Has U.S. Democracy Been Trumped?

[hrothgar]

Zelensky: “I would also like to thank you for your great support in the area of defense...” (That’s the military aid.)

Trump’s next line: “I would like you to do us a favor though...”

[Winstonm]

Why the f#ck is Bill Barr involved in foreign policy and how in hell is Guiliani acting as the State Department?

 

This is Mob 101.

[hrothgar]

So, about that straight shooter AG Barr,

 

Looks like both the Inspector General and the Director of National Intelligence referred the whistleblower report for criminal investigation, but were over ruled by Barr...

[barmar]

Ronny Chieng expressed cynicism about the impeachment perfectly on last night's The Daily Show.

 

http://www.cc.com/episodes/soz6ms/the-daily-show-with-trevor-noah-extended---september-24--2019---gavin-newsom-season-24-ep-24158

 

It's the second segment, starting at the 16:00 mark.

 

"I wouldn't be surprised if this ends with Ukraine going to jail and Trump being President for life."

 

They said that Clinton was Teflon when none of his scandals cost him anything. What's even more slippery than Teflon, because that's what Trump seems to be made of.

[Winstonm]

The continued media quest for some proof of a quid pro quo trade of weapons for Biden investigation is a red herring. Likewise, the continued reporting that there is no crime is a red herring. Neither matters.

 

So far, the known facts are impeachable offenses. The entire purpose of the impeachment powers in the constitution was to have a way to remove a president or judge who abused the powers of the office he holds or who failed to uphold his oath of office.

 

Edit: I'm watching and listening to Adam Schiff talk about the Mafia-like shakedown of this presidential call and he sounds like some WC poster with whom I'm vaguely familiar. B-)

[Winstonm]

Reporting indicates that Barr is already ducking for cover: "No one told me about Guiliani. I didn't know about this call. Yada, yada, yadi."

[Winstonm]

A remarkable letter Adam Schiff sent Tuesday to AG William Barr:

 

These consequences raise the specter that the department has participated in a dangerous cover-up to protect the President.

[hrothgar]

Reporting indicates that Barr is already ducking for cover: "No one told me about Guiliani. I didn't know about this call. Yada, yada, yadi."

 

Can't help but believe that Barr should be forced to recuse from any involvement

[johnu]

So, about that straight shooter AG Barr,

 

Looks like both the Inspector General and the Director of National Intelligence referred the whistleblower report for criminal investigation, but were over ruled by Barr...

The Manchurian President's government paid personal attorney is as crooked and untrustworthy as any of the other mafioso appointed to the executive branch since 2017.

 

William Barr’s been accused of a presidential cover-up before

 

Weeks before former Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger’s criminal trial over his role in the 1980’s Iran-Contra scandal, then-Attorney General William Barr dropped a bomb on the prosecution.

 

“People in the Iran-Contra affair have been treated very unfairly,” Barr told USA Today in December 1992, blasting the charges as illegitimate. “People in this Iran-Contra matter have been prosecuted for the kind of conduct that would not have been considered criminal or prosecutable by the Justice Department.”

Barr’s broadside alarmed the lead prosecutor handling the case against Weinberger, James J. Brosnahan, who warned the judge that Barr may have just unduly biased his jury pool. Later that month, when the White House pardoned six top Iran-Contra defendants on Christmas Eve 1992 at Barr’s urging, Brosnahan believed he’d just witnessed the completion of a successful cover-up.

 

Three decades on, Brosnahan fears Barr has returned to his old job to run the same scheme again.

 

“If you want a presidential cover-up, Barr is your guy,” Brosnahan, now 85, told VICE News. “And I think we’ve already seen that.”

You don't have to teach old dogs new tricks when they remember the old tricks. As we have seen from Barr's deliberate lies and misrepresentations in his written fantasy summary of Mueller's report, his unrelated to the facts TV appearance before Mueller appeared before Congress, or his repeated obstruction of justice in delaying House oversight, if you want a crooked lawyer, Barr's your man.

