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

"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.

David Roth is the best

Impeachment is a Kitchen Table Issue

Dean Baker

As the Democrats have pushed ahead with impeachment proceedings, there have been criticisms from both the right and left that impeachment is a needless distraction from the pocketbook issues that people really care about. The argument is that people will see the Democrats as playing political games rather than focusing on health care, jobs, wages, and other issues that directly affect people’s lives.

This sort of argument ignores the world we now live in. First, we have to be clear about the Republican agenda. To put it simply, it is to give all the money to rich people.

This means that not only that they don’t want rich people to pay taxes, the rich also get to cheat workers out of their pay, pollute drinking water, destroy the planet, and do anything else to ordinary people and the environment that might boost their income. Republicans and their allies also design patent and copyright monopolies to give even more money to the rich (both here and overseas) and they structure the digital economy in ways that deny ordinary people any privacy.

It’s true that some Democrats also seem to share much of this agenda, but that’s beside the point. If the Republicans can control the White House and Congress, this is what they will do.

So, is impeachment a distraction from fighting this disastrous agenda? Not at all, impeachment is a necessary step in trying to stop it.
In case people somehow have missed it, Republicans do not care at all about democracy or the rule of law. They will do anything and everything they can get away with to keep power. We see this again and again.

To take one prominent example, Republicans wanted to include a question on citizenship on the Census to discourage immigrants from answering. The explicit purpose was to reduce political representation in areas with large immigrant populations. The Supreme Court ultimately blocked this effort because the Trump administration could not find a plausible reason to include this question, other than to discriminate against immigrants.

Just last week, the Republican leader of Kentucky’s state senate suggested reversing the results of the state’s gubernatorial election (which the Democrat won), based on his assessment that a third party candidate had pulled away enough votes from the Republican to cost him the election. While he seems to have backed away from this position in response to mass public outcry, the fact that he could seriously consider completely ignoring the results of an election shows the lack of respect that Republicans have for democracy and the rule of law.

The Ukraine affair has to be understood in this context. Trump is quite openly using the State Department, the Justice Department, and most likely other branches of government to directly advance his personal and political interests.

David Roth is the best

As he says, his insight is just simply treating Trump at face value as the person he has always been, and he's not the only one doing that. But his disgust is expressed in such elegantly hilarious riffs: "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" is the best, on-point, accurate reduction of Trump since these threads' President Brainstem back in 2017.

not really trying very hard either I think is also otm - if Trump's soggy, tiny brain still worked enough to ever be able to assess how well he's putting his bullying grifts over on the marks, he'd be revelling in how many Republican elected officials are prepared each day to completely sell out their constituencies and abase themselves at the temple of repeating whatever self-serving bullshit Trump's greasy thumbs blurted out during the morning's rage-warm-up.

every day, an even more flaccidly obvious version of "no puppet! you're the puppet!" transformed into a gilt standard and waved until the next half-coherent protestation of people being very unfair to him, really, gets enough English words shouted over helicopter blades in the right order for donorholic chumps to pretend they were intentional and start shouting those ones.

(by which time the revelling would be over because he can't get anything he wants without mentally transforming it from an achievement into an absolute birthright)

how many Republican elected officials are prepared each day to completely sell out their constituencies and abase themselves at the temple of repeating whatever self-serving bullshit Trump's greasy thumbs blurted out during the morning's rage-warm-up.

wouldn't they be selling out their constituencies if they *didn't* do that?

er no???

Is the David Roth interview subscription only?

It's time to spin the Wheel ... of ... Assholery!

"President Trump is expected to intervene in three military justice cases involving service members charged with war crimes any day, issuing pardons or otherwise clearing them of wrongdoing and preventing the U.S. military from bringing the same charges again, three U.S. officials said Thursday."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2019/11/14/white-house-pentagon-prepare-trump-issue-pardons-war-crimes-cases-officials-say/

Good morning!

You can get to both Roth articles if you click a few buttons

Huh. It says paid subscription for me.

It's really easy to commit war crimes in other countries. Everyone has done it.

It really is his core value set. If you're not cheating, you're not trying. If you're not cheating you're a sucker and a loser. Your first position is to cheat, then deny, then accuse the others of cheating, then create enough other bullshit to walk away. you know who pays taxes? losers who are NOT SMART.

so if youre not war criming youre not trying. none of them are angels. they knew what they signed up for, all sides. they’d do it to you.

It is very much in character for this administration to pursue a corrupt campaign against an anti corruption stalwart in the name of fighting corruption but in service of other corrupt individuals and policies.

Hunt3r xpost is as succinct a distillation of Trump's guiding principle as I've read.

Hasn't Trump been more or less explicit with that MO?

Wow, Schiff is having Yovanavitch respond to Trump's tweets in real time. What a fucked up world.

yes that was insane

twitter is the fucking worst thing to ever happen

twitter Trump is the fucking worst thing to ever happen, twitter is ancillary.

well i'd happily nuke twitter to deny Trump that platform

It's kind of amazing that they immediately responded like that, but points to a grim future where all hearings are held via tweet attacks.

Why is he tweeting a conversation from April

Trump is such a coward, doing that shit from his bathroom or whatever.

of all the places to do shit that seems like a good one tbh

Why isnt rudy being forced to comply with the subpoena again?

I have no idea what the GOP chumps are going to ask her about. Like, I do, generally, but I don't see why she even needs to be there to listen to conspiracy theories.

that's the thing Hunt3r missed, for all his tough talk and shows of strength when it comes down to it he really is a gigantic coward who is afraid to insult or fire anyone in person

This doesn't matter, but:

Interesting: on FOX just now, Bret Baier comes down very hard on Trump's real-time Tweet, noting that intimidating a witness "is a crime" and says GOP members will have to spend a lot of time trying to "clean this up."

— Jeff Greenfield (@greenfield64) November 15, 2019

Wallace also reaffirms Baier’s point about witness tampering and that overall it was “powerful testimony.”

Some of the other Fox News contributors are trying to deflect the import of Yovanovitch’s testimony but if Trump is watching FNC he’s going to blow a gasket.

— Daniel W. Drezner (@dandrezner) November 15, 2019