Many officials from many countries, including Ukraine, bet on the wrong horse. They believed former [Secretary of State Hillary] Clinton … was going to win. And many said some pretty disparaging and pretty hurtful things about President Trump, and I can’t blame him for feeling aggrieved about them.”
I’m sure he was. But it was only Ukraine that he tried to bribe into helping him steal the 2020 election.
And, let’s not pretend it was only foreign heads of state:
Those are all real quotes.
We know that Putin, Manafort and Rudy fed his strange antipathy for Ukraine and planted this conspiracy theory in his feeble mind.
John Bolton helping the Republicanssteal the vote in 2000
We have now liberated the Twitter account, previously suppressed unfairly in the aftermath of my resignation as National Security Advisor. More to come…..
I don’t know what he’s up to and I don’t have any faith that it’s something good. But on the off-chance that he realizes that he will sell more books if he discloses what he knows to the country than if he waits until it’s too late to do anything about it, perhaps the Democrats should offer him congressional immunity in this case and have him testify?
This is the latest, in which Bolton and his deputy are revealed to have tried to go around the “three amigos” apparently without the president’s knowledge.
In the days following a July meeting at the White House, senior officials in the National Security Council reached out to their Ukrainian counterparts in an effort to circumvent U.S. Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland and the “amigos” to establish a direct line of communication with Kyiv, according to officials in both the U.S. and Ukraine.
Charles Kupperman, President Donald Trump’s former deputy national security adviser, contacted Ukrainian officials close to President Volodymyr Zelensky via telephone in mid-July after a tumultuous meeting at the White House in which Sondland told the Kyiv representatives that they would need to launch certain domestic investigations in exchange for a presidential meet in Washington, according to three officials familiar with the matter. Kupperman was not the only official to reach out, the sources said.
The meeting in question took place July 10 at the White House between senior Ukrainian officials, former National Security Adviser John Bolton, and other U.S. officials, including the president’s former Russia adviser Fiona Hill, national security official Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, Energy Secretary Rick Perry, former top diplomat for Ukraine Kurt Volker, and Sondland. The Ukrainians visited Washington to discuss a roadmap for U.S.-Ukrainian relations that included how the two countries could work together in the energy sector. But as The Daily Beast reported last week, that meeting turned sour quickly.
Kupperman, who was on the Trump-Zelensky July 25 call, and other national security officials’ outreach was meant to course correct a meeting that left the Ukrainian officials uncomfortable and confused about Washington’s messaging, sources said. The overtures underscore the extent to which Bolton’s National Security Council wanted to work around Sondland and others he coordinated with in their efforts to convince Ukraine to launch investigations into Burisma, the natural gas company on whose board Hunter Biden sat, and the 2016 presidential election. Witnesses in the House impeachment inquiry testified that Bolton equated Sondland’s work to a “drug deal” that he had cooked up with acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney. Trump fired Bolton in September.
Both Kupperman and the National Security Council did not respond to requests for comment for this story.
Sources said the need for a course correction with Ukraine came as a result of the conversations that took place in the Ward Room of the White House after the official meeting with Bolton July 10.
Sondland moved the conversation into the Ward Room of the White House. Bolton did not attend but asked Hill to go into the room and report back on what was being said, according to Hill’s public testimony in front of House investigators Thursday.
Hill told House investigators in her closed-door deposition last month that Bolton told her to tell John Eisenberg, the National Security Council counsel: “I am not part of whatever drug deal Sondland and Mulvaney are cooking up on this. You go and tell him what you’ve heard and what I’ve said.”
That’s when Hill went to the Ward Room. Sondland had again brought up the investigations with the Ukrainians, including Oleksandr Danylyuk, the top national security official in Ukraine, and Zelensky aide Andriy Yermak. The Daily Beast previously reported that Sondland grew emotional in the meeting and began to demand the investigations from the Ukrainians. Hill told House investigators the Ukrainian officials at one point were asked to move into the hallway and that Vindman told Sondland bringing up the investigations was inappropriate.
