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Month: September 2019

Trump’s impeachment tantrum can’t hide that he screwed the pooch

Published by digby on September 24, 2019

Trump’s impeachment tantrum can’t hide that he screwed the pooch

by digby

Uhm, Trumpie. They don’t need the transcript! You confessed:

The conversation I had [with President Zelenskiy] was largely congratulatory, with largely corruption—all of the corruption taking place—and 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.”

That’s an impeachable offense.

Here’s his henchman:

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Impeachment doesn’t require an explicit quid pro quo. It doesn’t even require an implicit quid pro quo. It’s an egregious abuse of power for a president to and his emissary to demand that a foreign government smear his political opponent in advance of the next election. Period.

But if they want the quid pro quo well, Trump hasn’t exactly helped himself with that either:

There are dozens of reasons to impeach Trump. He is a criminal. But this one goes directly to the manipulation of the election in 2020 and if they don’t do something about it there will be no going back.

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The second part of the smear

Published by digby on September 24, 2019

The second part of the smear


by digby

I think we all know that Trump and his family have been profiting like crazy from the presidency in dozens of different ways,  from influence peddling to straight up graft. It couldn’t be more obvious.

Nonetheless, aside from the Ukraine gambit, the Trump and Rudy show has adopted the “Clinton Cash” author, Peter Schweitzer’s,  latest smear to try to take out Biden. You have heard Rudy babble madly about “billions” from China and Trump has incoherently alluded to it as well.

Here’s what it’s all about:

The president’s personal attorney has convinced more Democrats to open an impeachment inquiry into his client. But Rudy Giuliani is already hinting at a new front in his questionable offensive against former Vice President Joe Biden’s son. And it’s a charge that Trump allies outside the White House have been pursuing for months.

A group of conservative activists closely aligned with the president—including former White House adviser Steve Bannon, conservative author Peter Schweizer, and anti-Muslim activist Frank Gaffney—are trying to spread dirt on Hunter Biden’s work in China. Their efforts have come as almost all of the national political attention is currently focused on Giuliani’s and President Donald Trump’s efforts to pressure the Ukrainian government into investigating alleged corruption involving the former VP’s son who formerly sat on the board of an energy company in the country.

Giuliani himself has barely concealed his desire to see a second line of attack opened on the younger Biden over his involvement in an investment fund called Rosemont Seneca, which Biden ran with Christopher Heinz, the stepson of former secretary of state John Kerry. In his protracted interview last week with CNN host Chris Cuomo, Trump’s attorney said the word “China” more than a dozen times to draw attention to the matter. Giuliani and Trump have also talked about China as a liability for Biden and his son in recent conversations, according to a source with knowledge of the discussions.

Reached for comment on Monday afternoon, Giuliani said he couldn’t comment on his private conversation with President Trump, “except to say I’ve done nothing on China but repeat what others have reported but it really looks bad.”

“It’s arguably worse than Ukraine,” he added for good measure.

As with Hunter Biden’s work in Ukraine, his supposed China controversy is rooted in the investigative work of Schweizer, a conservative journalist whose 2016 book, Clinton Cash, raised conflict of interest allegations surrounding Hillary Clinton and her family’s foundation that dogged the former secretary of state’s 2016 presidential bid.

Schweizer’s 2018 book, Secret Empires, sought to tie Rosemont’s investment activity to Vice President Biden’s senior government position. Giuliani has spotlighted a $1.5 billion private equity deal between Rosemont and the Bank of China in his allegations of corruption. That figure came directly from Schweizer, who reported that a Rosemont entity secured a $1.5 billion private equity deal with the bank a couple weeks after Hunter Biden traveled to Beijing with his father aboard Air Force Two in 2013.

On both fronts—Ukraine and China—Biden’s presidential campaign insists the attacks are scurrilous. In a memo to reporters on Monday, a campaign spokesman called the corruption allegations at the heart of the charge “a roundly debunked conspiracy theory” that “Trump and Giuliani have tried to manipulate the media into repeating.” Schweizer’s reporting laid out a conspicuous timeline, but didn’t establish any actual connection between the Bidens’ trip to China and Rosemont’s Bank of China-backed venture. Hunter Biden wasn’t even a Rosemont equity owner while his father served as vice president, according to his attorneys and he has said that he conducted no business while on that 2013 trip.

