized a chunk of its territory five years before and was beginning a new offensive. Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s new president (and, like Trump, a straight-from-television political novice), desperately needed aid from the U.S. to fend off the invasion as well as a meeting with Trump to underscore Trump’s commitment and to discourage Russia from expanding its attacks.

Giuliani spearheaded the effort, holding numerous meetings with Ukrainians to demand the investigations. Far from disguising his role, Giuliani went out of his way to advertise it. “We’re meddling in an investigation … because that information will be very, very helpful to my client,” he boasted to the New York Times in May. The intended audience for his confession was likely Zelensky. The Ukrainian president, after all, needed to understand that this intermittently coherent cable-news shouting head, who did not hold a government job of any kind, did in fact speak on behalf of the world’s most powerful person.

In an April phone call, Trump urged Zelensky to coordinate with Giuliani. Zelensky dragged his feet, causing Trump to increase the pressure. According to the complaint of a CIA officer detailed to the White House, Trump ordered Vice-President Pence not to attend Zelensky’s inauguration (a snub celebrated by Russian television). Trump held up the military aid and withheld the cherished meeting, while Giuliani continued demanding the investigations. Trump reiterated the demands in a second call in July, in which the two presidents danced around each other while making their respective asks perfectly clear.

In recent days, Trump denied ever having made an explicit quid pro quo. “I did not make a statement that ‘you have to do this or I’m not going to give you aid,’ ” he told reporters. “I wouldn’t do that.” This is probably true. As Trump’s former fixer Michael Cohen testified, he “speaks in a code.” Trump makes it clear that he views relationships as transactional and lets counterparties know what he wants from them. Trump phrased his demands as rooting out “corruption” (i.e., “We’re giving a lot of money away to Ukraine and other places. You want to see a country that’s going to be not corrupt”), but nobody mistook him as a wide-eyed advocate of good government.

Trump’s salad days as a young builder working Mob contacts and crooked politicians left him with the belief that greasing palms is how business gets done. He has imported that style to the presidency, letting it be known that putting money in his pocket is the entry price to secure his favor.
(In their phone call, Zelensky mentions that he had stayed in one of Trump’s New York properties.) He has cozied up to a rogues’ gallery of the world’s most corrupt states (including Russia and the Gulf kingdoms). Trump believes in corruption at an almost ideological level. He is not only corrupt but a corruptionist.

Both Ukrainians and American officials, the Times reported, understood his talking about the term “as code” — there’s the word Cohen used again — “for the Bidens and Ukrainians who released damaging information about the Trump campaign in 2016.” Trump has even translated the code himself. Asked by a reporter if he “raised Joe Biden or his son’s name with Ukraine,” the president replied, “Well, I don’t even want to mention it, but certainly I’d have every right to. I’d have every right to. If there’s corruption, and we’re paying lots of money to a country, we don’t want a country we’re giving massive aid to to be corrupting our system, and we don’t want it to be corrupt in any way.”

The Ukrainians “expressed concern to U.S. senators that the aid had been held up as a penalty for resisting that pressure” to investigate Biden, reported The Wall Street Journal. In an early-September press conference, a reporter asked Pence if the aid was being held up over Ukraine’s failure to open the investigations requested by Giuliani. Pence did not deny it. Instead, he reiterated the threat in the familiar code. After insisting that the U.S. stands behind Ukraine, he warned, “But as President Trump had me make clear, we have great concerns about issues of corruption.”

Trump’s diplomatic interactions have prioritized using foreign leaders to solicit endorsements. He regularly boasts that world leaders praise him and mock his enemies behind closed doors. Trump told reporters in May, “Kim Jong-un made a statement that Joe Biden is a low-IQ individual,” as if Americans should trust the assessment of a possibly insane dictator. His efforts with Ukraine took that tendency to an extreme, pushing for a formal investigation that he could brandish as evidence of guilt.

Trouble is, American foreign policy is not designed to jack up other countries to supply dirt on the president’s enemies. Trump had to jury-rig the system to run it through a non-diplomat without security clearance or even a government job, who represented not the U.S. government but Trump personally. And when American diplomats and members of Congress raised concerns, he engaged in a cover-up that recruited numerous officials, some of them high ranking, into the plot.

Pence and Mick Mulvaney, Trump’s acting chief of staff and budget director, were tasked with disseminating cover stories to explain the holdup with aid. (Pence, for one, almost certainly knew the real story.) White House officials hid the records of Trump’s phone calls with Zelensky on a classified system, fearing they contained incriminating evidence of Trump using the Ukrainian leader for domestic political gain. When the CIA operative filed an official complaint about the scheme, the Inspector General for the Intelligence Community deemed it credible, but the acting director of national intelligence didn’t send it to Congress, and the Department of Justice quashed a referral for a criminal investigation. Attorney General William Barr did not recuse himself, even though Barr himself is implicated. (On the second Zelensky call, Trump promises to put Barr on the Biden case, reflecting once again his faith in his AG’s subservience and total lack of professional ethics.)

Trump’s Ukraine policy was at best illegitimate and at worst illegal, so there was no way to operate it through normal channels. The cover-up rippled through the bureaucracy. Trump’s accomplices have already begun fingering each other. Giuliani waved around his phone on a Fox News segment, claiming it contained messages authorizing his actions from the State Department — which, if true, may implicate Mike Pompeo, who was just subpoenaed by three House committees. “I’m the real whistle-blower,” he later warned his co-conspirators. “If I get killed now, you won’t get the rest of the story.” Trump told reporters, “I think you should ask for Vice-President Pence’s conversations, because he had a couple conversations also,” a helpful reminder that if Trump goes down, his subordinate might, too.

