The Impeachment of President Donald J Trump

[seemslikeadream]

sorry this is different

I am optimistic I have always been optimistic even during the last 3 years here...with so many crimes there is going to be lots of tipping points

this is now an official impeachment ...a very rare occurrence in this country

trump has admitted he committed a crime

trump has already said he robbed the bank on national tv.........

he is a member of a transnational crime syndicate masquerading as a government

“I don't buy this theory at all that Trump thought he wasn't going to win or he didn't want to win. I mean, first off, this is Trump and you have to imagine that in his head he's content to lose to a woman and lose to a Clinton.

“But second of all, his relationship with Russia goes back 30 years as do his political ambitions. He nearly ran for president in 1988, in 1996; he ran in 2000, he ran in 2012, and he ran again in 2016. That's not a political neophyte, that's somebody whose had long-term political ambitions.
We also know that Trump has had ties to Russian officials and to organized crime for about 30 years and that he's been the source of various crackdowns on those crimes. For example, there's an investigation into the Taj Mahal casino by the US Treasury in 2015, Trump may have been in trouble.

“A great way to get out of trouble is if you're the President of the United States and you can pack the courts, you can purge agencies, you can rewrite the law so that you can be immune from prosecution as well as filling your own autocratic objectives and partnering with autocrats around the world, which is what he's done.

“This is a transnational crime syndicate masquerading as a government.”
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2019/1 ... government

trump is not a republican ...he is not a Democrat .....HE IS A CRIMINAL and HE HAS BEEN OWNED BY THE MOB SINCE THE DAY HE WAS BORN

this time his asking a foreign government to meddle in our elections AGAIN and he is NOT going to get away with it this time


I heard for 3 years trump would never be impeached ....well it is happening now just like I knew it would

Let's Do This Impeachment Thing
Let's get straight what the straw that broke Nancy Pelosi's back on impeachment was. It wasn't the phone call to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky where he said he wanted that country to go after Joe Biden and his son (or at least make it look like they were going after them). It wasn't the implication of the president of the United States using our country's relationship with a foreign country to go after a political opponent, to, really, collude with that country.

While surely that call and Trump's admitted actions played a role in Pelosi finally giving in to her increasingly restive and vocal caucus, it was really more cut-and-dried: the law says that if a whistleblower gives information to the inspector general of the intelligence community that the IG deems "urgent" and legitimate, it must be given to the proper congressional committees. It's that fucking simple. And even though Pelosi has let some things slide (like Trump refusing to turn over his taxes to the chair of the House Ways and Means Committee, as required by law), this one could not only be couched in terms of "national security" since it involves, you know, intelligence. But the motherfucking IG who found it urgent is a Trump appointee.

You know how this is gonna play out over the next few days: Trump has already said he's going to release the "transcript" of his July 25 call with Zelensky. And let's be clear: it ain't gonna be a transcript, unless they record the calls in the Oval Office, which would be peak Trump stupidity, and even then there's no way to trust it. Probably the transcript will show that Trump never said, "Hey, Voldemort, dick over Biden or no bomb money for you." But, as Jeffrey Toobin and others have said today, if Trump even mentions Biden's name, it's abuse of power. I'm betting that, if you're really concerned about corruption in Ukraine, there are lots of people not named Biden involved. (Besides, Hunter Biden was already completely cleared of any involvement in anything. He was never even formally accused of anything.)

This fuckin' dance will go something like the Mueller Report. Because it's not absolutely obvious to the dumbest dumbass what's going on in the phone call, most Republicans and Fox "news" and Twitter fucknuts will proclaim it a "witch hunt" and try to discredit the whole impeachment effort.

But we don't even know if that's all that the whistleblower was talking about. As I write this, the New York Times is reporting that the White House is figuring out how much to allow the whistleblower to speak to Congress, which, again, is not what the law says. It's a distraction strategy so that that array of leperous whores who run interference for Trump can say to his idiot hordes of voters, "See? Look how transparent your orange god is."

While I'm still leaning agnostic on the whole "this is finally what brings this motherfucker down" early celebration because we've been burned so many times before, I gotta say that there is something different going on here. First off, today, Mitch McConnell, that infected sore on the scrotum of politics, went along with a nonbinding resolution calling for the whistleblower's complaint to be given to the intelligence committees, and it passed with unanimous consent. Say what you will about it, but it gives Democrats some pretty potent ammunition to say that Trump, Barr, and the Acting Director of National Intelligence are being fucking criminals by holding it back.

If I were an optimistic person, I'd say that we might see some Republicans start to peel off as people wake up and see that, at last, in a game of chicken with the White House, Democrats in the House did not swerve at the last minute. It's a whole lot more fun to root for a fighter, and if polls start to show growing support for impeachment, I'd say some GOP House members, at the very least, are gonna start to get a little nervous about keeping their lips superglued to Trump's voluminous ass.

And I've seen a few conservatives in the media agreeing that Trump admitted to impeachable offenses when he bragged that he talked about the Bidens with Zelensky. Maybe we'll get more who give a shit about the rule of law, but I wouldn't hold my breath. The one thing I would say to any Republicans who might be reading: "Fuck you." And then the next thing I'd say is "You knew it was gonna come to this. You knew Trump was just that vile and depraved and greedy and dumb and narcissistic. How else was this gonna go?" Perhaps I'd add: "Did you see him at the United Nations today? Sweet Jesus, I thought he was gonna collapse into himself like a deflating yoga ball. He ain't right. You wanna stand by that?"

We are at the beginning now. I don't think this will be like the oddly fast Clinton impeachment, which took a little over two months (with the trial and acquittal in the Senate over two months after that). That came in the wake of the Starr Report, so it was a response to a full, ludicrous, shameful sham of an investigation. We're starting from scratch here. Let's have some hearings on the TV, please. Drag Trump's ass for as long as it's necessary.

What Nancy Pelosi finally did was to stop allowing Democrats to be so goddamned feckless and seemingly random in their attempts to investigate Trump and his administration. An effective Democratic caucus would have already gone after Trump for profiting off his position or for what was revealed in the Mueller Report, which essentially said, "You gotta impeach this crooked cock."

Now Democrats can have a crystal clear, simple message that can tie together the threads of all the various committees' work: Trump is a criminal, and here are all the ways he has violated the law, his oath of office, and the public trust. Now let's impeach the motherfucker.

Gird yer loins, oh, good Trump-haters of America, for things are gonna get intense and weird and possibly (even more) violent, if his yahoo-brigade starts to think their racist president is going down.

We've finally, really joined the battle. It's about goddamn time.

(One last note: Rudy Giuliani is fucked. He better cut some deals fast because Trump is selling him out in a heartbeat.)
http://rudepundit.blogspot.com

[seemslikeadream]

Rudy was NOT freelancing .....

During the call, Mr. Trump told President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine that he should be in touch with both Mr. Barr and the president’s personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani

2 intelligence officials referred President Trump’s activity to the Justice Department for a possible criminal inquiry. It declined to open one.

trump is a mobbed up fucking traitor

What’s fascinating is that the Trump regime actually released this transcript, which incriminates Donald Trump a thousand times over, and fully validates Nancy Pelosi’s decision to impeach him.
This means the full truth about Trump’s actions must be even worse than this transcript. Trump’s presidency and life are now over.
https://www.palmerreport.com/analysis/s ... dal/21105/

Tom Nichols
‏
I think the House impeachment articles should list everything from obstruction to the Ukraine call.
GOP Sens will then have to either acquit on *everything*, or find him guilty on one of the many things of which he's guilty.
An or up-or-down on 1 or 2 articles won't do it.
https://twitter.com/RadioFreeTom/status ... 0315911169

Now.
Release.
The.
Whistleblower.
Complaint.

Trump Told Ukraine’s Leader to Work With Barr to Investigate Biden

On Wednesday, the White House released the transcript of a July 25 call between President Trump and the leader of Ukraine.


By Maggie Haberman, Michael D. Shear and Katie Benner
Sept. 25, 2019, 10:00 a.m. ET

