Impeachment Inquiry

[fraurosena]

Could this be a sign that the GOP is slowly but surely reconsidering their support for Trump? One can but hope.

 

[Alisamer]

1 hour ago, fraurosena said:

But no, there are not enough of them to make a difference in the elections. So no need to worry on that account.

I'm not so sure.

I know a TON of people like that. Like the majority of people I know over 50. I think it's dangerous to discount the working class, largely rural population of people who only vote in presidential years, get all their news info from the half hour of Fox news they watch in the evening after working a long hard day (plus what they see on Facebook), and who distrust ALL politicians - but don't think of Trump as a politician. They have little if any post high school education, and they look at highly educated people with a touch of suspicion, expecting them to be snobby and elitist. They think most celebrities are air headed and out of touch, and should stick to doing their jobs of entertaining people and keep their mouths shut about politics. Many of them think "millennials" are lazy and entitled, and that democrats are encouraging and enabling that entitlement. They believe the myths of the "welfare queen", and as they are often struggling themselves they resent seeing people get help they either don't quite qualify for or are too proud to ask for. Some of them resent "city folk". Some of them who work manual labor jobs resent people who "sit on their asses all day and don't know how to work". They usually consider themselves Christian, even the ones who haven't darkened the doorway of a church in decades.

There are a lot of these people. A vast majority of them vote republican.

They are often in more rural areas, outside cities and more densely populated places.

And due to the electoral college, these people's votes count MORE than "city people's" votes. 

I really think that's a big part of how Trump got elected. The crazies, white supremacists, racists and others contributed, but I think it was the average rural blue-collar worker who considers himself conservative who really provided most of the votes.

 

[fraurosena]

Good. They really are not messing around anymore.

 

[fraurosena]

5 minutes ago, Alisamer said:

I really think that's a big part of how Trump got elected. The crazies, white supremacists, racists and others contributed, but I think it was the average rural blue-collar worker who considers himself conservative who really provided most of the votes.

Yes this is quite probably true. But are they diehard Trumpers, or are they simply conservatives who vote R no matter who the candidate is? 

Please don't think I'm trying to discount your experience with the Trumpers though. I'm not even an American, so what do I really know? It's just my belief in humanity, that not everybody is a stupid raging idiot who ignores facts just because they don't want to know. I think the average R voter isn't a Trumper per se. Misguided and ignorant? Yes, most definitely. But not a diehard Trumper.

What everybody is also forgetting, is that Hillary Clinton got more votes than Trump did. There are more people who don't want Trump in the Oval Office than there are who want him there. And if the voters who voted for him for reasons other than Trumpism were to vote now, I'm quite sure that a lot of them wouldn't vote for him again, tipping the scales to a Democrat winning again, and in the electoral college as well.

I think Americans shouldn't focus their anxiety on the Trump-or-die voters. If I were an American, I'd be worried sick about hacking, voter suppression and rampant cheating at elections. If nothing is done about that, then a second Republican term is a definite possibility. And if that happens, Democracy will be dead and gone.

That is more my worry than the number of Trump voters. I don't think Trump will last out this year, so their opinion is moot.

 

[Alisamer]

36 minutes ago, fraurosena said:

Yes this is quite probably true. But are they diehard Trumpers, or are they simply conservatives who vote R no matter who the candidate is? 

Mostly they are simply conservatives who will vote R no matter who it is. A surprising number of them who normally just show up once every four years and vote R, however, were much more excited about Trump for some reason. Some of them became diehard, but a lot of them aren't. But even many of the non-diehards actually LIKE Trump, when they didn't much care, before.

So if Trump does manage to scrape through to the election, he's still going to get most of those votes. Some of them have wised up, but a lot of them just don't seem to see what he really is. I just hope enough "never Hillary" people are willing to vote for whichever Democrat runs to make up the electoral college difference.

Quote

I don't think Trump will last out this year, so their opinion is moot.

I really, really, really hope and pray you are right!

I  think a lot of what I'm posting came from that conversation today. They just don't understand, don't care to understand, and are unwilling or unable to put themselves in anyone else's place - anyone worse off, anyway. They can imagine themselves being super wealthy and not wanting to pay higher taxes all day. The whole situation made me feel a little ill. And worried. I had thought the current outright treason going on was pretty obvious, but it's not. Not at all. Not to them. 

[fraurosena]

Sweet, everloving, deerest deer Rufus! The son of a deceased Deutsche Bank exec has been secretly aiding the FBI and House Intelligence Committee investigations with a shit ton of confidential bank files.

Buckle up everyone, this is explosive.

Me and My Whistle-Blower

Quote

One sunny Wednesday in February, a gangly man in a sports jacket and a partly unbuttoned paisley shirt walked into the Los Angeles field office of the F.B.I. At the reception desk, he gave his name — Val Broeksmit — and began to pace anxiously in the lobby.

Mr. Broeksmit couldn’t believe he was voluntarily meeting with the F.B.I. An unemployed rock musician with a history of opioid abuse and credit card theft, not to mention a dalliance with North Korea-linked hackers, he was accustomed to shunning if not fearing law enforcement. But two investigators had flown from the bureau’s New York office specifically to speak with him, and Mr. Broeksmit had found their invitation too seductive to resist. Now the agents arrived in the lobby and escorted him upstairs.

They wanted to talk about Deutsche Bank — one of the world’s largest and most troubled financial institutions, and the bank of choice to the president of the United States. Mr. Broeksmit’s late father, Bill, had been a senior executive there, and his son possessed a cache of confidential bank documents that provided a tantalizing glimpse of its internal workings. Some of the documents were password-protected, and there was no telling what secrets they held or how explosive they could be.