The most committed of Trump’s defenders have insisted that he is the victim of smears or the usual litany of Fake News, radical socialists, and their allies in the intelligence community. A somewhat more sophisticated defense has emerged, predicated on the absence of an explicit statement by Trump that he would grant the aid and the meeting in return for the investigations. They are circulating the same pointillistic defenses of his statements and actions they used during the Russia scandal, analyzing each statement in isolation and in the most favorable light, ignoring the unmistakable context. The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page insists that in the second phone call, Zelensky brings up Giuliani and his investigative demands before Trump mentions them, as if Zelensky had thought up the idea of investigating Biden himself, rather than having faced months of pressure to do it.

What almost none of the Republicans have dared offer is a positive defense of his actions. Their shyness reflects a surprising consensus that withholding military aid to force Ukraine to investigate Biden — i.e., exactly what Trump did — is deeply improper. A September 24 YouGov poll asked: If Trump “suspended military aid to Ukraine in order to incentivize the country’s officials to investigate his political rival, Joe Biden,” is impeachment warranted? Fifty-five percent supported impeachment, with only 26 percent opposed. No wonder Trump’s defenders have concluded their only viable defense is to dispute the factual premise.

The public remains divided on impeachment, reflecting the fact that the scandal remains unfamiliar to many. Democrats must prove their case to the public, but if they do, they have a path to a solid majority. They have weeks of hearings to drive home the known facts and produce additional evidence. The cynical and historically correct assumption is that Republicans will rally around the president who boasted he could shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue without losing any support.

Yet there is at least some reason to suspect this episode might play differently. The customary phalanx of Republicans has failed to materialize. “I want to say to the president, ‘This is not okay,’ ” scolded Ohio Republican Mike Turner. “I think it’s disappointing to the American public when they read the transcript.” Mitt Romney said he was “deeply troubled” by Trump’s behavior. Ben Sasse, who has curried Trump’s favor, said his party “ought not just circle the wagons.” Dozens of Republicans either refused to comment or said they needed more information.

Most of the holdouts will hop back on the Trump train eventually. But their lack of vocal support creates a favorable asymmetry for Democrats as the impeachment process begins. Democrats are unanimous in their condemnation of Trump’s behavior, while Republicans are divided, giving Democrats an opportunity to split wide open the crack in the Republican wall. The appearance of more evidence against Trump might conceivably cause them to defect. It is, at least, no longer unimaginable.

Trump responded to the threat of impeachment by reaffirming why he deserves it. He told reporters that impeachment (a mechanism in the Constitution) “shouldn’t be allowed. There should be a way of stopping it.
Maybe legally through the courts.” And he told a private audience that the media reporting the story were “animals” and “scum” and said the CIA officer who filed the complaint (through approved legal channels) committed “treason” and implied that he should be executed. L’état, c’est Trump, as always.

Part of Trump’s rage stemmed from what appeared to be genuine surprise that the record of him pressuring Zelensky failed to win the approbation he expected. Hadn’t Zelensky flattered him and noted his great electoral victory? Didn’t his counterpart meekly submit to Trump’s demands? How could this be received as anything other than the “perfect” conversation Trump had promised it would be?

Representative Mark Meadows, one of Trump’s more slavish followers, observed in the president’s defense, “He didn’t see anything wrong with the conversation he had with a foreign leader.” That is probably accurate. Trump has a finely honed antenna for assessing winner versus loser, or loyal versus disloyal. But the formulation of moral concepts is not a function he can perform. His brain is no more capable of distinguishing right from wrong than your microwave oven can tell you what’s on Netflix. No American president has more richly deserved impeachment.

 

This was a good read of the lesser known elements of the scandal.  I didn’t realize how caught up in this thing Pence is.  No wonder Trump is ready to throw him under the bus. 

Edited September 29, 2019 by Hugo Stiglitz

[Irwin F Fletcher 3550]

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/09/ukraine-scandal-trump-downfall-impeachment.html
 

History books will record Donald Trump as the first president of the United States to assume office without any previous experience in government. This is not a mere biographical detail but a skeleton key for understanding his methods of wielding power. Trump has never recognized any distinction between his public and private life. Extraordinarily, he didn’t divest from his businesses even while serving as president. Even worse, he treated the government as if it were his property. The Ukraine scandal is another case of Trump treating the executive branch as though it had been acquired by the Trump Organization. It may or may not be the worst of his many offenses, but it would be perfectly fitting if, as now seems possible, it is ultimately the instrument of his demise.

 

The scandal revolves around Trump turning American foreign policy toward Ukraine into an extortion scheme for his political benefit. The plot began as early as this spring and at first was mostly conducted in broad daylight. Trump deputized his lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, to undertake this mission.
Giuliani’s original goal was to prod Ukraine to turn over evidence that would exonerate Paul Manafort, the former Trump campaign manager. Manafort had worked in Ukraine for a pro-Russian party, then gone on to manage Trump’s campaign while maintaining secret contacts with a Russian intelligence officer, and he was helping Trump in 2018 by withholding cooperation from special counsel Robert Mueller. Giuliani was attempting to prove that Manafort had been set up by Ukrainians working with the Clinton campaign and that — even more bizarrely — Ukrainians had stolen Clinton’s emails.

 

If these theories sound fantastical, they are. But just as Watergate demystified the White House staff as bumblers, the Ukraine scandal has revealed Trump and his allies are suffering from Fox News poisoning. The bizarre conspiracy theories that the rest of us took to be devious propaganda had a profound impact on the president and his inner circle. They are not-very-bright guys who also happen to be genuinely nuts.

