Month: November 2019

Grassley and Johnson have their own conspiracy channel

by digby

Once again, if you are thinking of valorizing Chuck Grassley as some kind of nonpartisan heroic defender of the rule ‘o law because he’s defending the whistleblower, think again. He and Senator Ron Johnson are still pimping conspiracy theories:

Republican Senators Chuck Grassley, Iowa, and Ron Johnson, Wisc., want some answers on how much, if any, influence Hunter Biden’s job at a Ukrainian energy company had on decisions made by the State Department under President Barack Obama.

In a letter dated Wednesday, the two senators asked Secretary of State Mike Pompeo for a wide range of records to “better understand what actions, if any, the Obama administration took to ensure that policy decisions relating to Ukraine and Burisma were not improperly influenced by the employment and financial interests of family members.”

“In April 2014, Vice President Biden reportedly became the ‘public face of the administration’s handling of Ukraine,’” the lawmakers write. “Around the same time, the Vice President’s son, Hunter Biden, and his business associate, Devon Archer, both began serving on the board of Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian energy company.”
[…]
In their Wednesday letter, Grassley and Johnson refer to a recent story from reporter John Solomon saying that, during the 2016 election cycle, a U.S. representative for Burisma — Karen Tramontano — tried to set up a meeting with Undersecretary of State Catherine A. Novelli to discuss ending the corruption allegations against the company.

“Although it is not clear if Under Secretary Novelli met with Karen Tramontano on March 1, 2016, as planned, later that month Tramontano and other members of Burisma’s legal team reportedly met with Ukrainian prosecutors,” the letter notes, referring to another report from Solomon from September. “According to what appears to be contemporaneous notes by one of those Ukrainian prosecutors, during that meeting, Burisma’s legal team apologized about what they alleged to be ‘false information’ promoted by the U.S. Government about the prosecutors’ handling of the investigation of Burisma.”

The two also note other documents that “show other meetings that Burisma board members Hunter Biden and Devon Archer scheduled with high-ranking State Department officials” in 2015. The letter also points out that “just one day after Tramontano was scheduled to meet with Under Secretary Novelli about Burisma, Devon Archer was scheduled to meet with Secretary of State John Kerry.”

These people are exhausting. I hope everyone knows that if Biden does manage to win the presidency this will be flogged relentlessly by the Republicans.

And it’s BS:

Why was Ukraine’s top prosecutor fired?

The allegation at the heart of the controversy is that while Mr. Biden was vice president, he pushed to have Ukraine’s top prosecutor removed for investigating a company connected to Mr. Biden’s son Hunter, the Ukrainian natural gas firm Burisma. Videos pushing this theory began appearing on Twitter in late September and early October and have been viewed tens of millions of times. Mr. Trump’s campaign has also asserted the claim in ads on Facebook.

Vice President Biden was overseeing American policy toward Ukraine at the time, and he did push for the removal of the country’s top prosecutor, who was seen as corrupt or ineffectual by the United States and Western European governments. But there is no evidence he did so to benefit Hunter Biden or the oligarch who owns Burisma, Mykola Zlochevsky.

In 2014, Hunter joined the board of Burisma, which was then mired in a corruption scandal. Authorities in Ukraine, Britain and the United States had opened investigations into the company’s operations. Mr. Zlochevsky had also been accused of marshaling government contracts to companies he owned and embezzling public money.

At the time of his board appointment, the younger Mr. Biden had just been discharged from the Navy Reserve for drug use. He had no apparent experience in Ukraine or natural gas. And while accepting the board position was legal, it reportedly raised some eyebrows in the Obama administration. The Burisma board position was lucrative: Mr. Biden received payments that reached up to $50,000 per month.

A year later, Viktor Shokin became Ukraine’s prosecutor general, a job similar to the attorney general in the United States. He vowed to keep investigating Burisma amid an international push to root out corruption in Ukraine.

But the investigation went dormant under Mr. Shokin. In the fall of 2015, Joe Biden joined the chorus of Western officials calling for Mr. Shokin’s ouster. The next March, Mr. Shokin was fired. A subsequent prosecutor cleared Mr. Zlochevsky.

As I said: an exhausting cascade of unadulterated bullshit. And it’s not ever going to end unless Trump is defeated by someone other than Joe Biden. And even then — they’re still chanting “lock her up” at Trump rallies.”

I think fascism often wins simply by wearing down the opposition.

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They like him, they really like him


by digby

This is from 2017 but I’d imagine it holds even today:

It’s not about economic anxiety or taxes or anything else. They like him because he’s their asshole. I just don’t think there’s any getting around this.

