The House impeachment inquiry on Monday released a transcript of the testimony of Laura Cooper, the deputy assistant defense secretary for Russia, Ukraine and Eurasia.
115 pages- Americans don’t read. We need to see live testimony on Wednesday. The Republicans will make it a circus that will turn people off.
…or they will tune in for the circus, stay for the mud-wrestling match.
There should be indivdual and collective counterespionage investigations into each Omarosa wannabe who tried getting into the SCIF without proper clearance.
CBS will be preempting Young and the Restless and Bold and the Beautiful to air the hearings. That will put most folks likely to be home to watch it in a snit. The mud-wrestling folks will be tuned in to Judge Jerry on a different channel. Anyone else is going to be watching the Fox cut in the evening or already converted.
On the question of how to quickly describe what this is all about, I’d go for:
Trump has been caught red handed trying to secretly undermine the 2020 election.
Then talk about Ukraine.
And yet another witness says Agolf Trump ordered extortion and bribery. So …
Maybe their IQ’s will go up a point or two.
I’ll watch highlights at night, unless it really heats up.
Cooper said her office “was trying to figure out how we could get the funds released” and “how long we could delay obligation and still be able to obligate the entirety of the funding prior to September 30.”
I’m pretty sure that if the DoD had announced an investigation into the Biden family en masse, that money would have shot out the tube like a greased mole rat.
Geez. One thing is that there’s an enormous amount of not recalling the detailed timeline that could probably be helped with access to documents or even metadata. The other is that Meadows really wanted to waste the witness’s and the committee’s time. Haven’t got much more with a skim. She apparently had little or no direct knowledge, but what was going on was obvious to everyone.
Mulvaney’s lawyers are withdrawing from Bolton’s lawsuit. Ari just announcing.
hahaha!
Don’t know why THAT, of all things makes me SO happy, but it does. They eat their own I guess. Schadenfreude in the early evening is a great way to destress after a workday.
The greatest thing about the Nixon saga was that Sam Ervin’s Senate hearings on Watergate were covered gavel to gavel every evening on PBS. The public got a real education from those hearings. They shifted public opinion. People could add two and two.
Hope we get some version of that every evening for people at work—or at least the two 45-minute sustained interrogations from counsel.
Not sure how they’ve set up the rules, but Schiff needs to be ready when Nunes offers to yield his 45 minutes to Jordan. That will turn the hearings into a shit show.
It’s been a nice day. 
Why are all the “Appearances” redacted? I mean, even the lawyers for the Committee are blacked-out. What gives?
“in the foreseeable past”
Sigh.
I actually thought she had several valuable elements to offer in her testimony.
First, that all the appropriate due diligence before allocating funds was done and benchmark processes to combat corruption were in place.
Second, that questions came down from the oval and were answered substantively.
Third, that the hold came from the Oval Office through the OMB - and none of the various agencies were given a clear reason for it beyond some vague concerns about corruption, despite attempts at getting clarification.
Fourth, that the hold had dubious legal status without a formal notice to congress, an action that was not set in motion.
There is more, but those are the highlights as I see them.
Mulvaney, Trump’s “LeFou”.
OT and possibly inappropriate, but I find her quite attractive.
My schadenfreude quota has been vastly exceeded over the last couple of weeks. I’ve really been enjoying the news for a change.
Long may it last.