WASHINGTON — President Trump urged the president of Ukraine to contact Attorney General William P. Barr about opening a potential corruption investigation connected to former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., according to a transcript of a July phone call at the center of accusations that Mr. Trump pressured a foreign leader to find dirt on a political rival.
The director of national intelligence and the inspector general for the intelligence community each referred a whistle-blower’s concerns about the call for a possible criminal investigation into the president's actions, according to a Justice Department official.
Law enforcement officials reviewed the matters and declined to open an inquiry, the official said.
During the call, Mr. Trump told President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine that he should be in touch with both Mr. Barr and the president’s personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani, according to the transcript released by the White House on Wednesday.
“There is a lot of talk about Biden’s son, that Biden stopped the prosecution, and a lot of people want to find out about that,” Mr. Trump said to Mr. Zelensky during the call, according to the transcript. “So whatever you can do with the attorney general would be great.”
The Justice Department said Wednesday that Mr. Barr was unaware that Mr. Trump had told Mr. Zelensky that he would contact him.
Though rooting out widespread corruption in Ukraine has long been an American foreign policy goal, Mr. Trump referenced Mr. Biden during the call. Mr. Trump and Mr. Giuliani have long pushed for Ukrainian officials to examine whether there was any improper overlap between Mr. Biden’s dealings with Ukraine while in office and his son’s position on the board of a Ukrainian energy company.
But Mr. Trump’s suggestion that American law enforcement be directly involved and in contact with Ukraine’s government marks the first evidence that the president personally sought to harness the power of the United States government to further a politically motivated investigation.
Mr. Trump specifically asked his Ukrainian counterpart to “do us a favor” by looking into an unsubstantiated theory pushed by Mr. Giuliani holding that Ukrainians had some role in the emails stolen from the Democratic National Committee.
“I would like to have the attorney general call you or your people and I would like you to get to the bottom of that,” Mr. Trump said on the call, also referencing Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel who investigated Russia’s election sabotage. “Whatever you can do, it’s very important that you do it, if that’s possible.”
Mr. Trump’s allies argue that he was not exerting improper pressure on Mr. Zelensky, but mentioned Mr. Barr because the Justice Department was already reviewing the origins of the inquiry into Russia’s 2016 election meddling.
The president’s mentions of Mr. Barr and Mr. Giuliani were the most striking part of a half-hour conversation in which the two men discussed a series of issues. But several times, Mr. Trump steered the conversation back to Mr. Barr, Mr. Giuliani and Mr. Biden.
There was no reference, implicit or explicit, to the $391 million in foreign aid that Mr. Trump had told Mick Mulvaney, the acting White House chief of staff, to put a hold on several days before the call took place.
The details of the call — which were first revealed by a whistle-blower who works in the intelligence community — prompted Democrats on Tuesday to formally open an impeachment inquiry, accusing Mr. Trump of betraying his country by pressuring a foreign leader to dig up dirt on Mr. Biden.
ImageAttorney General William P. Barr at the White House last week. The Justice Department said Wednesday that Mr. Barr was unaware that Mr. Trump had told Mr. Zelensky that he would contact him.
Attorney General William P. Barr at the White House last week. The Justice Department said Wednesday that Mr. Barr was unaware that Mr. Trump had told Mr. Zelensky that he would contact him.CreditDoug Mills/The New York Times
But until Wednesday, lawmakers had not yet seen the transcript, which documents the 30-minute call and includes banter about Mr. Zelensky staying at the Trump Hotel and the two men comparing which of their airplanes is better.
The July 25 call between Mr. Trump and Mr. Zelensky is at the center of a rapidly escalating political crisis for the American president, who now faces an impeachment inquiry as he prepares to run for re-election.
In the days before the transcript was released, news reports revealed that Mr. Trump used the call in July to pressure Mr. Zelensky for an investigation about Mr. Biden’s actions on behalf of his son Hunter Biden’s work with a business in Ukraine.
That followed repeated efforts over the past several months by Mr. Giuliani to urge the Ukrainians to start an investigation into Mr. Biden.
Over the weekend, Mr. Trump publicly acknowledged that he discussed the former vice president with Mr. Zelensky, even as he angrily railed against what he called another “witch hunt” and insisted that his conversation with the Ukrainian president was perfectly appropriate.
“The conversation I had was largely congratulatory,” Mr. Trump told reporters on Sunday. “It was largely corruption — all of the corruption taking place. It was largely the fact that we don’t want our people, like Vice President Biden and his son, creating to the corruption already in the Ukraine.”
Over the next several days, the president offered a series of shifting and at times contradictory explanations and justifications for his conversation with Mr. Zelensky and his decision this summer to freeze $391 million in aid to Ukraine. It was unblocked after officials at the Office of Management and Budget raised concerns that the money would be impounded, making it harder to spend in the future, and after two Republican senators — Rob Portman of Ohio and Ron Johnson of Wisconsin — raised concerns to the White House.
Mr. Trump made no direct or indirect mentions of aid to Ukraine during the July 25 call, according to the transcript. But Mr. Trump does repeatedly mention Mr. Biden, saying at one point that the former vice president had bragged about stopping a prosecution involving the company that his son worked for — a charge for which there is no public evidence.
According to the transcript, Mr. Zelensky responded that Ukraine has a good prosecutor now.
In New York for the annual United Nations General Assembly, which opened Monday, Mr. Trump at one point repeated his assertion that the conversation with Mr. Zelensky was about corruption. But he later said he had frozen the aid because European countries were not committing their fair share toward defending Ukraine against Russian aggression.
Mr. Trump and his allies inside the White House initially refused to allow the transcript of the call to be released to lawmakers or disclosed publicly. They argued that doing so would set a dangerous precedent and would discourage frank conversations between presidents and foreign leaders.
Faced with mounting demands for details of the call to be disclosed, including by Senate Republicans, Mr. Trump relented on Tuesday. He said on Twitter that he had “authorized the release tomorrow of the complete, fully declassified” information about the call and directed the administration to release it, unredacted.
But Mr. Trump’s advisers, even as the president gave in, said they believed that Democrats had gone too far and that the transcript — and the substance of the whistle-blower’s complaint — would prove not to be damaging to Mr. Trump.
Meanwhile, the president made it clear on Twitter that he planned to aggressively fight Democratic efforts to impeach him. He lashed out at the allegations of impropriety regarding the call, saying they were nothing more than “more breaking news Witch Hunt garbage.” And he denounced what he called “crazy” partisanship by his opponents.
“PRESIDENTIAL HARASSMENT,” he tweeted Tuesday evening.
http://archive.is/xMSc5#selection-253.0-606.0

[seemslikeadream]

now there are 211 Democrats for impeachment


the Ukrainians have an actual transcript of this call also so trump had no choice he could be a victim of blackmail .......not a document from Barr

watch for the ellipses ...NOT A TRANSCRIPT...30 MINUTE CALL

via this tool: https://www.edgestudio.com/production/w ... calculator …

Rick Wilson

Wait. How did they think this was a good thing?

Lincoln's Bible
‏

Because they had a ton of pre-crafted propaganda for this, should Biden win nom. Now, stupid donald has forced them to play that hand early. Coordinated talking points & crap memes to spin the story won’t be as effective, but it’s the best play they have. Use it or lose it.
https://twitter.com/LincolnsBible?ref_s ... r%5Eauthor

The Inspector General has filed a criminal complaint against Donald Trump

Yesterday, Nancy Pelosi and the House Democrats announced that they’re moving forward with Donald Trump’s impeachment, due to his attempt at using money to extort the president of Ukraine into helping him alter the outcome of the 2020 U.S. presidential election. As a reminder, impeachment does not require a crime to have been committed. But it turns out someone in the Trump regime thinks Donald Trump did commit a crime.

Intelligence Community Inspector General Michael Atkinson referred a criminal complaint against Donald Trump to the Department of Justice last month, according to Shimon Prokupecz of CNN. The criminal complaint specifically seeks to determine whether Trump’s actions were a “violation of campaign finance law.” There are far larger crimes at play here, such as espionage, extortion, and conspiracy against the United States. But campaign finance crimes tend to be far easier to get a conviction on.

The key here is that the Intelligence Community Inspector General is a Trump appointee. While he has a greater degree of independence than a lot of other appointees, the reality is that Donald Trump chose this guy, and now this guy believes Trump’s phone call with Ukraine may be felonious in nature. This disproves any argument that Trump might try to make about impeachment being a witch hunt.

In addition, this criminal complaint from the Inspector General to the Department of Justice would have ended up landing on Attorney General Bill Barr’s desk. It’s a given that Barr tried to bury it – which means that Barr has been caught red handed committing obstruction of justice

– and that Barr is toast.https://www.palmerreport.com/analysis/c ... ump/21107/

Scott Hechinger
‏
As “law & order” mayor of NYC, Giuliani arrested & caged hundreds of thousands of Black & latinx people for jumping the turnstile, marijuana, drug possession, trespass, suspended licenses, petit larceny. He would’ve demanded life for a crime like this.
https://twitter.com/emptywheel

Daniel Dale
‏
White House document says Trump said AG Barr and Giuliani would call Zelensky re Biden: “There’s a lot of talk about Biden’s son, that Biden stopped the prosecution and a lot of people want to find out about that so whatever you can do with the Attorney General would be great.”


The part we didn’t know about is that Trump also asked Zelensky for a “favor” regarding Crowdstrike and “the server.” Crowdstrike is the company that the Democratic National Committee hired to investigate and respond to the Russian hack.

https://twitter.com/ddale8/status/1176863600587227137

MAY 1ST TRANSCRIPT OF BARR AT THE HEARING........

I'll be back with that


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=idP5-vtkhBE



Scott Stedman
@ScottMStedman
·
It needs to become common knowledge that the Israeli private spy company Psy Group ran a smear campaign in 2017 against the same people that Trump and Giuliani are now smearing by saying they colluded with the DNC. We don’t know who hired Psy Group to do this.


SUMMARY OF IMPEACHABLE TRUMP-UKRAINE QUID PRO QUO*

TRUMP: We need reciprocity in our relationship with Ukraine.
ZELENSKY: We need Javelin missiles.
TRUMP: OK, I need election aid. Talk to my lawyer.

* Source: White House "memo" summarizing July 25 Trump-Zelensky call.

[Belligerent Savant]

.

Gluttons for punishment. Dupes that continue to fall prey to the charade.

Tragic, if not so predictable.

[seemslikeadream]

this is not a fucking charade...of course it may be to you as always you are entitled to your opinion ....have a nice day


the Attorney General of the United States is covering up for a criminal treasonous president


I am following this AND I AM NOT A DUPE FAR FROM IT AND I RESENT THE FUCKING IMPLICATION

do what is important to you and I will not judge you the way you judge me

the only tragedy here is that my sister died this morning 6 months after her husband...that's real tragedy I know real tragedy and I am sure you know real tragedy, my following a criminal president is not in the category of extreme distress or sorrow.

I am done with you I have little time or energy for your put downs...I understand this is all beneath you
you have said as much over and over and over again I get it. I have come to accept your contempt over the last few months .....but not this morning .....not this morning

[seemslikeadream]

213 Democrats are now for impeachment

Aaron Rupar


.@SenKamalaHarris: Has the president or anyone at the White House ever asked or suggested you open an investigation into anyone?

BARR: ..... ah .....

HARRIS: Seems like something you should be able to answer

BARR: I don't know ......
https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1123655541241282561

southpaw
‏

This part of the OLC opinion briefly summarizing what is and isn’t contained in the whistleblower complaint is, I believe, the most detailed official description to date. https://www.justice.gov/olc/file/1204586/download …


The OLC opinion also says that someone—who implicitly determined that the IC whistleblower complaint was a “credible complaint of alleged criminal conduct”—referred the whistleblower complaint to DOJ’s criminal division for review.



Further description of the complaint


This part relates that the ICIG was concerned about safeguarding elected officials from foreign compromise. That could explain the reference in the ICIG’s letters to Schiff regarding “one of the most significant and important of the DNI’s responsibilities to the American people.”


How the ICIG determined this matter was within the scope of the statute (i.e. the DNI’s responsibilities):

https://twitter.com/nycsouthpaw/status/ ... 9302347777

[Cordelia]

I'm sorry for your loss SLAD.

So, Capitol Hill's High Priestess announced a new chess move. (What moves will Biden make next?)



Election 2020: Why am I reminded of ‘American Horror Story’, which I’ve never watched...don’t need to.

(Still wondering if another candidate might announce late, à la mode Reagan’s entry for 1980. probably no.)

