you are insane. Trump has evidence against Biden, and he’s not letting everyone know about it. Pull the other one, it’s got bells on it
I suspect he has a predilection for minors.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
Well, there is.
But who are we to judge.
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If Miss Lindsey had launched a bullshit smear investigation of Biden, tRumpf wouldn’t have had to try and extort the Ukrainian government.Why didn’t cock holster and fudge licker hatch that simpler plan during one of their golf dates? What exactly was going on when they searched for errant ball inside the tree line?
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Ms Lindsey believes so strongly in Donald “two” Corinthians tRump that he fled . . .
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Not sure what your background is, but this is an extremely nuanced & sharp analysis of the moment we’re in – and the best strategy for navigating it. I’ve sized this up in much the same way, but haven’t seen it reflected anywhere. It’s quite frustrating, considering the stakes. Thanks for making me not feel so isolated & disoriented.
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Like Clockwork, Graham Launches Probe To Further Bogus Biden Conspiracy Theory
You mean like Clockwork Orange?
A) Guiliani has a great deal more influence over Trump than Graham, so it was always going to be his plan they went with. This is not a plan, but rather a late attempt to continue a failed strategy for defending Trump/changing the narrative.
B) Guiliani’s plan was going to ultimately lead to cashing in on Ukrainian natural gas and other resource extraction conglomerates, of which Trump was no doubt going to be part of. Graham doesn’t think that ambitiously.
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Extremely doubtful. There simply isn’t going to be enough time to kick off an impeachment of Pence, after Trump would be convicted. Nor would Pelosi be able to garner as much support for back to back impeachments of two republicans in the Executive Branch, that just happens to make her President.
Actually, Pence was probably more entangled in the Russian issues than the Ukraine issues. He was after all, in charge of the transition team, and that entire team and process was filled with constant Russian contacts, including far too many people who were reporting directly to Pence during that period. Less we forget, Manafort, working for Russian oligarchs, hand picked Pence to be the VP, going to such lengths as to fake an airplane malfunction to force Trump to spend another night in Indiana with the Pences.
Republicans can explain away anything. Its much easier when you aren’t burdened by facts or shame.
The point of a Senate defense at impeachment trial will be to convey two things. (1)What Trump did wan’t impeachable, mostly because (2) the Bidens were really involved in something corrupt. They don’t have to prove what that was, because they will say “because we weren’t able to get that investigation going. But it’s bad”.
Its only necessary that they provide the flimsiest of cover stories, because they know they already have the votes to acquit. They just need to provide something besides “he’s republican, so its ok”
Exactly this.
Won’t be that lengthy. Rest of this month and next month are already shot. So they will have from January - Pelosi passes impeachment to them…I am figuring maybe March. Not a lot of time, and, given that they don’t know for sure when she will hold the vote, they will be pressured to make them even shorter.
Sorry, but spinning our wheels trying to disprove a thoroughly debunked conspiracy theory that exists primarily now only in Trump’s head, would have been a horrible strategy.
The good news (such as it is) on that front, is Graham and whoever gets the short straw to lead his defense in the Senate is going to be under never ending pressure to bring up Crowdstrike anyway…because it DOES live on in Trump’s twisted little brain.
Rightly so. “Honing in” on absurd conspiracy theories would only serve to elevate those theories as being legitimate in the public’s eyes. That is about as counter to what we are trying to do as possible.
Incorrect. Trump’s intent was corrupt, and he was engaged in bribery and extortion, using public taxpayer dollars to bribe a foreign country into digging up dirt on a potential political rival that he could use personally. The intent was corrupt, it was Bribery as defined in the Constitution as an impeachable act, and he broke the law by using Congressionally mandated funds to conduct the bribe and extortion. Specifically he violated the 1974 Congressional Budget and Impoundment Act.
That’s it, in a complete nutshell…no need to muddy it up with crazy conspiracy theories.
Is it possible that Trump has a video of Graham in a compromising position? I can’t understand how one could go from calling one a presidential candidate corrupt, a liar and unfit to serve, suddenly turn to standing up and protecting every wrong step Trump takes on a daily basis.
Graham has committed himself to NOT even review the evidence that Trump has committed a series of crimes while in office! Why is that?
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The problem with reading corrupt intent into the Biden/Burisma aspect of what Trump pressured Ukraine to investigate is that such investigation would serve a completely legitimate public purpose, in addition to the admittedly private benefit it would also provide Trump. You don’t have bribery if you focus only on Biden/Burisma, you only have a conflict of interest. Corrupt intent is not established by the presence of some private benefit to an official act, but only by the absence of any public benefit. Ds have a very clear and very strong partisan interest in impeaching and removing Trump, but we cannot be accused of pursuing impeachment with corrupt intent unless it can be shown that his removal is also not in the public interest. Legislators and other elected officials always have a conflict of interest in taking any position on any public policy or political issue, and the voters must judge how they handle such conflicts, and vote accordingly at the next election.
