Month: September 2019

Profiles in courage

by digby

Remember when all used to talk about honor and integrity and clutch their pearls about presidential lying?

Many Senate Republicans said today that they haven’t read the whistleblower complaint yet. Others said the complaint doesn’t change things and raises “more questions than answers.”

Here’s what they told reporters about the complaint:

Oklahoma Sen. James Lankford and North Dakota Sen. John Hoeven each said they were in appropriations mark-ups and hadn’t yet read the full complaint.

Indiana Sen. Mike Braun said he hadn’t read it either, adding that he didn’t know about the allegations to “lock down” information at the White House. Braun went on to say that he didn’t feel the complaint would change Republican’s views of impeachment, and said the Democrats had made a mistake starting an impeachment inquiry before knowing more about the complaint.

Tennessee Sen. Lamar Alexander said he has not read the complaint. “I’m waiting for the intelligence committee to finish its work.” 

 
Ohio Sen. Rob Portman said he said he’s been “running around” all day and hasn’t read it and would not comment.

Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton said “no comment” twice and boarded a senators-only elevator when asked if he was concerned the White House was locking down information.

Missouri Sen. Roy Blunt, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said “I’ll have a better idea of how credible he is later this afternoon” when asked if he is concerned about the strong allegations from a credible whistleblower.

Florida Sen. Marco Rubio told reporters he has read the whistleblower’s complaint, and says he has “more questions than answers.”

Idaho Sen. Jim Risch, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said that there was “nothing there” when asked about the rough transcript of President Trump’s call with the Ukrainian leader. On the whistleblower complaint, he said that he prefers to look at the primary document, meaning the rough transcript.

South Dakota Sen. Mike Rounds said “they are using second-hand information right now. Let’s let the committee investigate it.”

Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst said she hasn’t had time to read the whole complaint, saying, “I am going to have to dig into it.”

In a weird way, this is actually progress. Normally they’d all be out there eagerly licking his boots. The fact that they are stalling, waiting to see which way the wind blows means they are having to

This is Serious 

by tristero

Trump is threatening people’s lives. I see no reason not to take him seriously. This is not a joke. This is not bluster. This is the president of the United States making it very clear what he wants his people to do.

He is capable of anything.  He must be impeached and removed immediately.

In related news, Dean Baquet demonstrates, once again, that he has no idea what Trump is and how dangerous the situation is.

Is Trump putting something in the water at his hotels?

by digby

This story about Giuliani’s total meltdown as he undoubtedly realizes that he’s about to bkicked off the island is really something:

When I last saw Rudy Giuliani for lunch, at the Trump International Hotel in Washington four weeks ago, his most pressing concern was that he had been locked out of his Instagram account. Giuliani, the former mayor of New York City and current personal attorney to President Donald Trump, had a young woman named Audra, who told me she had won the “hottiesfortrump” Reddit channel’s “Miss Deplorable” contest three years in a row, there to assist him. As Giuliani and I spoke, roughly a dozen tourists asked him to pose for photos and congratulated him on the “work” he was doing for the country.

Today, Giuliani, and specifically his “work” on behalf of the president’s 2020 reelection campaign, is a key part of a whistle-blower complaint describing alleged efforts to solicit foreign interference in the upcoming election—perhaps the most damning scandal of the Trump presidency to date. The complaint alleges that White House officials sought to “lock down” all records of Trump’s call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, during which Trump offered the help of Attorney General William Barr and Giuliani to investigate the dealings of former Vice President Joe Biden’s son Hunter in the country. It also alleges that State Department officials were “deeply concerned” about Giuliani’s subsequent conversations with Ukrainian leaders.

Even among the president’s closest allies, Giuliani is now the subject of scorn. When I reached him by phone this morning, following House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff’s release of the full whistle-blower complaint at the center of the Ukraine scandal, he was, put simply, very angry.

“It is impossible that the whistle-blower is a hero and I’m not. And I will be the hero! These morons—when this is over, I will be the hero,” Giuliani told me.