[seemslikeadream]

thank you Cordelia ......she just could not live without him, I am just numb

but I will continue to post because there is nothing else to do right now

there are 3 republicans running for the 2020 nomination....Joe Walsh Bill Weld and Mark Sanford


https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_cont ... 1CjMtRs59g

Andrew Desiderio
‏
Hmmm… The White House just sent its talking points on Ukraine to House Democrats.

Here are some screenshots, per source.




Source says the White House just sent a follow-up to “recall” the email to House Democrats containing talking points...

https://twitter.com/AndrewDesiderio/sta ... 4768185344

HOW ROGER STONE’S TRIAL RELATES TO THE UKRAINE SCANDAL

September 25, 2019/0 Comments/in 2016 Presidential Election, Mueller Probe /by emptywheel
The White House released the readout from one (but not all) of the calls involved in the whistleblower complaint. It shows that before Trump asked Volodymyr Zelensky for help framing Joe Biden, he first asked Zelensky for help attacking Crowdstrike.

The President: I would like you to do us a favor though because our country has been through a lot and Ukraine knows a lot about it. I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine, they say Crowdstrike … I guess you have one of your wealthy people… The server, they say Ukraine has.it. There are a lot. of things that went on, the whole situation. I think you are surrounding yourself with some of the same people. I . would like to have the Attorney General call you or your people and I would like you to get to the bottom of it. As you said yestrday, that whole nonsense ended with a very poor performance by a man named Robert Mueller, an incompetent performance, but they say a lot of it started with Ukraine. Whatever you can do, it’s very important that you do it if that’s possible.

As with the sections involving the request on Biden, this one includes ellipses, hiding part of Trump’s ask. Also like those sections, this one suggests Bill Barr is involved in his improper request.

A request about Crowdstrike more directly addresses matters of intelligence — the attribution of the 2016 operation to Russia — than an effort to frame Joe Biden.

And this Crowdstrike request is what ties the call obviously to the timing — the day after the Mueller testimony gave Trump the belief he had weathered the Russian investigation.

Only, Trump is not clear of the impact of the Mueller investigation. On the contrary, if all goes on schedule, prosecutors will present abundant evidence of what even Mark Meadows calls “collusion,” the campaign’s effort to optimize the WikiLeaks releases, in Roger Stone’s November trial. As I have noted, in addition to Steve Bannon and Erik Prince, the trial will talk about Stone’s texts and calls to four different Donald Trump phone numbers, as well as his aides and bodyguard, Keith Schiller. (This screen cap comes from a list of stipulated phone numbers and emails that has since been sealed.)


The Stone trial (if it goes forward–I still have my doubts) will show that Trump was personally involved in these efforts and got repeated updates directly from Stone.

And a key strand of Stone’s defense is to question the Crowdstrike findings on the hack. Stone has been pursuing this effort for months — it’s what almost got him jailed under his gag. And while Amy Berman Jackson ruled twice this week against Stone getting any further Crowdstrike reports (once in an opinion denying Stone’s efforts to get unredacted Crowdstrike reports as moot since the government doesn’t have them, and once today in his pre-trial hearing when she deemed the remaining unredacted passages to pertain to ongoing Democratic cybersecurity protections and so unrelated to what Stone wants them for), Stone still has several Crowdstrike reports from discovery.

Stone’s defense has focused entirely on discrediting the evidence that Trump partnered with a hostile country to get elected (which presumably is part of his effort to get a pardon). If he can support that effort by releasing currently private Crowdstrike reports he will do so.

Today’s pre-trial hearing — where ABJ also ruled that Stone won’t be able to question the underlying Russian investigation — may have mooted the effort to tie Ukrainian disinformation to Stone’s own disinformation effort. But the two efforts are linked efforts by Trump to deny his own role in “colluding” with Russia.
https://www.emptywheel.net/2019/09/25/h ... e-scandal/

"I will tell Rudy and Attorney General Barr to call." - trump

Nice of trump to include evidence we can use to impeach Barr along with trump.


"One Republican senator told me if it was a secret vote, 30 Republican senators would vote to impeach Trump."

– Mike Murphy, fmr. senior adviser to Mitt Romney and John McCain


216 Democrats are now for impeachment

[Iamwhomiam]

Before Trump's defenders begin complaining how wrong his impeachment is while justifying Clinton's, let me point out the similarities and differences between the two, What is similar is that they both involve cock sucking and the difference is found in who the cocksucker was in each case. In Clinton's case, he lied to congress about having his willy sucked by a youthful red-blooded female American intern. In Trump's case, it was he who was doing the cock-sucking, and it wasn't American cock Trump was sucking, it was Ukrainian cock he was sucking, red-blooded and male, at that, and in fact, enormously Presidential. Compliant satisfaction by all parties so engaged, momentary as it might have been. It's rumored Zelensky later complained to aides that the teeth in Trump's tiny mouth are very sharp!

[seemslikeadream]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UG6xMglSMdk

Speech by Barbara Jordan (D-Texas) to the House Judiciary Committee.
Mr. Chairman:
I join in thanking you for giving the junior members of this committee the glorious opportunity of sharing the pain of this inquiry. Mr. Chairman, you are a strong man and it has not been easy but we have tried as best we can to give you as much assistance as possible.
Earlier today, we heard the beginning of the Preamble to the Constitution of the United States, “We, the people.” It is a very eloquent beginning. But when the document was completed on the seventeenth of September 1787 I was not included in that “We, the people.” I felt somehow for many years that George Washington and Alexander Hamilton just left me out by mistake. But through the process of amendment, interpretation and court decision I have finally been included in “We, the people.”
Today, I am an inquisitor; I believe hyperbole would not be fictional and would not overstate the solemnness that I feel right now. My faith in the Constitution is whole, it is complete, it is total. I am not going to sit here and be an idle spectator to the diminution, the subversion, the destruction of the Constitution.
…The subject of its jurisdiction are those offenses which proceed from the misconduct of public men. That is what we are talking about. In other words, the jurisdiction comes from the abuse or violation of some public trust. It is wrong, I suggest, it is a misreading of the Constitution, for any member here to assert that for a member to vote for an article of impeachment means that that member must be convinced that the President should be removed from office.
The Constitution doesn’t say that. The powers relating to impeachment are an essential check in the hands of this body, the legislature, against and upon the encroachment of the Executive. In establishing the division between the two branches of the legislature, the House and the Senate, assigning to the one the right to accuse and to the other the right to judge, the framers of this Constitution were very astute. They did not make the accusers and the judges the same person.
We know the nature of impeachment. We have been talking about it awhile now. It is chiefly designed for the President and his high ministers to somehow be called into account. It is designed to “bridle” the Executive if he engages in excesses. It is designed as a method of national inquest into the conduct of public men. The framers confined in the Congress the power, if need be, to remove the President in order to strike a delicate balance between a President swollen with power and grown tyrannical and preservation of the independence of the Executive. The nature of impeachment is a narrowly channeled exception to the separation of powers maxim; the federal convention of 1787 said that. It limited impeachment to high crimes and misdemeanors and discounted and opposed the term, “maladministration.” “It is to be used only for great misdemeanors,” so it was said in the North Carolina ratification convention. And in the Virginia ratification convention: “We need one branch to check the others.”
The North Carolina ratification convention: “No one need to be afraid that officers who commit oppression will pass with immunity.
“Prosecutions of impeachments will seldom fail to agitate the passions of the whole community,” said Hamilton in the Federalist Papers, number 65. “And to divide it into parties more or less friendly or inimical to the accused.” I do not mean political parties in that sense.
The drawing of political lines goes to the motivation behind impeachment; but impeachment must proceed within the confines of the constitutional term, “high crime and misdemeanors.”
Of the impeachment process, it was Woodrow Wilson who said that “nothing short of the grossest offenses against the plain law of the land will suffice to give them speed and effectiveness. Indignation so great as to overgrow party interest may secure a conviction; but nothing else can.”
Common sense would be revolted if we engaged upon this process for petty reasons. Congress has a lot to do: Appropriations, tax reform, health insurance, campaign finance reform, housing, environmental protection, energy sufficiency, mass transportation. Pettiness cannot be allowed to stand in the face of such overwhelming problems. So today we are not being petty. We are trying to be big, because the task we have before us is a big one.
This morning, in a discussion of the evidence, we were told that the evidence which purports to support the allegations of misuse of the CIA by the President is thin. We are told that that evidence is insufficient. What that recital of the evidence this morning did not include is what the President did know on June 23, 1972. The President did know that it was Republican money, that it was money from the Committee for the Re-election of the President, which was found in the possession of one of the burglars arrested on June 17.
What the President did know on June 23 was the prior activities of E. Howard Hunt, which included his participation in the break-in of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist, which included Howard Hunt’s participation in the Dita Beard ITT affair, which included Howard Hunt’s fabrication of cables designed to discredit the Kennedy Administration.
We were further cautioned today that perhaps these proceedings ought to be delayed because certainly there would be new evidence forthcoming from the President of the United States. There has not even been an obfuscated indication that this committee would receive any additional materials from the President. The committee subpoena is outstanding and if the President wants to supply that material, the committee sits here. The fact is that on yesterday, the American people waited with great anxiety for eight hours, not knowing whether their President would obey an order of the Supreme Court of the United States.
At this point, I would like to juxtapose a few of the impeachment criteria with some of the President’s actions.
Impeachment criteria: James Madison, from the Virginia ratification convention. “If the President be connected in any suspicious manner with any person and there is grounds to believe that he will shelter him, he may be impeached.”
We have heard time and time again that the evidence reflects payment to the defendants of money. The President had knowledge that these funds were being paid and that these were funds collected for the 1972 presidential campaign. We know that the President met with Mr. Henry Petersen twenty-seven times to discuss matters related to Watergate, and immediately thereafter met with the very persons who were implicated in the information Mr. Petersen was receiving and transmitting to the President. The words are, “If the President be connected in any suspicious manner with any person and there be grounds to believe that he will shelter that person, he may be impeached.”
Justice Story: “Impeachment is intended for occasional and extraordinary cases where a superior power acting for the whole people is put into operation to protect their rights and rescue their liberties from violations.”
We know about the Houston plan. We know about the break-in of the psychiatrist’s office. We know that there was absolute, complete direction in August 1971 when the President instructed Ehrilichman to “do whatever is necessary.” This instruction led to a surreptitious entry into Dr. Fielding’s office. “Protect their rights.” “Rescue their liberties from violation.”
The South Carolina ratification convention impeachment criteria: Those are impeachable “who behave amiss or betray their public trust.”
Beginning shortly after the Watergate break-in and continuing to the present time, the President has engaged in a series of public statements and actions designed to thwart the lawful investigation by government prosecutors. Moreover, the President has made public announcements and assertions bearing on the Watergate case which the evidence will show he knew to be false. These assertions, false assertions; impeachable, those who misbehave. Those who “behave amiss or betray their public trust.”
James Madison, again at the constitutional convention: “A President is impeachable if he attempts to subvert the Constitution.”
The Constitution charges the President with the task of taking care that the laws be faithfully executed, and yet the President has counseled his aides to commit perjury, willfully disregarded the secrecy of grand jury proceedings, concealed surreptitious entry, attempted to compromise a federal judge while publicly displaying his cooperation with the process of criminal justice. “A President is impeachable if he attempts to subvert the Constitution.”
If the impeachment provision in the Constitution of the United States will not reach the offenses charged here, then perhaps that eighteenth century Constitution should be abandoned to a twentieth century paper shredder.
Has the President committed offenses and planned and directed and acquiesced in a course of conduct which the Constitution will not tolerate? This is the question. We know that. We know the question.
We should now forthwith proceed to answer the question.
It is reason, and not passion, which must guide our deliberations, guide our debate, and guide our decision.
Mr. Chairman, I yield back the balance of my time.

