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

love how trump's negotiating style is based on projection ie the surest way to success is aggressively kissing the ass of the person across the table and never saying or doing anything that they would get mad about.

when his dementia progresses to a point where he is not even semi-lucid, are his supporters going to claim the deep state somehow did something to him?

he passed that point 2 years ago

Even when he's nothing but an immobile sack of moldering flesh and his capacity for speech has been thoroughly diminished there will be seers and sages on hand to relate to his flock the true meaning of those nonverbal croaks and burbles emitting from his facial sphincter.

who at the same time will call for the heads of any Democrat who tries to decode his obvious mobspeak

https://www.vox.com/2019/11/22/20977752/trump-fox-and-friends-interview-crowdstrike-ukraine-impeachment

this clarified things for me. so apparently the conspiracy is:

1. seth rich leaked the dnc emails
2. they revealed all sorts of malfeasance--including, by some accounts, the business with comet pizza
3. the democratic party murdered him in retaliation
4. they hired crowdstrike to do a sham investigation. crowdstrike fabricated evidence of a russian hack.
5. the idea was, they wanted an espionage story to overshadow the content of the emails. plus, they could tie russia to trump!
6. crowdstrike didn't fully cooperate with the fbi and didn't turn over all the evidence, such as the physical server. it is actually being housed in ukraine, where crowdstrike is based. (it's really based in california but whatever.)
7. the mueller investigation was an attempt to blow up this russia story to take down trump. for some reason the deep state was willing to bring more attention to the damning emails that were leaked.

basically, these people don't think there was a hack.

basically when trump brings up this crowdstrike stuff, he is implying this entire elaborate backstory of conspiracy that goes back to the seth rich stuff.

has he golfed yet?

basically when trump brings up this crowdstrike stuff, he is implying this entire elaborate backstory of conspiracy that goes back to the seth rich stuff.

Not really. The Seth Rich stuff is a very extreme subset of the more general theory that the DNC had bad internal security and the leaks came from disgruntled staffers. Which is not to say there is anything to support that idea.

oh, ok

Did crowdstrike also investigate the podesta leaks? I kee forgetting there were two separate hacking incidents.

doesn't matter i guess

has he golfed yet? where are the tax returns? and does he plan to golf this weekend?

I'm starting to think he should golf some more. Like, everyday. Treat yourself, Mr President.

this clarified things for me. so apparently the conspiracy is:

1. seth rich leaked the dnc emails
2. the press exposed him

3. anon did a phishing attack

4. people were scared/frustrated by the public release of emails and assumed rich was hacked

5. start talking shit that there's a new leaker and it would be amazing

(the latter is my theory, we'll find out soon enough)

_______
I love you treeship, but save your wide-eyed investigation into dumbass Republican conspiracies somewhere else.

oh surprise, the horowitz report all the republicans (and Trump, who talked about it this morning on Fox and Friends) finds no evidence of wrongdoing by the FBI and rebuffs conspiracy claims

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/22/us/politics/russia-investigation-inspector-general-report.html

So obviously we will never hear about it again

Lol. They got excited about the criminal referral thinking it was gonna be this blockbuster bust and it's one low level FBI guy and Horowitz is all like "otherwise it was fine"

Watch them realllly focus on that low level FBI guy now

REVEAL THE NAME

PBKR otm why are you guys trying to parse our this garbage

Think of your fellow man
Then go pull down his pants

Would it be illegal for Dems to run ads, for example during NFL games, laying out the case for impeachment? Seems like that’s probably not legal or else we’d see it more. I feel like the Dems are failing to capitalize on the incredibly damning testimony they got.

Doing so would turn impeachment into a wholly partisan political process and would quickly delegitimize it in the eyes of the public. Bad idea. The republicans are the ones who badly want to convince everyone it's nothing but a democratic political ploy, because that neutralizes it.

oh no not wholly partisan

What I really wish they'd do is set aside full day for testimony by congressional historians, constitutional scholars.

A day-long civics class embarrassing these fuckfaces with their "process" objections, "secret dungeon depositions!" etc.

not even drunk history can make most people sit through history

Chris Hayes' monologue before a live studio audience just now was good.