But those are the hard-cores. They will lie down in front of a tank for him. The question is whether or not the majority of people who don’t like him, feel that way because of his personality or because of policies and values. That’s the key to getting people out to vote in 2020.  I don’t know the answer.

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Junior and his “sacrifices”

I don’t hold it against his father or him for not joining the military. But sourly comparing the “sacrifice” of pretending to give up their foreign business dealings to the sacrifices of dead service members and their families is simply astonishing. My God.

I can’t get over the lack of self-awareness in this person — or the fact that he’s hugely popular with tens of millions of Americans. Everything I thought I knew about politics has been upended by these people. Who can believe that someone this thick and obtuse could possibly be seen as a burgeoning political talent? And yet the right-wing is hugely enthusiastic about him. I guess all you have to do is be dumb as a rock and act like a total ass and they will love you.

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All the president’s defenses

by digby

My Salon column today:

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about President Trump’s defense strategy in the Ukraine scandal, noting that he’s basically running the same play that he ran during the Mueller investigation. He finds a few catchphrases to use on Twitter and during interviews and just repeats them over and over again. It’s a crude salesman’s trick and not one you’d expect to be effective in dealing with a legal and political scandal, but Trump thinks he was able to survive the Russia probe by yelling “No collusion, no obstruction!” and denigrating the press and the investigators.

He will almost certainly go with his gut instinct again and there’s probably nothing anyone can do about it. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a very lively debate among Republicans about the right course of action.

Trump’s allies have complained for weeks about his stubborn refusal to have an impeachment “war room,” as Bill Clinton did back in 1998. The fact is that it wouldn’t do much good. Its efficacy under Clinton depended on message discipline and a president who could at least pretend that the process wasn’t interfering with his ability to do the job. Obviously Trump would be unable to do either of those things. But he has brought in a couple of spokespeople to deal with impeachment questions, former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi and former Treasury Department spokesman Tony Sayegh. (Bondi is uniquely qualified for this gig, since she herself was credibly accused of a quid pro quo with Trump during the 2016 campaign.)

The Trump supporter who seems most at sea with all this is Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, perhaps the president’s most loyal minion. Graham started out denying the whole thing outright, just as Trump did. On Sept. 25, he told reporters:

Sen. Lindsey Graham: “If you’re looking for a circumstance where the President of the United States was threatening the Ukraine with cutting off aid unless they investigated his political opponent, you’d be very disappointed. That does not exist.” pic.twitter.com/io19f19725

— The Hill (@thehill) September 26, 2019

It turned out that absolutely did exist. Yet Graham still seemed to think that was all there was to it. On Oct. 20, he told Axios on HBO:

If you could show that Trump was engaging in a quid pro quo outside the phone call that would be very disturbing.

More than half a dozen witnesses have now testified that the quid pro quo was discussed constantly and caused a full-blown uproar among the Foreign Service professionals. Graham remained the good soldier, parroting Trump’s language but not sounding terribly convincing. On Oct. 25, he said: “He’s telling me that the phone call was perfect. I’m saying the phone call was OK with me.”

On Tuesday of this week, Graham finally threw up his hands, saying, “I’ve written the whole process off. I think this is a bunch of BS,” telling reporters he won’t even read any of the transcripts — the same ones he had previously clamored for Democrats to release. But by Wednesday, he was taking yet another tack:

“It was incoherent,” Sen @LindseyGrahamSC
says of Trump’s Ukraine policy.

“They seem to be *incapable* of forming a quid pro quo.” pic.twitter.com/rdZxyIazNj

— Steven Portnoy (@stevenportnoy) November 6, 2019

This has become known as the “moron defense,” which holds that the president is too dumb to commit all the crimes it appears he has committed. So far, Graham’s the only one I’ve heard articulate that defense in this case and I would guess that’s because it’s bound to make Trump livid. You may have noticed that he sees himself as a “very stable genius” and he’d probably rather be impeached than hear Republicans say that he was too stupid to have committed a crime. Which really is stupid, but there we are.

The other defense that’s apparently being discussed among the senators who will supposedly be the jurors in an impeachment trial is the one that says, “Yeah, he did it, but it doesn’t rise to the level of a high crime or misdemeanor.” Sens. John Kennedy, R-La., and Ted Cruz, R-Texas, told the Washington Post that Trump had no corrupt intent when he did what did. Kennedy said, “To me, it all turns on intent, motive. … Did the president have a culpable state of mind? … Based on the evidence that I see, that I’ve been allowed to see, the president does not have a culpable state of mind.”

According to the testimony of former State Department official George Kent, the White House insisted that the president of Ukraine go on CNN and use three particular words: investigation, Biden and Clinton. What could possibly be the corrupt intent in that?