 

Barr’s Playbook: He Misled Congress When Omitting Parts of Justice Dep’t Memo in 1989

 

Even before he was AG the first time,

 

On Friday the thirteenth October 1989, by happenstance the same day as the “Black Friday” market crash, news leaked of a legal memo authored by William Barr. He was then serving as head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC). It is highly uncommon for any OLC memo to make headlines. This one did because it was issued in “unusual secrecy” and concluded that the FBI could forcibly abduct people in other countries without the consent of the foreign state. The headline also noted the implication of the legal opinion at that moment in time. It appeared to pave the way for abducting Panama’s leader, Gen. Manuel Noriega.

 

Members of Congress asked to see the full legal opinion. Barr refused, but said he would provide an account that “summarizes the principal conclusions.” Sound familiar? In March 2019, when Attorney General Barr was handed Robert Mueller’s final report, he wrote that he would “summarize the principal conclusions” of the special counsel’s report for the public.

 

When Barr withheld the full OLC opinion in 1989 and said to trust his summary of the principal conclusions, Yale law school professor Harold Koh wrote that Barr’s position was “particularly egregious.” Congress also had no appetite for Barr’s stance, and eventually issued a subpoena to successfully wrench the full OLC opinion out of the Department.

 

What’s different from that struggle and the current struggle over the Mueller report is that we know how the one in 1989 eventually turned out.

 

When the OLC opinion was finally made public long after Barr left office, it was clear that Barr’s summary had failed to fully disclose the opinion’s principal conclusions. It is better to think of Barr’s summary as a redacted version of the full OLC opinion. That’s because the “summary” took the form of 13 pages of written testimony. The document was replete with quotations from court cases, legal citations, and the language of the OLC opinion itself. Despite its highly detailed analysis, this 13-page version omitted some of the most consequential and incendiary conclusions from the actual opinion. And there was evidently no justifiable reason for having withheld those parts from Congress or the public.

[johnu]

Not for John though.

He has not doubts.

He knows everything.

 

Tell us John: what/when/with whom was discussed?

andrei - Maybe a quarter or half of everything bad Putin's Puppet did in the Ukraine blackmail scandal is now out in the public. Everybody is waiting for your informed comments about the latest developments.

[Winstonm]

Can't help but believe that Barr should be forced to recuse from any involvement

 

I think you underestimate his corrupt nature. He will only recuse if he thinks he might go to prison if he doesn't.

[rmnka447]

Give it a rest!!!

 

Impeachment may salve your unmitigated hate for Trump, but it is going nowhere. Nor should it.

 

In the meantime, all you superior minds (not that I think that) have been tearing the country apart with all your accusations. That you constantly use members of your own choir to bolster your feelings and prove them correct is laughable.

 

I'm thinking that those "people in Wal-Mart that you can smell" have figured it out and a day of reckoning will come next November at the ballot box.

 

Keep up what you're doing because the more you concentrate on impeachment, the more the public at large will get angry about you're not focusing on the problems of the country. How are you going to sell that impeachment was much more important than solving the country's problems to the electorate? You won't be able to, so you're left with only more hate mongering to make your case to the public. Good luck with that.

 

I have great faith that the broad electorate get it right every time in the end. They did the last time, but you couldn't accept it. BTW, I was fully expected Hillary would win and was wondering if the country could survive another 4 year extension of Obama like rule. It would have been the end of democracy. When Trump won, I couldn't help but think that when the country is at stake, the people do the right thing. They did in 1980, and also 2016. Trump comes with many flaws, but he's a lot of right things to get the country to a better place. It may not be the place you desire, but the alternative you push is worse.

[Winstonm]

The Manchurian President's government paid personal attorney is as crooked and untrustworthy as any of the other mafioso appointed to the executive branch since 2017.

 

William Barr’s been accused of a presidential cover-up before

 

 

 

You don't have to teach old dogs new tricks when they remember the old tricks. As we have seen from Barr's deliberate lies and misrepresentations in his written fantasy summary of Mueller's report, his unrelated to the facts TV appearance before Mueller appeared before Congress, or his repeated obstruction of justice in delaying House oversight, if you want a crooked lawyer, Barr's your man.

 

Barr’s Playbook: He Misled Congress When Omitting Parts of Justice Dep’t Memo in 1989

 

Even before he was AG the first time,

 

One of the greatest mistakes we have made as a country is to take a hands off approach to the previous administration once they are out of office. Cheney should have been held to account for orchestrating the Iraq war with fake data; Clinton should have been held accountable for perjury, after he left office; Barr, too, should have been held accountable.

