The Trump Impeachment

[Woodbutcher]

The only way you could improve your system is if in a case like this the decision whether to impeach would rest on an impartial country, say, like Russia.

[Joe]

Well, when the Senate majority leader has the nickname "Moscow Mitch," it may already.

[laklak]

I wish all of them would get ebola and bleed out through the anus.

I'm seeing reports of people upset that he's still President, like they thought all you had to do is get the House to vote him out of office and he'd be gone. I find it hard to believe there are people that fucking stupid and ignorant who are allowed to vote and drive cars and live on their own without a minder, but then again, this is 'Murika, and any fucking thing is possible.

Oh well, only 8 more weeks and we're back to eSwatini and civilization. We're on the boat till then, so I'm sure I can live through it.

[Sean Hayden]

Her rationale is ridiculous. By her logic, it will never be right to impeach so long as the party of the impeached president decides to defend its president.

I think this relies on a much diminished interpretation of what she said. Her point seems to be about the absence of the appearance of legitimacy owing to the obvious extreme partisanship at play. This assumes the possibility of a gradient between a totally partisan hack job, and something more objective. Presumably she could still decide to impeach at points not totally objective but before "hack job".

The big problem with this is probably how impractical it is right now. Maybe that's why it feels like grandstanding? I bet it's closer to running from chaos though. In the end her point regarding how fucked the process is stands as far as I'm concerned. The system looks broken.

[L'Emmerdeur]

She doesn't say that Trump's actions were not impeachable, nor does she say that they merit impeachment. She can't see one way or another from her lofty centrist perspective? She says that she won't vote in favor of impeaching because she thinks the impeachment process was too partisan. Again, it appears that she believes the principled centrist thing to to is lie back, close your eyes, and think of America.

[Tero]

[JimC]

...the principled centrist thing to to is lie back, close your eyes, and think of a G & T...

I'm convinced that Hermit would think that of me...

[L'Emmerdeur]

[Seabass]

[L'Emmerdeur]

Approximately 90 minutes after the 'perfect' telephone call, an OMB official (Office of Management and Budget, management of which is Mulvaney's other day job) at the White House sent a message to the Pentagon instructing that the aid to Ukraine needed to be held back.

'Live Blog: Digging into the #Ukrainedocs'

A June 19 message from a White House Office of Management and Budget official queried the Pentagon’s chief financial officer about the aid. “The President has asked about this,” he wrote, including an article that had appeared that day in the Washington Examiner discussing the funds. That’s the first indication of the White House taking a focused interest in military aid to Ukraine.

And a July 25 email to the Pentagon from the same official shows how quickly OMB acted to block the aid – within 91 minutes – of the end of the now-infamous call between Trump and Ukraine’s Prime Minister Vlodymyr Zelensky that morning. The email, sent at 11:04 a.m., instructs the Pentagon to “please hold off on” distribution of the funds and says that “given the sensitive nature of the request” the information should be “closely held.”

[Tero]

TRUMP: “You know full well that Vice President Biden used his office and $1 billion dollars of U.S. aid money to coerce Ukraine into firing the prosecutor who was digging into the company paying his son millions of dollars.” — letter to Pelosi.

THE FACTS: He’s incorrect to say that Biden, now a 2020 Democratic presidential candidate, pressed to have the prosecutor fired while the prosecutor was investigating Burisma, the energy company in Ukraine where Biden’s son Hunter sat on the board of directors. In fact, by the time Biden came out against the prosecutor, the investigation into the company was dormant.

Biden, among other international officials, was pressing for a more aggressive investigation of corruption in Ukraine, not a softer one.

Trump's team cites a video of Joe Biden from 2018. Speaking on a public panel, Biden recounted threatening to withhold a loan guarantee from Ukraine's government unless it fired the prosecutor, who was widely considered ineffective if not corrupt himself.

What Trump doesn't say is that in February 2016, a few months after Biden threatened to hold back a $1 billion loan guarantee, the International Monetary Fund threatened to delay $40 billion in aid unless Ukraine took action to fight corruption.