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., is pushing the idea that Trump’s defense team in a Senate trial should call Joe and Hunter Biden to testify in public. So far, other Republican senators haven’t seemed too keen on that idea, but seeing as they’re all afraid to cross Trump it’s possible that if he decides he wants this, they will follow his orders. He seems to like the idea:

“What did Hunter Biden do for the money?” @SenJohnKennedy A very good question. He and Sleepy Joe must testify!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 7, 2019

Meanwhile, Bloomberg reports that there is a brewing battle between White House counsel Pat Cipollone and acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, with each demanding to be in charge of impeachment strategy. Mulvaney should probably be careful what he wishes for: Along with EU ambassador Gordon Sondland and Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, he’s on a House GOP list of possible scapegoats to take the fall for Trump’s corrupt bargain with Ukraine.

Richard Nixon tried that by throwing his two most trusted aides, John Ehrlichman and H.R. Haldeman, over the side. They did it gladly. They’d been with him for years and were his loyal Praetorian guards. Somehow, I doubt that these three amigos feel that way about Trump. Sondland and Mulvaney hardly know him, and it’s hard to imagine Giuliani falling on his sword and winding up in federal prison, as Haldeman and Ehrlichman did. Anyway, we all know what happened to Nixon, don’t we?

Finally, we have the working White House impeachment war room that will almost certainly handle Trump’s defense on an official basis. Its two arms would be Fox News and the Twitter feed of Donald Trump Jr. The New York Times did a deep dive into the swift-boat campaign against Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, who testified in the impeachment inquiry last week. Trump Jr and Fox News host Pete Hegseth played a big part in spreading an easily rebutted smear that bubbled up through the right-wing fever swamp. Don Jr. has also tweeted out the name of the purported CIA whistleblower, whom Trump and his henchmen have been trashing nonstop. Whatever happens going forward, we can be sure that Trump family Twitter feeds will play a big part in defending the president throughout the impeachment process.

Lindsey Graham says Trump’s Ukraine policy was incoherent. It wasn’t. He knew what he wanted. But the strategy to defend the president in this impeachment proceeding is certainly incoherent at this point. He will probably survive a trial in the Senate, but none of his defenders are going to come out looking any better than he does. The central fact they can’t accept is that his behavior was indefensible.

The bad, the good and the outlier
by Tom Sullivan

Eli Wallach in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966).
Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp in 2018 campaign commercial.

Catherine Rampell delivers some good news otherwise buried in a torrent of bad for the Trump administration.

First, to summarize the bad.

Witness after witness before House investigators confirm in their testimony that Donald Trump, Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giluliani and their associates attempted to use the presidency for personal, political gain. The revelations have turned his spinning defenders into dervishes. It will only get worse for Trump (and harder for his lackeys to spin) when public hearings begin next week.

Politico reports:

In the assessment of the five diplomats at the center of the impeachment inquiry, Giuliani was everywhere. He was texting with State Department officials and directing U.S. foreign policy, all seemingly at the behest of the president. He was Trump’s free-wheeling emissary seeking to push a foreign government to, in effect, publicly tar Joe Biden.

House investigators have stitched together a uniquely Trumpian narrative — one of retribution against perceived enemies, defiance of diplomatic norms and a pervasive fear that Russia would benefit from the disarray, all to help Trump fend off his top 2020 rival.

Donald Trump has turned the executive branch into an ongoing criminal enterprise like his others. House investigations underway will determine whether Congress will shut down this one the way the state of New York shut down the fraudulent Trump Foundation. New York Attorney General Letitia James announced Thursday Trump must pay $2 million in damages “for improperly using charitable assets to intervene in the 2016 presidential primaries and further his own political interests.” The money will go to nonprofit organizations in the state.

In “19 paragraphs of factual admissions,” Trump and the Foundation admitted multiple acts of self-dealing in court filings while claiming in public James “is deliberately mischaracterizing this settlement for political purposes.” And why isn’t she investigating the Clinton Foundation, huh?!

Expect past Trumpian behavior to be prologue.

Now, for the good news. Medicaid work requirements designed to kick poor and sick Americans out of Medicaid coverage are beginning to crumble, writes Rampell:

I’m referring to Medicaid work requirements, policies that kick low-income people off their insurance if they don’t register sufficient work hours. Until recently, it looked as if these programs were on an unstoppable march, with two dozen states pursuing them.

But with the state elections in Kentucky and Virginia this week, plus policy rollbacks recently announced in other states, things are starting to change.