[hrothgar]

 

 

In the meantime, all you superior minds (not that I think that) have been tearing the country apart with all your accusations.

 

For *****'s sake, the issue isn't our "accusations".

 

The President of the United States is extorting foreign leaders in order to encourage them to interfere in the US elections...

The Director of National Intelligence threatened to resign because the Attorney General was attempting to block the required release of whistleblower reports....

In what world are these not impeachable offenses?

 

I don't expect that the Senate will vote to convict Trump. However, I'd be shocked if multiple Republican Senators don't cross the aisle.

[Winstonm]

Lawfare has a good article on why the impeachment should not focus on criminality.

 

There will be time to sort out the issues of legal criminality; impeachment doesn’t preclude that, and it may well turn out that Trump broke the law. But right now the focus should be on whether Trump satisfied his constitutional duties: to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed” and to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” We won’t need the criminal law to know if he’s failed.

[y66]

Larry Noble's abridged video summary of Trump's conversation with President Zelensky of Ukraine.

[Winstonm]

Yahoo reports:

 

After viewing the whistleblower complaint relating to President Donald Trump, Rep. Adam Schiff, the chair of the House intelligence committee, said the whistleblower has exposed “serious wrongdoing.” Schiff said the complaint was “well-written” and provides the committee information it can use to follow up with other witnesses and documents. “The idea that the Department of Justice would have intervened to prevent it from getting to Congress, throws the leadership from that department into further ill repute,” Schiff said in a statement to reporters.

[johnu]

Stay tuned for tomorrow's news. The whistleblower's complaint has been declassified and is supposed to be released Thursday morning. The acting DNI is also scheduled to testify before Congress tomorrow morning to answer questions about the attempted coverup by the Criminal in Chief and his government paid personal attorney Barr.

 

I am almost never surprised by the criminality of the Manchurian President. I also am never surprised that Barr will subvert the law because he has a long history of doing so, and you only had to watch his confirmation hearings to know that you can't trust him any more than the Grifter in Chief. How could Barr not recuse himself when he was directly named in the transcribed phone call? Answering my own question, because he's got no more respect for the law than his boss.

[johnu]

Attention right fringe posters: Please stick to the following White House talking points when you make posts in this thread. Otherwise, I will have to report you to the Criminal in Chief's government paid personal attorney who will personally investigate you. Do not freelance from the "official" line or it may be necessary for the FBI (or at least Giuliani) to open a file on you.

 

Oops! White House Emails Democrats Its Trump-Ukraine Talking Points.

 

In what sounds like a scene straight out of “Veep,” the White House on Wednesday accidentally emailed all of its talking points on President Donald Trump’s call with the Ukrainian president to House and Senate Democrats ― and then followed up with a “recall” email hoping lawmakers would ignore what just happened.

 

The White House even sent those GOP talking points to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), her office confirmed ― a day after she announced a formal impeachment inquiry spurred by Trump’s Ukraine call.

[cherdano]

Strange - rmnka suddenly sounds really defensive and is completely ignoring the actual issue. Maybe he is waiting for the updated list of talking points? I don't want to mock him, it's really a tough situation as even the messages from headquarters at Fox News have been somewhat confusing, and other team players thst usually step in when headquarters are distracted, such as Washington examiner or National Review, are refusing to play along.

[rmnka447]

One of the greatest mistakes we have made as a country is to take a hands off approach to the previous administration once they are out of office. Cheney should have been held to account for orchestrating the Iraq war with fake data; Clinton should have been held accountable for perjury, after he left office; Barr, too, should have been held accountable.

 

Does that mean that Obama is still culpable for abuse of power by weaponizing the government departments to go after political opposition?

 

Remember US Attorney John Durham is investigating the origins of the Trump collusion investigation. I'm just waiting to see what he finds and think he will be fair.

 

But enough government documents are becoming public that make it clear that the FBI was aware that the Steele dossier wasn't reliable. Yet the FBI presented it as credible to the FISA court, that's potentially perjury by some high ranking FBI officials. Was it an oversight or deliberate misleading of the court?

 

Even the Papadopolous incident which allegedly fueled concerns over collusion is unravelling. His "Russian contact" is proving to be someone very close to foreign friendly intelligence agencies.