“I’m not acting as a lawyer. I’m acting as someone who has devoted most of his life to straightening out government,” he continued, sounding out of breath. “Anything I did should be praised.”

Giuliani unleashed a rant about the Bidens, Hillary Clinton, the Clinton Foundation, Barack Obama, the media, and the “deep state.” He has spoken freely about all these topics since the moment he became a surrogate in Trump’s 2016 campaign. Giuliani has aired far-right conspiracy theories about Hillary Clinton’s health on national television. He has discussed his convictions about alleged Biden-family corruption with Trump in the White House residence. Still, until the Ukraine scandal broke, Trump’s allies were almost uniformly supportive of Giuliani to reporters, and current and former administration officials would often praise him for his loyalty.

Not until the back-to-back release of the summary of the Trump-Zelensky call and the full whistle-blower complaint did the mood change among this group.

This morning, a former senior White House official told me this “entire thing,” referring to the Ukraine scandal, was “Rudy putting shit in Trump’s head.” A senior House Republican aide bashed Giuliani, telling me he was a “moron.” Both individuals spoke on condition of anonymity in order to be candid.

“They’re a bunch of cowards,” Giuliani told me in response. “I didn’t do anything wrong. The president knows they’re a bunch of cowards.”

Giuliani said he’s looking forward to watching the State Department “sink themselves” as officials try to create distance from him. In the complaint, the whistle-blower wrote that officials, including Ambassadors Kurt Volker and Gordon Sondland, “had spoken with Mr. Giuliani in an attempt to ‘contain the damage’ to U.S. national security,” and that the ambassadors had tried to help the Ukrainian administration “understand and respond to the differing messages they were receiving from official U.S. channels on the one hand, and from Mr. Giuliani on the other.”

When I asked him about this specifically, Giuliani nearly began shouting into the telephone. “The State Department is concerned about my activities? I gotta believe [the whistle-blower] is totally out of the loop, or just a liar,” he said.

Giuliani went on to say that State Department officials had asked for his assistance. “If they were so concerned about my activities, why did they ask for my help? Why did they send me a bunch of friendly text messages reaching out for my help, thanking me for my help?” Giuliani said he planned to make sure these “friendly text messages” came out “in a longer story.”

He continued to stress that “all his facts” were “true” about the Bidens, though there is no evidence so far that they are. Giuliani argued the reason his attempts to root out corruption were front-page news, and not the alleged corruption itself, was because “the press idolizes Joe Biden and despises Donald Trump.” In a tweet last night, Biden said it was “clear” that “Donald Trump pressured Ukraine to manufacture a smear against a domestic political opponent,” calling it “an abuse of power that violates the oath of office and undermines our democracy.”

Giuliani has no intention, however, of slowing the smear campaign. “If this guy is a whistle-blower, then I’m a whistle-blower too,” Giuliani said. “You should be happy for your country that I uncovered this.”

He’s going to have a heart attack if he doesn’t watch it.  And he probably ought to tell “Miss Deplorable” to go home so he can get some rest.

It’s amusing. But considering that this man is involving himself in life and death issues having to do with Russia, Ukraine and national security in cahoots with an equally looney president in the White House and it’s not funny. It’s not funny at all.

.

Is there a crack in the Trump coalition?

by digby

I don’t know if this means anything just yet but here it is. The YouGov poll:

I’m sure you noticed that 22% of Republicans said they “strongly support” impeachment and another 10%  “somewhat support” it.  19% don’t know.

Let’s see if this holds up. I’m skeptical. But if it does we may be looking at something fundamental shifting.

Update: Axios has some other numbers

By the numbers: The Morning Consult/Politico poll was conducted Sept. 24–26 and surveyed 1,640 registered voters with a 2% margin of error. The latest numbers show:

43% support impeachment proceedings against Trump, up 7 points from a poll on Sept. 20–22.