Medicaid work requirements might sound reasonable enough. Ostensibly, they’re about helping poor people move up in the world, or at least making sure they’re not taking advantage of taxpayer largesse. If you buy the premise that poor people choose to be poor because poverty is just too darn comfortable, maybe taking away their access to insulin or inhalers is just the kick in the rear they need to go out and get a job.

Turns out that’s not how it works. Data from the Kaiser Family Foundation finds most recipients are already working. Most of those who aren’t are in school, care-giving or ill. Or else lack the child care, skills, or clean criminal records needed to hold down a job.

But it is no surprise to find that to dislodge a few suspected, undeserving deadbeats, “small-government” conservatives are willing to spend more than $250 million in Kentucky alone. And they don’t mind if this evil rain falls on the just as well as the unjust:

In Arkansas — the first state to actually implement these requirements — more than 18,000 people lost their health insurance over the course of a few months. Many of these Arkansans actually met the work requirements, or were legally exempted from them. Yet they were still purged from the insurance rolls, due to onerous and confusing reporting requirements.

Consider one such person whom I profiled last year, Adrian McGonigal. He was employed at a chicken plant and thought he had sufficiently documented his hours. He lost his Medicaid coverage anyway, leaving him unable to get the prescriptions he needed to manage his chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). He landed in the hospital multiple times and eventually lost his job.

Rampell cites a New England Journal of Medicine study that found work requirements shrank insurance rolls but did not increase employment. Oh, work requirements may also be illegal, but in this administration, that’s probably by design.

Even so, states are figuring out this “sticks” approach is costing them. They are shelving work requirements:

In fact, just last month, two more states — Arizona and Indiana — announced that they were pausing programs that had already been approved by the Trump administration.

Then on Tuesday, Democratic electoral victories in Kentucky and Virginia raised expectations that these states will soon rescind their states’ policies as well. This would mimic a similar reversal from Maine earlier this year, when a Democrat replaced a far-right Republican as governor.

The progress isn’t universal. Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R) recently unveiled his own work requirements proposal — expected legal, administrative and human costs be damned.

For now, Georgia appears to be as much an outlier as Kemp. Authoritarians gonna authoritarian.

Meanwhile, in the world …

by digby

Trouble in paradise

I haven’t heard much about this story, so it’s worth at least putting out there:

EMMANUEL MACRON, the French president, has warned European countries that they can no longer rely on America to defend NATO allies. “What we are currently experiencing is the brain death of NATO,” Mr Macron declares in a blunt interview with The Economist. Europe stands on “the edge of a precipice”, he says, and needs to start thinking of itself strategically as a geopolitical power; otherwise we will “no longer be in control of our destiny.”

During the hour-long interview, conducted in his gilt-decorated office at the Elysée Palace in Paris on October 21st, the president argues that it is high time for Europe to “wake up”. He was asked whether he believed in the effectiveness of Article Five, the idea that if one NATO member is attacked all would come to its aid, which many analysts think underpins the alliance’s deterrent effect. “I don’t know,” he replies, “but what will Article Five mean tomorrow?”

Trump has made it very clear from the time he started running that he thinks NATO is “obsolete”, although his reasoning is as simple-minded and puerile as usual: “they don’t pay their dues.”  I don’t have a strong opinion on NATO and I confess that up until the last few years, I would have thought it was probably time to rethink an alliance that was formed to fight the Soviet Union during the cold war.  But since Russia has made aggressive moves recently and is a nuclear power, not to mention making this monster in the White House president for their own purposes, this doesn’t seem like a good idea, at least not without some kind of replacement alliance.

Even more importantly, I think international cooperative institutions are a good thing especially now since we have a global challenge unlike anything we’ve ever faced with climate change.  Trump, of course, thinks all international organizations are anathema to US interests because he’s a moron.  His ignorant worldview has disrupted what little we had in the way of institutions to greet this existential challenge to our planet and likely made it much, much more difficult to build new ones after having destroyed what little goodwill there was for US leadership after the Iraq debacle.

Angela Merkel took issue with Macron’s characterization, saying the alliance is as strong as ever, but you get the feeling that they are playing good cop-bad cop in advance of the NATO Summit next month. Macron is much more of a Trump favorite than Merkel so it makes sense that he would be the one to come out swinging and let her take the conciliatory side.  It’s pathetic that they have to play these games to appease the toddler in the White House but that’s where we are.

Scary times …

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Junior’s impeachment war room

by digby

We knew this swiftboating was coming. I wrote about the fact that Republicans have been dissing troops since the 1950s for Salon last week. Here is the story from the NY Times. It’s pathetic of course, but the most pertinent detail, and it’s a big one, is that this story was amplified by Donald Trump Jr who is apparently taking on the role Roger Stone would have had if he weren’t on trial:

Days after a decorated Army lieutenant colonel offered damaging testimony about President Trump’s conduct on a July phone call with Ukraine’s leader, Mr. Trump stood on the South Lawn and issued a vague but ominous warning.

