同情特朗普

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Sept. 27, 2019, 6:56 AM EDT
By Associated Press

MOSCOW — Russia has voiced hope that the U.S. administration wouldn't publish private conversations between the two nations' presidents, like it did with Ukraine.

The rough transcript of Trump's call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy released by the White House Wednesday shows that Trump urged Ukraine to "look into" his Democratic political rival Joe Biden. The July 25 call is now the focus of a U.S. impeachment probe.

Asked Friday if Moscow is worried that the White House could similarly publish transcripts of Trump's calls with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that "we would like to hope that it wouldn't come to that in our relations, which are already troubled by a lot of problems."

He noted that the publication of the Trump-Zelenskiy call was "quite unusual."

 

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Donald Trump’s presidency would have been impossible without his reality-TV fame from NBC’s “The Apprentice.”

And he is skilled at dominating the visual medium that still matters so much — even in our digital age — from his raucous rallies to his impromptu media gaggles outside a whirring helicopter to his symbiotic relationship with Fox News.

But not this week.

In a tectonic shift of media attention, every major television network — broadcast and cable alike — focused on a deeply damaging story that Trump can’t control.

On Tuesday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced that impeachment proceedings would begin.

On Wednesday, Trump responded in a rambling, low-energy news conference from the United Nations, for which all three broadcast networks ditched their usual programming.

Then, for hour upon hour Thursday morning, the networks did the same for the congressional testimony of acting director of national intelligence Joseph Maguire, who was grilled about a whistleblower’s report that puts a harsh spotlight on Trump’s urging Ukraine’s president to dig up dirt about his political rival.

“Almost like moving forward with impeachment would get people’s attention,” quipped author Jonathan Katz about the media onslaught.

At least some Americans were riveted. As one indication, Whistleblower Wednesday brought sky-high cable ratings — including on Fox, where Trump defenders were working tirelessly in prime time but where news coverage couldn’t fully avoid, or spin, the obvious.

And even those who weren’t all that interested could hardly avoid it.

It was thrust before their eyes, including on the three networks’ evening news shows, which led their 30-minute broadcasts with substantial segments — not one of which could have made Trump happy. (Those three half-hours are still appointment viewing for more than 20 million people each night, on average.)

Even in this digital age, most Americans still get their news on the tube, according to a 2018 Pew Research Center study — though that, of course, is shifting fast to digital sources, especially smartphones.

In fact, it may be the combination of the incessant online blasts and the negative television imagery that is proving so hard for Trump to control.

“Brace Yourself for the Internet Impeachment,” was the headline of a Thursday New York Times article.

“In many ways, it is a made-for-the-internet event,” wrote Kevin Roose. ‘The political stakes are high, the dramatic story unspools tidbit by tidbit and the stark us-versus-them dynamics provide plenty of fodder for emotionally charged social media brawls.”

Frustrated and angry, Trump has ramped up his customary attacks on journalists — and has acknowledged, with an edge of bitter self-pity, that things have dramatically changed.

“I used to be the king of good press,” he lamented at the U.N. news conference. “They covered me well — otherwise, I probably wouldn’t be here.”

He now favors a new adjective of disparagement.

“Much of the press . . . is not only fake, it’s corrupt,” he said at the same event.

Meanwhile, the White House has abandoned — perhaps foolishly — a traditional way it used to get its message out (and allow itself to be held accountable): the daily press briefing.

It has now been 200 days without one. The new White House press secretary, Stephanie Grisham, has yet to answer questions from behind the lectern — preferring, apparently, to condemn reporters in writing, whether by tweet or by op-ed in the friendly spaces of the conservative Washington Examiner.

It’s about to get worse: Impeachment hearings are sure to flood the media zone with images and words that cannot make the president look good, despite the best efforts of his loyal defenders.

In the new film “Where’s My Roy Cohn?” the disgraced lawyer to the mob — and to celebrities, including Trump — is heard speculating in an interview on how he’ll be remembered. Cohn confidently predicts that his obituary will emphasize his role as aide to the red-baiting Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy.

His voice then is spookily followed by a photograph of his New York Times obituary. He called it: “Roy Cohn, Aide to McCarthy and Fiery Lawyer, Dies at 59.”

The moment of truth for McCarthy and Cohn came in televised hearings when a lawyer for the U.S. Army shut down the senator with his damning accusation: “Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?”

Television made all the difference in 1954, as it did again almost two decades later during the televised Watergate hearings, with their disastrous effect on Richard Nixon’s presidency.

Granted, the media world looks nothing like it did in the 1950s or the 1970s.

But then again — for the president — it also looks nothing like it did two weeks ago.