Hill said she too stepped in to address Sondland’s remarks.
“I pointed out that this wasn’t an appropriate place to be having a discussion about what was going to be a deliberative process about how one goes about setting up a meeting and the timing of it and the content of it,” Hill said in her impeachment deposition in October. “It’s completely inappropriate to have, you know, the ambassador to the EU take the Ukrainians down to the Ward Room to have a huddle on next steps about getting a meeting with the president of the United States.”
In the weeks that followed, the National Security Council kept in contact with senior Zelensky officials in an attempt to re-establish the normal lines of communication with the Ukrainian national security apparatus.
Like Bolton, Kupperman left his post in September. The House subpoenaed him to appear for a deposition. However, Kupperman filed a lawsuit last month to seek a judicial ruling on whether he is required by law to testify. Last week Trump moved to dismiss that lawsuit, claiming Kupperman should follow his direction instead of seeking legal guidance.
Is Bolton prepared to implicate the president? I have no idea. He could just as easily testify that the president never said anything to him about Biden and Crowdstrike and it was all Rudy’s fault. He is not a good-faith actor. But I can guarantee his book sales will be a lot bigger if he tells the truth about Trump than if he lies and tries to glorify him. Whether he knows that or not is unknown.
Vindictive Vindman is the “whistleblower’s” handler.— Sen. Marsha Blackburn (@MarshaBlackburn) November 22, 2019
I’m so old I remember when Republicans were concerned about the children learning bad behavior from their leaders. Now we have an entire political party flagrantly smearing their opponents, name-calling and hurling juvenile insults. I wonder if this puerile behavior will persist after Trump is gone. It’s tempting to believe that they are just trying to kiss up to the king but I have a sneaking suspicion they are more like him in most ways than we may have thought.
By the way, there is zero evidence that the whistleblower has a “handler” or that Vindman is one. This is just plain smearing of a witness by the Senator from Tennessee, who was always a horrible person and continues to be one. One thing you can be sure of, she didn’t come up with this on her own. It’s a new line of attack.
The Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee expressed shock and anger at the mere suggestion they were trying to exonerate the Russians the hacking in 2016. It’s insane that anyone would suggest such a thing.
Somebody forgot to remind you-know-who:
When even Steve Doocy is trying to get you to stop spewing conspiracies
TRUMP: They have the server from the DNC
KILMEADE: Who has the server?
TRUMP: They gave the server to Crowdstrike, which is a company owned by a very wealthy Ukrainian.
When Steve Doocey feels the need to push back you n
Aaaand, just a friendly reminder:
That was the moment that made it clear to me that there was more to his weird relationship with Putin than mere ego over having lost the popular vote and needing to prove his legitimacy. We may never know what it is, but there’s definitely more to the story.
Having watched the past two weeks of marathon testimony in the House impeachment inquiry, it can no longer be disputed that President Trump, his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani and members of his administration engaged in a plot to bribe or extort Ukraine into helping the president smear his domestic political opponents. Witness after witness testified to what they saw and the conclusion was inescapable: The president broke the law and abused his power.
This is not really a big surprise, though, is it? After all, we saw the evidence first hand when Trump released that transcript of the call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. The problem has been that he boldly declared his criminal behavior “perfect.” That was so disconcerting and bizarre that it became necessary to reconstruct the events that preceded and followed the call in order to reassure the public that what they saw with their own eyes was actually true.
Over the course of many hours, we’ve heard from the people who were involved in Ukraine policy in the White House and the State Department and how they reacted when they became aware of this plot, which they all realized at one point or another was potentially illegal and certainly contrary to the U.S. national interest. Thursday’s witness, the former National Security Council official and Russia expert Fiona Hill, testified about her experience with Gordon Sondland, Trump’s EU ambassador, and the moment she realized that this “irregular”channel was actually a presidential-level domestic political operation.
