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Month: October 2019

“I think it’s crazy to withhold security assistance for help with a political campaign.”

Published by digby on October 3, 2019

“I think it’s crazy to withhold security assistance for help with a political campaign.”


by digby

Former envoy Kurt Volcker gave a deposition today. Details are dribbling out:

In newly disclosed text messages shared with Congress, the top U.S. diplomat to Ukraine at the time writes to a group of other American diplomats that “I think it’s crazy to withhold security assistance for help with a political campaign.”

The exchange, provided by former U.S Special Envoy to Ukraine Kurt Volker as part of his closed-door deposition before multiple House committees Thursday, shows what appears to be encrypted text messages he exchanged with two other American diplomats in September regarding aid money President Donald Trump ordered to be held back from Ukraine.

In the exchange, obtained by ABC News, the concerns are expressed by Bill Taylor, the top U.S. diplomat to Ukraine. Gordon Sondland, the United States Ambassador to the European Union, responds to Taylor, saying, “Bill, I believe you are incorrect about President Trump’s intentions. The President has been crystal clear: no quid pro quo’s of any kind. The President is trying to evaluate whether Ukraine is truly going to adopt the transparency and reforms that President Zelensky promised during his campaign.”

Sondland then suggests to the group take the conversations off line, typing “I suggest we stop the back and forth by text.” It’s unclear if the conversation continues, based on the material obtained by ABC News.

It appears that discussion happened as the new of Trump blackmailing Ukraine was dribbling out. Even dumb old me got it. I presume that Trump’s factotum Sondland also knew this was bubbling up when he made that very obvious CYA comment.

The former U.S. special envoy for Ukraine told House investigators on Thursday that he warned President Trump’s personal attorney, Rudolph W. Giuliani, that Giuliani was receiving untrustworthy information from Ukrainian political figures about former vice president Joe Biden and his son, according to two people familiar with his testimony.
Kurt Volker, who resigned last week after being named in a whistleblower complaint that sparked the House impeachment inquiry of Trump, said he tried to caution Giuliani that his sources, including Ukraine’s former top prosecutor, were unreliable and that he should be careful about putting faith in the prosecutor’s stories, said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the closed door meeting.
Volker’s testimony offers the first inside account of the Trump administration’s efforts to press for a Ukrainian investigation into Trump’s political rival.
At the heart of this effort is Giuliani’s contention that, as vice president, Biden pushed for the firing of Ukraine’s former prosector general, Viktor Shokin, as part of a corrupt plot to halt investigations into a Ukrainian natural gas company that employed Biden’s son Hunter.
Joe Biden has denied the accusation, and foreign policy experts have pointed out that Biden’s push to remove Shokin was part of a broader international effort that included the European Union and the International Monetary Fund, where leaders viewed Shokin as an inept.
Volker also said that he and other State Department officials cautioned the Ukrainians to steer clear of U.S. politics. Getting involved, he said he told them, would open the nation up to allegations that they were interfering in an election and could be detrimental to Ukraine long-term, according to these two individuals.

Trump himself had no such worries. Of course, he assumes that he’s going to be president for life:

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Remember, Trump henchman Pompeo was CIA Director

Published by digby on October 3, 2019

Remember, Trump henchman Pompeo was CIA Director

by digby

I wonder what he was bullying and yelling about?

I don’t think we have properly considered the fact that Pompeo had access to everything as CIA director. And now he’s right in the middle of this crazytown conspiracy nonsense.

This is disturbing, to say the least.

As far as his reputation at the CIA, I’d imagine this didn’t help:

Susan Pompeo, the wife of Central Intelligence Agency Director Mike Pompeo, has taken an unusually active and prominent role at the organization, and has fashioned herself as an unofficial “first lady of the CIA,” according to people with knowledge of her activities.

Pompeo, who is a volunteer at the CIA, uses office space on the seventh-floor headquarters in Langley, Va., where senior leaders, including the director, have their offices. A support staff of CIA employees assists her in her duties, although that is not their full-time job. And Pompeo travels with her husband, who President Trump nominated last week to replace Rex Tillerson as secretary of state, including on trips he takes overseas to meet with foreign intelligence officials.