Nevertheless, Schweizer has called for additional government investigations into the Bank of China investment, as well as his business activities in Ukraine.

“Will the Senate investigate Joe and Hunter Biden’s actions in China and Ukraine? We don’t know, but they should,” Schweizer wrote in a May column in the New York Post.

That column ran about two weeks after a group of Trump allies assembled in New York for a conference on the economic threat posted to the U.S. by Beijing. The event was sponsored by a new group called the “Committee on the Present Danger: China,” which is led in part by Gaffney, the president of the Center for Security Policy, a right-wing foreign policy group that alleges Biden and his family have “profited handsomely” from “business-as-usual with Beijing.”



There’s more at the link.

I’m sure that Hunter Biden used his relationship to power in his business dealings. Influence peddling is a big business in governments all over the world and has been for decades. Neil Bush (and, to some extent, Jeb and George W as well), Billy Carter and Hugh Rodham come to mind. But there is no evidence that Joe Biden changed any foreign policy, or even had the capacity to do that, to favor his son.

This is a “but her emails” smear that they are betting will equalize Joe Biden as a “crooked” dealer on the same level as the outright criminal Donald Trump. Biden may have problems as a candidate and a political official. But this isn’t one of them and these right wing operatives should not be allowed to get away with this again.

Last time it arguably put Trump in the White House and went some way toward destroying the country. The rollbacks on the climate change and the Iran deal alone could have spelled the doom of our world as we have known it.

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So What? by tristero

Published by tristero on September 24, 2019

So What?


by tristero

Trump is claiming that he will release a “declassified and unredacted transcript” of his phone conversation with the Ukrainian president.

So what?

First, anyone who believes, without hearing an audio recording, that the transcript is truly verbatim is naive.* Secondly, “unredacted” does not mean “unedited.” The clue is in the word “declassified.” It will almost certainly be edited. There just won’t be those ominous black boxes on the page so it will look “pure.”

Third, it’s not enough.

The whistleblower complaint was only partly about the phone call. There is more. And I’m not the only one who thinks there is a lot more.  The complaint itself must be handed over to Congress. The law must be followed.

But even that is not enough. Joseph Maguire must go.

And no, that’s not enough, either. Maguire must be replaced by someone completely acceptable to Adam Schiff. And there needs to be assurances from the Justice Department that there will no more interference — ever — with the whistleblower program by the Trump administration.**

Oh, and in other news, Pelosi announced a formal impeachment inquiry. I suppose I should be relieved but instead I’m just disgusted that it took this much to get her to stop dithering. Why?

Read David Leonhardt’s brilliant precis of Trump’s high crimes and misdemeanors and ask yourself how on earth any decent Congressperson could have waited so long to support a formal impeachment inquiry.

There is something dangerously wrong with a government that would allow any president to get away with 1/10th what Trump has done. There is something dangerously wrong with a press that — after all his lies and bullshit — would fall for Trump’s switcheroo on the whistleblower complaint and minimize that aspect of this story.

It is my sincere hope that this is the beginning of a transition to sanity, but I fear that the press is going to let the whistleblower complaint go after the transcript is released. And that  Pelosi moved far too late.

*Even with an audio recording, it’s easy enough to edit out the naughty bits and no one would ever be able to tell. I happen to be an expert at audio editing. Believe me, I know.

**Frankly, I don’t know how such a pledge could be enforced but it’s better than no pledge.

A loon lands at the UN

Published by digby on September 24, 2019

A loon lands at the UN

by digby

Is it appropriate for the president’s son who is in charge of his ongoing International businesses to be sitting with the WH delegation at the UN?

Here are some highlights:

Those were actually his best moments. He’s been acting like a lunatic those whole time. One example:

He’s rattled, it’s obvious. And he should be. As I write this, the number of Democrats for impeachment procedures has gone up to 167. That’s 29 who have joined the call in the last 24 hours.