 
Spoiler

But the mission followed a coherent strategic goal. Trump thrives on cynicism, excusing his misconduct with the assumption everybody does it — simultaneously condoning his own failings while dragging his antagonists down to his level. His election required many Americans to believe his opponent had engaged in criminal behavior. He has instinctively replicated those conditions in his quasi-campaign against Mueller as well as against the Democrats in 2020.
In the course of his work, Giuliani made contact with Ukrainian prosecutors and hit upon yet another conspiracy theory. The story held that, during the Obama administration, Joe Biden had called for the firing of a prosecutor who was on the tail of a Ukrainian firm that had hired his son Hunter. This theory, too, was wrong. Hunter Biden had gone to work for a Ukrainian energy firm as part of a generally sleazy practice of trading on his father’s name. And it was true that Joe Biden spearheaded demands to fire a prosecutor. But the prosecutor was not investigating Hunter Biden’s firm at that time. And the vice-president’s call to fire the prosecutor, who was notoriously ineffectual at rooting out corruption, placed him squarely on the side of human-rights activists, democratic countries, the IMF, the World Bank, and other international do-gooders.
President Trump began to focus on the twin goals of pressuring Ukraine’s government to investigate his antagonists from the 2016 election and the leading contender to face him in the next one. He had the benefit of leverage: Ukraine was under military attack from Russia, which had seized a chunk of its territory five years before and was beginning a new offensive. Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s new president (and, like Trump, a straight-from-television political novice), desperately needed aid from the U.S. to fend off the invasion as well as a meeting with Trump to underscore Trump’s commitment and to discourage Russia from expanding its attacks.
Giuliani spearheaded the effort, holding numerous meetings with Ukrainians to demand the investigations. Far from disguising his role, Giuliani went out of his way to advertise it. “We’re meddling in an investigation … because that information will be very, very helpful to my client,” he boasted to the New York Times in May. The intended audience for his confession was likely Zelensky. The Ukrainian president, after all, needed to understand that this intermittently coherent cable-news shouting head, who did not hold a government job of any kind, did in fact speak on behalf of the world’s most powerful person.
In an April phone call, Trump urged Zelensky to coordinate with Giuliani. Zelensky dragged his feet, causing Trump to increase the pressure. According to the complaint of a CIA officer detailed to the White House, Trump ordered Vice-President Pence not to attend Zelensky’s inauguration (a snub celebrated by Russian television). Trump held up the military aid and withheld the cherished meeting, while Giuliani continued demanding the investigations. Trump reiterated the demands in a second call in July, in which the two presidents danced around each other while making their respective asks perfectly clear.
In recent days, Trump denied ever having made an explicit quid pro quo. “I did not make a statement that ‘you have to do this or I’m not going to give you aid,’ ” he told reporters. “I wouldn’t do that.” This is probably true. As Trump’s former fixer Michael Cohen testified, he “speaks in a code.” Trump makes it clear that he views relationships as transactional and lets counterparties know what he wants from them. Trump phrased his demands as rooting out “corruption” (i.e., “We’re giving a lot of money away to Ukraine and other places. You want to see a country that’s going to be not corrupt”), but nobody mistook him as a wide-eyed advocate of good government.
Trump’s salad days as a young builder working Mob contacts and crooked politicians left him with the belief that greasing palms is how business gets done. He has imported that style to the presidency, letting it be known that putting money in his pocket is the entry price to secure his favor.
(In their phone call, Zelensky mentions that he had stayed in one of Trump’s New York properties.) He has cozied up to a rogues’ gallery of the world’s most corrupt states (including Russia and the Gulf kingdoms). Trump believes in corruption at an almost ideological level. He is not only corrupt but a corruptionist.
Both Ukrainians and American officials, the Times reported, understood his talking about the term “as code” — there’s the word Cohen used again — “for the Bidens and Ukrainians who released damaging information about the Trump campaign in 2016.” Trump has even translated the code himself. Asked by a reporter if he “raised Joe Biden or his son’s name with Ukraine,” the president replied, “Well, I don’t even want to mention it, but certainly I’d have every right to. I’d have every right to. If there’s corruption, and we’re paying lots of money to a country, we don’t want a country we’re giving massive aid to to be corrupting our system, and we don’t want it to be corrupt in any way.”
The Ukrainians “expressed concern to U.S. senators that the aid had been held up as a penalty for resisting that pressure” to investigate Biden, reported The Wall Street Journal. In an early-September press conference, a reporter asked Pence if the aid was being held up over Ukraine’s failure to open the investigations requested by Giuliani. Pence did not deny it. Instead, he reiterated the threat in the familiar code. After insisting that the U.S. stands behind Ukraine, he warned, “But as President Trump had me make clear, we have great concerns about issues of corruption.”
Trump’s diplomatic interactions have prioritized using foreign leaders to solicit endorsements. He regularly boasts that world leaders praise him and mock his enemies behind closed doors. Trump told reporters in May, “Kim Jong-un made a statement that Joe Biden is a low-IQ individual,” as if Americans should trust the assessment of a possibly insane dictator. His efforts with Ukraine took that tendency to an extreme, pushing for a formal investigation that he could brandish as evidence of guilt.
Trouble is, American foreign policy is not designed to jack up other countries to supply dirt on the president’s enemies. Trump had to jury-rig the system to run it through a non-diplomat without security clearance or even a government job, who represented not the U.S. government but Trump personally. And when American diplomats and members of Congress raised concerns, he engaged in a cover-up that recruited numerous officials, some of them high ranking, into the plot.
Pence and Mick Mulvaney, Trump’s acting chief of staff and budget director, were tasked with disseminating cover stories to explain the holdup with aid. (Pence, for one, almost certainly knew the real story.) White House officials hid the records of Trump’s phone calls with Zelensky on a classified system, fearing they contained incriminating evidence of Trump using the Ukrainian leader for domestic political gain. When the CIA operative filed an official complaint about the scheme, the Inspector General for the Intelligence Community deemed it credible, but the acting director of national intelligence didn’t send it to Congress, and the Department of Justice quashed a referral for a criminal investigation. Attorney General William Barr did not recuse himself, even though Barr himself is implicated. (On the second Zelensky call, Trump promises to put Barr on the Biden case, reflecting once again his faith in his AG’s subservience and total lack of professional ethics.)
Trump’s Ukraine policy was at best illegitimate and at worst illegal, so there was no way to operate it through normal channels. The cover-up rippled through the bureaucracy. Trump’s accomplices have already begun fingering each other. Giuliani waved around his phone on a Fox News segment, claiming it contained messages authorizing his actions from the State Department — which, if true, may implicate Mike Pompeo, who was just subpoenaed by three House committees. “I’m the real whistle-blower,” he later warned his co-conspirators. “If I get killed now, you won’t get the rest of the story.” Trump told reporters, “I think you should ask for Vice-President Pence’s conversations, because he had a couple conversations also,” a helpful reminder that if Trump goes down, his subordinate might, too.
The most committed of Trump’s defenders have insisted that he is the victim of smears or the usual litany of Fake News, radical socialists, and their allies in the intelligence community. A somewhat more sophisticated defense has emerged, predicated on the absence of an explicit statement by Trump that he would grant the aid and the meeting in return for the investigations. They are circulating the same pointillistic defenses of his statements and actions they used during the Russia scandal, analyzing each statement in isolation and in the most favorable light, ignoring the unmistakable context. The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page insists that in the second phone call, Zelensky brings up Giuliani and his investigative demands before Trump mentions them, as if Zelensky had thought up the idea of investigating Biden himself, rather than having faced months of pressure to do it.
What almost none of the Republicans have dared offer is a positive defense of his actions. Their shyness reflects a surprising consensus that withholding military aid to force Ukraine to investigate Biden — i.e., exactly what Trump did — is deeply improper. A September 24 YouGov poll asked: If Trump “suspended military aid to Ukraine in order to incentivize the country’s officials to investigate his political rival, Joe Biden,” is impeachment warranted? Fifty-five percent supported impeachment, with only 26 percent opposed. No wonder Trump’s defenders have concluded their only viable defense is to dispute the factual premise.
The public remains divided on impeachment, reflecting the fact that the scandal remains unfamiliar to many. Democrats must prove their case to the public, but if they do, they have a path to a solid majority. They have weeks of hearings to drive home the known facts and produce additional evidence. The cynical and historically correct assumption is that Republicans will rally around the president who boasted he could shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue without losing any support.
Yet there is at least some reason to suspect this episode might play differently. The customary phalanx of Republicans has failed to materialize. “I want to say to the president, ‘This is not okay,’ ” scolded Ohio Republican Mike Turner. “I think it’s disappointing to the American public when they read the transcript.” Mitt Romney said he was “deeply troubled” by Trump’s behavior. Ben Sasse, who has curried Trump’s favor, said his party “ought not just circle the wagons.” Dozens of Republicans either refused to comment or said they needed more information.
Most of the holdouts will hop back on the Trump train eventually. But their lack of vocal support creates a favorable asymmetry for Democrats as the impeachment process begins. Democrats are unanimous in their condemnation of Trump’s behavior, while Republicans are divided, giving Democrats an opportunity to split wide open the crack in the Republican wall. The appearance of more evidence against Trump might conceivably cause them to defect. It is, at least, no longer unimaginable.
Trump responded to the threat of impeachment by reaffirming why he deserves it. He told reporters that impeachment (a mechanism in the Constitution) “shouldn’t be allowed. There should be a way of stopping it.
Maybe legally through the courts.” And he told a private audience that the media reporting the story were “animals” and “scum” and said the CIA officer who filed the complaint (through approved legal channels) committed “treason” and implied that he should be executed. L’état, c’est Trump, as always.
Part of Trump’s rage stemmed from what appeared to be genuine surprise that the record of him pressuring Zelensky failed to win the approbation he expected. Hadn’t Zelensky flattered him and noted his great electoral victory? Didn’t his counterpart meekly submit to Trump’s demands? How could this be received as anything other than the “perfect” conversation Trump had promised it would be?
Representative Mark Meadows, one of Trump’s more slavish followers, observed in the president’s defense, “He didn’t see anything wrong with the conversation he had with a foreign leader.” That is probably accurate. Trump has a finely honed antenna for assessing winner versus loser, or loyal versus disloyal. But the formulation of moral concepts is not a function he can perform. His brain is no more capable of distinguishing right from wrong than your microwave oven can tell you what’s on Netflix. No American president has more richly deserved impeachment.