Ukrainians understood Biden probe was condition for Trump-Zelenskiy phone call: Ukrainian adviser - ABC News

PHOTO: President Donald Trump speaks as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy looks on during a meeting in New York on Sept. 25, 2019, on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly. Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images

When Ukrainians voted to elect comedian Volodymyr Zelenskiy as their next president in the spring of 2019, the fledgling administration was eager to coordinate a phone call with Kyiv’s most important benefactor -- the United States, according to an adviser to Zelenskiy.

But after weeks of discussions with American officials, Ukrainian officials came to recognize a precondition to any executive correspondence, the adviser said.

(MORE: Transcript of Trump call with Ukraine includes talk of Giuliani, Barr probing Biden)
"It was clear that [President Donald] Trump will only have communications if they will discuss the Biden case," said Serhiy Leshchenko, an anti-corruption advocate and former member of Ukraine's Parliament, who now acts as an adviser to Zelenskiy. "This issue was raised many times. I know that Ukrainian officials understood."

The Trump administration’s alleged insistence that the two leaders discuss a prospective investigation into Biden, one of the president’s political opponents, casts his July 25 conversation with Zelenskiy in a new light.

During the call, a rough summary of which was released by the White House Wednesday, Trump repeatedly encouraged Zelenskiy to work with Attorney General William Barr and his personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, to probe Biden’s role in the dismissal of the country’s prosecutor general, Viktor Shokin, in 2016.

Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images PHOTO: President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy talk to the press during a meeting in New York, on Sept. 25, 2019, on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly.
President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy talk to the press during a meeting in New York, on Sept. 25, 2019, on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly.more +
In an interview with ABC News in April 2019, Shokin said he believed Biden pressured the government to fire him because he was leading an investigation into Burisma, a Ukrainian oil and gas company where Biden’s son, Hunter, had a seat on the board of directors.

But the assertion that Biden acted to help his son has been undercut by widespread criticism of Shokin from several high-profile international leaders, including members of the European Union and International Monetary Fund, who said Biden's recommendation was well justified and that Shokin had been removed because of widely shared concerns he was obstructing efforts to root out entrenched corruption in his office and Ukraine’s judicial system.

(MORE: Read the transcript of Trump's call with the Ukraine president)
During a bilateral meeting with Trump on Wednesday in New York, Zelenskiy reaffirmed that he has no interest in getting Ukraine involved in U.S. politics and denied that Trump had pressed him to investigate Biden.

"I'm sorry, but I don't want to be involved in ... elections of USA," Zelenskiy said. "No, you heard that we had, I think, a good phone call. It was normal, we spoke about many things, and you read it that nobody pushed it, nobody pushed me."

Fallout from the release of a transcript chronicling Trump’s July phone call with his Ukrainian counterpart has sparked partisan furor in the United States. But in Ukraine, according to Leschenko, the prospective investigation was part of an effort by a Ukrainian official to curry favor with the Americans.

NurPhoto via Getty Images, FILE PHOTO: Ukrainian lawmaker Sergiy Leschenko speaks and shows documents to journalists in front of a courthouse in Kyiv, Ukraine, on May 13, 2019.
Ukrainian lawmaker Sergiy Leschenko speaks and shows documents to journalists in front of a courthouse in Kyiv, Ukraine, on May 13, 2019.more +
The source of the proposed investigation was Shokin’s successor as prosecutor general, Yuri Lutsenko, who fed the idea to Giuliani and has spoken about it publicly before he was removed from his post this summer.

Leshchenko and another former senior Ukrainian law enforcement official said they believe that Lutsenko invented the investigations that Giuliani pushed as part of an effort to keep his job.

In early 2019, Lutsenko’s position as prosecutor general was under threat after Zelenskiy -- who was then heavily ahead in the polls -- promised to remove him if elected president. Leshchenko and the other official said Lutsenko had then sought out Giuliani in a desperate bid to try to enlist the Trump administration in the hope it would somehow protect him.

"We understood that he was just trying to protect his position in the new administration using this scandal," Leshchenko said. "And he put Ukraine on this battlefield."

(MORE: Ukraine's 2014 revolution to Trump's push for a Ukrainian probe of Biden: A timeline)
Leshchenko and other Ukrainian officials said that as far as they were aware no investigation was ever opened into Biden. They said that if the Trump administration suspected that Biden and his son had broken the law, then U.S. authorities should submit a formal request that Ukraine investigate through the usual channels.

"If there will be a request from the American side, we’ll look at it," Anton Gerashchenko, who was appointed Ukraine’s deputy interior minister on Wednesday, told ABC News. He said that as far as he was aware no formal request had ever been made.

NurPhoto via Getty Images, FILE PHOTO: Prosecutor General of Ukraine Yuriy Lutsenko talks to lawmakers during the sitting of the Parliamentary Comittee on Legislative Support of Law Enforcement in Kyiv, Ukraine, Feb. 6, 2019.
Prosecutor General of Ukraine Yuriy Lutsenko talks to lawmakers during the sitting of the Parliamentary Comittee on Legislative Support of Law Enforcement in Kyiv, Ukraine, Feb. 6, 2019.more +
Leshchenko himself was attacked by Lutsenko and Giuliani, who alleged he had played a role in the origins of the Russia investigation into Trump that Giuliani has claimed were sown in Ukraine by Democrats and their allies there.

In 2016, Leshchenko helped publish parts of a secret accounts books detailing alleged illegal payments made by the party of Ukraine’s former President Viktor Yanukovych. Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort’s name was included next to payments in the accounts, The New York Times reported, after which he stepped down as campaign manager.

(MORE: Biden sidesteps questions about his son's foreign business dealings but promises ethics pledge)
Over two years later, Giuliani and Lutsenko alleged that Leshchenko acted unlawfully in helping publish the parts of the ledgers involving Manafort, and while Lutsenko was still prosecutor general, a court in Kyiv in December convicted Leshchenko of illegally harming the interests of Ukraine. Leshchenko appealed that judgment, however, and in May a court in Kyiv cleared him of any wrongdoing and ordered he be paid compensation, he said.

The saga with Giuliani, Leshchenko said, had placed Ukraine in a very difficult position. The the key thing now was for Zelenskiy’s administration to remain neutral and not appear to take sides either with the Democrats or Republicans, he said.

"The best way for Ukraine is to be neutral," he said. "Ukraine has done nothing wrong."
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/ukraini ... d=65863043

[seemslikeadream]

218 House members now support an impeachment inquiry. That’s enough to impeach trump

Ukraine president thought only U.S. side of Trump call would be published
KIEV (Reuters) - Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Wednesday he thought that only U.S. President Donald Trump’s side of their July phone call would be published.

According to a summary of the momentous telephone call released by the Trump administration, Trump pressed Zelenskiy to investigate a political rival, former Democratic Vice President Joe Biden, in coordination with the U.S. attorney general and Trump’s personal lawyer.

“I personally think that sometimes such calls between presidents of independent countries should not be published,” Zelenskiy told Ukrainian media in a briefing in New York that was broadcast in Ukraine. “I just thought that they would publish their part.”

Zelenskiy said he did not know the details of an investigation into Biden’s son, repeating that he wants his new general prosecutor to investigate all cases.

Reporting by Pavel Polityuk; writing by Matthias Williams; Editing by Leslie Adler
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa- ... SKBN1WA2R6

Factbox: Six new pieces of information in memo on Trump's Ukraine call
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The White House released a memo on Wednesday summarizing President Donald Trump’s phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy in July that prompted Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives to start an impeachment inquiry.

Democratic Senate leader Chuck Schumer holds up a copy of the telephone conversation between U.S. President Donald Trump and Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskiy while speaking to reporters in the U.S. Capitol in Washington U.S., September 25, 2019. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque
In the memo, Trump asks Zelenskiy directly to investigate his political rival, Democratic challenger Joe Biden, Biden’s son’s business dealings, and a Ukraine prosecutor.

The memo is more damning than anticipated, said Adam Schiff, the Democrat who heads the House Intelligence Committee. He called it a “mafia-like shakedown” of a foreign leader.

Republicans said it showed Democrats were wrong to move forward with impeachment. “There was no quid pro quo and nothing to justify the clamor House Democrats caused,” said Doug Collins of Georgia, the top Republican on the House Judiciary Committee.

The memo shows Trump pressured Zelenskiy to look into other issues beyond Biden, while criticizing U.S. allies and a former ambassador. Here are six new pieces of information it contains, in order of appearance:

TRUMP SAYS MERKEL DOES NOTHING FOR UKRAINE

Trump says that the United States is doing much more for Ukraine than European countries, and singles out German Chancellor Angela Merkel. The European Union has given 3.3 billion euros ($3.6 billion) financial assistance to Ukraine, since 2014, the largest to any non-EU country, Reuters reported in July.