 

If you understand that nothing militarily happened in the fight against ISIS in Iraq without White House approval, then you understand how that White House tried to micromanage everything. It would be easy to believe that such a domestic intelligence operation as the Trump collusion investigation would also have to have a go ahead from the White House.

 

I really hope that Durham finds the culpability ends with a few rogue FBI officials. But I'll wait to see what he finds before making any judgments. There are a lot of arms and legs to what happened that need to be investigated and made public.

 

Let's get everything out in the open in the light of day and let the chips fall where they may.

[hrothgar]

Does that mean that Obama is still culpable for abuse of power by weaponizing the government departments to go after political opposition?

 

Remember US Attorney John Durham is investigating the origins of the Trump collusion investigation. I'm just waiting to see what he finds and think he will be fair.

 

But enough government documents are becoming public that make it clear that the FBI was aware that the Steele dossier wasn't reliable. Yet the FBI presented it as credible to the FISA court, that's potentially perjury by some high ranking FBI officials. Was it an oversight or deliberate misleading of the court?

 

Even the Papadopolous incident which allegedly fueled concerns over collusion is unravelling. His "Russian contact" is proving to be someone very close to foreign friendly intelligence agencies.

 

If you understand that nothing militarily happened in the fight against ISIS in Iraq without White House approval, then you understand how that White House tried to micromanage everything. It would be easy to believe that such a domestic intelligence operation as the Trump collusion investigation would also have to have a go ahead from the White House.

 

I really hope that Durham finds the culpability ends with a few rogue FBI officials. But I'll wait to see what he finds before making any judgments. There are a lot of arms and legs to what happened that need to be investigated and made public.

 

Let's get everything out in the open in the light of day and let the chips fall where they may.

 

What a load of unmitigated crap.

 

Just for a moment, can you drop the inane "what aboutism" and deal with the actual issue that is being discussed.

 

We have a transcript that unambiguously shows Trump engaging in impeachable acts.

We have live testimony from Trump and Giuliani that show the same

We have the DNI and the Inspector General saying that these complaints have merit

In a few hours, we're going to have the test of the Whistleblower complaint.

 

Stop trying to distract with ridiculous non sequiturs

[rmnka447]

Strange - rmnka suddenly sounds really defensive and is completely ignoring the actual issue. Maybe he is waiting for the updated list of talking points? I don't want to mock him, it's really a tough situation as even the messages from headquarters at Fox News have been somewhat confusing, and other team players thst usually step in when headquarters are distracted, such as Washington examiner or National Review, are refusing to play along.

 

Speaking of talking points, how is it that virtually every MSM outlet seems to be using the exact same language in describing Trump's action as the Dems spokespersons? Seems like they get their talking points straight from the Dems. Maybe, they're just lemmings and following the leader. Or maybe it's a case of monkey see, monkey do.

 

BTW, a new poll out asked conservatives, independents, and liberals about impeachment. Right now, 58% of independents are against impeachment. That should be a BIG worry for the next election unless progressives can convince the independents that impeachment is indeed completely justified and necessary. Right now, all the impeachment claims are just preaching to the choir, If impeachment is seen as frivolous by independents, Dems will pay a severe price in the next election. Remember that the Dem majority was obtained by Dems in normally red districts who promised to work with the President and won close races. Those seats could easily flip back if the independents can't be convinced.

 

Maybe you ought to go back and review Nancy Pelosi's and Jerry Nadler's statements about impeachment in 1998. Spending oodles of time parsing words to get to impeachment isn't going to do it. Let sanity rule and give it a rest.

[hrothgar]

BTW, a new poll out asked conservatives, independents, and liberals about impeachment. Right now, 58% of independents are against impeachment. That should be a BIG worry for the next election unless progressives can convince the independents that impeachment is indeed completely justified and necessary. Right now, all the impeachment claims are just preaching to the choir, If impeachment is seen as frivolous by independents, Dems will pay a severe price in the next election. Remember that the Dem majority was obtained by Dems in normally red districts who promised to work with the President and won close races. Those seats could easily flip back if the independents can't be convinced.

 

What poll?

Who conducted it?

When was the polling period?

 

Given that the transcript was only released yesterday I have to wonder whether your claims are anything other than drug induced fever dreams...

[cherdano]

Good news, the talking points have arrived!!!