 

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With only public spiritedness as my motive, and in total impartiality, for these purposes, about American political events and people, I remind readers of a few fundamental facts about the politics of our neighbour. The United States is not really the country of the American Revolutionary mythos. It became an independent country when Benjamin Franklin helped persuade the British to evict the French from Canada in the Seven Years’ War (which was started, in this continent, by an unauthorized attack by 21-year-old adjutant George Washington on the French near what is now Pittsburgh in 1753), and then persuaded the French to help the Americans evict the British from America in 1778. It was never a war for the rights of man, and Americans had no more rights after the Revolution than before, nor more than the British or several other countries, but they were a sovereign country. Unlike almost all other sovereign countries in the late 18th century, they didn’t have a language of their own, but as the opening turn in what has been a durable genius for the spectacle and for matters of image and propaganda, they claimed to be the national cradle of human liberty. America was, indeed, a land of opportunity and comparative absence of class prejudices, but the chief author of the Declaration of Independence (Thomas Jefferson) who held “these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,” was a slave-holder, and the Constitution, when it was promulgated in 1789, entrenched slavery.

A century after the U.S. Civil War, which at the cost of 750,000 dead in a population of 31 million suppressed the southern insurrection and emancipated the slaves, the majority of African-Americans were still segregated and could not vote. The U.S. justice system, though it has had many brilliant legislators, jurists and barristers, is an immense exploitive cartel of lawyers, very many of whom regularly engage in practices that would lead to disbarment in this country (and the Canadian legal system is nothing to write home about either). The U.S. criminal justice system, because of the corruption of the plea bargain system that facilitates the prosecutors’ extortion of perjured inculpatory evidence with impunity, is just an immense kangaroo court. Federal prosecutors win over 95 per cent of their cases, and over 95 per cent of those without a trial, so stacked is the deck. Whenever you hear any American talking about the rule of law or the law of the land or asserting that no one is above the law, it is time to get into your night attire and turn out the lights.

Beneath the façade of Norman Rockwell and Walt Disney and most of Hollywood’s production before it was taken over by the limousine left, the United States is a jungle, and that is its strength and its weakness. It assures an immensely competitive Darwinian society in constant fermentation with high levels of achievement in practically every field, but it also causes inordinately large numbers of people to be ground to powder. The land of opportunity is the place where anyone can accomplish almost anything, but there is a threadbare safety net and more than 30 million people live in poverty. It has six to 12 times as many incarcerated people as other large, prosperous democracies, including Canada. And like all jungles, it is run, even if from a little behind the scenes, by the human equivalent of 30-foot constricting snakes and 700-pound cats. Trump’s offence, and his strength, is that he doesn’t make much effort to disguise the fact that he is a fierce, tough and often ruthless alumnus of the very tough schools of American capitalism, entertainment and politics.

The Globe and Mail headline implies that he has ridden his luck to where he is now. In fact, in making billions of dollars in (principally) Manhattan real estate, inventing a television concept and pulling in 25 million viewers every week for 14 seasons, devising a concept of levering celebrity, through being a boxing and wrestling impresario, a tabloid star and a reality TV icon, and then changing party affiliations seven times in 13 years and using social media to end-run the national press, seizing control of one of the great political parties and gaming the electoral system into the White House, he achieved more prior to his inauguration than any of the 43 preceding U.S. presidents except Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Grant, Eisenhower, and possibly Hoover. He is the only person elected president of the U.S. who never sought or held a public office or high military command and only the sixth to win the office with fewer votes than his chief opponent. This wasn’t luck; it was ambitious calculation and flawless execution.

Canadians liked Obama because he was non-white, fluent and suave, leftish and undemanding of “allies.” But GDP growth per capita in the U.S. declined from 4.5 per cent under Reagan to 3.9 per cent under Clinton, to two per cent under George W. Bush, to one per cent under Obama, and the Americans were not going to stand for what they feared (instinctively) would happen next under the Democrats. They were right. With Trump, working and lower-middle class earnings have risen 3.4 per cent annually, average income for female-led, single-parent homes rose 7.6 per cent, defined poverty in such households among African-American and Hispanics fell by 3.5 per cent, and the number of defined poor people declined by over five million. Illegal immigration has been reduced by 60 per cent; oil imports, which were five million barrels a day four years ago, are zero (on a net basis), and in absolute terms, China has ceased to gain in GDP on the United States, and the concept of nuclear non-proliferation has been revived in respect of Iran and North Korea (who swindled Trump’s predecessors). The United States worships success, and practices it, rather than being envious of it. The United States, by the standards of most other advanced countries, is garish and corrupt; it’s not what many Americans and most Canadians want, but it is a democracy and Americans can run their country as they please. There has never in human history been anything like the rise of America from three million colonists to overwhelming pre-eminence in the whole world in two long lifetimes (1783-1945).

Successful American presidents are never Mr. Nice Guy, though it’s a bonus when, like Franklin D. Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan, they act the part. This Ukraine nonsense is a fraudulent desperation shot by the Democrats and will blow up in their faces. Donald Trump is probably the most successful and powerful person in the world and he will steamroller this rag-tag of kooks and retreads desultorily arrayed against him. The U.S. system periodically crushes one of its parties like a waffle. FDR in 1936, Lyndon Johnson in 1964, Richard Nixon in 1972, Ronald Reagan in 1984, all won by over 20 points. The Globe and Mail can dream on like Johnny Cash’s Teenage Queen, but Trump will gain a victory on that scale next year, and like the presidents just mentioned, he will have earned it. Those who resurrect the fortunes of great nations are not groomed and sent out by casting studios, or subject to confirmation by foreign newspapers.