It was even worse than we thought. The president wasn’t just conspiring with his lawyer and a couple of obscure factotums. He had many high-level members of his Cabinet and staff involved as well, including the vice president, the secretary of state, the White House chief of staff, the energy secretary and the national security adviser. If the whistleblower hadn’t come forward, there is every reason to believe the plot would have succeeded and we would never have known what happened. After all, half a dozen staffers went through the normal channels and reported their concerns to the National Security Council’s legal counsel, and the result was to hide the record of the president’s call in a top-secret vault to keep it from being leaked.
If the president had put people other than the far too garrulous Sondland and the out-of-control Rudy Giuliani in charge, it’s likely this would have been handled much more discreetly. One cannot help but wonder how many other such “irregular” activities have been successfully covered up. Jared Kushner, for instance, has an expansive portfolio and has been involved with some of the most important foreign policy issues, many of which have had serious consequences in the Middle East and Turkey. Attorney General Bill Barr’s single-minded mission to hamstring the FBI and the intelligence community appears even more sinister in this light. Trump’s own inexplicable behavior with Russia comes to mind as well.
The fact that they almost got away with this crude and badly executed plot argues for the idea that it was not a one-off.
It is a given at this point that the president will be impeached. The talk among analysts and pundits in the wake of all this naturally turns to whether or not any of this has changed the underlying political dynamic that governs whether or not Trump will actually be convicted in the Senate and removed from office. The consensus is that it will not. Judging by the defiant, unhinged performance by the Republicans during the House Intelligence Committee hearings, in which they used their time to spread bogus conspiracy theories and insult the witnesses, that consensus is probably correct.
There was some hope for a time that a few of the Republicans who have already decided to retire might wish to preserve some shred of integrity on their way out the door, but that does not appear to be something they care about. The one considered most likely to break from the pack, Rep. Will Hurd of Texas — who is now the only black Republican in the House — lugubriously declared at the end of Thursday’s hearing that he had not been convinced: “An impeachable offense should be compelling, overwhelmingly clear and unambiguous. And it’s not something to be rushed or taken lightly. I have not heard evidence proving the president committed bribery or extortion.”
Hurd also said that he would like to hear from Hunter Biden, so any notion that Hurd has been acting in good faith must be taken with a grain of salt. But he does raise a good question. If Democrats believe that there’s no serious prospect of Republicans changing their minds in the face of such clear evidence — and it appears they are correct — why are they so intent upon rushing through this process? Why not take their time and try to get as much as possible before the public and into the record?
The Mueller investigation took two years and uncovered massive evidence of obstruction of justice. The Republicans had 10 investigations into the Benghazi attack over the course of three years. The Republican National Convention even featured a Benghazi night! House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy admitted they had done it all for political purposes to damage Hillary Clinton in the election — and it worked. In the course of one of those investigations, it was discovered that Clinton had used a personal email server for non-classified State Department business. I don’t think I need to tell you how that affected the campaign in 2016.
So it seems counterproductive for the Democrats to be so anxious to close this impeachment inquiry when we now know that the highest levels of the administration were involved. Without hearing from Giuliani, John Bolton, Mick Mulvaney and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo (who reportedly wants to resign because this scandal is damaging his reputation) — all of whom have been heavily implicated, and all of whom appear to have further political ambitions — this case doesn’t accurately convey what happened and continues to happen in this White House. You’d think they’d at least want to hear from Rudy Giuliani’s accomplice Lev Parnas, who has signaled a willingness to talk. Who knows what he might have to say?
I realize that Democrats like the idea of having this staid, formal, very tight case, with unimpeachable experts and patriotic public servants as the only witnesses. It leaves less room for them to be called partisan. But in this polarized environment, the whole thing is partisan whether they like it or not. That doesn’t make it unethical, dishonest or biased. It’s just a function of how politics is organized at the moment.
Since the Republicans are acting as Trump’s accomplices, oversight of this corrupt administration requires that the House keeps the pressure on to prevent them from continuing to engage in criminal behavior and abusing their power. An early Senate acquittal is likely to have the opposite effect. If the Democrats aren’t doing all this to stop Trump’s outrageous criminality and expose the massive corruption of this White House, why are they doing it at all?