 
This is a must read. Thanks again for posting.

[triplehorn 2664]

 

[cactusflinthead 27598]

3 hours ago, Jack Straw said:

@Johnny Sack is proud to see the world through exactly the same prism as this guy - the pride of today's Republican party.

 

I'm thinking if I'm not on Sack's ignore list I'm gonna have have to redouble my efforts like Phlegm. 

[cactusflinthead 27598]

siap 

 

[triplehorn 2664]

^^^

 

[Chooky 13307]

4 hours ago, Jack Straw said:

@Johnny Sack is proud to see the world through exactly the same prism as this guy - the pride of today's Republican party.

 

Give 'em access to your country clubs. Bring them to your banquets. Put a handful of their sleeveless asses on the board at Augusta. You baited the hook. Now reel 'em in. All aboard. Give them the gate code and let cousin Eddie park his RV on the curb. Push out a chair and let then sit at the table. They've earned it. 

[zork 629]

[hpslugga 4058]

7 hours ago, David Dennison said:

It can't be easy to be that illiterate.

Isn’t that the guy who got arrested in California for setting those fires?

[jimmyjazz 45888]

1 hour ago, cactusflinthead said:

I'm thinking if I'm not on Sack's ignore list I'm gonna have have to redouble my efforts like Phlegm. 