 

[Teddy]

副总统最近不露面了？

 

[ccc]

副总统最近不露面了？

问得好。

 

[ottawa_tj]

这位也可能成为倒霉蛋。

Trump impeachment inquiry: House Democrats subpoena secretary of state Mike Pompeo – live
Three House committees request documents related to Donald Trump’s interactions with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news...ld-trump-ukraine-live-news-latest-us-politics

副总统最近不露面了？

问得好。

Trump在昨天的记者会上说，你们还应该去问问pence的电话记录，他也和乌克兰通过一两次电话。。。。当然也是“perfect”的。。。

Pence也得避避风头。。。

https://twitter.com/girlsreallyrule/status/1176974606953078786?s=19

 

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Trump在昨天的记者会上说，你们还应该去问问pence的电话记录，他也和乌克兰通过一两次电话。。。。当然也是“perfect”的。。。

Pence也得避避风头。。。

https://twitter.com/girlsreallyrule/status/1176974606953078786?s=19

OMG, Donald Trump Is Setting Up a Real-Life Veep Scenario
"President Pelosi" could be a real possibility.
by Vivian Kane | 6:32 pm, September 25th, 2019

As Donald Trump hurls toward impeachment, he isn’t going quietly. Not only is he loudly declaring this to be unfair “PRESIDENTIAL HARRASSMENT” while also trying to milk it for as much money as he can, he’s also taking as many people down with him, whether he means to or not.

Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani has already admitted to pressuring the Ukrainian president to dig up dirt on Trump’s political opponent. Attorney General William Barr has been heavily and directly implicated in those same crimes. And now Trump has turned the focus to Vice President Mike Pence.

At the UN summit today, Trump told reporters, “I think you should ask for VP Pence’s conversation because he had a couple of conversations also.”

“I could save you a lot of time,” he continued. “They were all perfect. Nothing was mentioned of any import other than congratulations.”

Cool. Cool cool cool. I’m totally sure the House Democrats are just going to take his word for that, even though Trump also used the word “perfect” to describe his own phone call with Ukraine, and even his own doctored summary of that call showed it was far from that.

What’s really incredible about this is that no one was publicly looking into Pence’s role in this probably impeachable scandal before Trump mentioned his name, but now they definitely will be.

The worst thing about the idea of Trump’s impeachment has always been the thought of him leaving Mike Pence to take his role of president. But if Trump and Pence get taken out in this scandal, you know who becomes President? Nancy F***ing Pelosi.

If we get our first female president because the two doofuses ahead of her on the chain of command get impeached by her, that might literally be the most Veep scenario imaginable.

In addition to being a weird imagination exercise, that scenario is also not entirely without precedent. When Nixon’s Vice President Spiro Agnew resigned (also due to crimes), Nixon appointed House Minority Leader Gerald Ford to take his place. When Nixon then also resigned because he wanted to avoid impeachment, Ford became the first person to ever serve as President and VP without ever having been elected to either office.

But if both Trump and Pence were to quit/be removed together, there would be no one left to appoint a replacement, meaning Pelosi, as Speaker of the House, would take that job.

It would be weird, but it would not be the worst outcome. Not by a long shot. And it would drive Trump absolutely mad.

https://www.themarysue.com/donald-trump-president-pelosi/

 

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Harris and the other former Justice Department lawyers said they believe Giuliani has potentially exposed himself to a range of offenses — from breaking federal election laws to bribery to extortion — through his efforts to assist the Ukrainians in probing Biden, Trump’s top political opponent.

NBC News reached out to seven former colleagues of Giuliani's. Of the six who offered comments on or off the record, none defended him.

At the heart of the whistleblower's complaint is the allegation that Trump abused his power by soliciting "interference from a foreign country" in the 2020 elections — with Giuliani acting as the president’s point person in the effort.

"There’s a whole apparatus of the United State government that’s set up to deal with foreign officials and Rudy Giuliani’s not one of them," said Harris, now a lawyer in private practice in Washington D.C.

"To the extent that you could look at this as using government resources for your benefit, there are a number of crimes that this conduct would answer to."

Giuliani’s trip to Spain came one day after Trump urged Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky to probe Biden and his son Hunter, according to the whistleblower's complaint.

The president has been pushing the claim that Biden helped to force out a Ukrainian prosecutor because the man was probing a gas company that employed Hunter Biden as a consultant. The prosecutor was ousted amid calls from top officials of several Western nations over concerns he wasn’t doing enough to root out deep-seated corruption.