“You’ll be seeing very soon what comes out,” Mr. Trump said on Saturday, referring to the officer, Lt. Col. Alexander S. Vindman.

Mr. Trump was not more specific. But an attack on Colonel Vindman’s character and motives was already making its way from the dark corners of Mr. Trump’s social media following to the front lines of the impeachment battle.

One day earlier, the right-wing commentator Jack Posobiec had retweeted a lengthy thread by a Florida man — a fan of QAnon, a fringe conspiracy about the “deep state” — claiming to have witnessed Colonel Vindman “bash America” in conversation with Russian officers during a joint military exercise in Germany in 2013.

That accusation was unsubstantiated and has been rejected by some of the colonel’s colleagues. Even so, Mr. Posobiec’s post was retweeted by Mr. Trump’s son and chief defender, Donald Trump Jr., driving it through conservative social media circles and onto pro-Trump websites, whose stories the younger Mr. Trump promoted to his four million followers.

“Anyone who’s been watching for the past three years is not at all surprised that this would be their ‘star witness,’” Donald Jr. posted about Colonel Vindman, who had testified that he was concerned about the United States’ linking of military aid to Ukraine with an investigation of Mr. Trump’s political rival.

While the White House has scrambled to mount an organized response to the House impeachment inquiry — there is no consistent message from Mr. Trump’s team and little formal guidance to surrogates — Twitter has become the Trump war room. The president and his supporters, including his family, have used Twitter to frame his defense, torch his Democratic inquisitors and try to undermine public officials, like Colonel Vindman, who have testified against him.

It is hard to discern how the six-year-old comments attributed to the officer affect the veracity of his testimony on Capitol Hill, which aligns with that of numerous other witnesses. But by questioning the colonel’s loyalties, partisans who are spreading the story uncritically to millions of Americans leave the impression he is somehow not to be believed.

The attack emerged late on Halloween night, when a retired Army officer, Jim Hickman, claimed he had overheard Colonel Vindman — a major at the time who was chatting with Russian soldiers during a military exercise — laugh “about Americans not being educated or worldly” and talking up “Obama & globalism to the point of uncomfortable.” Mr. Hickman said he took the major aside and reprimanded him.

Through his lawyer, Michael Volkov, Colonel Vindman declined to comment.

Mr. Hickman, a former lieutenant colonel whose service record indicates he served in Afghanistan and earned a Purple Heart, at some point took an interest in QAnon. A review of his past tweets found more than 100 in which he recirculated or commented on QAnon-related theories, including hoaxes about Satanism and pedophilia, and until recently he had the hashtag #Q in his profile. Reached for comment, Mr. Hickman said he did not believe in QAnon but found it “interesting.”

“I do think it’s actually been pretty accurate on predicting a lot of things,” he said.

He has also tweeted strident pro-Trump, anti-Democratic themes, writing, “It’s incredible how evil the Democrat party is.” A week before going public with his story about Colonel Vindman, he retweeted a Trump supporter urging: “STOP IMPEACHMENT! STOP THIS COUP!”

In a Twitter thread, Mr. Hickman, who said he was disabled from combat injuries and living in Florida, said he had helped manage joint exercises in Germany involving United States and Russian soldiers. He met Colonel Vindman there in 2013, he said.

Colonel Vindman referred to himself as a patriot during closed-door testimony in the House last month, and said he had reported concerns about the president and his inner circle’s conduct out of a “sense of duty.” The colonel received a Purple Heart after being injured by an improvised explosive device in Iraq. He now serves on the National Security Council.

Several officials have publicly defended the colonel since his testimony emerged. General Joseph F. Dunford Jr., the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has called the colonel “a professional, competent, patriotic and loyal officer.” Michael McFaul, the former ambassador to Russia, has said he had worked with the colonel “and interacted with him in front of Russian officers. He never once said anything near what this ‘retired Army officer’ claims.”

Mr. Hickman appears to have first shared his story in a private “DM room” on Twitter, where people can send direct messages to one another. He said in a tweet that he had forgotten about the encounter with Colonel Vindman, but that his Army friends “reminded me of what happened and it all came back,” adding “Damn TBI,” a reference to traumatic brain injury.

Ok, the “Q” thing should put this to bed. But unfortunately, it won’t. Trump himself teased this ridiculous story so the wingnuts will run with it.

Meanwhile, a little reality:

As the tale gained attention on Twitter, and received pushback from some who questioned it, a new Twitter account popped up with the name Thomas Lasch, tweeting that he had worked with Mr. Hickman and remembered the 2013 episode.