“I will say that we do a lot for Ukraine. We spend a lot of effort and a lot of time. Much more than the European countries are doing and they should be helping you more than they are Germany does almost nothing for you. All they do is talk and I think it’s something that you should ·really ask them about. When I was speaking to Angela Merkel she talks Ukraine, but she doesn’t do anything.”

ZELENSKIY COMMITS TO BUY RAYTHEON-LOCKHEED EQUIPMENT

Zelenskiy says he plans to buy more Javelins, anti-tank missiles developed by the United States military that are now produced by Raytheon Co (RTN.N) and Lockheed Martin Corp (LMT.N).

“I would also like to thank you for your great support in the area of defense. We are ready to continue to cooperate for the next steps specifically we are almost ready to buy more Javelins from the United States for defense purposes.”

TRUMP ASKS FOR INVESTIGATION OF TECH COMPANY THAT FINGERED RUSSIA

The president asks Zelenskiy to “do us a favor” and investigate CrowdStrike, the American cybersecurity company that investigated the hacking of the Democratic National Committee. CrowdStrike was one of three firms that led U.S. intelligence officials to conclude Russian intelligence had hacked the DNC, former FBI Director James Comey told Congress in January 2017.

Trump says: “I would like you to do us a favor though because our country has been through a lot and Ukraine knows a lot about it. I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine, they say Crowdstrike ... I guess you have one of your wealthy people... The server, they say Ukraine has it.”

In his response, Zelenskiy agrees to the request, saying, “I also plan to surround myself with great people and in addition to that investigation, I guarantee as the president of Ukraine that all the investigations will be done openly and candidly.”

Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and U.S. President Donald Trump face reporters during a bilateral meeting on the sidelines of the 74th session of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) in New York City, New York, U.S., September 25, 2019. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst
TRUMP PRESENTS GIULIANI AS A KEY U.S. CONTACT

Rudy Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer, holds no official government position. That means he has not been subject to the U.S. Senate confirmation process like other top presidential advisers. Still, he is mentioned multiple times as a go-to figure in the U.S.-Ukraine relationship.

Zelenskiy indicates his office is in touch with Giuliani early in the call. “I will personally tell you that one of my assistants spoke with Mr. Giuliani just recently and we are hoping very much that Mr. Giuliani will be able to travel to Ukraine and we will meet once he comes to Ukraine. I just wanted to assure you once again that you have nobody but friends around us.”

Later, Trump says of Giuliani, “He was the mayor of New York City, a great mayor, and I would like him to call you. I will ask him to call you along with the attorney general. Rudy very much knows what’s happening and he is a very capable guy.”

Then, Trump says twice more he will ask Giuliani and Barr to call, pairing the U.S. attorney general together with his personal lawyer.

ZELENSKIY SAYS HE STAYS AT A TRUMP PROPERTY

Zelenskiy said he stayed at Trump Tower, Trump’s New York apartment building. The building is not a Trump hotel. It is a condominium residence. He indicates that Ukrainian citizens are buying property there.

“I would like to tell you that I also have quite a few·Ukrainian friends that live in the United States,” he says. “Actually last time I traveled to the United States, I stayed in New York near Central Park and I stayed at the Trump Tower. I will talk to them and I hope to see them again in the future.”

THE TWO DISCUSS INVESTIGATING A U.S. AMBASSADOR Speaking of Marie Yovanovitch, the former ambassador to Ukraine who was abruptly removed from her post in May, Trump says: “The former ambassador from the United States, the woman, was bad news and the people she was dealing with in the Ukraine were bad news so I just wanted to let you know that.”

Later, Zelenskiy says: “I would kindly ask you if you have any additional information that you can provide to us, it would be very helpful for the investigation to make sure that we administer justice in our country with regard to the Ambassador to the United States from Ukraine as far as I recall her name was Ivanovich(sic?). It was great that you were the first one who told me that she was a bad ambassador because I agree·with you 100%.”

Trump responds “Well, she’s going to go through some things,” then says he will have Giuliani “give you a call” with Attorney General Barr to “get to the bottom of it.”

Reporting by Heather Timmons; editing by Anna Driver and Lisa Shumaker
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa- ... SKBN1WA2J3

Pentagon Letter Undercuts Trump Assertion On Delaying Aid To Ukraine Over Corruption
David WelnaSeptember 25, 20196:00 PM ET

President Trump meets with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on Wednesday in New York, where they were attending the U.N. General Assembly meeting.
Evan Vucci/AP
Updated at 9:03 p.m. ET

Earlier this week, President Trump cited concerns about corruption as his rationale for blocking security assistance to Ukraine. But in a letter sent to four congressional committees in May of this year and obtained by NPR, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy John Rood informs lawmakers that he has "certified that the Government of Ukraine has taken substantial actions to make defense institutional reforms for the purposes of decreasing corruption [and] increasing accountability."

The certification was required by law for the release of $250 million in security assistance for Ukraine. That aid was blocked by the White House until Sept. 11 and has since been released. It must be spent before Sept. 30, the end of the fiscal year.

At a news conference wrapping up a three-day visit to the United Nations General Assembly on Wednesday, Trump repeated his professed concerns about corruption as the reason for holding up $391 million in security assistance to Ukraine.

"We want to make sure that country is honest," Trump said of Ukraine. "It's very important to talk about corruption. If you don't talk about corruption, why would you give money to a country that you think is corrupt?"

The Pentagon announced in mid-June that it would be sending $250 million in security assistance to Ukraine, which has been battling pro-Russia separatists near its eastern border with Russia since 2014.

But the White House blocked that assistance in July. That was prior to a phone call Trump made to Ukraine's recently elected leader, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy.

According to notes of that call released by the White House Wednesday, Trump asked Zelenskiy to "look into" reports that former Vice President and current Democratic presidential hopeful Joe Biden "went around bragging" that he stopped the Ukrainian government from looking into Biden's son Hunter's activities in Ukraine.

Trump has denied seeking to pressure Zelenskiy into carrying out such a probe by withholding the military assistance. That aid was released Sept. 11 after an angry bipartisan response from Congress to reports that the money was being withheld.

Some congressional Republicans are defending Trump's conversation with Zelenskiy. "I think to suggest that this phone call was the president of the United States threatening to withhold aid to the Ukraine unless they did his political bidding," said South Carolina Republican Lindsey Graham, "is simply ridiculous."

Another explanation Trump has been giving for blocking the Ukraine assistance is his view that European allies are not contributing enough to that aid. "Europe and other nations (must) contribute to Ukraine," he told reporters at the U.N. Tuesday. "Because they're not doing it. Just the United States. We're putting up the bulk of the money."

Eight European embassies in Washington contacted by NPR Wednesday reported no attempts by the Trump administration over the summer to increase their contributions to Ukraine. "There was no effort at all," said a senior official at the German embassy, who requested anonymity to speak freely. "The topic was not brought up at all at recent meetings we've had."

European diplomats hasten to point out that they have been contributing far more to Ukraine than what Trump has claimed. "Our bilateral assistance to Ukraine of $1.4 billion is almost at the U.S. level," said the German embassy official. The U.S. has disbursed nearly $1.5 billion since 2014 in security assistance to Ukraine, while the European Union has provided about $15 billion, mostly in the form of loans.

House committees that are starting impeachment inquiries are virtually certain to probe further into Trump's reasons for holding back assistance to Ukraine while he was seeking an investigation there of a potential Democratic rival in next year's election.

https://www.npr.org/2019/09/25/76445366 ... witter.com

Pelosi says Trump is barring her from speaking out on the whistleblower complaint
Published 3 hours ago on September 25, 2019 By Bob Brigham

Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Wednesday spoke with reporters after reading the unredacted whistleblower complaint concerning President Donald Trump.

Pelosi made her statement after emerging from the “Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF) where the document is being held.

She said that she could not speak about what she had read, because the administration had classified the whistleblower complaint.

Leadership and members of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees are the only members of Congress able to see the document.
https://www.rawstory.com/2019/09/pelosi ... complaint/

Joaquin Castro
‏
Just read the Whistleblower report.

This thing is bigger that I thought.

[Iamwhomiam]

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6429020-Ukraine-Transcript.html#document/p4/a526710

https://www.politico.com/news/2019/09/25/donald-trump-ukraine-call-analysis-000039

[seemslikeadream]

Trump offered Ukrainian president Justice Dept. help in an investigation of Biden, memo shows
Carol D. Leonnig

President Trump’s July 25 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has come under intense scrutiny from lawmakers. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post; Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images)
September 26 at 12:39 AM
President Trump repeatedly urged the Ukrainian president to investigate Joe Biden, one of his chief political rivals, and offered to enlist the U.S. attorney general in that effort while dangling the possibility of inviting the foreign leader to the White House, according to a rough transcript of the call released Wednesday.

The July 25 phone call between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky raised alarms among some intelligence officials, leading in August to a secret whistleblower complaint and a Justice Department referral to determine whether the president’s conduct amounted to a violation of a campaign finance law that bars foreign contributions to U.S. politicians.

[Official readout: President Trump’s July 25 phone call with Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky]

Prosecutors reviewed the rough transcript and last week declined to investigate, concluding that the president had not violated campaign laws, senior Justice Department officials said Wednesday.

The document touched off a wide spectrum of reactions on Capitol Hill, where Democrats accused Trump of violating his oath of office by soliciting political payback from a foreign leader, having only a day earlier announced they have launched a formal impeachment inquiry of the president. Republicans defended the president and lobbed counteraccusations at Biden.

Trump continued to insist he did nothing wrong, and Zelensky, seated beside him during an awkward joint appearance at the United Nations in New York, described their July phone call as “normal,” saying, “I’m sorry, but I don’t want to be involved to democratic open elections of U.S.A.”

The drumbeat of revelations about the Trump-Zelensky call is likely to continue this week. After the White House allowed some lawmakers Wednesday to review the whistleblower’s complaint, Democrats signaled they were increasingly convinced that the president’s behavior justified their drive for impeachment.

“He copped to asking a foreign power to help him in his election,” said Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.). “That’s impeachable.”