Having watched both a significant amount of the Watergate hearings and about 2/3 of the public testimony this week, there is no doubt in my mind that Chairman Schiff performed an extraordinary public service. He was, in many ways, far more effective than Ervin or Rodino. The organization of the witnesses to tell a coherent narrative, the intense focus of the hearings on a single issue, the actual questioning by Schiff and Goldman — brilliant. The flow of the hearings was so seamless that it belied the immense amount of hard work it took to put these hearings together and keep them on track. And Schiff’s summations were exemplary, both eloquent and and appropriately outraged.
It is surely the case, as Krugman writes this morning, that the GOP is too far out in La La Land to pay attention to the damage they are doing not only to the country but to themselves. But for anyone who is not a professional dissembler, Schiff’s herculean efforts made it crystal clear that:
(1) Trump broke numerous laws re: Ukraine;
(2) The laws he broke were extremely serious;
(3) Trump’s conduct, here and elsewhere, amounts to an egregious betrayal of his country; and
(4) Trump must be removed from office immediately.
For making the case against Trump so crystal clear, Adam Schiff, his staff, and the amazing people who risked their privacy and careers to appear, deserve our deep thanks.
The key moment in Thursday’s impeachment hearing came when Dr. Fiona Hill, the former National Security Council official, began explaining that the Trump administration had steered American foreign policy into the weeds.
Hill described a couple of “testy” encounters with Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland. In one, she was angry that Sondland was not coordinating with the rest of the NSC team and career diplomats in the field. Sondland had insisted during his testimony that he was following the president’s orders in pursuing an arms-for-political dirt deal with Ukraine. “Everyone was in the loop,” the newly minted diplomat testified. That is, everyone Sondland thought mattered: President Trump, Vice President Mike Pence, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Secretary of Energy Rick Perry, White House acting Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney, and Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani.
But Sondland’s assignment and Hill’s were very different.
But it struck me when yesterday, when you put up on the screen Ambassador Sondland’s emails, and who was on these emails and he said “These that these people need to know,” that he was absolutely right. Because he was being involved in a domestic political errand. And we were being involved in national security foreign policy. And those two things had just diverged. So he was correct.
And I had not put my finger on that at the moment, but I was irritated with him and angry with him that he wasn’t fully coordinating. And I did say to him, Ambassador Sondland, Gordon, I think this is all going to blow up. And here we are.
This was not going the way Republicans on the panel wanted. Hill continued, explaining in a slight-of-hand way she’d been unfair to Sondland:
And after I left to my next meeting, our director for the European Union talked to him much further for a full half-hour or more later, trying to ask him about how we could coordinate better or how others could coordinate better after I had left the office. And his feeling was that the National Security Council was always trying to block him.
What we were trying to do was block us from straying into domestic or personal politics. And that was precisely what I was trying to do.
But Ambassador Sondland is not wrong that he had been given a different remit than we had been.
And it was at that moment that I started to realize how those things have diverged. And I realized, in fact, that I wasn’t really being fair to Ambassador Sondland because he was carrying out what he thought he had been instructed to carry out. And we were doing something that we thought was just as or perhaps even more important, but it wasn’t in the same channel.
Ranking member Devin Nunes jumped in, cut off staff attorney Steve Castor, and launched into 2016 conspiracy theory questions. He needed to change the subject. Now. The rest of the Republican bench tried to discredit Holmes or stalled for time, trying to avoided giving Hill more rope.
The Ukraine scandal has unfolded like a Quentin Tarantino film. Different time frames. Different characters with different viewing points. Same arms-for-political-dirt story.
Hill was based in the White House. David Holmes, a State Department political aide, works at the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine. Both told the same story from different angles thousands of mile apart. Sondland told the same story from his perspective. As did Amb. William Taylor and George Kent. As did former Amb. Marie Yovanovitch, Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, and others. How many career professionals (and one, millionaire Trump donor) have to tell the same story before Republicans sworn to uphold the Constitution acknowledge they are not part of a Never-Trump conspiracy? Trump abused his office to direct an international smear campaign against a domestic political rival.