Mark Hertling, a retired general who was suspicious of the pair and contacted them through direct messaging, later tweeted: “They are who they say they are.” But he added that “LTC Hickman and I agreed to disagree on LTC Vindman and many other things.”

In an interview, General Hertling, who commanded the United States Army in Europe, said that a number of things about Mr. Hickman’s recollections did not add up, including his claim of hearing what Colonel Vindman, who was born in Ukraine, said to Russian soldiers.

“Vindman would’ve been speaking to Russian soldiers in Russian, not English,” he said. “Russians, when they come to these exercises, they don’t speak English — they take pride in it.”

General Hertling added: “I asked Hickman about that, and he said, ‘Well, they were going back and forth between Russian and English.’”

An effort to reach Mr. Lasch was unsuccessful. At his home in Homosassa, Fla., Mr. Hickman said, “All I want is the truth to get out.”

How did this get out? Well, guess. Good old Pete Hegseth, defender of war criminals:

Within a day of Colonel Vindman’s testimony, conservative media figures on Fox News and elsewhere, as well as Republican surrogates like Rudolph W. Giuliani, raised questions about whether the Ukrainian-born colonel had “dual loyalties.” Some even pushed the innuendo that he could be some sort of spy for Ukraine.

On Monday, Mr. Hickman’s tweets were picked up by a pro-Trump web magazine, American Greatness, in an article that was promoted by Mark Levin, a talk radio host and vociferous Trump defender. On Wednesday, Pete Hegseth, a host on the Fox morning show “Fox & Friends” — arguably the president’s favorite cable news show — also tweeted the article.

“Guys I’ve served with — and trust with my life — served with LTC Vindman and saw the same thing,” Mr. Hegseth said. “He’s been a partisan from the beginning.”

But those who know and have worked with him have provided a different account. They said that Colonel Vindman, then a military attaché, was assigned to meet with Russians and gather whatever intelligence he could.

He spoke to the Russians in Russian, did not denigrate the United States and reported everything he heard, according to a person briefed on the episode, speaking on the condition of anonymity because the colonel had not publicly testified. Colonel Vindman did not have dealings with Mr. Hickman in relation to his work during the exercise, the person said, and was not reprimanded for it.

Peter B. Zwack, a retired brigadier general who was Colonel Vindman’s commanding officer during the joint exercise, said he was skeptical of Mr. Hickman’s account.

“If there was something egregious that occurred, believe me, we would have had our ears rapped in Moscow,” said General Zwack, who served as the United States’ senior defense official and attaché to Russia.

“The bottom line is, where there are Russians in an exercise in and among our units and people, we have an attaché that coordinates with them,” the general said. “It’s all just a part of an attaché’s job.”

This is disgusting but we all know it’s nothing new. Look what they did to John Kerry. This poor guy isn’t even involved in politics and he’s getting it. But that’s just how they roll:

On Wednesday morning, Donald Trump Jr. tweeted out an article purporting to name the whistle-blower.

He later denied coordinating with the White House.

Yeah right.

The is the Trump impeachment war room — smears on twitter and Fox News. So far that seems to be good enough for Trump voters. 

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Three little words

by digby

In his testimony to the impeachment investigators, former State Department official George Kent got to the heart of what Trump wanted from Ukraine:

.”Potus wanted nothing less than President Zelenskiy to go to the microphone and say investigations, Biden and Clinton. That was the message. … Zelenskiy needed to go to a microphone and basically there needed to be three words in the message, and that was the shorthand.”

Sure, that’s totally normal. Nothing to see here. He was just concerned about Ukrainian corruption.

On MSNBC today, the NY Times reporter Nick Confessore nailed exactly what was going on:

What happened in Ukraine, from US officials, is how gangster states work. Imagine the surprise of the president of Ukraine. He is trying to clean up his country, reform if from a gangster state into a free country, and here comes the president’s son and his private lawyer who, by the way is working on some deals for himself, and essentially extorting him to get US aid in exchange for — he has to basically invest a story — and that is the key takeaway.

From Kent’s testimony, he wanted three words in there: investigation, Biden and Clinton. It was almost like a Mad-lib, it didn’t matter what they were going to say, the sole thing they wanted, was an announcement, a public announcement that there was something being investigated. It didn’t seem to matter to them if it proceeded from there. What they wanted was a cudgel that they could take back home to the US and wave on the campaign trail.

I don’t think people have properly absorbed just how mindboggling it is that Trump has gone out with a straight face to the American people and claimed that he was just trying to clean up Ukrainian corruption — by bribing the new president to smear his domestic political rivals with desperately needed military aid. The extreme chutzpah, the utter gall of him claiming that he is a big corruption fighter even as he is the most corrupt president in history is enough to drive you mad.