I guess that the prospect of the president blatantly trying to steal the election in almost exactly the way he tried to steal it in 2016 may have been a bit much.

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Oh what a tangled Ukrainian web we weave …

Published by digby on September 24, 2019

Oh what a tangled Ukrainian web we weave …

by digby

In case you are just catching up on the latest reporting on this Ukraine story, this is the info in a Washington Post article last night seems to have pushed some people over to impeachment:

President Trump told his acting chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, to hold back almost $400 million in military aid for Ukraine at least a week before a phone call in which Trump is said to have pressured the Ukrainian president to investigate the son of former vice president Joe Biden, according to three senior administration officials.

Officials at the Office of Management and Budget relayed Trump’s order to the State Department and the Pentagon during an interagency meeting in mid-July, according to officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. They explained that the president had “concerns” and wanted to analyze whether the money needed to be spent.

Administration officials were instructed to tell lawmakers that the delays were part of an “interagency process” but to give them no additional information — a pattern that continued for nearly two months, until the White House released the funds on the night of Sept. 11.
[…]
Trump’s order to withhold aid to Ukraine a week before his July 25 call with Volodymyr Zelensky is likely to raise questions about the motivation for his decision and fuel suspicions on Capitol Hill that Trump sought to leverage congressionally approved aid to damage a political rival.

According to administration officials, discussions about Ukrainian aid began in June. Withholding aid from foreign governments is something the president has frequently requested, such as with Central American countries when he said they were not doing their part to help the United States with immigrants amassing at the southern border.

Former national security adviser John Bolton wanted to release the money to Ukraine because he thought it would help the country while curtailing Russian aggression. But Trump has said he was primarily concerned with corruption.

“It’s very important to talk about corruption,” Trump told reporters. “If you don’t talk about corruption, why would you give money to a country that you think is corrupt?”

Besides Bolton, several other administration officials said they did not know why the aid was being canceled or why a meeting was not being scheduled.

The decision was communicated to State and Defense officials on July 18, officials familiar with the meeting said.

By mid-August, lawmakers were acutely aware that the OMB had assumed all decision-making authority from the Defense and State departments and was delaying the distribution of the aid through a series of short-term notices. Several congressional officials questioned whether the OMB had the legal authority to direct federal agencies not to spend money that Congress had already authorized, aides said.

Spokespeople for the Pentagon and the State Department declined to comment.

Mid-August is also when a whistleblower from the intelligence community filed a complaint regarding Trump and Ukraine to Intelligence Community Inspector General Michael Atkinson.

I think this story opens up an important line of inquiry. As I noted yesterday, it now appears that a whole lot of people knew that something strange was going on. How many of them knew that Trump’s decision to withhold aid to Ukraine was tied to his plan to smear Biden is unknown but that plan was not a secret. Giuliani had been pimping it since the spring.

But there are people all along the chain of command who were involved in this going all the way to the Secretary of State and the Vice president.

Oh, and Bolton’s name keeps coming up, naturally because he was the NSC. But he is also an angry ideologue who is opposed to much of Trump’s foreign policy and may feel his reputation would be better served by being an apostate than a Trump toadie at this point. After all, he doesn’t answer to the base — his constituency is the neo-conservative national security community.

It would be the height of irony if he ended up being the whistleblower. I doubt that he would go that far, but in Bizarro World anything can happen.

Update: Trump has changed his explanation today. Yesterday he said he withheld money because of corruption in Ukraine. Now he says he withheld aid because Europe wasn’t paying its fair share.

For a pathological liar, he sure is bad at it.

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Once Again, the Story is the Destruction of Effective Whistleblowing by tristero

Published by tristero on September 24, 2019

Once Again, the Story is the Destruction of  Effective Whistleblowing 

by tristero

I honestly don’t understand why the Times, among so many others, is downplaying the fact that Trump has now made it impossible for whistleblowers to come forward without suffering dire consequences,  including jail time. Slate sums it up.