Last year, Pompeo accompanied the CIA director on a trip to Britain, where he met with his counterpart Alex Younger, the head of the Secret Intelligence Service, or MI6, according to people familiar with the trip. Pompeo also went with the CIA director on a tour of Fort Monckton, a military base in southern England where MI6 trains its personnel.

While it is not unheard of for directors’ spouses to take on volunteer work, particularly advocating for families, Susan Pompeo’s presence at the agency, along with her use of office space and help from staff, has raised questions internally about the nature of her duties and why agency resources are being used to support her, according to people who spoke on the condition of anonymity to talk about a sensitive subject.

They’re all a bunch of kooks.

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He cannot learn. They must not be allowed to normalize this lunacy

Published by digby on October 3, 2019

He cannot learn.

by digby

Here’s the transcript:

THE PRESIDENT: Well, we’re looking at a lot of different things. China is coming in next week. We’re going to have a meeting with them. We’ll see. But we’re doing very well.

Some of the numbers, I think, are being affected by all of the nonsense, all of the politics going on in this country by the Democrats. I call them the “Do-nothings.” They do nothing for this country. They don’t care about this country. But the numbers, really, are looking very good, going into the future.

So, we’ll see. I have a lot of options on China. But if they don’t do what we want, we have tremendous — tremendous power.

Q Mr. President, what exactly did you hope Zelensky would do about the Bidens after your phone call? Exactly.

THE PRESIDENT: Well, I would think that, if they were honest about it, they’d start a major investigation into the Bidens. It’s a very simple answer.

They should investigate the Bidens, because how does a company that’s newly formed — and all these companies, if you look at —

And, by the way, likewise, China should start an investigation into the Bidens, because what happened in China is just about as bad as what happened with — with Ukraine.

So, I would say that President Zelensky — if it were me, I would recommend that they start an investigation into the Bidens. Because nobody has any doubt that they weren’t crooked. That was a crooked deal — 100 percent. He had no knowledge of energy; didn’t know the first thing about it. All of a sudden, he is getting $50,000 a month, plus a lot of other things. Nobody has any doubt.

And they got rid of a prosecutor who was a very tough prosecutor. They got rid of him. Now they’re trying to make it the opposite way. But they got rid —

So, if I were the President, I would certainly recommend that of Ukraine.

Q Have you asked President Xi to investigate at all?

THE PRESIDENT: I haven’t, but it’s certainly something we can start thinking about. Because I’m sure that President Xi does not like being under that kind of scrutiny, where billions of dollars is taken out his country by a guy that just got kicked out of the Navy. He got kicked out of the Navy; all of a sudden, he’s getting billions of dollars. You know what they call that? They call that a “payoff.”
[…]

Q Mr. President, Vice President Biden — Vice President Biden said that he’s not going anywhere. He has said that you’re not going to destroy his family. What do — what’s your response?

THE PRESIDENT: Well, I think Biden is going down. And I think his whole situation — because now you may very well find that there are many other countries that they scammed, just like they scammed China and Ukraine. And basically, who are they really scamming? The USA. And it’s not good.

Q He said he was carrying out the official policy —

THE PRESIDENT:And that’s probably why China, for so many years, has had a sweetheart deal where China rips off the USA — because they deal like people with Biden, where they give their son a billion and a half dollars. And that’s probably why China has such a sweetheart deal that, for so many years, they’ve been ripping off our country.

That’s right. It’s incoherent (did “the Bidens” rip off China or did they get a “payoff” or did they do a deal with China to destroy the US? So hard to know…)

But the fact is — HE DID IT AGAIN. He asked yet another foreign adversary to involve itself in the US election. He simply does not believe that it’sa problem and his Republican accomplices are fine with it too.

When all the smoke has cleared, where do we end up with all this? It isn’t entirely clear to me that we can repair this with the Republicans all deciding its fine to betray the country.

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About that weird packet

Published by digby on October 3, 2019

About that weird packet

by digby

It was Rudy, of course. America’s Craziest Former Mayor sent a package full of crazy conspiracy theories over to the State Department. No word yet on who did the lovely arts and crafts work on the envelope:

After State Department Inspector General Steve Linnick briefed Congress on Wednesday and handed over materials that some Democrats said amounted to a packet of “propaganda” apparently designed to smear former Vice President Joe Biden, Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani proudly told CNN that some of these documents originated with him.