Johnny gets real twitchy if you reference his grocery background.  Call it a pro tip.

[hpslugga 4058]

11 hours ago, Thetexashammer said:

I'm in favor of knowing the truth.

Just stop it. You’re full of shit, and you know it.

[hpslugga 4058]

Double

Edited September 29, 2019 by hpslugga

[cactusflinthead 27598]

11 minutes ago, jimmyjazz said:

Johnny gets real twitchy if you reference his grocery background.  Call it a pro tip.

I suppose he ventured this information voluntarily. And then gets mad when it's brought up. 

Huh. Seems like I've heard of another poster with this problem. 

[hpslugga 4058]

4 minutes ago, cactusflinthead said:

I suppose he ventured this information voluntarily. And then gets mad when it's brought up. 

Huh. Seems like I've heard of another poster with this problem. 

Another poster who always agreed with him about every subject on which one or the other would post?

[Ted Lange 16084]

1 hour ago, zork said:

Everyone remembers when the Gop pretended to be against that, until they weren’t...  FRAUDS. 

 

[cactusflinthead 27598]

Tailored jerseys. 

That was enough for this place. I don't want to know what motivated him to tell that. I damn sure don't want to know the rest of the story. 

Hell, I don't see why they don't come back to CR. I expect that the majority of the cabal is in the iggy bin. It would be a nice echo chamber of only those permitted to speak. 

[Ted Lange 16084]

13 hours ago, Thetexashammer said:

 

The real issue is truth. If Biden is a corrupt piece of shit, voters need to know. If Trump is a corrupt piece of shit, voters need to know. 

The idea that we should ignore information because we don't like its source is the most childish, absurd thing I've ever heard. And the people who keep screaming it from the rooftops don't even believe it. Since it's nonsense. The idea is ridiculous and its proponents look ridiculous.

 

So if Hunter Biden shows up at the IRS with an gun, murders 125 people, and gets Trumps tax reruns that show Trump is a crook, your response is, tough shit dead people, we shouldn’t ignore information because we don’t like the source, anyone thinking differently is absurd!

You are the perfect trump rube.   Sad!

[horncyclist 1387]

Democrats need to go all in on putting Trump's corruption before the American people. They need to ratchet up whatever messaging apparatus they have and put his shit on blast. The media will do it's reporting but it can be ignored if you wish. If this doesn't bring down Trump, then we've gone off Brisket's ledge. The only thing that gives me some comfort is that he's old but then what if someone younger--and more capable--carries on Trumpism after Trump? These are very dark times and the next few weeks--and then  maybe 2020--if it can somehow be a fair election-- are probably the last chance to save our democracy. 

[Francisco 2.0 32387]

7 hours ago, cactusflinthead said:

Tailored jerseys. 

That was enough for this place. I don't want to know what motivated him to tell that. I damn sure don't want to know the rest of the story. 

Hell, I don't see why they don't come back to CR. I expect that the majority of the cabal is in the iggy bin. It would be a nice echo chamber of only those permitted to speak. 

If that's what he shared here, imagine what he didn't feel comfortable enough sharing.

[Junior Miller 1502]

3 hours ago, horncyclist said:

Democrats need to go all in on putting Trump's corruption before the American people. They need to ratchet up whatever messaging apparatus they have and put his shit on blast. The media will do it's reporting but it can be ignored if you wish. If this doesn't bring down Trump, then we've gone off Brisket's ledge. The only thing that gives me some comfort is that he's old but then what if someone younger--and more capable--carries on Trumpism after Trump? These are very dark times and the next few weeks--and then  maybe 2020--if it can somehow be a fair election-- are probably the last chance to save our democracy. 

The corruption is widespread and the red half of the American government is operating like La Cosa Nostra. Racketeering on an American foreign policy level. Widespread cover up by everyone from the President to the Attorney General. All of it likely proven on classified phone calls although the public statements and actions of the criminal politicians prove it just as well. 

There is no more "American Democracy". America has deteriorated into a corrupt quasi - police state run by the wealthy in which everything from local police (Amber Guyger) to federal agencies can and most definitely will get away with cold blooded murder, while our politicians at every level are open to the highest bidders. 

It's already over. You can kill trump but you can't kill the corrupt system that allowed him to operate with impunity for several years. You can't rectify the growing entitlement and stupidity of the average American citizen. You can't corral the "pay for play" corruption of virtually every US politician. America of the 21st century has become a garbage state that the founders of the country would regard as tyranny and fight against. 

[Message Board User 12395]

 

[Nice Guy Eddie 13509]

I don’t see this investigation going anywhere unless someone on the inside turns on trump. And even if the House impeaches trump, McConnell already has the playbook to not move forward with a trial. He will use his Merrick Garland rule. He will say it’s unprecedented in US history to put a president on trial during a presidential election year so it’s best to let the US citizens decide. 

And Americans have now learned to forgot about trump scandals as soon as the next one comes out.

[triplehorn 2664]

5 minutes ago, Junior Miller said:

The corruption is widespread and the red half of the American government is operating like La Cosa Nostra. Racketeering on an American foreign policy level. Widespread cover up by everyone from the President to the Attorney General. All of it likely proven on classified phone calls although the public statements and actions of the criminal politicians prove it just as well. 

There is no more "American Democracy". America has deteriorated into a corrupt quasi - police state run by the wealthy in which everything from local police (Amber Guyger) to federal agencies can and most definitely will get away with cold blooded murder, while our politicians at every level are open to the highest bidders. 

It's already over. You can kill trump but you can't kill the corrupt system that allowed him to operate with impunity for several years. You can't rectify the growing entitlement and stupidity of the average American citizen. You can't corral the "pay for play" corruption of virtually every US politician. America of the 21st century has become a garbage state that the founders of the country would regard as tyranny and fight against. 