Opposition to impeachment dropped to 43%, falling 6 points.
Republican support for impeachment rose to 10%, up from 5% last weekend.
Independent support rose to 39%, up from 33%.

The NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist Poll surveyed 864 adults on Sep. 25 with a 4.6% margin of error.

49% support impeachment, up from 39% in April.
46% oppose impeachment, down from 53% in April.
Between the lines: “The Ukraine story, and subsequent calls for his impeachment, have not changed Trump’s already-low approval rating. Forty-one percent of voters approve of Trump and 56 percent disapprove, roughly unchanged since the Sept. 20-22 poll,” per Morning Consult.

.

They need to bring this whistleblower in from the cold, stat

by digby

2016: “We get a traitor like Berghdal, a dirty rotten traitor, who by the way when he deserted, six young beautiful people were killed trying to find him. You know, in the old days ……bing – bong. When we were strong, when we were strong.”

The president is quoted telling a group of people this morning:

“Basically, that person never saw the report, never saw the call, he never saw the call — heard something and decided that he or she, or whoever the hell they saw — they’re almost a spy. I want to know who’s the person, who’s the person who gave the whistleblower the information? Because that’s close to a spy. You know what we used to do in the old days when we were smart? Right? The spies and treason, we used to handle it a little differently than we do now.”

So the president threatens the whistleblower and the NYT publishes information about him the same day?

The whistle-blower who revealed that President Trump sought foreign help for his re-election and that the White House sought to cover it up is a C.I.A. officer who was detailed to work at the White House at one point, according to three people familiar with his identity.

The man has since returned to the C.I.A., the people said. Little else is known about him. His complaint made public Thursday suggested he was an analyst by training and made clear he was steeped in details of American foreign policy toward Europe, demonstrating a sophisticated understanding of Ukrainian politics and at least some knowledge of the law.

The whistle-blower’s expertise will likely add to lawmakers’ confidence about the merits of his complaint, and tamp down allegations that he might have misunderstood what he learned about Mr. Trump. He did not listen directly to a July call between Mr. Trump and President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine that is at the center of the political firestorm over the president’s mixing of diplomacy with personal political gain.

Lawyers for the whistle-blower refused to confirm that he worked for the C.I.A. and said that publishing information about him was dangerous.

“Any decision to report any perceived identifying information of the whistle-blower is deeply concerning and reckless, as it can place the individual in harm’s way,” said Andrew Bakaj, his lead counsel. “The whistle-blower has a right to anonymity.”

A C.I.A. spokesman declined to comment. A spokeswoman for the acting director of national intelligence, Joseph Maguire, said that protecting the whistle-blower was his office’s highest priority. “We must protect those who demonstrate the courage to report alleged wrongdoing, whether on the battlefield or in the workplace,” Mr. Maguire said at a hearing on Thursday, adding that he did not know the whistle-blower’s identity.

Dean Baquet, the executive editor of The New York Times, said The Times was right to publish information about the whistle-blower. “The role of the whistle-blower, including his credibility and his place in the government, is essential to understanding one of the most important issues facing the country — whether the president of the United States abused power and whether the White House covered it up.”

Agents, officers and analysts from the military, intelligence and law enforcement communities routinely work at the White House. Often, they work on the National Security Council or help manage secure communications, like calls between the president and foreign leaders.

They need to provide this person protection right away. Even if Trump doesn’t give the order there are plenty of violent yahoos out there, foreign and domestic….

Who is the creepy person who laughed at that I wonder?

.

QOTD— So Far 

by tristero

From the redacted whistleblower complaint:

According to White House officials I spoke with, this was “not the first time“ under this administration that a presidential transcript was placed into this codeword-level system solely for the purpose of protecting politically sensitive – rather than national security sensitive – information.

 Translated: Trump’s White House is hiding a lot more. About a lot of crimes beyond this one.