“What Giuliani told me is that he somehow routed this information—this is at the end of March, earlier this year—he says he routed that to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo,” reporter Michael Warren said on CNN Wednesday night. “He did say that he received a call a couple of days later from Pompeo who said that he had gotten these documents and that he would refer it for investigation.”

“Giuliani telling me he was frustrated he never heard anything back from the State Department thereafter,” Warren added.

The chairs of the House Intelligence, House Foreign Affairs and Oversight committees released a joint statement hours earlier expressing concerns about the “urgent” briefing that they had been summoned to by the State Department. The documents given to lawmakers at that briefing “raise troubling questions about apparent efforts inside and outside the Trump Administration to target specific officials,” the statement said, including former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch and Biden’s son Hunter.

“The documents provided by the Inspector General included a package of disinformation, debunked conspiracy theories, and baseless allegations in an envelope marked ‘White House’ and containing folders labeled ‘Trump Hotel,’” the statement read. “These documents also reinforce concern that the President and his allies sought to use the machinery of the State Department to further the President’s personal political interests.”

The committee chairmen further noted that the IG “stated that his office interviewed Secretary Pompeo’s Counselor, Thomas Ulrich Brechbuhl, who informed the Inspector General that Secretary Pompeo told him the packet ‘came over,’ and that Brechbuhl presumed it was from the White House.”

Giuliani later appeared on Fox News’ Hannity, where he boasted about the Ukrainian documents he had fed to the State Department in the spring.

“And the committees, I guess, they were sitting there figuring out how they can do impeachment based on nothing and what they got shoved down their throats, it’s a complete, total absolutely terrific prosecutorial outline of why Joe Biden is so guilty,” Giuliani exclaimed to Trump-boosting host Sean Hannity. “It’s a joke for me to describe it to you.”

Giuliani also credited conservative columnist John Solomon—who apparently shared his Ukraine stories with Giuliani’s allies before publication—with helping to get his Ukraine-Biden narrative to the forefront.

“Ultimately it was John Solomon, who should get a Pulitzer Prize, by the way, put them all on tape, so it’s all memorialized on videotape,” he declared, referencing Solomon’s interviews with Ukrainian figures. “This is as solid as it can get.”

The Soloman story is something else again.  He has long worked as more or less a right wing operative. Now he’s not even trying to hide it.

This is the most convoluted baroque scandal in history, mostly because the Republicans involved are all batshit crazy and the conservative media bubble will run with absolutely anything, even if it makes no sense at all. The MSM is more skeptical of their nonsense these days but it still muddies the waters.

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“My whole life, you know what I say? ‘Don’t worry about it, I’ll just figure it out.'”

Published by digby on October 3, 2019

“My whole life, you know what I say? ‘Don’t worry about it, I’ll just figure it out.’ Does that make sense? I’ll just figure it out”

 by digby


Those quotes are so revealing. The first was Trump on the campaign trail in 2018. The magazine profile was about his approach to the 2020 campaign:

The 2020 campaign is unmistakably Trump’s show. “We all have our meetings,” the President says. “But I generally do my own thing.” Campaign staff have been hired to follow Trump’s lead, and the President has made it known that when he tweets a new policy or improvises an attack at a rally, everyone had better be ready to follow along. “He blows the hole and everyone runs into the breach,” says an aide.


Let’s see how that works with impeachment:

A week after House Democrats jump-started their impeachment inquiry, the White House has yet to converge on any single plan, strategy or even unified messaging to fight back.

All the talk about setting up a so-called war room inside the West Wing, similar to the approach of the Clinton White House, has gone nowhere. Acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, other top aides, lawyers and Trump advisers have been jockeying among their own internal factions for control of the approach or messaging. And President Donald Trump has expressed little interest in responding to House Democrats in such a conventional manner, preferring to deploy his own messaging on Twitter.

“He doesn’t need a war room,” said Newt Gingrich, the former speaker of the House and an informal Trump political adviser. “This is not about impeachment. This is just a coup d’état.”

The infighting over the fate of a war room reflects the long-standing operational styles of the Trump White House and 2016 campaign over the past four years, during which personnel battles often overshadowed any well-honed strategy. The president has always preferred to run his White House with a team-of-rivals approach, with aides fighting over various policies or political options and Trump alone as the decider at the center of the action.

The impeachment battle may be no different.