I think that might be the point. How is it possible that anyone could be this utterly shameless?

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Trump n’ Rudy’s kooky plan almost worked

by digby

If that damned whistleblower hadn’t come forward, Zelensky would have endorsed the ridiculous conspiracy theory under pressure to Fareed Zakaria:

It was early September, and Ukraine’s new president, Volodymyr Zelensky, faced an agonizing choice: whether to capitulate to President Trump’s demands to publicly announce investigations against his political enemies or to refuse, and lose desperately needed military aid.

Only Mr. Trump could unlock the aid, he had been told by two United States senators, and time was running out. If the money, nearly $400 million, were not unblocked by the end of the fiscal year on Sept. 30, it could be lost in its entirety.

In a flurry of WhatsApp messages and meetings in Ukraine’s capital, Kiev, over several days, senior aides debated the point. Avoiding partisan politics in the United States had always been the first rule of Ukrainian foreign policy, but the military aid was vital to the war against Russian-backed separatist forces in eastern Ukraine, a conflict that has cost 13,000 lives since it began in 2014.

By then, however, Mr. Zelensky’s staffers were already conceding to what seemed to be the inevitable, and making plans for a public announcement about the investigations. It was a fateful decision for a fledgling president elected on an anticorruption platform that included putting an end to politically motivated investigations.

Elements of this internal Ukrainian debate have appeared in the Ukrainian news media and seeped into congressional testimony in the United States, as part of an impeachment inquiry undertaken after accusations surfaced of Mr. Trump’s demands.

But interviews in Kiev with government officials, lawmakers and others close to the Zelensky government have revealed new details of how high-level Ukrainian officials ultimately decided to acquiesce to President Trump’s request — and, by a stroke of luck, never had to follow through.

Aides were arguing in favor of “bowing to what was demanded,” said Petro Burkovskiy, a senior fellow at the Democratic Initiatives Foundation who has close ties to the Ukrainian government. They were willing to do so, he said, despite the risk of losing bipartisan support in the United States by appearing to assist Mr. Trump’s re-election bid. “The cost was high.”

As President Trump’s principal envoy to Ukraine, Gordon Sondland, admitted Tuesday in congressional testimony, the Trump administration had withheld the military aid to pressure Mr. Zelensky to make a public statement on the two investigations: one into whether former Vice President President Joseph R. Biden Jr. had pressed for the firing of a Ukrainian prosecutor who was investigating Burisma, a natural gas company where his son served on the board; the other into unproven accusations that it was Ukraine, not Russia, that meddled in the 2016 election to promote the candidacy of Hillary Clinton.

In the July 25 phone call that provoked a whistle-blower complaint and touched off the impeachment inquiry, Mr. Zelensky offered private assurances that his government would look into those matters.

But a public statement that raised doubts about Russian meddling and Mr. Biden, whom the president regarded as the greatest threat to his re-election, would be far more useful politically to Mr. Trump. Not only would it smear Mr. Biden, it could also appear to undermine the Mueller investigation into Russian electoral interference by pinning some blame on Ukraine.
[…]

A tug-of-war ensued between a senior aide to Mr. Zelensky, Andriy Yermak, and another of Mr. Trump’s envoys to Ukraine, Kurt Volker, over the wording of the proposed public statement. Mr. Volker went so far as to draft a statement for Mr. Zelensky that mentioned both investigations.

Mr. Yermak pushed back, suggesting language that mentioned investigations but in general terms, so as not to antagonize the Democrats. Late in the negotiations, the American diplomats consented to dropping mention of Ukrainian interference in the 2016 election.

Even as Mr. Yermak negotiated the wording in August, the stakes were clear. While rumors had been swirling for months about a possible hold on military aid, by early August high-level Ukrainian officials had confirmed the freeze.

The trade soon became explicit. They were approached in September by Mr. Sondland, a major donor to Mr. Trump’s inauguration who had been appointed ambassador to the European Union despite having no diplomatic experience. At that point, he explained in blunt terms to Mr. Zelensky and Mr. Yermak, there was little chance the aid would be forthcoming until they made the public statement on the investigations.

“I said that resumption of the U.S. aid would likely not occur until Ukraine provided the public anticorruption statement that we had been discussing for many weeks,” Mr. Sondland said in sworn testimony released Tuesday by the House committees leading the impeachment inquiry.