In addition to his trip in Spain, the whistleblower's complaint says, Giuliani had other contacts with Ukrainian officials as part of the effort to dig up dirt on Biden. Giuliani met with Ukraine’s prosecutor general on at least two occasions — in New York in January and in Warsaw, Poland in February, according to the complaint.

Bruce Fein, who worked at the Justice Department with Giuliani in the early 1980s, said he believes Giuliani could be prosecuted for breaking federal election laws.

"He was soliciting a foreign government to help Trump’s 2020 campaign. That’s a problem," said Fein, a former special assistant to the assistant attorney general for the Office of Legal Counsel under President Richard Nixon and associate deputy attorney general under President Ronald Reagan.

"Federal election laws make it illegal to solicit anything of value from a foreign government or persons to influence the outcome of an election."

Fein said Giuliani could also have opened himself up to bribery charges in connection with the president allegedly withholding military funds in order to pressure the Ukraine to launch an investigation of the Bidens.

"If Giuliani was privy to that, he could be complicit with Trump in conspiring to solicit a bribe," Fein said.

Giuliani, who has said he’s been working as an unpaid attorney for Trump, has told NBC News that he went to Spain on his own dime on a trip he described as a mix of business and pleasure. Giuliani is not listed as receiving any money from the Trump campaign, according to FEC filings.

President-elect Donald Trump and Rudy Giuliani shake hands following a meeting at Trump International Golf Club in Bedminster, N.J., on Nov. 20, 2016.Drew Angerer / Getty Images file

Reached for comment on Friday night, Giuliani scoffed at the suggestion that he had broken the law.

"Bulls--t," Giuliani texted. "They don’t know what they are talking about. What crimes."

Giuliani followed up with a phone call in which he used colorful language to defend his actions and attack his former colleagues.

He said he could not have committed bribery because he didn’t offer the Ukrainians anything of value. "Are these guys lawyers or are they morons?" Giuliani said.

Giuliani also pushed back against the claims that he tried to pressure the Ukrainians or influence the upcoming presidential election.

"I did not threaten them. I didn’t tell them what to do," Giuliani told NBC News. "I recommended that it would be a good thing to complete the investigations."

He added: "I wasn’t going there to affect the 2020 elections. I was going there to clear my client. It’s totally absurd."

Giuliani does have his defenders from his time working for the Justice Department, including Joseph diGenova, a prominent Fox News contributor.

Daniel Richman, who worked under Giuliani in the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Manhattan in the late 1980s, said he needed to see more evidence before making a conclusive determination. But he agreed that an effort to assist in a plot to withhold funds from a foreign power in exchange for a personal or political favor could expose Giuliani to criminal charges.

"An effort to use congressionally allocated funds as a club to extract a personal benefit could easily fit within some combination of fraud, extortion, and perhaps bribery statutes," said Richman, now a professor at Columbia Law School.

Other former prosecutors who worked with Giuliani raised the issue of him seemingly conducting American foreign policy in apparent violation of the Logan Act, which bars private citizens from negotiating with a foreign government on behalf of the U.S.

But no one has been convicted under the law, which dates back to 1799, and a potential case would likely be complicated by the fact that Giuliani was authorized by the president, the ex-prosecutors said.

"I’m of the view that this is probably less criminal than it is outrageous," said a former prosecutor who requested anonymity because he didn’t want to be seen as publicly criticizing his one-time colleague.

Former federal prosecutor John Flannery, who worked with Giuliani in the mid-1970s, said he was taken aback by what he described as Giuliani’s flagrant abuse of the law.

"He’s put himself in a position of aiding and abetting, and perhaps initiating, an exchange of favors with a foreign government for an American political campaign at the behest of the candidate himself," Flannery said. "Neither of them deny it, and in fact they’re profusely, repeatedly, painfully, admitting to it."

Flannery said the Giuliani of today is nothing like the man he worked with some 40 years ago. "He’s a shadow of the best Rudy he was, and he's not the great lawyer I thought he’d be," said Flannery.

While many of the former prosecutors interviewed by NBC News expressed skepticism that the Justice Department would ever charge Giuliani, Flannery said he wasn’t so sure.

"Right now, it seems like we’re looking at a system where crimes we believed to have happened will not be prosecuted." Flannery said. "But history teaches us that can turn around as quickly as the impeachment inquiry did this week."

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/ju...lleagues-believe-he-committed-crimes-n1059861

 

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https://www.theguardian.com/us-news...ld-trump-ukraine-live-news-latest-us-politics

 

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Kurt Volker, the US special envoy for Ukraine, has resigned, according to a US official, becoming the first casualty in the rapidly growing impeachment crisis surrounding Donald Trump.

Volker was due to appear before the congressional committees next week and was mentioned in the whistleblower complaint as helping Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelenskiy “navigate” Trump’s demands.

The news, first reported in an Arizona student newspaper, the State Press, emerged late on Friday, hours after Congress issued a subpoena to the US secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, to hand over documents related to contacts the president and his lawyer had with the Ukrainian government.