We'll never eliminate the unending potential for corruption.  Like all forms of unfair practice, top to bottom, it will always be there.  The Founding Fathers understood this aspect of the human condition.  It's why we formed a government rooted in the concept of separation of powers with checks and balances.  The system is severely stressed right now, and it's been incremental over a long time, but it can and will shift back to a more sustainable balance where corrupt forces wield marginal control compared to now.  Support those who can articulate this and are proponents of reform.  It's a function of the flow of money which can be both a weight on a system and a lever for change.

[Francisco 2.0 32387]

 

 

 

[Francisco 2.0 32387]

 

 

[Hugo Stiglitz 23367]

21 minutes ago, Francisco 2.0 said:

Son of a bitch

[triplehorn 2664]

14 minutes ago, Francisco 2.0 said:

 

Barr signal to Trump: "I got your back"

 

from the Barr "surprised and angry" AP article:

"...The Justice Department was first made aware of Trump’s call when a CIA lawyer mentioned the complaint from the unidentified CIA officer on Aug. 14, said a person familiar with the matter who wasn’t authorized to discuss the matter publicly and spoke anonymously. Some Justice Department lawyers learned about the accusations after the whistleblower filed a complaint with the intelligence community’s internal watchdog.

The watchdog later raised concerns that Trump may have violated campaign finance law. The Justice Department said there was no crime and closed the matter."

Marcy Wheeler notes:

"Note what’s not described in that passage, or anywhere else in the story? Precisely when Bill Barr himself learned about the substance of the complaint. When Bill Barr himself learned he was named in the transcript. It does not matter at all whether Bill Barr was surprised to hear the President roping him into framing his opponent’s son (though we should not believe he was surprised until the Attorney General says that publicly himself, preferably under oath). It does not matter when Demers learned of the substance of the complaint, it matters when Barr did, and whether it preceded other actions he took.

What matters is whether Barr learned he was named in the transcript before the DOJ made the decision there was no crime there. What matters is whether Barr knew he was implicated before making the decision not to recuse in advance of a prosecutorial decision made while lacking all the facts. What matters is whether Barr knew he was named in the transcript before getting an OLC opinion justifying withholding the complaint. (h/t F for the last point)

The AP story doesn’t tell us that. Instead, it tells us everything we don’t need to know."

 

Haul his ass in under oath.  whatever it takes.  Full court press on that motherfucker.

[Mdhorn 5947]

15 hours ago, Hugo Stiglitz said:

While IQ isn’t the same as education, Democrats on the whole have a higher education level.  Republicans prey on the poorly educated.  That’s why they rail on those “evil liberal colleges” indoctrinating our youth with critical thinking skills.

they don't just prey on the poorly educated--they create them.  

Edited September 29, 2019 by Mdhorn

[Tuco 5076]

I haven't been following this as closely as I'd like, but a recap of my basic understanding:

Trump and Giuliani go on a campaign to have Ukraine publicly investigate Hunter Biden and to cast doubt on CounterStrike's conclusions regarding the Russians being behind the DNC hack.  They use the federal government, including withholding military aid, to compel Ukraine to do so.  Several of Trump appointees (Barr, Pompeo) are uncomfortable with Guiliani's efforts, but are too much of sychophantic cowards to do anything about it.  Now that the shit's hitting the fan, everybody is spinning stories about how they were uncomfortable with it, while Rudy is holding up text messages to show they were on board.  

Does that about cover it?

I like the quote for Samurai Jack: "The decisions you make and the actions that follow are a reflection of who you are. You cannot hide from yourself. "  Trump and Rudy are idiots who actually half belief the conspiracy theories they push and completely believe they have a mandate to use the federal government to fulfill their personal agenda.  Barr and Pompeo are cowardly yes-men who hitched their wagons to an unstable moron, and lack any backbone to push back.  Their decisions and actions are reflections of who they are.  This was inevitable. 

 

Edited September 29, 2019 by Tuco

[Hugo Stiglitz 23367]

2 minutes ago, Tuco said:

Does that about cover it?

Read article below:

12 hours ago, Francisco 2.0 said:

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/09/ukraine-scandal-trump-downfall-impeachment.html

 

 

 

 

  Reveal hidden contents

But the mission followed a coherent strategic goal. Trump thrives on cynicism, excusing his misconduct with the assumption everybody does it — simultaneously condoning his own failings while dragging his antagonists down to his level. His election required many Americans to believe his opponent had engaged in criminal behavior. He has instinctively replicated those conditions in his quasi-campaign against Mueller as well as against the Democrats in 2020.

In the course of his work, Giuliani made contact with Ukrainian prosecutors and hit upon yet another conspiracy theory. The story held that, during the Obama administration, Joe Biden had called for the firing of a prosecutor who was on the tail of a Ukrainian firm that had hired his son Hunter. This theory, too, was wrong. Hunter Biden had gone to work for a Ukrainian energy firm as part of a generally sleazy practice of trading on his father’s name. And it was true that Joe Biden spearheaded demands to fire a prosecutor. But the prosecutor was not investigating Hunter Biden’s firm at that time. And the vice-president’s call to fire the prosecutor, who was notoriously ineffectual at rooting out corruption, placed him squarely on the side of human-rights activists, democratic countries, the IMF, the World Bank, and other international do-gooders.

President Trump began to focus on the twin goals of pressuring Ukraine’s government to investigate his antagonists from the 2016 election and the leading contender to face him in the next one. He had the benefit of leverage: Ukraine was under military attack from Russia, which had seized a chunk of its territory five years before and was beginning a new offensive. Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s new president (and, like Trump, a straight-from-television political novice), desperately needed aid from the U.S. to fend off the invasion as well as a meeting with Trump to underscore Trump’s commitment and to discourage Russia from expanding its attacks.