The whistleblower complaint focuses largely on the July 25 call between Trump and Zelensky, which the whistleblower sees as evidence of Trump’s efforts to pressure the Ukrainian government to investigate his political opponents, according to a person who has read the complaint and spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss its contents. But the complaint also broadly alleges an effort by Trump and his personal lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, to pressure Ukrainian officials over time, not just on the July 25 call, this person said. The whistleblower paints a picture, also using public news reports, to suggest that Giuliani pressured Ukrainian officials to further Trump’s interest in investigating his political opponents.

The complaint also alleges a pattern of obfuscation at the White House, in which officials moved the records of some of Trump’s communications with foreign officials onto a separate computer network from where they are normally stored, this person said. The whistleblower alleges that is what officials did with Trump’s July 25 call with Zelensky, an action that alarmed the intelligence community inspector general and prompted him to request that the White House retain records of the Zelensky call, the person who read the complaint said.

[Cracks emerge among Senate Republicans over Trump urging Ukrainian leader to investigate Biden]

In keeping with White House practice, the memo on the phone call is not a verbatim account. A cautionary note on the document warns that the text reflects the notes and memories of officials in the Situation Room and that a number of factors, including accents and translations, “can affect the accuracy of the record.”

The phone call began with Trump congratulating Zelensky on his election victory, and Zelensky effusively praised Trump in return, according to the White House memo.

Trump said the United States “has been very, very good to Ukraine,” and Zelensky replied by agreeing “1,000 percent.” The Ukrainian president went on to suggest his country may soon buy more antitank missiles from the United States. “We are almost ready to buy more Javelins from the United States for defense purposes,” Zelensky said.

Trump replied: “I would like you to do us a favor because our country has been through a lot and Ukraine knows a lot about it.” He then asked for help in finding the Democratic National Committee computer server that U.S. officials say was hacked by Russian intelligence in the run-up to the 2016 election. Trump also called special counsel Robert S. Mueller III “incompetent” for his performance a day earlier while testifying to Congress about his investigation into Russian interference in the U.S. presidential election.

“The server, they say Ukraine has it,” Trump says according to the memo. “I would like to have the Attorney General call you or your people and I would like you to get to the bottom of it.”

[Giuliani pursued shadow Ukraine agenda as key foreign policy officials were sidelined]

Trump repeatedly said Zelensky should work with Attorney General William P. Barr or Giuliani. Giuliani had separately pressed Ukrainian officials for a Biden inquiry.

“I would like to have the Attorney General call you or your people and I would like you to get to the bottom of it,” Trump said, according to the White House memo.

As the half-hour conversation went on, Trump’s requests of Zelensky shifted to a different topic: investigating the Bidens.

“There’s a lot of talk about Biden’s son, that Biden stopped the prosecution and a lot of people want to find out about that so whatever you can do with the Attorney General would be great,” Trump said, according to the memo. “Biden went around bragging that he stopped the prosecution so if you can look into it. . . . It sounds horrible to me.”

Zelensky replied, according to the White House memo, that “my candidate” for the prosecutor job “will look into the situation.” After Zelensky noted that he stayed at Trump Tower on his last visit to New York City, Trump invited him for a White House meeting — something the Ukrainian leader had wanted.

“Whenever you would like to come to the White House, feel free to call,” Trump says, according to the White House’s rough transcript.

Since Zelensky’s election in April, Ukraine had urgently sought a meeting for the new president at the White House, a sit-down to demonstrate Washington’s backing as it fights a long-simmering war with Russian-backed separatists. U.S. officials and members of the Trump administration wanted the meeting to go ahead, but Trump personally rejected efforts to set it up, The Washington Post reported last week.

The White House has not yet set a date for an Oval Office meeting.

[Justice Dept. rejected investigation of Trump phone call just weeks after it began examining the matter]

Although the Justice Department concluded the call did not violate campaign finance law, Democrats said the president’s conduct endangered national security. Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.), who chairs the House Intelligence Committee, said the call “reads like a classic mob shakedown.”

At a news conference later in New York, Trump savaged Schiff, Democrats and the media.

“It’s all a hoax, folks. It’s all a big hoax,” the president said. “When you look at the information, it’s a joke. Impeachment for that? When you have a wonderful meeting or a wonderful phone conversation.”

Trump denied any wrongdoing and suggested the Biden family deserved to be investigated for possible corruption, making unsubstantiated allegations they’ve taken millions of dollars out of China. He insisted his hands were clean.

“I didn’t do it, I didn’t threaten anyone,” the president said. “No push, no pressure, no nothing.”

Not all Republicans agreed. Sen. Mitt Romney (Utah) said the matter “remains troubling in the extreme. It’s deeply troubling.”

White House officials said the call memo does not show the president seeking any quid pro quo to kneecap a political rival because the president did not tie his requests to aid from the U.S. government.

While political fights surrounding the phone call have raged for the past 10 days, government officials at a host of agencies have been privately dealing with the matter for more than a month.

Senior Justice Department officials said the director of national intelligence referred concerns about the call to the Justice Department in late August, after the intelligence community inspector general found that it was a possible violation of campaign finance laws. Days later, the inspector general referred the matter to the FBI.

Career prosecutors and officials in the Justice Department’s criminal division reviewed the rough transcript, which they obtained voluntarily from the White House, and determined the facts “could not make” the appropriate basis for an investigation, a senior Justice Department official said Wednesday. The final decision was made by Brian Benczkowski, who leads the Justice Department’s criminal division. As part of their reasoning, Justice Department lawyers determined that help with a government investigation could not be quantified as “a thing of value” under the law, officials said.

Their primary source for reaching that conclusion was the memo, according to the officials. While prosecutors did gather information about how the White House memorializes presidential calls with foreign heads of state, they did not interview other White House officials because they had not formally opened an investigation. Justice Department officials still do not know who the whistleblower is, officials said Wednesday.

In a statement, Justice Department spokeswoman Kerri Kupec said the Justice Department’s criminal division “reviewed the official record of the call and determined, based on the facts and applicable law, that there was no campaign finance violation and that no further action was warranted.”

“All relevant components of the Department agreed with this legal conclusion, and the Department has concluded the matter,” Kupec said.

Kupec also said Trump had never spoken with Barr “about having Ukraine investigate anything related to former vice president Biden or his son,” nor had Barr talked about “anything related to Ukraine” with Giuliani.

She noted, though, that U.S. Attorney John Durham, who is exploring the origins of the FBI’s probe into possible coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia, was “exploring the extent to which a number of countries, including Ukraine, played a role in the counterintelligence investigation directed at the Trump campaign during the 2016 election.”

Trump ordered the memo released following days of mounting pressure from Congress, and a new surge of Democrats who favor impeachment. The president’s decision followed reports that he pressed Zelensky to investigate Biden, considered a leading candidate for the Democratic nomination to challenge Trump in 2020, and his son, Hunter Biden.

White House officials said there were discussions for several days about releasing details of the call, with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo objecting to its release on the grounds that doing so would make it harder for Trump to speak frankly with foreign leaders, and senior Justice Department officials urging it be made public to quell the growing debate over Trump’s conduct.

Trump has acknowledged publicly that he asked Zelensky to investigate Hunter Biden, who served on the board of a Burisma, a Ukrainian gas company that came under scrutiny by authorities there. Hunter Biden was not accused of any wrongdoing in the investigation. As vice president, Joe Biden pressured Ukraine to fire its top prosecutor, who Biden and other Western officials said was not sufficiently pursuing corruption cases. At the time, the Ukrainians’ investigation was dormant, according to former Ukrainian and U.S. officials.

[Trump’s communications with foreign leader are part of whistleblower complaint that spurred standoff between spy chief and Congress]

Initially, the parameters of the whistleblower allegations were mysterious. Although whistleblower complaints to the intelligence community inspector general are often forwarded to the intelligence committees in Congress, the Justice Department determined this one should not be provided to lawmakers for their review.

Justice Department officials released their legal reasoning for doing so Wednesday, asserting that because the matter did not concern the “funding, administration, or operation of an intelligence community” matter — but instead was an allegation of possible criminal conduct by the commander in chief — it should be more properly handled as a criminal referral.

The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel noted the inspector general had found “some indicia of an arguable political bias on the part of the Complainant in favor of a rival political candidate.”

Lawmakers have raised concerns about Trump’s directive to freeze nearly $400 million in military assistance for Ukraine in the days leading up to the phone call with Zelensky.

[Trump ordered hold on military aid days before calling Ukrainian president]

On Tuesday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) announced she was launching a formal impeachment inquiry, saying “the actions of the Trump presidency have revealed the dishonorable fact of the president’s betrayal of his oath of office, betrayal of our national security and betrayal of the integrity of our elections.”

The rapidly escalating confrontation between the White House and Congress comes just months after Trump freed himself from the cloud of the investigation led by Mueller. Now, he is back in the crosshairs of a resurgent impeachment effort over a fresh allegation of election season misconduct.

One senior White House official said that while the call summary was “not entirely helpful for our side,” it also showed there was not an explicit quid pro quo — which could be a crime. “Everyone is going to see in that transcript what they want to see,” this person said, adding there were robust discussions about whether it would help or hurt Trump.

Josh Dawsey contributed to this report.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national ... story.html

THE DEFINITION OF “COLLUSION” AS IMPEACHMENT PROCEEDS: THE RISK TRUMP POSES TO ALL AMERICANS

September 26, 2019/6 Comments/in 2016 Presidential Election, 2020 Presidential Election, Mueller Probe /by emptywheel
It’s a testament to how crazy things have been this week that this memo — Andrew McCabe’s memorialization of opening the investigation into Donald Trump on May 16, 2017 — only got covered by obsequious propagandists on the frothy right. Judicial Watch liberated it via FOIA and actually had to focus on something else — Rod Rosenstein’s offer to wear a wire — to drive interest.