It emerged this week that Volker had helped organise a meeting between Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, and a Ukraine presidential aide. Giuliani was trying to convince Zelenskiy’s government to investigate the son of Joe Biden, Trump’s possible opponent in next year’s elections.

With impeachment proceedings against Trump under way, further reports emerged of White House efforts to limit access to transcripts of conversations with other countries. Trump’s phone calls with Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman and Russian president Vladimir Putin were also tightly restricted, according to former administration officials quoted by CNN and the New York Times.

The Washington Post reported that further restrictions were placed on details from a 2017 meeting between Trump, Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov and ambassador Sergei Kislyak, in which Trump is reported to have said he was not bothered by Moscow interference in the 2016 election because the US did the same kind of thing in other countries. The White House limited access to the remarks to “an unusually small number of people”, the Post said, after speaking to three former officials. The president had already been accused of sharing highly sensitive information on Islamic State during the meeting.

Earlier on Friday, in a congressional letter delivered to Pompeo, three House committees demanded documents as part of their investigation into “the extent to which President Trump jeopardised national security by pressing Ukraine to interfere with our 2020 election and by withholding security assistance provided by Congress to help Ukraine counter Russian aggression”.

The chairmen of the intelligence, foreign affairs and oversight committees also warned Pompeo that “your failure or refusal to comply with the subpoena shall constitute evidence of obstruction of the House’s impeachment inquiry”.

The committees sent a separate note to Pompeo notifying him of a rapid schedule of depositions they expected to hold with five state department officials involved in contacts with Ukraine. The list begins next Wednesday with the former ambassador, Marie Yovanovitch, who was forced to retire from the post in May, earlier than planned.

Trump, according to the White House version of his 25 July conversation with Zelenskiy, was scathing about Yovanovitch, referring to her as “the woman” who was “bad news”, and who was “going to go through some things”.

Volker is due to appear on 3 October, the day after Yovanovitch’s scheduled deposition. Giuliani has publicly displayed text messages purportedly from Volker, about a meeting had helped arrange with a Zelenskiy aide.

Giuliani was seeking to persuade the Kyiv government to investigate Hunter Biden, the son of former vice-president Joe Biden, Trump’s possible Democratic opponent in next year’s presidential election.

Giuliani himself again came under the spotlight on Friday when it emerged he had accepted a paid slot to speak at a Moscow-backed conference next week that Putin is expected to attend. The appearance was promptly cancelled after a report by the Washington Post.

The younger Biden had been on the board of an Ukrainian energy company, but an Ukrainian investigation found no evidence of impropriety.

Shortly before making the call to Zelenskiy in July, to press him further on investigating Biden, Trump ordered the suspension of US military aid to Ukraine.

Speaking to reporters on Thursday, Pompeo claimed to have been too busy to read more than a couple paragraphs of the whistleblower complaint about Trump’s behaviour towards Ukraine, and insisted that no state department official had done anything appropriate.

In their letter to Pompeo, the three committee chairman, noted that he had first been asked to hand over relevant documentation on 9 September, but had not complied.

“Your actions are all the more troubling given that since our 9 September request, it has become clear that multiple state department officials have direct knowledge of the subject matters of the House’s impeachment inquiry,” the chairmen – Democrats Eliot Engel, Adam Schiff and Elijah Cummings – said.

Pompeo’s continued refusal to hand over the documents, they added, would impair Congress’s “constitutional responsibilities to protect our national security and the integrity of our democracy”.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/sep/27/mike-pompeo-subpoena-documents-trump-Ukraine


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https://www.cnn.com/politics/live-news/whistleblower-impeachment-inquiry-09-27-2019/index.html

 

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(CNN) It's always a challenge to understand why Donald Trump says and does things. He is a hugely impulsive figure who often acts on a whim. There is no long-term strategy that informs his daily tactical decisions -- just Trump, well, doing stuff.

But even by that haphazard standard, the President's decision this week to release a rough transcript of his July 25 conversation with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky makes zero political sense -- either in the moment he did it or in the after-action report.

The rough log of the call makes quite clear to any fair-minded person that Trump did the following things:

1) Repeatedly reminded Zelensky of how much the United States does (and can do) for Ukraine.

2) Asked Zelensky to investigate debunked allegations of corrupt activity by Joe Biden and his son, Hunter, in Ukraine

3) Said he would put Attorney General William Barr and former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani in touch with Zelensky to follow up about the Biden probe.

That's not an interpretation of what Trump said or a second-hand account of the call. It is an, admittedly rough, transcript released (and presumably blessed) by the White House. In which the President of the United States says things like "I will say that we do a lot for Ukraine. We spend a lot of effort and a lot of time" and "Biden went around bragging that he stopped the prosecution so if you can look into it ... It sounds horrible to me." (There is no evidence of wrongdoing by either Joe or Hunter Biden.)