Giuliani spearheaded the effort, holding numerous meetings with Ukrainians to demand the investigations. Far from disguising his role, Giuliani went out of his way to advertise it. “We’re meddling in an investigation … because that information will be very, very helpful to my client,” he boasted to the New York Times in May. The intended audience for his confession was likely Zelensky. The Ukrainian president, after all, needed to understand that this intermittently coherent cable-news shouting head, who did not hold a government job of any kind, did in fact speak on behalf of the world’s most powerful person.

In an April phone call, Trump urged Zelensky to coordinate with Giuliani. Zelensky dragged his feet, causing Trump to increase the pressure. According to the complaint of a CIA officer detailed to the White House, Trump ordered Vice-President Pence not to attend Zelensky’s inauguration (a snub celebrated by Russian television). Trump held up the military aid and withheld the cherished meeting, while Giuliani continued demanding the investigations. Trump reiterated the demands in a second call in July, in which the two presidents danced around each other while making their respective asks perfectly clear.

In recent days, Trump denied ever having made an explicit quid pro quo. “I did not make a statement that ‘you have to do this or I’m not going to give you aid,’ ” he told reporters. “I wouldn’t do that.” This is probably true. As Trump’s former fixer Michael Cohen testified, he “speaks in a code.” Trump makes it clear that he views relationships as transactional and lets counterparties know what he wants from them. Trump phrased his demands as rooting out “corruption” (i.e., “We’re giving a lot of money away to Ukraine and other places. You want to see a country that’s going to be not corrupt”), but nobody mistook him as a wide-eyed advocate of good government.

Trump’s salad days as a young builder working Mob contacts and crooked politicians left him with the belief that greasing palms is how business gets done. He has imported that style to the presidency, letting it be known that putting money in his pocket is the entry price to secure his favor.
(In their phone call, Zelensky mentions that he had stayed in one of Trump’s New York properties.) He has cozied up to a rogues’ gallery of the world’s most corrupt states (including Russia and the Gulf kingdoms). Trump believes in corruption at an almost ideological level. He is not only corrupt but a corruptionist.

Both Ukrainians and American officials, the Times reported, understood his talking about the term “as code” — there’s the word Cohen used again — “for the Bidens and Ukrainians who released damaging information about the Trump campaign in 2016.” Trump has even translated the code himself. Asked by a reporter if he “raised Joe Biden or his son’s name with Ukraine,” the president replied, “Well, I don’t even want to mention it, but certainly I’d have every right to. I’d have every right to. If there’s corruption, and we’re paying lots of money to a country, we don’t want a country we’re giving massive aid to to be corrupting our system, and we don’t want it to be corrupt in any way.”

The Ukrainians “expressed concern to U.S. senators that the aid had been held up as a penalty for resisting that pressure” to investigate Biden, reported The Wall Street Journal. In an early-September press conference, a reporter asked Pence if the aid was being held up over Ukraine’s failure to open the investigations requested by Giuliani. Pence did not deny it. Instead, he reiterated the threat in the familiar code. After insisting that the U.S. stands behind Ukraine, he warned, “But as President Trump had me make clear, we have great concerns about issues of corruption.”

Trump’s diplomatic interactions have prioritized using foreign leaders to solicit endorsements. He regularly boasts that world leaders praise him and mock his enemies behind closed doors. Trump told reporters in May, “Kim Jong-un made a statement that Joe Biden is a low-IQ individual,” as if Americans should trust the assessment of a possibly insane dictator. His efforts with Ukraine took that tendency to an extreme, pushing for a formal investigation that he could brandish as evidence of guilt.

Trouble is, American foreign policy is not designed to jack up other countries to supply dirt on the president’s enemies. Trump had to jury-rig the system to run it through a non-diplomat without security clearance or even a government job, who represented not the U.S. government but Trump personally. And when American diplomats and members of Congress raised concerns, he engaged in a cover-up that recruited numerous officials, some of them high ranking, into the plot.

Pence and Mick Mulvaney, Trump’s acting chief of staff and budget director, were tasked with disseminating cover stories to explain the holdup with aid. (Pence, for one, almost certainly knew the real story.) White House officials hid the records of Trump’s phone calls with Zelensky on a classified system, fearing they contained incriminating evidence of Trump using the Ukrainian leader for domestic political gain. When the CIA operative filed an official complaint about the scheme, the Inspector General for the Intelligence Community deemed it credible, but the acting director of national intelligence didn’t send it to Congress, and the Department of Justice quashed a referral for a criminal investigation. Attorney General William Barr did not recuse himself, even though Barr himself is implicated. (On the second Zelensky call, Trump promises to put Barr on the Biden case, reflecting once again his faith in his AG’s subservience and total lack of professional ethics.)

Trump’s Ukraine policy was at best illegitimate and at worst illegal, so there was no way to operate it through normal channels. The cover-up rippled through the bureaucracy. Trump’s accomplices have already begun fingering each other. Giuliani waved around his phone on a Fox News segment, claiming it contained messages authorizing his actions from the State Department — which, if true, may implicate Mike Pompeo, who was just subpoenaed by three House committees. “I’m the real whistle-blower,” he later warned his co-conspirators. “If I get killed now, you won’t get the rest of the story.” Trump told reporters, “I think you should ask for Vice-President Pence’s conversations, because he had a couple conversations also,” a helpful reminder that if Trump goes down, his subordinate might, too.

The most committed of Trump’s defenders have insisted that he is the victim of smears or the usual litany of Fake News, radical socialists, and their allies in the intelligence community. A somewhat more sophisticated defense has emerged, predicated on the absence of an explicit statement by Trump that he would grant the aid and the meeting in return for the investigations. They are circulating the same pointillistic defenses of his statements and actions they used during the Russia scandal, analyzing each statement in isolation and in the most favorable light, ignoring the unmistakable context. The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page insists that in the second phone call, Zelensky brings up Giuliani and his investigative demands before Trump mentions them, as if Zelensky had thought up the idea of investigating Biden himself, rather than having faced months of pressure to do it.