I suspect that’s because the memo paints McCabe’s own actions in favorable light (and Rosenstein in a damning light, both as regards his own integrity and his purported loyalty to Trump). Consider this paragraph:

I began by telling [Rosenstein] that today I approved the opening of an investigation of President Donald Trump. I explained that the purpose of the investigation was to investigate allegations of possible collusion between the president and the Russian Government, possible obstruction of justice related to the firing of FBI Director James Comey, and possible conspiracy to obstruct justice. The DAG questioned what I meant by collusion and I explained that I was referring to the investigation of any potential links between the Trump campaign and the Russian government. I explained that the counterintelligence investigations of this sort were meant to uncover any [sic] the existence of any threat to national security as well as whether or not criminal conduct had occurred. Regarding the obstruction issues, I made clear that our predication was based not only on the president’s comments last week to reporter Lester Holt (that he connected the firing of the director to the FBI’s Russia investigation), but also on the several concerning comments the president made to Director Comey over the last few months. These comments included the President’s requests for assurances of loyalty, statements about the Russia investigation and the investigation of General Michael Flynn. I also informed the DAG that Director Comey preserved his recollection of these interactions in a series of contemporaneously drafted memos. Finally, I informed the DAG that as a result of his role in the matter, I thought he would be a witness in the case.

The substance of this paragraph has been told before, albeit by certain NYT reporters who have consistently misunderstood the substance of Trump’s ties to Russia. Those tellings have always left out that McCabe also predicated a conspiracy to obstruct justice investigation (meaning, among other things, that Rosenstein himself was on the line for his actions to create an excuse for firing Comey). The emphasis, here, is also not focused exclusively on Mike Flynn but on the Russian investigation generally; as I’ve been meaning to show, Trump faced at least as much direct exposure given the investigation into Roger Stone, and his actions after he learned Stone was a target in March 2017 reflect that more than commonly understood.

By far, the most important detail in this paragraph, however, is McCabe’s definition of “collusion,” as he explained it the day before Rosenstein appointed Robert Mueller to investigate what he would later call collusion. Collusion, for McCabe, is just “potential links between the Trump campaign and the Russian government,” not necessarily any criminal ties. McCabe made this statement at a time when FBI knew about neither the June 9 meeting to get dirt on Hillary Clinton nor Trump’s sustained effort to pursue an improbably lucrative Trump Tower deal, to say nothing of the fact that Trump’s campaign manager was sharing campaign strategy while discussing how to carve up Ukraine to Russia’s liking. That is, according to the definition McCabe used, the investigation did find “collusion.” Period, end of sentence.

Importantly, the first thing McCabe raised when discussing such — at that point hypothetical — links was national security, not criminal campaign finance or bribery exposure. That is, McCabe opened the “collusion” investigation to find out whether Trump’s — at that point hypothetical — links to the Russian government were making the US less secure. The answer to that question was not included in the Mueller Report; indeed, the most glaring evidence that those links did make the US less secure were very pointedly not included in the report.

This is an important lesson as the Ukraine investigation — which cannot and should not be separated from the Russian investigation — proceeds, one that has thus far been deemphasized again. Trump’s continued efforts to pursue policies — foreign and domestic — that personally benefit him don’t just amount to breathtaking corruption. But they provide foreign countries more and more leverage to use against Trump to limit his policy options. Every time Trump does something scandalous with a foreign leader — and he does it all … the … time — it means those foreign leaders can hold that over Trump going forward and in so doing, limit his negotiating position. So not only do Americans lose out on having a President who makes decisions based on how they benefit the country rather than himself personally, but they also get a far weaker President in the bargain, someone who — if he ever decided to prioritize American interests over his own — would have already traded away his bargaining chips to do so.

Through his actions thus far as President, Trump has guaranteed he cannot pursue policies that would benefit average Americans, and he has done so not just with Russia and Ukraine, and not just because of his executive incompetence.

There is an impact that Trump’s “collusion” and corruption have on everyday Americans, whether they wear pussy hats or MAGA caps, an impact that Democrats have permitted Republicans to obscure. Trump’s actions effectively rob Americans of the powerful executive on foreign policy issues that our Constitution very imperfectly sought to ensure, without stripping the weakened Trump of the tools he can wield to punish those who call him on his weakness.

Because he always self-deals, Trump has made himself an intolerably weak President, one who makes the US less secure at every step. Republicans defending him need to be held accountable for weakening the US.

What we know of Bill Barr’s treatment of the ICIG referral on the Ukrainian whistleblower suggests he only reviewed it, cursorily, for criminal campaign finance violations — possibly not even the obvious bribery prohibited by our Constitution it exhibits. Bill Barr did not, with the Russian investigation and has not with the Ukrainian referral, consider how by protecting Trump’s actions, he robs every American of what the Constitution guarantees: a President, not a man shopping for revenge and phallic symbols in foreign capitals. That’s why Barr had to totally distort the conclusions of the Mueller report on collusion: to hide what it is really about and to hide how enabling such activity by Trump hurts Americans.

Yet from the start, from the moment when McCabe opened an investigation into Trump, that’s what it was supposed to be about.
https://www.emptywheel.net/2019/09/26/t ... americans/

Trump, Giuliani, and Manafort: The Ukraine Scheme
Murray WaasSeptember 25, 2019, 3:40 pm

Yana Paskova/Getty ImagesFormer Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort leaving his arraignment on multiple felony charges in Manhattan Criminal Court, New York, June 27, 2019
The effort by President Trump to pressure the government of Ukraine to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden and his son had its origins in an earlier endeavor to obtain information that might provide a pretext and political cover for the president to pardon his former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, according to previously undisclosed records.

These records indicate that attorneys representing Trump and Manafort respectively had at least nine conversations relating to this effort, beginning in the early days of the Trump administration, and lasting until as recently as May of this year. Through these deliberations carried on by his attorneys, Manafort exhorted the White House to press Ukrainian officials to investigate and discredit individuals, both in the US and in Ukraine, who he believed had published damning information about his political consulting work in the Ukraine. A person who participated in the joint defense agreement between President Trump and others under investigation by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, including Manafort, allowed me to review extensive handwritten notes that memorialized conversations relating to Manafort and Ukraine between Manafort’s and Trump’s legal teams, including Trump’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani.

These new disclosures emerge as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced on Tuesday that the House would open a formal impeachment inquiry into President Trump’s conduct. What prompted her actions were the new allegations that surfaced last week that Trump had pressured Ukraine’s newly elected president, Volodymyr Zelensky, to investigate Trump’s potential 2020 campaign rival, Biden, and his son Hunter, placing a freeze on a quarter of a billion dollars in military assistance to Ukraine as leverage. The impeachment inquiry will also examine whether President Trump obstructed justice by attempting to curtail investigations by the FBI and the special counsel into Russia’s covert interference in the 2016 presidential election in Trump’s favor.

New information in this story suggests that these two, seemingly unrelated scandals, in which the House will judge whether the president’s conduct in each case constituted extra-legal and extra-constitutional abuses of presidential power, are in fact inextricably linked: the Ukrainian initiative appears to have begun in service of formulating a rationale by which the president could pardon Manafort, as part of an effort to undermine the special counsel’s investigation.

From 2004 to 2014, Manafort had advised President Viktor Yanukovych, who advocated that his country sever ties with the United States and other Western nations, and align itself more closely with Vladimir Putin’s Russia. After Yanukovych fled the country in disgrace in 2014, a ledger was recovered from the burned-out ruins of his Party of Regions. Its records showed that Yanukovych and his political allies had made some $12.7 million in secret cash payments to Manafort. The disclosure led directly to Manafort’s resignation in August 2016 as chairman of the Trump presidential campaign.

The records I have reviewed also indicate that on at least three occasions, Rudy Giuliani was in communication with Manafort’s legal team to discuss how the White House was pushing a narrative that the Democratic National Committee, Democratic donors, and Ukrainian government officials had “colluded” to defeat Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential bid. (This story has since been debunked as baseless, though that has not prevented Trump, Giuliani, and other surrogates in conservative media from repeatedly pushing the story.)

In particular, the records show that Manafort’s camp provided Giuliani with information designed to smear two people: one was a Ukrainian journalist and political activist named Serhiy Leshchenko, whom Manafort believed, correctly, of helping to uncover Manafort’s secret payments from Yanukovych; another was Alexandra Chalupa, a Ukrainian-American political consultant and US citizen, whom Manafort suspected, mistakenly in this case, was also behind the exposé. The records also show that Giuliani and attorneys for Manafort exchanged information about the then US ambassador to the Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, who Giuliani believed had attempted to undercut his covert Ukrainian diplomacy and fact-finding; the records are unclear as to whether it was Giuliani or Manafort’s attorney who first initiated their discussion about her.

After his arrest in 2017, Manafort continued to encourage President Trump and his lawyers to engage in this effort when they joined Manafort in a joint legal defense agreement. Attorneys are allowed to enter into such agreements in order share information and coordinate legal, public relations, and political strategies—in this case regarding the investigations of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, including that of the special counsel. Federal courts have long ruled that joint defense agreements are legal to protect the due process rights of those under investigation, as long as they are not used by potential defendants to coordinate providing cover stories or false information to prosecutors.

Trump’s dangling of pardons to Manafort and others who might provide damaging testimony against the president to law enforcement agents, such as his former personal attorney Michael Cohen, have been widely reported, both by news media outlets and in the Mueller Report. According to the participant in the joint defense agreement discussions, Manafort was distressed at the uncertainty about whether President Trump would pardon him. There was no formal understanding that Trump would do so, because this would instantly have raised the specter of whether such a pardon might constitute an obstruction of justice.

Instead, Manafort and those around him took the very public efforts by Giuliani to press Ukraine to investigate Manafort’s accusers as a favorable signal that the president might still pardon him after the 2020 presidential election. Trump is famously transactional, and Manafort feared that the president might be leading him on, according to the person who was party to the joint defense agreement communications. Giuliani’s constant touting of the Ukraine issue proved “reassuring” to Manafort, albeit to “a limited degree,” according to this person.

If Giuliani’s own account can be believed, it was while he was looking into the purported Ukrainian collusion to defeat Trump that he stumbled upon Hunter Biden’s business dealings in Ukraine. “The reality is I came about this by accident, investigating Ukrainian collusion with Democrats to affect the election,” Giuliani said in an interview with Fox News on May 10.

Giuliani did not add that he was also pressing for Kiev to investigate Manafort’s enemies. As I first disclosed last year in an article for Vox, Manafort encouraged the president and his top aides in this effort from the first days of the administration in early 2017. In recent months, both Trump and Giuliani have intensified those efforts, pressuring Ukraine to investigate not only Leshchenko and Chalupa, but also other Ukrainian government officials, activists, and journalists—and specifically to look into any part they may have had in publishing details of Manafort’s illicit political consulting work in the Ukraine.