Trump’s Ukraine obsession? Cui bono?

by digby

This long piece in the NYT about Trump’s belief that Ukraine is the source of all his troubles is interesting but despite the fact that it isn’t mentioned in the article,  you can’t help but be struck, once again, by the fact that for some reason once again Trump finds himself working on behalf of Vladimir Putin.

It’s the damnedest thing.

It was not a country that would naturally have seemed high on the priority list of a president who came to office relishing a trade clash with China, promising to reorder the Middle East and haranguing European allies to spend more on NATO.

But for President Trump, Ukraine has been an obsession since the 2016 campaign.

Long before the July 25 call with the new Ukrainian president that helped spur the formal start of impeachment proceedings against him in the House, Mr. Trump fretted and fulminated about the former Soviet state, angry over what he sees as Ukraine’s role in the origins of the investigations into Russian influence on his 2016 campaign.

His fixation was only intensified by his hope that he could employ the Ukrainian government to undermine his most prominent potential Democratic rival in 2020, former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.

His personal lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, has undertaken a nearly yearlong, free-ranging effort to unearth information helpful to Mr. Trump and harmful to Mr. Biden.

And Mr. Trump has put the powers of his office behind his agenda: He has dispatched Vice President Mike Pence and top administration officials with thinly veiled messages about heeding his demands about confronting corruption, which Ukrainian and former American officials say is understood as code for the Bidens and Ukrainians who released damaging information about the Trump campaign in 2016. This summer he froze a package of military assistance to Ukraine even as the country, eager to build closer relations with Washington, continued to be menaced by its aggressive neighbor Russia.

When Ukraine elected its new leader, Volodymyr Zelensky, on April 21, Mr. Trump seized on the moment as an opportunity to press his case. Within hours of Mr. Zelensky’s victory, Mr. Trump placed a congratulatory call as he was en route from his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida to Washington.

He urged Mr. Zelensky to coordinate with Mr. Giuliani and to pursue investigations of “corruption,” according to people familiar with the call, the details of which have not previously been reported. On Wednesday night, a spokesman for Mr. Trump declined to respond to questions about the call and whether Mr. Trump mentioned Mr. Giuliani. Officials at the National Security Council declined to comment.
[…]
Four days after that call, Mr. Trump said on Sean Hannity’s Fox News program that he “would imagine” that Attorney General William P. Barr would like to review information about Ukraine’s actions in the 2016 election.

On Wednesday, the Justice Department said that the official named to review the origins of the counterintelligence investigation into Mr. Trump’s campaign, John H. Durham, is looking into the role of Ukraine, among other countries. “While the attorney general has yet to contact Ukraine in connection with this investigation, certain Ukrainians who are not members of the government have volunteered information to Mr. Durham, which he is evaluating,” the Justice Department said in a statement.

When the American delegation dispatched to Mr. Zelensky’s inauguration — including Energy Secretary Rick Perry — reported back favorably in May about the new leader, Mr. Trump was dismissive. “They’re terrible people,” he said of Ukrainian politicians, according to people familiar with the meeting. “They’re all corrupt and they tried to take me down.”
[…]
Mr. Trump’s focus on Ukraine started after a law enforcement organization, the National Anticorruption Bureau of Ukraine, released damaging information about cash payments earmarked to his campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, by the Russia-aligned political party of Ukraine’s ousted former president.

Even after Mr. Manafort stepped down from the Trump campaign under pressure, he insisted to Mr. Trump’s aides that Mrs. Clinton’s campaign was behind the surfacing of the documents revealing the payments, and questioned the authenticity of the documents.

Mr. Manafort remained in contact with Mr. Trump’s aides through the election. And during the presidential transition, Mr. Manafort told people that he was discussing possible investigations with the president-elect’s team into whether Ukrainians tried to undermine the Trump campaign through the release of damaging information about Mr. Manafort.

Mr. Trump was briefed on the subject, and would consider pursuing investigations “if the Democrats keep pushing” investigations into Russian meddling on Mr. Trump’s behalf, Mr. Manafort told people in the days before the inauguration.