This process appeared to have worked as intended until the Ukraine whistleblower’s complaint landed on Maguire’s desk. ICWPA does not seem to give Maguire any leeway here: Under the law, he must accept Atkinson’s judgment and send the complaint to Congress. Yet Maguire has refused to do so, asserting that he does not believe the complaint constitutes an “urgent concern.” House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam B. Schiff has sent Maguire multiple demands and even a subpoena for the complaint, but Maguire will not turn it over. 

What is Maguire’s legal basis for withholding the complaint? The OLC [Office of Legal Counsel] told him it was not an “urgent concern.” Its reasoning, of course, is secret. 

The OLC’s intervention to block the transmission of the whistleblower’s complaint is a startling breach of protocol. ICWPA defines an “urgent concern” as a “serious or flagrant problem, abuse, violation of law or Executive order, or deficiency relating to the funding, administration, or operations of an intelligence activity involving classified information.” Because the complaint remains hidden, we cannot know if it meets this standard. But the law does not give Maguire the power to answer that question. Instead, it grants Atkinson the authority to decide if a whistleblower’s complaint fits this definition. Moreover, it states that Maguire “shall … forward” the complaint to Congress if Atkinson determines it meets the statutory standard. Maguire has no apparent right to veto Atkinson’s judgment. 

And yet, the OLC has conjured precisely such a right and handed it to Maguire. It is possible, if unlikely, that the OLC’s legal analysis is defensible. But it is impossible to assess that analysis because the office has suppressed it. And the OLC’s track record, especially under Trump, gives us good reason to doubt that its logic holds water. 

Schumer wants to change that, but his own powers are limited. He has urged his Republican colleagues to “insist” that the Justice Department turn over the OLC’s opinion; congressional committees can’t normally gain access to such information, but Schumer appears to be seeking some accommodation from the administration. Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr has shown no indication that he will comply with Schumer’s requests. 

There are many layers of alleged misconduct here, from the president’s own reported criminality to the administration’s efforts to conceal the president’s actions from Congress—and, by extension, the public. But it should not be forgotten that this cover-up is being facilitated by the office ostensibly responsible for keeping the executive branch in line with the law. The whistleblower’s complaint remains secret today because the OLC decided that a statute does not mean what it says. Instead of following the law, the office seems to be helping Trump cover his tracks. 

And I’d just like to repeat that publicly releasing what will surely be bowdlerized transcripts — which Trump appears to be dangling as a substitute for releasing the whistleblower complaint to Congress — will do nothing but enable Trump to set the initial tone of the reporting and therefore, the story. As he did to catastrophic effect with the Mueller report.

This is very serious.

They’re running the same play again by @BloggersRUs

Published by Tom Sullivan on September 24, 2019

They’re running the same play again
by Tom Sullivan

MSNBC’s Chris Hayes noted on “All In” Monday night that it was obvious in the Ukraine affair Donald Trump is running the same play he ran in 2018. It’s antecedent was the second item in David Leonhardt’s “just the facts” column on Sunday:

He has pressured a foreign leader to interfere in the 2020 American presidential election.

He urged a foreign country to intervene in the 2016 presidential election.

Trump is enlisting the Party of Trump to run the same “Benghazi” play they ran against Hillary Clinton against Joe Biden. Benghazi – Part 2 will be “Ukraine.” Every Republican pundit and operative will repeat it until they’re blue in the face. They’re doing it because they got away with it before. And if it doesn’t get immediate traction, they’ll turn their amps up to 11.

This was entirely predictable. It is the Republican M.O. What they get away with once they will keep doing until somebody stops them. This is not news to me. But it’s a lesson Democrats refuse to learn. Someone you’d think they would listen to spelled it out 15 years ago.

In a 2004 interview with “The Daily Show” host Jon Stewart, former President Bill Clinton explained it in talking about what the Bush campaign had done in 2000 with the daughter Sen. John McCain adopted from Bangladesh:

Clinton: They had a calling operation in South Carolina in the primary in 2010 about how John McCain had a black baby, and they didn’t want the white voters to forget it.

[banter]

Stewart: Do you believe that politics has gotten so dirty … that these kinds of tactics become so prevalent that this is the reason half the country doesn’t vote? Or this is the reason that we don’t get, maybe, the officials that we deserve?

Clinton: No, I think people do it because they think it works.

