US Politics, November 2019: These people are truly sick.

this latest "overheard call" revelation is hilarious because it means trump was yelling so loudly into the phone that at least two nearby people could clearly hear what he was saying

Matt Bevin conceded in Kentucky. Good news considering I was worried this might be a dry run for a potential refusal to accept election results in 2020. Of course that still might happen anyway.

Holmes is the first official that overheard the call:

Suriya Jayanti, a Foreign Service officer based at the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv, overheard the phone call and also witnessed Sondland’s other interactions during his trip to Ukraine, where the call took place in a restaurant, according to a person familiar with the matter

It's hearsay, he only heard what the President said out loud

yes, David Holmes! he overheard Trump ask Sondland about the 'status of the investigations'

― Dan S, Thursday, November 14, 2019 2:55 PM (seven minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

now that's some 'say what karaoke'

lol

sorry, didn't realize another person came forward

I think really our only hope is that six weeks or so from now the facts are just too heavy and too voluminous even for Lindsay Graham and a group of twenty or more Senators goes to the White House and tells Trump he's got to resign, that not-guilty votes are no longer politically tenable and their Senate majority is in jeopardy.

The difference from Watergate in this case being that they'd be totally bluffing, that none of them would publicly vote to remove.

It would also have to include Pence's assurance of a blanket pardon.

pence could be wrapped up in all this, too. it's hard to believe he would have no awareness of the formal/informal channels of diplomacy, the actions of the "three amigos", etc. i haven't seen any reporter successfully ask him a question about this in weeks.

that might be the linchpin in all of this. maybe the republicans would have sacrificed trump by now if they had pence as a backup. but i don't think they see President Pelosi as an option

yes

he was totally aware, his appearance at Yelensky's inauguration was part of the bribe—and he canceled the trip when they hadn't paid up yet

idk Pence is such a one-of-a-kind bizarronaut that i’d think twice before putting any scenario out of his reach

maybe Nikki Haley isn't so much campaigning for Pence's job as McConnell et al are engineering her succession as potus

xpost Yeah, I was gonna say, if there's anyone in this administration I can believe could be totally unaware of any of this shit, willfully or not, it's Pence.

He's like Gary in "Veep," tasked with Christian outreach or some shit.

was working on site down in South Jersey had to grab lunch in a pub that was filled with what seemed like Trump voters and boy do they love them some Nikki Haley .xxp

You really gotta look out for these loons like her and Sessions that get pressured out of the administration but remain loudly loyal.

https://www.politico.com/news/2019/11/14/trump-judicial-nominee-confirmed-070886

just for shits and giggles they should confirm a potato or a thumbtack or something to one of these positions

this guy is really human garbage

Oh yeah she’d sealed it with them with her sycophancy

You really gotta look out for these loons like her and Sessions that get pressured out of the administration but remain loudly loyal.

if they want to resume their careers, they have to stay loudly loyal. all of their supporters are trump supporters. they have to demonstrate fealty so that later, when they are shocked to find out that trump has actually been committing crimes more or less in the open since the 1970s, they won't get characterized as traitors by the GOP base

the legacy of shit fuck judges left by this administration is what truly makes me sad about all this. xxp

if there's anyone in this administration I can believe could be totally unaware of any of this shit, willfully or not, it's Pence

he's aware of everything, he just doesn't understand anything

https://media2.giphy.com/media/3oEjHOarluhPmrTQA0/giphy.gif

"Ha ha ha! Wait, I don't get it ... "

I mean it's all remote control right?

there must be some guy on staff who manages the system

Westwingworld

it's gonna be one of those deals where later we found out it's all cambridge analytica and it sort of doesn't make sense at all, but it sort of does

didn't Taylor implicate Pence in this yesterday

Trump about to release transcript that apparently doesn't even have the stuff in the redacted synopsis they released previously ie: they wrote some fictional shit and are saying "here's the perfect transcript".

i thought the "new" transcript was supposed to be the transcript of a different, earlier call?

"in order to form a more perfect transcript"

“Hey I’m about to call you and say a bunch of crazy shit about Crowdstrike and Biden. Just play along. it’s all a joke on the libs.”

Washington (CNN)President Donald Trump appears poised to make good on his vow to release a transcript of his first phone call with the Ukrainian President after a month-and-a-half-long debate among aides over the wisdom of making another conversation public.

In a transcript of the call reviewed by CNN, Trump offers his congratulations to Zelensky for his recent election victory and invites him to visit the White House. The call doesn't contain the problematic mentions of the Bidens or the 2016 election that have drawn scrutiny in the impeachment probe.

On Thursday, the President showed a group of visiting Republican senators the document during lunch, according to Sen. Kevin Cramer, R-North Dakota, who said Trump referenced the call "a couple of times" during the meal before asking the senators if they wanted to see it.