Mr. Manafort told the people that the Ukrainians who released the damaging information about him were working with the Clinton campaign to mount a “politically motivated attack on me.”

The issue continued to fester with Mr. Trump. He tweeted six months after his inauguration about “Ukrainian efforts to sabotage Trump campaign” and to “boost Clinton,” and asked, “where is the investigation?”
[…]
With Mr. Trump’s blessing, Mr. Giuliani has worked for months with current and former Ukrainian prosecutors to seek information and push for investigations into matters that he admitted would be of political benefit to Mr. Trump.

One involves the overlap between Mr. Biden’s diplomacy in Ukraine as vice president and his son Hunter’s position on the board of a Ukrainian energy company owned by an oligarch who had been accused of corruption.

A second involves the claim that Ukrainian officials sought to damage Mr. Manafort and Mr. Trump’s campaign in 2016. Mixed in with the issues related to Mr. Manafort is the unsubstantiated theory that the hack of Democratic National Committee emails in 2016 could have been carried out by Ukrainians who in turn pinned the blame on Russia — something that Mr. Trump brought up in general terms with Mr. Zelensky on the July 25 call.

Throughout Mr. Giuliani’s efforts he would brief Mr. Trump, keeping the president abreast of his work. But Mr. Giuliani also decided he would talk publicly about what he found.

“I decided because I couldn’t get law enforcement agencies interested in doing their job, I would just put it out publicly and I would see if anyone was interested in it,” Mr. Giuliani said in an interview on Wednesday.

There’s a lot more recapping the events of recent months which I’m sure you’re all familiar with by now.

This is a crazy story. I’m sure it’s all true. But I also suspect that Trump has had another unnamed little bird whispering in his ear the way that same little bird whispered in his ear about North Korea.

Ask yourself who really benefits from all this besides Trump?

Update: More here by Murray Waas:

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.

The impulse to separate all this from the Russia investigation must be resisted. It’s all the same story.

.

The complaint is about the call — and the White House covered-up

by digby

TPM summarized the whistleblower complaint:

The complaint focuses on efforts by Trump and his personal attorney Rudy Giuliani to pressure the Ukrainian government into manufacturing helpful political information, and lays out internal reactions from White House officials to the campaign. Those officials were in some cases alarmed by the effort and, in other cases, attempted to hide President Trump’s tracks as he and his personal lawyer sought information that could help him in the 2020 election.

“In the course of my official duties, I have received information from multiple U.S. Government officials that the President of the United States is using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country in the 2020 U.S. election,” the redacted complaint reads.

The unnamed whistleblower accuses both Giuliani and Attorney General Bill Barr of involvement in the pressure campaign. The Justice Department released a statement distancing itself from the effort on Wednesday, after the White House released a transcript of a July 25 phone call between Trump and Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky.

The whistleblower described the activity as occurring over the four months preceding the August complaint, and said that, while he or she was not a direct witness to the conduct, much of the behavior was described to the whistleblower by multiple witnesses.

The first section of the complaint describes Trump’s July 25 call with Zelensky — a record of which the White House released on Wednesday — and said the White House officials who told him or her about the call were “deeply disturbed.”

According to the whistleblower’s White House sources, there had been a “discussion ongoing” among White House lawyers about how to treat the call because “of the likelihood, in the officials’ retelling, that they had witnessed the President abuse his office for personal gain.”

From there, the complaint moves to a discussion of what the whistleblower describes as “efforts to restrict access to records related to the call.”

Those appear to encompass alleged efforts by top White House officials to “lock down” records of the call, including alleged orders from White House lawyers to “remove the electronic transcript from” a computer system where such records are typically stored.

Rather, the complaint alleges, the document was moved “into a separate electronic system” used to “store and handle classified information of an especially sensitive nature.”

The whistleblower cites a White House official as calling the decision “an abuse” of the electronic system, “because the call did not contain anything remotely sensitive from a national security perspective.”