Mr. Trump wanted the Ukrainian president to speak on CNN, William B. Taylor Jr., the top American diplomat in Ukraine, testified.
[…]
Nearly all Mr. Zelensky’s top advisers favored his making the public statement, said one of the officials who participated in the debate. United States military aid, they agreed, as well as diplomatic backing for impending peace talks to end the war outweighed the risks of appearing to take sides in American politics.

There was a lone holdout — Alexander Danyliuk, the director of the national security council. Mr. Danyliuk, who resigned in late September, told the Ukrainian news media that the Zelensky administration would now need to “correct the mistakes” in relations with the United States and “in particular their own.”

Finally bending to the White House request, Mr. Zelensky’s staff planned for him to make an announcement in an interview on Sept. 13 with Fareed Zakaria, the host of a weekly news show on CNN.

Though plans were in motion to give the White House the public statement it had sought, events in Washington saved the Ukrainian government from any final decision and eliminated the need to make the statement.

Trump and his cronies almost certainly knew there was a whistleblower since it had been run past his henchman Bill Barr. They kept pressing anyway, refusing to release the aid to make Zelensky gon on CNN and lie to get it.

This story makes you wonder how many other “deals” like this have taken place in the last three years. We know he strongarmed the Japanese Prime Minister to nominate him for the Nobel Peace Prize. Whatever has happened with Russia and Turkey remains a mystery but this certainly indicates that none of it is on the up and up. How about Mexico and the central American countries?

In fact, at this point I think we have to question every foreign leader’s positive comments and wonder if they were coerced using the power of the US government to punish them.

We can’t assume anything is as it seems with this administration.

.

It takes a con artist to know a con artist

by digby

She seems nice:

President Donald Trump’s personal spiritual adviser, Paula White, launched a prayer effort alongside other evangelical Christian leaders on Tuesday, offering a prayer condemning the president’s opponents, accusing them of being aligned with evil spirits and using sorcery.

The White House officially announced last week that White would spearhead the president’s Faith and Opportunity Initiative. Trump and the wealthy televangelist have been friends for years ,and she has been a key religious supporter, rallying her Christian base to back the president.

Alongside fellow Christian leaders Cindy Jacobs, Dave Kabul and Dutch Sheets, White has launched the One Voice Prayer Movement, starting the initiative on Tuesday with a prayer for Trump. “Lord, we ask you to deliver our president from any snare, any setup of the enemy, according to Ephesians 6:12. Any persons [or] entities that are aligned against the president will be exposed and dealt with and overturned by the superior blood of Jesus,” she said during her prayer in a conference call with other Christian leaders.

“Whether it’s the spirit of Leviathan, a spirit of Jezebel, Abaddon, whether it’s the spirit of Belial, we come against the strongmen, especially Jezebel, that which would operate in sorcery and witchcraft, that which would operate in hidden things, veiled things, that which would operate in deception,” she continued. “We come against it according to your word.”
President Donald Trump talks to Paula White, his spiritual adviser, after a May 2 event to celebrate a national day of prayer.

White’s prayer continued by saying that anyone who stands against Trump “would be exposed and dealt with and overturned in Jesus’ name.” She said that believers know that Trump and his Christian supporters “do not wrestle against flesh and blood but against principalities, powers, rulers of darkness of this age, hosts of wickedness in heavenly places.”

White went on: “Stretch out your arm and deliver President Trump and rid him of any bondage the enemy would try to bring against him.”

While White has a prominent base of Christian supporters, she has been criticized by other evangelical leaders who view her “prosperity gospel” message as antithetical to the teachings of the Bible. The so-called prosperity gospel, which is also promoted by preachers like wealthy televangelist Joel Osteen, teaches followers that God will bless them financially if they follow him, often while encouraging believers to donate heavily to the preachers’ ministries.

“She has done what no one thought she could do, scraping out a place for an unpopular theology beside an unpopular president,” Kate Bowler, a professor of Christian history at Duke Divinity School, recently told The New York Times.

Meanwhile, white evangelical Christians remain a key base of support for the president. During the 2016 election, about 81 percent of that demographic voted for Trump. The number has remained high, regardless of scandals that have rocked the Trump administration. A poll released last month by the Public Religion Research Institute found that 99 percent of Republican evangelicals are opposed to the fast-moving impeachment inquiry against the president, as well as his removal from office.

In recent weeks, other Christian leaders besides White have also equated the president’s opponents with witchcraft and evil spirits. “They’re trying to place hexes and curses on President Trump,” evangelical pastor Perry Stone said in a late-October prayer service, referring to Democrats in Congress.

“I have never, in any nation of the world…seen people raised up with demons in them [like] in Washington,” Stone added. “They have demons in them. You can look at their eyes when they almost start foaming at the mouth.”

Paula White and her husband Lucifer