Cramer described the transcript as "short" and consisting of about one page of "real text."

...Trump first raised the prospect of releasing the log of an April phone call with Volodomyr Zelensky on September 25, insisting it would help reenforce his innocence in the then-nascent impeachment crisis. He said at the time that Vice President Mike Pence's phone conversations should also be made public.

CNN is so good at news that they don't bother to provide the date of the this earlier phonecall/transcript until paragraph TWENTY-THREE:

In the days following Trump's first hint in September he was open to releasing the additional calls, White House lawyers resurfaced the transcripts of Trump's April 21 conversation, along with the transcript of Pence's September 18 call, to determine if there's anything damaging or worrying, the sources said.

so yes, he's offering the transcript of a call that took place 5 months earlier, a rote congratulatory call to the newly elected President of Ukraine which miraculously did not directly reference any obvious crimes.

in other words: TOTAL EXONERATION

this is all so fucking stupid it's unbelievable.

we were all set to convince charles manson. but then he produced evidence of an apartment he entered months earlier where he and his followers did NOT mutilate a bunch of people, which immediately proved his innocence

CONVICT CHARLES MANSON

WHICH HUNT

TOTAL HOAMX

NO CUNNILLUSION

E PUBIS UNUN

hey remember how Trump's personal lawyer got put in fed prison and testified before Congress with hard evidence of campaign finance crimes of Trump amongst other things? I totally forgot that happened

NY will prosecute him on those charges as soon as he's out of office

Yeah but now his new personal lawyer is about to go to jail, it’s a whole new thing. Trump has been really unlucky with how corrupt his personal lawyers have been, weird

you think Giuliani's about to go to jail?

the Foreign Agents Registration Act is apparently hard to enforce, but they’re already rolling up two of his dudes, so maybe

He also “needed a lot of money” for his own legal representation, per that butt dial, so now he owes somebody else another favor.

going back to the bribery thing:

Why “bribery”? For one thing, we avoid quibbling about what is a “high crime” in the Constitution. “Bribery” is listed specifically and has a broad meaning. Lawfare blog helps us through the reasoning:

Even if Trump’s actions do not satisfy the modern criminal standard for bribery, the argument from Trump’s defenders is misplaced—because the federal statute isn’t the relevant statement of the law in the context of impeachment. ...

In short, the Founders’ conception of bribery—and thus the scope of that term in the Constitution—cannot be understood with reference to modern federal statutes and the interpretation of those statutes by modern courts. As [Laurence] Tribe and [Joshua] Matz explain, “[T]he Framers were concerned with abuse of power, corruption, and injury to the nation. At no point did any delegate link the ultimate safeguard against presidential betrayal to intricacies of a criminal code.”

So what did the Founders understand “bribery” to refer to when they included that term in the Constitution as one of two specific impeachable offenses? There is every reason to believe that the drafters of the Constitution had in mind a scope that easily encompasses Trump’s conduct.

return of the revenge of the son of originalism

"A longtime career employee at the White House Office of Management and Budget is expected to break ranks and testify Saturday in the House Democrats’ impeachment inquiry, potentially filling in important details on the holdup of military aid to Ukraine.

Mark Sandy would be the first OMB employee to testify in the inquiry, after OMB acting director Russell T. Vought and two other political appointees at the agency defied congressional subpoenas to appear. The White House has called the impeachment inquiry unconstitutional and ordered administration officials not to participate.

Unlike these other OMB officials, Sandy is a career employee, not one appointed by the president. He has worked at the agency off and on for over a decade, under presidents of both parties, climbing the ranks to his current role as deputy associate director for national security programs."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2019/11/14/career-white-house-budget-official-expected-break-ranks-testify-impeachment-inquiry/

haven't read much about him

David Roth, interviewed about the Deadspin / general media situation, on his Trump writing:

...your Trump mind meld. You seem to be able to get inside the brain of the man in a way that a lot of people really enjoy and seems very authentic. [...]

I think with Trump the only real insight I have into the guy, and this is the part I’m self conscious about because it’s nice to be praised, but I don’t think I really know that much. I just know that whatever it is it seems like he’s doing, if it looks like he’s lying in an obvious way, he is. If he says I didn’t do this he did. He’s just not smart and he’s not really trying very hard either I think. So whatever it is he appears to be doing is what he’s doing.

I guess it qualifies as an insight because of the fact that somehow still after all this, after every single day he gets his dick stuck in one of those 711 hot dog rollers, everybody is like why did he do it? Let’s unpack this move and see if we can’t figure out why for the 500th consecutive day this guy has managed to get into an argument with a bird and lose.