“Have all of these geniuses been able to get this done for him? No, he gets it done for himself,” a former senior administration official said of the president’s approach to management.

A senior administration official said Trump is currently discussing his options with his family, aides and outside advisers, while another person close to the White House called it a “disorganized mess.”

He’s just dancing as fast as he can as usual. He’s been very lucky in his life to escape accountability for the many mistakes he’s made. Maybe he’ll escape this time too.

But maybe not.

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Precious bodily fluids by @BloggersRUs

Published by Tom Sullivan on October 3, 2019

Precious bodily fluids
by Tom Sullivan

Donald J. Trump, acting president of these United States, is in “precious bodily fluids” territory. Brigadier General Jack D. Ripper, the mad Air Force general from Dr. Strangelove (1964), was also obsessed with conspiracy theories. Ripper believed fluoridation was a communist plot to impurify his “essence.” Trump the germophobe is obsessed with proving Russians did not help him win election in 2016. Both were empowered to launch nuclear strikes.

A saner man would be focused on his reelection in 2020. Trump is trying to relitigate his unlikely last one.

Trump is out of his element. He never bothered to grasp the rudiments of his job, nor of the structure of U.S. government. He believes the courts should step in to forestall his day of reckoning. He believes he can lawsuit, bully and bluster his way out of impeachment by suing federal officials. Trump said in his press conference Wednesday [Timestamp 43:25]:

And just so you know, we’ve been investigating on a personal basis, through Rudy and others lawyers, corruption in the 2016 election. We’ve been investigating corruption because I probably will … I was going to, definitely … but I probably will be bringing a lot of litigation against a lot of people having to do with the corrupt investigation having to do with the 2016 election. And I have every right to do that…

Washington, D.C. is not Manhattan. Trump cannot just sic his attorneys on federal officials for doing their jobs.

In attempting to extort damaging information on a political rival from Ukraine, the acting president has been caught in a blatant abuse of power for which he himself has provided evidence and for which he has no defense. Reuters White House correspondent Jeff Mason asked Trump repeatedly Wednesday, “What did you want President Zelenskiy to do with regard to Joe and Hunter Biden?”

Trump filibustered. When Mason repeated the question, Trump melted down. He accused everyone for corruption except himself. He behaved like a cornered animal.

Charles Blow writes, “Donald Trump is scared. And he is incensed that he is scared. And his only impulse is to fight like a thing near death: with everything he has, and by all means necessary.”

Trump’s allies are grasping for any lifeline. They are giddy over a New York Times report that the office of Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.), chair of the House Intelligence Committee, received notice of the whistleblower complaint before it was filed:

The C.I.A. officer approached a House Intelligence Committee aide with his concerns about Mr. Trump only after he had had a colleague first convey them to the C.I.A.’s top lawyer. Concerned about how that initial avenue for airing his allegations through the C.I.A. was unfolding, the officer then approached the House aide. In both cases, the original accusation was vague.

The House staff member, following the committee’s procedures, suggested the officer find a lawyer to advise him and meet with an inspector general, with whom he could file a whistle-blower complaint. The aide shared some of what the officer conveyed to Mr. Schiff. The aide did not share the whistle-blower’s identity with Mr. Schiff, an official said.

“Like other whistle-blowers have done before and since under Republican and Democratic-controlled committees, the whistle-blower contacted the committee for guidance on how to report possible wrongdoing within the jurisdiction of the intelligence community,” said Patrick Boland, a spokesman for Mr. Schiff.

Fox News and Trump allies on Capitol Hill hope to regain control of the narrative. They will flog this story for all it’s worth to suggest Schiff did something improper. Indeed, Trump accused Schiff in his press conference of writing the whistleblower complaint. That the committee followed standard practice will matter not a whit.

The Trump train is throwing bearings. White House officials trying to cover up the coverup have been instructed by a federal court to “preserve all presidential records.” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is distancing himself from the president. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, the Washington Post Editorial Board believes, has “enabled the destruction of U.S. diplomacy.”

Trump has dispatched consigliere Rudy Giuliani as well as Pompeo and Attorney General Bill Barr around the globe to find, fabricate, or coerce from other governments evidence that would discredit the conclusions of U.S. intelligence agencies about Russia’s 2016 interference. They are chasing conspiracy theories that Ukraine did it. That an American president is desperate to clear Russia of wrongdoing must make Russian President Vladimir Putin smile.