If there is any public good that can come of this use of official power, corrupt intent can only be established if we have some testimony that Trump had no belief at all that any corruption could have been present in the Biden/Burisma connection, that nothing there needed to be investigated. We can’t determine that from the external facts of the case. Surely a situation in which the son of a D presidential candidate is receiving $600,000 a year from an oligarch of uncertain ethics for not doing anything represents a conflict of interest. If it doesn’t, why did Hunter Biden resign from his position with Burisma? Unless we get a recording of, or credible witnesses to,Trump saying that he didn’t believe that there was any possibility of there actually being anything of importance to the public interest in Biden/Burisma, we don’t have corrupt intent. What we have is a president pressuring Ukraine to conduct an investigation into a conflict of interest that might affect the next election. This is a crime?
Maybe it’s a poorly handled conflict of interest, and that is the story I see the Rs going with, at least their “moderates”. They will say he should have handed off any involvement in investigating Biden/Burisma to some apolitical career DoJ official.
You miss the point of what I wrote.
Sure, Crowdstrike is loony tunes, and its True Server offshoot is even loonier. No need to prove that unless the other side tries to assert their veracity in defense of Trump. Of course Graham is sticking with Biden/Burisma, and avoiding Crowdstrike, in trying to build a counternarrative to bribery.
Crowdstrike is such a non-starter as possibly motivating anyone in any position to know anything, that of course most of the mid-level govt officials who testified last week just took it for granted that, of course, Trump didn’t actually believe any of that nonsense. That’s what raised their concern that Trump was involved in a bribery scheme, because if he doesn’t believe Crowdstrike, he was asking Ukraine to produce fabricated evidence. There is no True Server in any cave anywhere in Ukraine, so asking for evidence derived from this fabulous entity was in effect asking Ukraine to fabricate something incriminating, and there is no possible public benefit in fake evidence. Any possibility of any true evidence of D wrongdoing coming out of an investigation into Biden/Burisma, and asking for that investigation is a conflict of interest but not bribery. Fake evidence has no possible public good, has only private political advantage, and we have corrupt intent from the externally verifiable facts of the case, without any appeal to mind-reading or finding some recording in which Trump fesses up to corrupt intent.
The Crowdstrike aspect of the investigation Trump pressured Ukraine to perform is much more important than the Biden/Burisma end of the affair. The latter creates no crux, proves nothing impeachable. Our side should make this logical crux clear that is created by the Crowdstrike end of this affair, that Trump is either mentally competent and knows Crowdstrike to be false and is therefore guilty of bribery, or he believes it and is mentally incompetent. Either way he needs to be removed. He’s still guilty of bribery in the latter case, by the way, as neither ignorance of the law nor general ignorance is any excuse, and someone in Trump’s position had at his command more than adequate resources to determine the soundness or falsity of Crowdstrike, and then to advise him on the legal implications of pressuring Ukraine in the light of Crowdstrike’s utter incredibility.
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Can’t retweet it. It says, “This tweet is unavailable.”
Protecting the WB is non- negotiable. If a dumped girlfriend WBs on a mobster it doesn’t matter what her motives are if her info checks out.
So who fed him that drivel or did he deliberately make up a lie from the whole cloth.
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The impeachment investigations into Nixon covered two years during which he was re- elected.
Probably because they wanted to claim their hands were clean and the matter non-partisan. Possibly they got gulled by corrupt Ukrainian players who sought to regain power in the Ukrainian government.
What, you object to consumer representation on boards? / semi-snark.
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The senate does not get to decide how the case against Trump is presented. The House managers get to present that side. The President presents his own defense. The Senate is sitting as jurors and they don’t even get to ask questions directly.
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Russia wanted the Democrats mad at Ukraine.
Yes, actually the Senate gets to decide everything about how the trial is conducted, or whether it consists of anything more than a vote to accept all the evidence as gathered by the House, and then vote to acquit about two minutes after the “trial” is gaveled in. The single condition placed by the Constitution on the Senate’s conduct of any trial is that if it’s the president who has been impeached, the Chief Justice has to preside.
There are Senate rules that lay out more procedural details, but those rules can be changed at any time, including during the trial, by a simple majority vote. We know that long practice, never successfully challenged by people who have been convicted on impeachment, does not allow the claim that by requiring a “trial” in the Senate, the Constitution is thereby requiring anything like the same due process rights guaranteed in actual civil or criminal trials. And those rules as they stand now and have been used in the past provide for the Senate to have the choice to fob off all responsibility for considering evidence to a committee, which can in turn choose to accept what the House has done as the only evidence or arguments it will consider before the whole Senate votes to acquit or convict.
I am by no means an expert on what the Senate rules say about the special case of a presidential trial, but my understanding is that the rules as they stand do require evidence and arguments in front of the whole Senate for a presidential trial. Sure, it would be politically risky for the Senate to change the rules now to get around that, and either fob the evidence and arguments off on a committee, or just consider that the Senators have heard the prosecution’s case on TV, and even if all of it is accepted as such, even without any defense needed to try to poke holes in it, it can be determined that the president should be acquitted forthwith.
It is also true as Josh Marshall has written, that it might be politically difficult for the Senate to vote to overrule the Chief Justice’s rulings, which to my understanding they can by the current rules. But overrule him they can. Of course they can. A full trial requiring the attendance of all the juror-senators for all the evidence and arguments cannot be left to the mercy of some judge’s ideas of how much time it is reasonable to take away form the Senate’s other business. The Rs won’t pay any political penalty at all if they vote to keep the thing from going on for months, as the Chief Justice might want it to in order to make it more like the judicial proceedings he is comfortable with.
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