That we have the President's actual words here -- undisputed -- makes this whole matter so, so much worse for Trump.
Remember that in the Mueller probe into Russian interference in the 2016 election and Trump's possible role in obstructing that investigation, we never had a transcript of, say, the conversation between the President and then-FBI Director James Comey in which Comey alleges Trump asked him to drop the investigation into Michael Flynn. Or of Trump's conversation with Corey Lewandowski, in which the President told his former campaign manager to tell Attorney General Jeff Sessions to un-recuse himself in the probe.

We also don't have a transcript of Trump referring to Haiti and African nations as "[s-hole] countries." Or of the full conversations between Trump and his former lawyer, Michael Cohen, as they discussed the hush money payments made to Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal. Or lots and lots of other controversies and alleged conversations -- big and small -- that have sprouted up during Trump's first three years in office.

That's not this. In this case, we have the receipts -- even if what was released by the White House was not a full transcript but rather a sort of rough memo documenting the conversation between Trump and Zelensky. It's a primary source document that, uh, documents a clear use of pressure by Trump to get Zelensky to do what he wants.

As he often does, Trump has doubled/tripled/quadrupled down on his initial mistake.

"'IT WAS A PERFECT CONVERSATION WITH UKRAINE PRESIDENT!'" Trump tweeted Friday morning -- apparently quoting himself and in ALL CAPS, no less! Later on Friday, he added: "If that perfect phone call with the President of Ukraine Isn't considered appropriate, then no future President can EVER again speak to another foreign leader!"

The number of tweets -- and the amount of defensiveness contained therein -- would suggest to even the most armchair of psychologists that the President might well be overcompensating for something he now realizes he very, very much should not have done.

As I wrote when the Ukraine call was initially released, it reads pretty close to a smoking gun that Trump used the power of his office to further his own personal, political interests. (If you are arguing that Trump didn't say the words "quid pro quo" so, therefore, he is in the clear, well, OK.)

Whether Trump's decision to release the transcript was driven by his blindness to how it would read or his conviction that he did everything absolutely perfectly -- or both -- is sort of beside the point now. The genie is out of the bottle. And that reality is incredibly perilous for the President.

https://www.cnn.com/2019/09/27/politics/donald-trump-ukraine-transcript/index.html

 

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WASHINGTON -- House Democrats took their first concrete steps in the impeachment investigation of U.S. President Donald Trump on Friday, issuing subpoenas demanding documents from Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and scheduling legal depositions for other State Department officials.

At the end of a stormy week of revelation and recrimination, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi framed the impeachment inquiry as a sombre moment for a divided nation.

"This is no cause for any joy," she said on MSNBC.

At the White House, a senior administration official confirmed a key detail from the unidentified CIA whistleblower who has accused Trump of abusing the power of his office. Trump, for his part, insisted anew that his actions and words have been "perfect" and the whistleblower's complaint might well be the work of "a partisan operative."

The White House acknowledged that a record of the Trump phone call that is now at the centre of the impeachment inquiry had been sealed away in a highly classified system at the direction of Trump's National Security Council lawyers.

Separately, Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway told reporters that the whistleblower "has protection under the law," something Trump himself had appeared to question earlier in the day. He suggested then that his accuser "isn't a whistleblower at all."

Still at issue is why the rough transcript of Trump's July 25 phone call with Ukraine's president was put on "lock down," in the words of the whistleblower. The CIA officer said that diverting the record in an unusual way was evidence that "White House officials understood the gravity of what had transpired" in the conversation.

The whistleblower complaint alleges that Trump used his office to "solicit interference from a foreign country" to help himself in next year's U.S. election. In the phone call, days after ordering a freeze to some military assistance for Ukraine, Trump prodded new Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy to dig for potentially damaging material on Democratic rival Joe Biden and volunteered the assistance of both his personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, and U.S. Attorney General William Barr.

Pelosi refused to set a deadline for the probe but promised to act "expeditiously." The House intelligence committee could draw members back to Washington next week.

Pelosi said she was praying for the president, adding, "I would say to Democrats and Republicans: We have to put country before party."

At the White House, it was a senior administration official who acknowledged that the rough transcript of Trump's conversation with Ukraine's Zelenskiy had been moved to a highly classified system maintained by the National Security Council. The official was granted anonymity Friday to discuss sensitive matters.

White House attorneys had been made aware of concerns about Trump's comments on the call even before the whistleblower sent his allegations to the intelligence community's inspector general. Those allegations, made in mid-August, were released Thursday under heavy pressure from House Democrats.

All the while, Trump was keeping up his full-bore attack on the whistleblower and the unnamed "White House officials" cited in the complaint, drawing a warning from Pelosi against retaliation.

Late Thursday, Trump denounced people who might have talked to the whistleblower as "close to a spy" and suggested they engaged in treason, an act punishable by death. Then on Friday, he said the person was "sounding more and more like the so-called Whistleblower isn't a Whistleblower at all."

He also alleged without evidence that information in the complaint has been "proved to be so inaccurate."

Pelosi told MSNBC, "I'm concerned about some of the president's comments about the whistleblower."