This past weekend, Trump acknowledged that he had also encouraged President Zelensky during a July 25 telephone call to have Ukraine’s law enforcement agencies investigate Hunter Biden’s business dealings. The White House has released a memorandum based on notes from officials, not a verbatim record. In it, Trump expressed concern to Zelensky that he was “surrounding [him]self with some of the same people,” an apparent reference to Leshchenko. Trump went on to disparage the Mueller Report, saying, “a lot of it started with Ukraine,” a seeming allusion to Manafort’s problems. And he urged the Ukrainian president to take calls from both his personal lawyer and Attorney General William Barr. Giuliani has admitted to repeatedly pressing the Manafort matter with Ukrainian officials.

The allegations that President Trump improperly pressured the head of state of a foreign government to improperly investigate the son of his potential Democratic opponent in the 2020 presidential race, and even withheld $250 million in military aid to that country, have become grounds for an impeachment inquiry. The new disclosures in this story underscore how this scheme originated in the long-running coordination between Trump, Giuliani, and Manafort to frustrate the Mueller investigation.

*


Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty ImagesThen President-elect Donald Trump conferring with Rudy Giuliani, who later became Trump’s personal lawyer, Bedminster, New Jersey, November 20, 2016
Giuliani’s smear campaign already met with some success. After Giuliani had to cancel a trip to Kiev earlier this year to meet with Zelensky to press the president’s agenda of having Ukraine investigate Trump’s political adversaries, Giuliani blamed Leshchenko for generating the publicity about it. In 2016, Leshchenko had held a press conference in Kiev to publicize the “black ledger” that forced Manafort’s resignation from Trump’s campaign.

On May 10, Giuliani lashed out at Leshchenko, characterizing him as one of several people around Zelensky who were “enemies of the president” and “enemies of the United States.” Without offering any evidence to substantiate this disparagement, Giuliani now claimed that the ledgers had been doctored or forged. He even alleged that Hillary Clinton or the Democratic National Committee were involved in the effort to bring the ledger to light. On Fox News this past Sunday, Giuliani added to his conspiracy theory the claim that George Soros was somehow involved in “Ukrainian collusion.”

Writing in The Washington Post on Saturday, Leshchenko—who had for a time been a member of the Ukrainian parliament—wrote that Giuliani’s accusations had “had a devastating effect on my political career.” “Giuliani’s smear,” he said, “cost me a job in the new administration.” Leshchenko had been an adviser on Zelensky’s team, but facing this onslaught from Trump’s attorney and his media allies, he had felt forced to withdraw in order to avoid creating problems for the Ukrainian president.

Alexandra Chalupa has faced similar attacks, encouraged by Manafort via the joint defense agreement. Chalupa had worked part-time as a political consultant to the Democratic National Committee, and Manafort claimed that she, too, had been involved in bringing the black ledger to light. Her consultancy for the DNC had involved outreach to Ukrainian-American voters, not opposition research; and she had conducted her research on Manafort entirely on her own account. Although Chalupa mentioned what she was doing to colleagues at the DNC, they took no interest in her efforts, and in July 2016 she quit working for the DNC to focus on human rights advocacy. Although she did independently report on Manafort’s work in Ukraine, she played no part in exposing the black ledger.

President Trump and his surrogates, however, had their own motives for attacking Chalupa. After the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting with Russian officials was revealed, they used Chalupa’s work to argue that Democrats had engaged in much the same conduct: Chalupa’s outreach to Ukrainian officials, they said, was no different. As I wrote for the Daily in January: “This argument does not stand up to scrutiny but the White House’s efforts were designed to persuade some—especially among the president’s conservative base—to believe that a moral and legal equivalence applied.”

Acting in part on Manafort’s advice, on July 10, 2017, then White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders encouraged reporters to investigate how, she claimed, “the Democrat National Committee coordinated opposition research directly with the Ukrainian Embassy.” Two days later, Fox News’s Sean Hannity began efforts to repeatedly amplify the allegations evening after evening on his show. On July 24, Republicans on Capitol Hill, among them Senator Charles Grassley, of Iowa, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said it would investigate whether Chalupa’s activity constituted a violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act (there would be no such finding). On July 25, President Trump himself tweeted: “Ukrainian efforts to sabotage Trump campaign—‘quietly working to boost Clinton.’ So where is the investigation A.G.”

*

Manafort is currently serving a seven-and-a-half-year federal prison sentence of eight felony counts, including money-laundering, tax avoidance, and mortgage fraud. Following those convictions in August 2018, Manafort agreed to cooperate with the Mueller investigation. As part of a plea bargain in which he admitted to additional crimes of witness-tampering and money-laundering, Manafort was guaranteed leniency as long as he were to “fully, truthfully, completely and forthrightly” answer any questions about “any and all matters” the government wanted to ask about.

But Manafort’s cooperation was a ruse. Little more than three months later, in December, the special counsel stated in federal court that Manafort had broken his cooperation agreement by telling prosecutors and FBI agents “multiple discernible lies.” Even more unsettling were disclosures that an attorney for Manafort had been constantly briefing President Trump’s attorneys on what Manafort was being asked and what he was telling the special counsel. Manafort and his attorneys argued that this conduct was legal under his joint legal defense agreement with the president—although many seasoned prosecutors were appalled that this had been allowed to continue.

Harry Littman, a former United States Attorney for the Western District of Pennsylvania, noted at the time in The Washington Post that “the open pipeline between cooperator Manafort and suspect Trump may have been not only extraordinary but also criminal”—potentially qualifying as crimes of obstruction and witness-tampering on both sides. Littman explained:

On Manafort’s and [his defense attorney’s] end, there is a circumstantial case for obstruction of justice. What purpose other than an attempt to “influence, obstruct, or impede” the investigation of the president can be discerned from Manafort’s service as a double agent? And on the Trump side, the communications emit a strong scent of illegal witness tampering (and possibly obstruction as well).

Littman also pointed out that Mueller had the right to compel attorneys for both the president and Manafort to testify about their discussions as part of an inquiry into whether they or their clients had obstructed justice. But Littman noted that “political considerations” might “possibly intercede.” Trump and his allies would criticize Mueller for overreach, he considered, and the then Acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker might not permit Mueller to serve subpoenas.

In the end, Mueller did not follow up. Nor have Democrats in the House, who had a similar legitimate right to independently investigate the matter. If they had, they would have discovered that as late as May of this year, Giuliani was in touch with Manafort’s attorneys to discuss how they could keep pushing the “Ukrainian collusion” narrative, as the records shown me demonstrate. In the absence of any branch of government holding them accountable, Trump and Giuliani faced no sanction for doing so. They had good reason, after all, to believe they were invincible.
https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2019/09/2 ... ne-scheme/

A Defense Department letter appears to conflict with Trump's assessment that Ukraine wasn't doing enough to fight corruption
David Choi14 hours ago
A letter from a top Pentagon official appeared to undercut President Donald Trump's opinion that Ukraine was not doing enough to rectify what he perceived to be a rampant case of corruption in the country, according to documents obtained by NPR.
In the letter, the Defense Department said it worked with the State Department to determine that Ukraine had "taken substantial actions to make defense institutional reforms for the purposes of decreasing corruption, increasing accountability, and sustaining improvements of combat capability enabled by US assistance."
The contents of the letter conflicts with the Trump administration's assertion that Ukraine was not doing enough to combat allegations of corruption.
"If there's corruption and we're paying lots of money to a country, we don't want a country that we're giving massive aid to be corrupting our system," Trump said to reporters on Sunday.
Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.
A letter from a top Pentagon official appeared to undercut President Donald Trump's assertion that Ukraine was not doing enough to rectify what he perceived to be a rampant case of corruption in the country, according to documents obtained by NPR.

The letter, which was written by Undersecretary of Defense for Policy John Rood, was sent in May to congressional leaders and committees. In it, the Defense Department said it worked with the State Department to determine that Ukraine had "taken substantial actions to make defense institutional reforms for the purposes of decreasing corruption, increasing accountability, and sustaining improvements of combat capability enabled by US assistance."

The federal analysis is required by law for the US to dispense military aid funds to Ukraine, in order to provide defensive capabilities to the country — including "training, equipment, and logistics support, supplies, to the military and other security forces."

The contents of the letter conflicts with the Trump administration's assertion that Ukraine was not doing enough to combat allegations of corruption. One senior US official told The Washington Post on Monday that the withholding of funds were due to Trump's belief that there was "a lot of corruption in Ukraine."

Read more: Ukraine's president tells Trump to his face that he doesn't want to be involved in US elections

"If there's corruption and we're paying lots of money to a country, we don't want a country that we're giving massive aid to to be corrupting our system," Trump said to reporters on Sunday.

According to The Post, Trump instructed acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney to withhold nearly $400 million in military aid to Ukraine shortly before his July 25 phone call with its newly elected president, Volodymyr Zelensky.

The funds were eventually released September 11, but the administration cited "concerns" and told congressional lawmakers that the delay was due to an "interagency process."

Democrats have scrutinized the delay in the dispersal of funds, which the Trump administration had already said it intended to approve in February and May.

Trump has come under increased pressure following the revelation of a whistleblower complaint lodged in August by a member of the intelligence community, which is linked to Ukraine.

It is unclear if Trump pressured President Zelensky to investigate unfounded allegations against a political opponent — former vice president and 2020 Democratic candidate Joe Biden and his son Hunter — as a condition for receiving the military aid funds.

Trump denied there was a "quid pro quo" arrangement during his discussions with President Zelensky, who met the US president at the United Nations building in New York on Wednesday.
https://www.businessinsider.com/pentago ... er=twitter

[82_28]

Oh boy, SLAD. Real sorry to hear of this.

[Belligerent Savant]

.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/26/us/p ... lower.html

Shocker.

Whistle-Blower Is a C.I.A. Officer Who Was Detailed to the White House

His complaint suggested he was an analyst by training with an understanding of Ukrainian politics.

Par for the course.

ALL of this NOISE ignores the egregious issue of the U.S. providing arms to the Ukraine in the first place. And that's because there's bipartisan agreement in sending arms there. Both parties are complicit in the crime(s).

But none of that matters. The focus now is on the latest click bait charade.