What almost none of the Republicans have dared offer is a positive defense of his actions. Their shyness reflects a surprising consensus that withholding military aid to force Ukraine to investigate Biden — i.e., exactly what Trump did — is deeply improper. A September 24 YouGov poll asked: If Trump “suspended military aid to Ukraine in order to incentivize the country’s officials to investigate his political rival, Joe Biden,” is impeachment warranted? Fifty-five percent supported impeachment, with only 26 percent opposed. No wonder Trump’s defenders have concluded their only viable defense is to dispute the factual premise.

The public remains divided on impeachment, reflecting the fact that the scandal remains unfamiliar to many. Democrats must prove their case to the public, but if they do, they have a path to a solid majority. They have weeks of hearings to drive home the known facts and produce additional evidence. The cynical and historically correct assumption is that Republicans will rally around the president who boasted he could shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue without losing any support.

Yet there is at least some reason to suspect this episode might play differently. The customary phalanx of Republicans has failed to materialize. “I want to say to the president, ‘This is not okay,’ ” scolded Ohio Republican Mike Turner. “I think it’s disappointing to the American public when they read the transcript.” Mitt Romney said he was “deeply troubled” by Trump’s behavior. Ben Sasse, who has curried Trump’s favor, said his party “ought not just circle the wagons.” Dozens of Republicans either refused to comment or said they needed more information.

Most of the holdouts will hop back on the Trump train eventually. But their lack of vocal support creates a favorable asymmetry for Democrats as the impeachment process begins. Democrats are unanimous in their condemnation of Trump’s behavior, while Republicans are divided, giving Democrats an opportunity to split wide open the crack in the Republican wall. The appearance of more evidence against Trump might conceivably cause them to defect. It is, at least, no longer unimaginable.

Trump responded to the threat of impeachment by reaffirming why he deserves it. He told reporters that impeachment (a mechanism in the Constitution) “shouldn’t be allowed. There should be a way of stopping it.
Maybe legally through the courts.” And he told a private audience that the media reporting the story were “animals” and “scum” and said the CIA officer who filed the complaint (through approved legal channels) committed “treason” and implied that he should be executed. L’état, c’est Trump, as always.

Part of Trump’s rage stemmed from what appeared to be genuine surprise that the record of him pressuring Zelensky failed to win the approbation he expected. Hadn’t Zelensky flattered him and noted his great electoral victory? Didn’t his counterpart meekly submit to Trump’s demands? How could this be received as anything other than the “perfect” conversation Trump had promised it would be?

Representative Mark Meadows, one of Trump’s more slavish followers, observed in the president’s defense, “He didn’t see anything wrong with the conversation he had with a foreign leader.” That is probably accurate. Trump has a finely honed antenna for assessing winner versus loser, or loyal versus disloyal. But the formulation of moral concepts is not a function he can perform. His brain is no more capable of distinguishing right from wrong than your microwave oven can tell you what’s on Netflix. No American president has more richly deserved impeachment.

 

 

[Grade of D as in David 13253]

1 hour ago, Nice Guy Eddie said:

I don’t see this investigation going anywhere unless someone on the inside turns on trump. And even if the House impeaches trump, McConnell already has the playbook to not move forward with a trial. He will use his Merrick Garland rule. He will say it’s unprecedented in US history to put a president on trial during a presidential election year so it’s best to let the US citizens decide. 

And Americans have now learned to forgot about trump scandals as soon as the next one comes out.

I think the McConnell theory above is exactly how this is going to go down.

[pantone159 719]

9 minutes ago, Grade of D as in David said:

I think the McConnell theory above is exactly how this is going to go down.

Yes, no matter what the investigation comes up with, the Senate will do nothing and there will be no impeachment trial. The end.

 

[Nice Guy Eddie 13509]

The Trump presidency & McConnell leadership will ultimately lead to more constitutional amendments.  

When the Senate fails to advise & consent on scotus nominees or potentially stand as court in an impeachment trial, future presidents could ignore the senates authority since they subjectively apply their authority. 

[Francisco 2.0 32387]

 

 

 

 

[Al Bundy's Napoleon Hand 13575]

23 minutes ago, Grade of D as in David said:

I think the McConnell theory above is exactly how this is going to go down.

The senator made the remarks at a Chamber of Commerce event in Paducah, Ky., after an audience member asked what Senate Republicans would do if a Supreme Court justice died next year.

“Oh, we’d fill it,” he responded with a grin, prompting laughter from the audience.

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/29/us/politics/mitch-mcconnell-supreme-court.html

[triplehorn 2664]

According to Schiff this morning, the whistleblower is in negotiations to testify to House Intel.  

[Celery Man 20931]

I don't think that Jim Jordan should talk about his expertise in assessing whistleblower complaints.

[Nice Guy Eddie 13509]

4 minutes ago, Celery Man said:

I don't think that Jim Jordan should talk about his expertise in assessing whistleblower complaints.

Watching the replay of the entire Jordan/tapper interview. Painful.  Jordan is making up new facts (lies) about the timeline.  When tapper tries to correct Jordan, his only reply is that tapper is ignoring the main point. You can’t support your main point with fake facts.  

And I agree that hunter Biden getting paid by a Ukrainian company is suspect but back it up with facts. 

[jimmyjazz 45888]

10 minutes ago, Celery Man said:

I don't think that Jim Jordan should talk about his expertise in assessing whistleblower complaints.

I don't know how Jake Tapper didn't just throw Jordan off the set, or just punch him.