The complaint purports to document a period of time following Trump’s call with Zelensky, in which State Department officials travelled to Kyiv and met with top Ukrainian officials and during which Giuliani himself met with a top Zelensky foreign policy adviser in Madrid.

The report suggests that two U.S. officials who traveled to Kyiv — U.S. Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland and Special Representative for the Ukraine Negotiations Kurt Volker — spoke to Giuliani “in an attempt to ‘contain the damage’ to U.S. national security” and to “help Ukrainian leaders understand and respond to the differing messages they were receiving from official U.S. channels on the one hand, and from Mr. Giuliani on the other.”

Multiple U.S. officials were “deeply concerned” by what the complaint describes as “Giuliani’s circumvention of national security decisionmaking processes,” according to the whistleblower’s sources.

The whistleblower traces the beginnings of the pressure campaign to discussions that Giuliani had with then-Ukrainian general prosecutor Yury Lutsenko, who gave an extensive series of interviews to The Hill’s John Solomon in March 2019 that hit a number of right-wing theories around Ukraine, including the debunked allegations against former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter, supposed Ukrainian interference in the 2016 election aimed at damaging former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort, and supposed disloyalty by then-U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch.

The complaint alleges that Giuliani attempted to convince Ukrainian leaders to act on the allegations made by Lutsenko, who was fighting at the time to keep his job as prosecutor general in Zelensky’s new administration. (Lutsenko left office in August.)

Ukrainian officials appear to have understood what was expected of them, the complaint reads, and also perceived that a potential meeting between Trump and Zelensky hung on whether the Ukrainian leader “showed willingness to ‘play ball’” on the Biden investigation.

An appendix attached to the complaint is heavily redacted.

One section of the appendix appears to focus on a May 14 order that Trump gave to Vice President Mike Pence to “cancel his planned travel” to Zelensky’s inauguration. It’s not clear if the cancellation was linked to the pressure campaign.

The appendix also states that the White House’s Office of Management and Budget cancelled security assistance to Ukraine on July 18 – one week before the call with Zelensky.

“As of early August, I heard from U.S. officials that some Ukrainian officials were aware that U.S. aid might be in jeopardy, but I do not know how or when they learned of it,” the complaint reads.

The White House covered up the call and worked to cover up the president’s treachery.  There is some thought that it might not have been the first time.

Trump betrayed the country — again. And his henchmen covered it up — again. Whether this hearing is educating the public about that fact remains to be seen.

You can read the complaint here.

.

The iron is hot
by Tom Sullivan

The whistleblower complaint was released minutes ago.

Acting president Donald Trump on Wednesday claimed Democrats “have been taken over by a radical group of people” and Nancy Pelosi is “no longer the Speaker of the House.” The White House sent talking points intended for the Republican caucus to every member of Congress Wednesday and hastily tried to recall their mistake. The opening of formal impeachment proceedings has the president and the White House rattled.

David Graham writes at that The Atlantic that Trump is unnerved:

Chaos is a constant in the Trump administration, but this week there are signs of a far rarer impulse: panic. The indications come in Trump’s demeanor, including the listless speech; a combative, brief press availability with Zelensky at the UN this morning; and a rambling, stream-of-semi-consciousness press availability this afternoon. They also manifest in his actions, with the White House suddenly scrambling to release documents that it had spent weeks zealously defending. This is not strategic withdrawal, but a wholesale rout. Trump is probably right to be shaken. No matter how many administration officials try to spin an impeachment inquiry as somehow constituting good news for Trump, it’s not persuasive, even if the president is never impeached, much less convicted.

CNN reported Wednesday night that the whistleblower complaint in the Ukraine affair has been declassified. It could be posted online this morning about the time (9 a.m. EDT) acting director of national intelligence Joseph Maguire gives testimony before the House Intelligence Committee on why he and the Justice Department tried to keep it from them. It will be another news cycle in which Trump will not be in control.

