You just know he’s got illegal shit going on in every cabinet department. Each should be thoroughly investigated.
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Me, too.
And hold the cornflakes.
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McConnell swims?
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Kevin McCarthy argues that since the House hasn’t voted to open an impeachment inquiry, and this is where it gets confusing, there is nothing to investigate, and thus no crime? Also members of Congress are the ultimate arbiters of what high crimes and misdemeanors means, so that bar can be as high as he wants, i.e. real high. My question is what crime are we talking about? Quid pro quo isn’t really the crime in solicitation, just an illegal quid is needed. If you have the quid and the quo, you’ve got conspiracy. There are also things like obstruction of justice, intimidation of witnesses, bribery, government procurement contracts, campaign finance. Some Democrat needs to spell out which crimes and then tell Kevin to cool his jets.
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More clings to the bottom and comes up for air periodically. Then slides back into the murk again.
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I think we’ve entered a new era, one where Presidential lawlessness is accepted by the party controlling the Executive and the Senate. There isn’t a mechanism to stop this if both bodies insist nothing illegal has been done. All of us here read the news, a lot, across a broad spectrum of outlets. 99% of the interviews or comments I read wherein a Republican replies to a journo has them saying everything they’ve seen indicates Trump has done nothing wrong. Many double down and say what he’s done is his duty, fulfilling an imperative. This is over the course of several days, each day revealing additional crimes, with each new wave greeted by more affirmations Trump is innocent and doing his duty. The mounting transgressions mean nothing to anyone in the GOP.
Many are derided as espousing hyperbole when claiming Trump can literally do anything he wants with impunity. Why that is puzzles me, as the last month or so only seems to confirm it.
There is no cavalry over the horizon coming to our rescue. The GOP killed them in their sleep before they even had a chance to mount for their big ride. Pelosi and Schiff are but nettlesome fleas biting at Trump’s hide. McConnell will brush them off when all this reaches the Senate. Trump will declare vindication and victory, then proceed to further tear down the legal framework preventing our slide into fascism and authoritarianism.
Oh, and look around you while in the grocery, or at the ball game, or while dining in a restaurant. See those people? They’re being conditioned and prepped to vote the bastard in a second time.
Mark it.
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One of the shocking parts here is the resignation of career diplomats to Trump’s corruption and abuse of power and their attempts to try to use it as best they could to get some good done even as it made their stomachs heave. Because this is what is happening throughout the federal government. The entire civil service, for all the GOP’s “deep state” bullshit, is so acculturated to subordination to the executive (as it should be) that when the executive is deeply corrupt, and appoints equally corrupt and servile senior administrators, the corruption automatically spreads like rot, like a cancer. Because the corruption is policy and the policy is corruption.
We’re not just seeing a scandal, we’re getting an inside glimpse of the acculturation of and submission to abuse of power that has spread throughout every executive agency that we see, from the outside, in the perversion of DoJ, EPA, Interior, Agriculture, CBP, ICE, and, to a lesser, but no less alarming, extent, the military.
But the saddest part here is the way the Ukrainians, representing a president who ran on a reformist, anti-corruption platform, just resign themselves to an assumption that we’re as corrupt and rotten as their government has been and as the Russians are and knuckle under to complicity in a plot to take the fall for Russia’s 2016 election interference in return for arms to resist Russian aggression. It’s a very familiar kind of twisty dealing for them, the only way any positive progress gets made there.
There’s just a sad, tragic kind of naivete here in their failure to see that this would generate a seismic shitstorm in the U.S. if it came out.
Or maybe I’m the naive one.
Maybe they saw perfectly well the extent that Trump had Putinized the government, the servility of the Republicans, the normalization narratives of the US press, the active complicity of the State Department, including career diplomats, in this extortion scheme, and the fact that Giuliani had been on TV bragging about doing this for months with no consequences, and rightly assessed how far gone we were. Maybe their only mistake was a failure grasp the uniquely American subtlety that attempting to cover up scandalous conduct that was already well-known to be occurring would trigger the press, or enable Democrats to trigger the press, into covering the scandal as a scandal.
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The mind-bending irony of all this, as I understand it, is that the actual Ukrainian corruption problem which had the attention of the world diplomatic community, including Joe Biden and others in the Obama administration, was chiefly prosecutorial corruption - advancing or quashing investigations as a vehicle for bribery (e.g. ending an illegitimate investigation for a price) or as a political tool (launch an illegitimate investigation to damage a political opponent). Which is exactly what Trump is asking Ukraine to do - launch an illegitimate investigation for political purposes. So under the guise of fighting Ukrainian corruption (cuz he was soooo concerned about it), Trump was committing the exact actual corrupt act that he was purporting to oppose. Just wow.
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Dang, I had a link for that but cannot find it now. But it basically laid out that it was a bogus statement.
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They’ll get testimony from everyone, although some testimony might have to wait until an impeachment trial. Then they should be able to get Captain Queeg on the stand, too, to show what he’s really all about.
Definitely!
From the document -
[9/9/19, 12:47:11 AM] Bill Taylor: As I said on the phone, I think it’s crazy to withhold security assistance for help with a political campaign.
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“…covering the scandal is a scandal.”
FIFY
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From an earlier Josh article.
“8/ career diplo worries that Ukraine will be forced to exonerate Russia for election interferences and accuse themselves and then still get stiffed by Trump on the guns. pic.twitter.com/FNLDT4myZT”
This needs to not get lost. In fact, it may be the most important part of all of this. This is crazy in itself alone.
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With Trump, it’s always projection.
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Neither quid nor quo is necessary. Solicitation is the crime.
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Whiner in Chief is feeling a bit aggrieved today:
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We’re still just seeing the extortion side of things… Haven’t seen anything that matches the “promise” that was in the early stories in the WaPo.
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I’m especially taken with the fact that Kurt Volker actually used a smiley emoji in one of the texts.
[8/9/19, 5:46:21 PM] Kurt Volker: Excellent!! How did you sway him? : )
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Note that the proposed statement to be issued by Zelensky never materialized. Now recall what Zelensky states in 09/25/19 press briefing with Trump when the topic of his White House visit / invite comes up, “But I think you forgot to tell me the date”. Bottom line, Zelensky is subtly reminding Trump of his extortion attempt. It was a shakedown from the outset!
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Even acceding to the “what’s the crime?” narrative plays into their hands. Because the last thing they want is for it to be framed the way the Founders intended.
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