Stewart: That’s it? Simply a strategy?

Clinton: Absolutely. And as soon as it doesn’t work, they’ll stop doing it.

Seven freshman Democrats with national security backgrounds wrote in the Washington Post Monday evening they plan to “preserve the checks and balances envisioned by the Founders,” including using “inherent contempt” authority if necessary:

The president of the United States may have used his position to pressure a foreign country into investigating a political opponent, and he sought to use U.S. taxpayer dollars as leverage to do it. He allegedly sought to use the very security assistance dollars appropriated by Congress to create stability in the world, to help root out corruption and to protect our national security interests, for his own personal gain. These allegations are stunning, both in the national security threat they pose and the potential corruption they represent. We also know that on Sept. 9, the inspector general for the intelligence community notified Congress of a “credible” and “urgent” whistleblower complaint related to national security and potentially involving these allegations. Despite federal law requiring the disclosure of this complaint to Congress, the administration has blocked its release to Congress.

This flagrant disregard for the law cannot stand. To uphold and defend our Constitution, Congress must determine whether the president was indeed willing to use his power and withhold security assistance funds to persuade a foreign country to assist him in an upcoming election.

As I write this Monday evening, these stories continue to break: Trump ordered hold on military aid days before calling Ukrainian president, officials say:

President Trump told his acting chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, to hold back almost $400 million in military aid for Ukraine at least a week before a phone call in which Trump is said to have pressured the Ukrainian president to investigate the son of former vice president Joe Biden, according to three senior administration officials.

Rep. Elaine Luria of Virginia, a 20-year U.S. Navy officer, told MSNBC’s “Rachel Maddow Show” Monday night before the story above went live, “There does not need to be a political calculus in this situation.”

“As soon as it doesn’t work, they’ll stop doing it.”

It needs to stop working now. Not just for the sake of the republic but the planet as well. Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her caucus cannot avoid trying to stop it until Americans vote in 2020. In 2016, #MoscowMitch used that excuse in stonewalling doing his constitutional duty to hold confirmation hearings for President Obama’s last nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court. It’s not a precedent Democrats want to validate.

Big Mistake by tristero

Published by tristero on September 24, 2019

Big Mistake 

by tristero

Democratic strategy, translated:

Dear Oh Great President Trump, Your Huge-ness,

Please release the transcript of your Ukraine phone calls. Or turn over the whistleblower complaint to Congress.

Please do whichever you want. We trust that you will do the right thing.

Pretty please. With sugar on top? And a cherry?

Your obediently feckless servants,

The Democrats

“Relentless Attacks Against Trump” by tristero

Published by tristero on September 24, 2019

“Relentless Attacks Against Trump”

by tristero

This ranks as one of the more ridiculous commentaries I’ve read on the Trump presidency:

There’s a lot we still don’t know about President Trump’s phone conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. There is one thing we do know: This budding scandal would probably have more political impact were it not for the last three years’ worth of relentless attacks against Trump.

They’re not attacks. They’re simply reports of the multiple egregiously criminal acts this president has perpetrated. Oh, and by the way, contrary to what the commentator pretends is true,  the Ukraine piece of the story is getting plenty of traction.  And although what I think is the most important part of the story is being underplayed, some outlets have indeed figured out that Trump is pulling a fast one: he’s dangling the release of an edited transcript to distract from his refusal to pass the whistleblower complaint to Congress. My guess is there’s a lot more to that whistleblower complaint than a few openly criminal extortion attempts.

… Trump has been relentlessly attacked every day since his inauguration. He has been accused of treason, breaking the law with impunity, running concentration camps along our southern border and a million other things.

That’s because it’s all relentlessly true.

The past three years have consisted of little else besides leading political, social and media figures yelling that he is unfit for the office he holds.

That’s because he is manifestly unfit for office. Duh. And the Democrats are auditioning for the role of Grand High Ditherers in some demented Gilbert and Sullivan knockoff.

I’ve got an idea! You want the “relentless attacks on Trump” to stop?

Just get him to resign. I promise you, the moment he is out of office and behind bars where he belongs, I will never, ever, mention Trump’s name again.