Perhaps headlines will convince them? As Digby (and TPM) noted on Thursday, headlines from coast to coast blared that Sondland implicated Trump. “We followed the president’s orders.” “Diplomat acknowledges ‘quid pro quo’.” “Envoy Says Trump Directed Effort.” “Trump directed Ukraine pressure campaign, EU envoy says.” And as MSNBC’s Chris Hays pointed out Thursday evening, many of the subheads implicated Pompeo by name.
In her opening statement, Hill chastised those (Republicans) peddling “politically driven falsehoods.” She refused “to be part of an effort to legitimize an alternate narrative that the Ukrainian government is a U.S. adversary, and that Ukraine — not Russia — attacked us in 2016.” She requested they “please” not aid the Russian security services’ propaganda campaign,
I say this not as an alarmist, but as a realist. I do not think long-term conflict with Russia is either desirable or inevitable. I continue to believe that we need to seek ways of stabilizing our relationship with Moscow even as we counter their efforts to harm us. Right now, Russia’s security services and their proxies have geared up to repeat their interference in the 2020 election. We are running out of time to stop them. In the course of this investigation, I would ask that you please not promote politically driven falsehoods that so clearly advance Russian interests.
The narrative Republicans advance is professionals such as Hill, Holmes, et. al. mean to undermine Donald Trump. In fact, such career patriots mean to defend the U.S. from being undermined by him, by those in his thrall, and by foreign adversaries with agendas hostile to U.S. interests and to democracy itself.
Jim Jordan is all alone with the dumbest Trump defense of all
by digby
I’ve been talking for a while about Jim Jordan’s alternate theory of Trump’s actions toward Ukraine. In a nutshell he’s suggesting that this was all a secret plot by Trump to test the new Ukrainian president to see if he would agree to a corrupt bargain to go after Biden and the Democrats in exchange for aid. He was springing a trap and when they didn’t do it, he released the aid, reassured that they weren’t corrupt actors after all.
I’m not kidding. Here he is saying that senior government officials were also concerned about this, then signed off and that was it:
LOL – Jordan explains suspicious timing of aid to Ukraine being released on same day the House started investigating the Ukraine scheme by insisting that “it got released because so many senior govt officials met w/Zelensky & they determined, ‘hey, this new kid in town is legit'” pic.twitter.com/NZxsYtH2aV
I guess if you ignore everything Trump has ever said and done you might believe it. But for all the alternative narratives they are throwing out there, this has to be the most unbelievable. Indeed, it’s so bad that even the Republicans seem to be recoiling. Jordan is the only one with the galloping chutzpah to put this out there.
President Trump on Thursday reversed a decision by the Navy seeking to oust Navy SEAL Chief Petty Officer Edward Gallagher from the elite commando force.
Chief Gallagher has been at the center of a high-profile war crime case and was granted clemency by the president on Friday. He was notified on Wednesday that the Navy planned to start the process to remove the Trident pin that symbolizes membership in the SEALs.
Less than 24 hours later, Mr. Trump announced on Twitter it would not happen, saying “The Navy will NOT be taking away Warfighter and Navy Seal Eddie Gallagher’s Trident Pin. This case was handled very badly from the beginning. Get back to business!”
What happened?
The president announced the reversal on Twitter shortly after Chief Gallagher’s lawyer, Timothy Parlatore, appeared on Fox News, framing the Navy decision as an act of defiance toward the president’s decision to restore Chief Gallagher’s rank.
“Monday morning the admiral comes in and says I disagree with the president, I’m going to take his Trident,” Mr. Parlatore said. “What he’s doing here is really just an effort to publicly humiliate Chief Gallagher and stick it right in the president’s eye.”
Gallagher has been on social media and in interviews trashing Naval commanders and his former colleagues, generally acting like an asshole, which he is. He’s got a friend in high places so he obviously feels he can do whatever he wants.
This is extremely disturbing. I’m very worried about what it’s doing to the military. He’s turning it into a mercenary troop, full of psychopaths.