Biden going after Graham lol

Senator Lindsey Graham, still hilarious, in a Batman-villain kind of way.

can't tell anymore whether or not any new story will have an impact

CNN BREAKING --->

Giuliani associate PARNAS willing to tell Congress that Rep NUNES met with ex-Ukrainian official to get dirt on BIDEN@ChrisCuomo and @VickyPJWard will break it down shortly on CNN - @CuomoPrimeTime https://t.co/9dYN8JTPak

— Vaughn Sterling (@vplus) November 23, 2019

uhoh

Pfft that's just politics. Everyone tries to get dirt on opponents. Crooked Hilary worked with foreign entities to try to get dirt on Everyone's Favorite President.

confirms to me that Eric Swalwell was one of the sharpest questioners of the impeachment hearings

Nuuuuuuuuunes.

the word "damned" keeps getting thrown around with these things, and yet they're not damned yet, but here i go again,

the damning thing about it is that nunes didn't disclose his previous work with parnas, or his meeting with former prosecutor Shokin. i mean, if that's true, you have to disclose that. x100000 if you're gonna be a fucking prick for the entire time and mock the entire idea as a circus.

also, he has this really annoying habit:

Over the past two weeks, CNN approached Nunes on two occasions and reached out to his communications staff to get comment for this story.

In the Capitol on Nov. 14, as CNN began to ask a question about the trip to Vienna, Nunes interjected and said, "I don't talk to you in this lifetime or the next lifetime."

"At any time," Nunes added. "On any question."

Asked again on Thursday about his travel to Vienna and his interactions with Shokin and Parnas, Nunes gave a similar response.

"To be perfectly clear, I don't acknowledge any questions from you in this lifetime or the next lifetime," Nunes said while leaving the impeachment hearing. "I don't acknowledge any question from you ever."

no need to be so absolutist ALL the time EVERY DAY devin. i also recall him asking sondland something that involved if anyone on the planet knew something.

fredo would have wiped the floor with these losers

if only he would hurry along into the next lifetime

by emphasizing that he won't be talking to them in the next lifetime, either, he's trying to save himself from the hassle of having to deal with the press again in the next lifetime, which will apparently be much the same as this lifetime. but he hates talking to the press in this lifetime, that's for sure. so do we know that there wasn't a previous lifetime where nunes warned that he wouldn't speak with the press in the next (meaning, this present one)? has he forgotten, or did we forget?

Can he be stripped of whatever remaining authority he has in the House by Pelosi?

No

They could censure him or something i suppose

I mena, come on:

The group, according to Parnas’s lawyer, included Rudy Giuliani, Lev Parnas, the journalist John Solomon, and the married attorneys Joe diGenova and Victoria Toensing.

— Vicky Ward (@VickyPJWard) November 23, 2019

lol

FOIA application from American Oversight resulted in documents being released tonight by the State Department show a paper trail between Pompeo, Giuliani and Trump’s assistant Madeleine Westerhout in March to facilitate Giuliani’s smear campaign against Yovanovitch

It also appears that there are many other documents still to be analyzed

yep! from a friend:

At this moment, the website for AmericanOversight.org is down because so many people are trying to download the hundreds of documents a court ordered the State Dept. to release tonight after a FOIA lawsuit. The Giuliani Pompeo Trump loop is closing. The group has dozens more FOIA lawsuits pending over any document mentioned during the investigations that Congress can not get. That means you or I can get documents through FOIA from the government that the administration will not provide to Congress, who is lawfully entitled to them. Obstruction plain and simple.

it’s still shocking to me how much evidence there is and how easy it is to follow, even for someone not paying close attention

For days I've thought "don't end this now. Announce that the House can move to decisions about when to vote on this matter only AFTER we hear from critical witnesses who're now violating subpoenas. So until we hear from Pompeo, Pence, etc, about Ukraine, the House will now turn to emoluments, and then business and taxation issues..." and just start carving. Make the fucker try to dissolve Congress or something. Siege.

^ the most beautiful fancy I’ve been able to imagine in three years

pelosi would stroke out just thinkin of the negative voting ~implications~. she's probly not wrong.

counterpoint: what about the positive voting implications