She said the House panels conducting the impeachment probe will make sure there's no retaliation against people who provided information in the case. On Thursday, House Democratic chairmen called Trump's comments "witness intimidation" and suggested efforts by him to interfere with the potential witness could be unlawful.

Rep. Joaquin Castro, D-Texas, a member of the intelligence committee, said the president calling whistleblowers spies is "obscene ... just grotesque."

"If you ask me, I'd like to hear from everybody that was mentioned in that whistleblowers report. I like to hear from Rudy Giuliani, from the attorney general. I think Mike Pompeo has explaining to do as well as the State Department."

Trump's Friday comment questioning the whistleblower's status seemed to foreshadow a possible effort to argue that legal protection laws don't apply to the person, opening a new front in the president's defence, but Conway's statement seemed to make that less likely.
The intelligence community's inspector general found the whistleblower's complaint "credible" despite finding indications of the person's support for a different political candidate.

Legal experts said that by following proper procedures and filing a complaint with the government rather than disclosing the information to the media, the person is without question regarded as a whistleblower entitled to protections against being fired or criminally prosecuted.

"This person clearly followed the exact path he was supposed to follow," said Debra D'Agostino, a lawyer who represents whistleblowers. "There is no basis for not calling this person a whistleblower."

Lawyers say it also doesn't matter for the purposes of being treated as a whistleblower if all of the allegations are borne out as entirely true, or even if political motives or partisanship did factor into the decision to come forward.

Giuliani, already in the spotlight, was scheduled to appear at a Kremlin-backed conference in Armenia on Tuesday, but he said Friday he would not be attending. The agenda showed him speaking at a session on digital financial technologies. Russian President Vladimir Putin also was scheduled to participate in the conference.

Republicans were straining under the uncertainty of being swept up in the most serious test yet of their alliance with the Trump White House.

"We owe people to take it seriously," said Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., a onetime Trump rival who is now a member of the intelligence committee.

"Right now, I have more questions than answers," he said. "The complaint raises serious allegations, and we need to determine whether they're credible or not."

A swift resolution to the impeachment inquiry may not be easy. The intelligence committee is diving in just as lawmakers leave Washington for a two-week recess, with the panel expected to work while away. One person familiar with the committee's schedule said that members might return at the end of next week.

Findings will eventually need to be turned over to Rep. Jerrold Nadler's Judiciary Committee, which is compiling the work of five other panels into what is expected to be articles of impeachment. The panel will need to find consensus.

Meanwhile, Trump's reelection campaign took to accusing Democrats of trying to "steal" the 2020 election in a new ad airing in a $10 million television and digital buy next week.

The ad also attacks Democrat Biden, highlighting his efforts as vice-president to make U.S. aid to Ukraine contingent on that country firing a prosecutor believed to be corrupt. The ad claims that the fired prosecutor was investigating the former vice-president's son.

In fact, the prosecutor had failed to pursue any major anti-corruption investigations, leaving Ukraine's international donors deeply frustrated. In pressing for the prosecutor's ouster, Biden was representing the official position of the U.S. government, which was shared by other Western allies and many in Ukraine.


https://www.ctvnews.ca/world/subpoenas-mark-first-concrete-steps-for-trump-impeachment-1.4613198

 

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https://www.cnn.com/politics/live-news/whistleblower-impeachment-inquiry-09-27-2019/index.html

 

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特朗普总统应该被弹劾。但这种可能性使我恐惧，也应该使你恐惧。

不是说弹劾是错误之举。按理说，这是唯一该做的，至少从对宪法的忠诚、以及基本的行为准则角度而言。从特朗普踏入总统办公室那一刻起，他就一直在侮辱这个重要职务——用一位总统无权用的语言（或无权用的推文）；用无休止的谎言；用幼稚且常常精神错乱的行为；用严重的利益冲突；用管理上的无能；用永远无法满足的贪婪自负；以及用有损美国价值观、独立性和利益的国外交易。坚持原则的立法者们怎能不用他们可使用的最强有力的方式告诉他，该适可而止了？

但在正式启动弹劾调查之际，人们现在绝对无法知道将发生什么。一丁点都不知道。你会在未来几天和几周里听到很多关于比尔·克林顿(Bill Clinton)的话题，但用克林顿1998年底遭弹劾的例子说事儿有点荒唐：他是一位非常不同的总统，他在一个非常不同的年代被指控犯有非常不同的罪名。此外，引用那次弹劾的政治分析人士对弹劾的教训没有一致意见。因此，一名对弹劾特朗普将带来的政治后果自信地做预测的权威，也是一名处于极其危险境地的权威。

任何情形都有可能，包括弹劾会对特朗普的利益有好处，从而增加他的连任可能，因为他将把自己装扮成受难者，躲避参议院的定罪，把那说成是宣布他无罪，然后看着自己的粉丝们行动起来，出来投他票的人数比以往任何时候都多。第二个特朗普任期也不只会是高尚立场的可悲次优副产品，那还会是一场灾难。无论在道德层面还是实际层面，限制这个不称职、不道德、不稳定之人的总统任期比几个世纪前所写的任何一小串句子都重要。