An investigation into Burisma's owner for money laundering, tax evasion and other alleged misdeeds began in 2012 and pertained to the years before Hunter Biden joined the board.

(Just for Tyrannical)
https://www.1011now.com/content/news/AP ... 02661.html

[Tero]

The smocking (trump-spell) gun
https://mobile.twitter.com/P_Lepinkaine ... 8495905792

[Tero]

For Tyrannical: the reason Hunter Biden, a whistleblower, Giuliani or any of these will not testify:

[Tero]

Rudy was to bring a bunch of Ukrainian criminals to testify in US, but not even the current Trump gov't (with expelled ambassadors) was able to do it

While in Europe, Giuliani also interviewed Shokin, who told him and One America News that at Biden’s demand, former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko pressured him to wind down the investigation into Burisma. But it’s never been clear that Shokin was actively investigating Burisma in the first place, and critics say Shokin was in fact leveraging the threat of opening a Burisma investigation to solicit bribes.

Yovanovitch and other U.S. officials deposed in the impeachment inquiry testified that pushing Ukraine to replace Shokin was official U.S. policy, precisely because he was seen as failing to sufficiently investigate corruption.

Documents given to Giuliani by Ukrainian lawmaker Andriy Derkach and obtained by NBC News show Giuliani has also been absorbing allegations that under Yovanovitch, the U.S. Embassy was acting as a puppet master for Ukraine’s recently formed National Anti-Corruption Bureau, or NABU.

The documents circulated by Derkach, who was trained at a KGB school in Moscow, include emails between NABU officials and U.S. embassy officials in 2017. Derkach had said they show the NABU “leaked” information to the U.S. about ongoing criminal cases, including investigations into Mykola Zlochevsky, the Ukrainian oligarch who founded Burisma.

Giuliani has acknowledged that in January he tried and failed to get the Trump administration to grant Shokin a U.S. visa.

In her impeachment testimony, Yovanovitch says she didn’t block the visa for Shokin, but concurred when State Department consular officials suggested withholding a visa because of his “known corrupt activities.” She says she notified Washington of the decision and that senior State Department officials stood behind it even as Giuliani was pressuring the White House to overrule them.

Giuliani says that’s another example of perjury by Yovanovitch. He says he now has State Department records showing the reason stated for the denial was that Shokin had undergone an operation two years earlier “and hadn’t recovered yet.”

Giuliani didn’t explain that unusual claim, which would not normally preclude a visa, and hasn’t produced the records. But Yovanovitch in her testimony suggested Shokin had lied in his visa application by saying he was coming to visit family, not provide evidence about corruption, as he now claims.

A State Department spokeswoman didn’t respond to requests for comment about Shokin’s visa application or Giuliani’s claim.

A second Ukrainian likely on Giuliani’s list is Andriy Telizhenko, the former Ukrainian diplomat who says he witnessed the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington collude with the Democratic National Committee in 2016. Telizhenko traveled to Ukraine with Giuliani on his trip and told NBC News he now can’t return because his visa is being blocked by “Soros people” with influence over the U.S. Embassy.

A third Ukrainian who says his visa was blocked is Mykhaylo Okhendovsky, who chaired Ukraine’s Central Election Commission until the Parliament fired him last year.

In an interview alongside Giuliani, Okhendovsky told One America News that Kent, the former deputy under Yovanovitch at the U.S. Embassy, tried to block his visa. He said when he appealed to Yovanovitch, she brushed him off. Okhendovsky says while he now holds a U.S. visa, he’s been told it won’t be renewed once it expires.

The fourth Ukrainian appears to be Kostiantyn Kulyk, a former prosecutor who compiled a dossier about Hunter Biden. Giuliani says in a One America News segment that Kulyk made a formal application to come to the U.S. to divulge what he knows, but that the U.S. Embassy hasn’t responded.

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/trump- ... t-n1106321

[Tero]

The Soros people!