Perhaps they’ll get to the bottom of that whole fluoridation thing while they’re at it.

Even Fox News in unguarded moments knows the lunatics are running the asylum.

Trump’s very normal day

Published by digby on October 2, 2019

Trump’s very normal day

by digby

I just don’t know what to say. He had two media availabilities with the Finnish president today.

Sone highlights:

I think the most absurd thing he said, and it’s a tough choice, was that he says he picks his words very carefully.

Oy..

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Because he’s an imbecile

Published by digby on October 2, 2019

Because he’s an imbecile

by digby

It’s not complicated. He is just plain dumb. He really is.

Shortly after taking office, Donald Trump asked his aides whether Ukraine, and not Russia, might have hacked Democratic National Committee emails as part of a false-flag operation. Then–Homeland Security Adviser Tom Bossert tried to stop the idea in its tracks.

“It’s not only a conspiracy theory, it is completely debunked,” Bossert said on ABC’s This Week on Sunday. Bossert brought in the director of the National Security Agency to brief Trump, according to The New York Times. The president, Bossert thought, seemed to grasp the truth.

But in July 2019, more than a year after Bossert left the White House, Trump raised the theory in a call with the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, which resulted in a whistle-bower complaint and the release of an incriminating reconstructed transcript of the call. Now Trump’s recalcitrance has landed him in perhaps the most serious peril of his presidency, with Democrats moving forward with an impeachment inquiry, and polls showing strong public support.

The latest Trump scandal demonstrates how incapable Trump is of learning—either facts or lessons—and how dangerous that is. Trump’s refusal to accept the truth about Ukrainian hacking (which did not happen) arose from his refusal to accept the truth about Russian hacking (which did happen). That is, Trump’s obsession with Ukraine began as a search for vindication over allegations of foreign interference in the 2016 election, and led directly to Trump importuning foreign interference in the 2020 race.
[…]
Trump’s troubles stem from a temperamental aversion to displeasing information, and an inability to sort reliable sources from bad ones. He shows notable lack of interest in his official briefing materials, which have been shrunk down to minimal form. He eagerly consumes conspiracy theories and humbug, though. Former Chief of Staff John Kelly attempted to keep bogus information away from Trump, but his successor, Mick Mulvaney, wants to let Trump be Trump—even, apparently, if that includes taking up debunked nonsense.

Trump has at his command the full information-gathering capabilities of the U.S. government, perhaps the most powerful data operation in world history. The intelligence community is not infallible, with several notable failures in recent memory, but it’s far better than the alternative: Giuliani’s credulous, harebrained solo investigations. Because Trump never accepted the reality of Russian interference despite the unanimous judgment of his own experts, he was also unable to grasp the danger in asking Zelensky to do him a “favor.” Nor did the Mueller experience teach him the dangers of attempting a cover-up.

The paradox is that the stubbornness Trump shows when he refuses to grapple with new information is tightly related to his success as a politician. During the 2016 presidential race, the search by some pundits for a “Trump pivot,” when the candidate would drop his bigoted and wild-eyed rhetoric and adopt a more somber tone, became a running joke. Trump never pivoted, because he was constitutionally incapable of it. But his consistency contributed to an appearance of authenticity that his supporters love, even though, as Gilad Edelman recently wrote, he is “an inveterate fabricator born to fabulous wealth who poses as the self-made tribune of the working class.” Obstinacy helped Trump succeed in 2016, but it threatens to cut him down in 2019.

With his psychological problems and intellectual limitations, if he hadn’t been born rich he would have been a petty criminal along the lines of Christopher Moltisanti in the Sopranos.

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Rightwing blackout on the alligator moat story

Published by digby on October 2, 2019

Rightwing blackout on the alligator moat story

by digby

Notice something? No right-wing sites:

That was last night. I just checked. Still no right-wing sites.

This is the problem. The only thing Trump voters will ever hear about it is Trump denying it in his wild, out-of-control press avails.

There’s a reason for this blackout. It’s entirely believable. It’s how he talked on the campaign trail about Muslims. They know he’s a bloodthirsty tyrant and that’s what they like about him. But this is such a lurid, violent fantasy from him as president that even they are afraid of how totally looney it makes him appear.

I hope it shows up in ads.

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