“He didn’t see anything wrong” with his conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.) told the Washington Post.

Nor would he. Leveraging military aid to Ukraine to extort help with undermining a domestic political rival comes as naturally as breathing to a man who has worked at the boundaries of the law his entire life.

The Post reports:

And as with the Mueller investigation, there is the risk that Trump’s frustration over impeachment — which he views as an attack on the legitimacy of his presidency — will come to so enrage him that it prompts him to begin lashing out and behaving erratically. In the words of one former aide, “It may lead to less structured output from the White House.”

Interpret that how you will.

For Democrats, the Zelensky call has been crystallizing. Pelosi told her Wednesday leadership meeting Democrats will focus articles of impeachment Trump’s implicit threat to withhold military aid to Ukraine to benefit his reelection campaign:

“This has clarity and understanding in the eyes of the American people,” Pelosi told her leadership team, according to a source with knowledge of the meeting. “If we do articles, then we can include other things.”

The iron is hot on the Ukraine matter, and so is her caucus. So, there is reason to lock onto the Ukraine affair to focus the public’s mind on Trump putting national security at risk for political gain and leveraging public money (“The Art of the Deal” tip: Use your leverage) to extort dirt on a political adversary from a foreign government. Time is a factor. The public’s attention is limited.

Recognizing that, Democracy for America, CREDO Action, the Courage Campaign and other groups advocating impeachment have already proposed a time for congressional action to keep Democrats from becoming overly broad and bogged down by White House legal efforts to deflect and delay:

1. The House Judiciary Committee votes on articles of impeachment against President Trump by November 1, 2019; and

2. The full US House of Representatives votes on articles of impeachment against President Trump by November 15, 2019.

Trump may provide a “target-rich environment” for impeachment, Lawfare explains, but a scattershot approach may look to the public like Democrats are throwing everything but the kitchen sink at Trump. He deserves it but:

[I]t is critically important to be disciplined at this juncture—to base articles of impeachment only on that activity which is not merely a plausible basis for removal but is unambiguously justified as a basis for removal. That means that anything that is a matter of policy—no matter how much one might disagree with the policy or how abhorrent one might find it—should not be included. For example, Congress should strongly resist the temptation to include disputes over border security—including both spending on the wall and the grotesque policy of family separation—in any articles it might draw up.

Lawfare suggests matters already documented in the Mueller probe and 1) “obstruction of justice and abuse of law enforcement institutions and personnel,” 2) “attempts to leverage the power of the presidency to cause investigation and prosecution of political opponents,” 3) the Ukraine matter (above), and 4) “the president’s efforts to obstruct or impede congressional investigations.”

Another reason for speed and focus is Trump is stung and the White House is off balance. Disoriented. Democrats need to keep them that way and give Trump and Republicans no space to regroup.

Huckleberry’s always been a fatuous nincompoop

by digby

He first came to national attention as a newly minted cornpone congressman, known for his “more in sorrow than in anger” persona in the Clinton impeachment trial:

“You don’t even have to commit a crime, to lose your job. Impeachment is not about punishment. Impeachment is about cleansing the office. Impeachment is about restoring honor and integrity to the office.” Lindsey Graham #LindseyGrahamResign pic.twitter.com/m4r4yuP5hU— Democratic Coalition (@TheDemCoalition) May 14, 2019

Look at him now:

Sen. Lindsey Graham: "From my point of view, to impeach any president over a phone call like this would be insane" https://t.co/zyCtH21PQY pic.twitter.com/n5ZADE6Yhr— CNN Politics (@CNNPolitics) September 25, 2019

You can read all of Grham’s sickening sanctimonious, fatuous speech before the Senate in that trial here. It was enough to make you puke even then. His support for this criminal imbecile today is enough to make you put a fist through the wall.

Our politics are terrible and most politicians are not to be trusted, we know that. But dear God, the Republican Party is little than a fascist, criminal gang at this point.

.