但是，虽然弹劾对2020年11月的影响无法知道，弹劾对我们国家造成的影响却几乎可以肯定。一个两极分化到了危险程度、对自己党派的支持到了常常是恶劣的程度的国家会愈演愈烈，处在对立面的人们会对自己阵营的观点更坚持不懈，更执着于自己选择的叙事，而只关心自己的总统将继续加强他的真理本身是主观的、是供人争夺的固执主张。

这不是要失败的理由，而是要接受的现实。在我们如此迫切地需要重新找到共同点的时刻，我们会进一步扩大对立双方的距离。在此之后将国家团结起来需要的不止是一位天才政治家，还需要能创造奇迹的人。还没有哪一位民主党总统候选人够得上这个水平。

弹劾应该使你恐惧，因为它将意味着把特朗普的目无法纪、荒唐行为、虚构的故事和愚蠢的推文作为持续的、无休止的、铺天盖地的焦点。他在短期内会赢——全体美国人则会输——因为只要华盛顿的大部分功夫都耗在这个推销手令人作呕的狂欢上，可用来解决国家的真正问题、审查他在解决这些问题上的严重不胜任的时间就少之又少。

从众议院共和党人对希拉里·克林顿(Hillary Clinton)的迫害，到众议院民主党人在特朗普治下没完没了的歇斯底里，华盛顿已比以往任何时候都更严重地退化，成为了一个程序取代进展、哗众取宠胜于治理、噪音盖过任何有意义的信息的地方。参与政治就是参与战斗——这不应当也不必总是如此。

我们已经——噢——晚实施四分之一世纪的基础设施计划哪去儿了？医疗保健体系问题的解决方案又在哪里？这些问题影响的远不止数千万仍无医保的美国人。教育的问题呢？弹劾会把所有这些问题推到比它们现在已经处在的位置更边缘的地方。

在民主党初选及随后的大选中，特朗普夸大表演和特朗普奇观会让所有别的东西黯然失色。而许多美国人与华盛顿的隔阂——以及他们对政府是否能改善他们的生活哪怕一丁点的愤世嫉俗态度——会不断加剧。

由于人们的困惑，这尤其是再真实不过了。如果你对特朗普有好感，并且乐于接受他称自己受迫害的断言，看过罗伯特·穆勒(Robert Mueller)周密且花了很长时间的调查，注意到国会大厦似乎无休止地安排的听证会和明星证人（迈克尔·科恩[Michael Cohen]、穆勒、比尔·巴尔[Bill Barr]、科里·莱万多夫斯基[Corey Lewandowski]），而且你以为众议员司法委员会(House Judiciary Committee)已经在展开弹劾调查。这些最新事态于你就像是波托马克河上的《土拨鼠之日》(Groundhog Day)。

如果特朗普让你感到深受冒犯，而且把你搞得彻底筋疲力尽，你会把弹劾当作等待已久的正义和你所企盼的获释感而忍不住欢呼雀跃，忘记了这不过是重头戏——参议院的弹劾审理——的前奏。参议院也是由共和党人控制的，从目前的情形看，他们给特朗普定罪的可能性与联名支持伊丽莎白·沃伦(Elizabeth Warren)的财富税法案的可能性不相上下。于是到头来，特朗普的支持者会对他被迫经历在他们看来是已有预料的必然结局的过分做法而愤怒不已，而特朗普批评者的挫败感则会指数式增长。让我们开始愈合创伤吧！

再者，弹劾程序能有效地揭露——并迫使美国人关注——特朗普那些被忽视的罪恶吗？这长期以来一直是民主党人主张弹劾的一个理由，但我有点怀疑。首先，迄今为止的一些听证会——尤其是莱万多夫斯基的——让人有疑问，这些听证会是否有能力从证人那里挖出想要得到的东西，并从听证会上尖刻的言论中找出确凿的证据。但还不止于此，对特朗普的报道已经太过饱和，以至于许多选民也许不想再看更多的，而且当今的部落政治也不允许有那么多的顿悟和转变。特朗普的本色从一开始就显而易见。你要么看见一道反常的彩虹，要么凝视着黑暗。

同时还有特朗普本人。漫长的弹劾程序将让他感到多脆弱？多无能为力？多绝望？为显示他的权力、发泄他的愤怒，或者转移人们的注意力，他会怎么做？他不受任何顾虑的牵制。他能干出任何事情。也许他会挑起的不只是一场文化战。也许那会是一场真刀实枪的战争。

当然，他会尽他所能让美国人相信民主党人的邪恶，而他的策略绝对会是把各种各样的反对他的人、程序和机构诽谤为完全不值得信任。如果抓住权力不放意味着统治一片废墟的话，那就这样吧。特朗普只对特朗普心存感激，他只会简单地把废墟宣称为金粉。

https://cn.nytimes.com/opinion/20190927/trump-impeachment-/