Federal and state authorities were swarming around Deutsche Bank. Some of the scrutiny centered on the lender’s two-decade relationship with President Trump and his family. Other areas of focus grew out of Deutsche Bank’s long history of criminal misconduct: manipulating markets, evading taxes, bribing foreign officials, violating international sanctions, defrauding customers, laundering money for Russian billionaires.

In a windowless conference room, one of the agents pressed Mr. Broeksmit, 43, to hand over his files. “You’re holding documents that only people within the inner circle of Deutsche would ever see,” he said.

“Clearly, things went on in Deutsche Bank which weren’t kosher,” added the second agent. “What we’re up against is, all those bad acts are being pushed down on the little people on the bottom.”

“The low-hanging fruit,” said the first agent.

“And the larger bank in its entirety is claiming ignorance and that it’s one bad player,” said his partner. “But we know what we’ve seen. It’s a culture of just — ”

“Fraud and dirt,” Mr. Broeksmit interjected. Already, he was warming to the idea of having a cameo in a high-stakes F.B.I. investigation. He spent the next three hours vaping, munching on raspberry-flavored fig bars and telling his story, entranced by the idea of helping the investigators go after executives high up the Deutsche Bank food chain. (Deutsche Bank has said it is cooperating with authorities in a number of investigations.)

When he finally emerged from the Los Angeles field office, Mr. Broeksmit got into a Lyft and called me. His adrenaline, I could tell, was still pumping; he was talking so fast he had to stop to catch his breath.

“I am more emotionally invested in this than anyone in the world,” he said. “I would love to be their special informer.”

The next great American whistle-blower

Here’s the thing about whistle-blowers: They tend to be flawed messengers. Daniel Ellsberg, Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden — each of them was dismissed as selfish, damaged, reckless and crazy. Yet all of them, regardless of motivation, used secret documents to change the course of history.

For more than five years, Val Broeksmit has been dangling his Deutsche Bank files in front of journalists and government investigators, dreaming of becoming the next great American whistle-blower. He wants to expose what he sees as corporate wrongdoing, give some meaning to his father’s death — and maybe get famous along the way. Inside newsrooms and investigative bodies around the world, Mr. Broeksmit’s documents have become something of an open secret, and so are the psychological strings that come attached. I pulled them more than anyone, as part of my reporting on Deutsche Bank for The New York Times and for a book, “Dark Towers,” to be published next year. It has been the most intense source relationship of my career.

An endless procession of bank executives and friends of the Broeksmit family have warned me that Mr. Broeksmit is not to be trusted, and, well, they might have a point. His drug use has sent him reeling between manias and stupors. He has a maddening habit of leaping to outrageous conclusions and then bending facts to fit far-fetched theories. He fantasizes about seeing his story told by Hollywood, and I sometimes wonder whether he’s manipulating me to achieve that ambition. He can be impatient, erratic and abusive. A few days ago, irate that he was not named in a blurb for my book on Amazon, among other perceived slights, he sent me a string of texts claiming that he’d taken out a brokerage account in my name and traded on secret information I’d supposedly fed him. (This is not true.) A little later, he left me a voice mail message saying it was all a joke.

Why do I put up with this? Because his trove of corporate emails, financial materials, boardroom presentations and legal reports is credible — even if he is not. (In this article, every detail not directly attributed to Mr. Broeksmit has been corroborated by documents, recordings or an independent source.) Besides, there’s something uncanny about how Mr. Broeksmit’s fearlessness and addiction to drama have led him, again and again, to the center of the news. In addition to Deutsche Bank’s troubles, he has figured into North Korea’s hack of Sony Pictures, the collapse of the world’s oldest bank and the House Intelligence Committee’s ongoing investigation into Mr. Trump.

We might wish our whistle-blowers were stoic, unimpeachable do-gooders. In reality, to let you in on a journalistic secret, they’re often more like Val Broeksmit.

‘Please don’t tell anyone where you’re getting this’

On a drizzly Sunday in London in January 2014, Bill Broeksmit cinched his dog’s red leash around his neck, slung it over a door and lunged forward. He was 58.

The elder Broeksmit was widely known as the unofficial conscience of Deutsche Bank and a longtime confidant of the company’s chief executive, and his death shocked the financial world. I was a reporter in The Wall Street Journal’s London bureau, and there were rumors that Mr. Broeksmit’s suicide was connected to his work — that he regretted what he’d seen and done. My colleagues and I divvied up the unpleasant task of contacting his family, and I got Val. He was easy to track down: His band, Bikini Robot Army, had a website with his email address.

When I reached him, he was in New York for his father’s funeral, and at first he asked me to leave his family alone. “Everyone is very sad and grieving right now,” he wrote. But before long he was on the phone — angry, slurring his speech, insisting without evidence that he knew why his father had killed himself and that it had nothing to do with Deutsche Bank. Over the next several months, we kept in sporadic touch as Mr. Broeksmit bounced between rehab facilities in Florida and California, trying to beat an opioid addiction and teasing me with provocative messages. (He is open about his struggles with substance abuse.) He would say things like “I think I know what happened” and then never follow up; once, apropos of nothing, he sent a picture of a San Francisco building on fire.

Finally, on a Tuesday in July 2014, he emailed me a single line: “Are you still looking into deutsche?”

The evening after his father died, Mr. Broeksmit had found the passwords to his email accounts. Now, he told me that he had discovered hundreds of messages related to Deutsche Bank. Mr. Broeksmit asked if I could help him sift through and decipher them, and I suggested a list of search terms: things like “subpoena” and “DOJ,” for the Department of Justice.

He soon forwarded an item with a number of those keywords. “Don’t know what it means,” he said. I started skimming: It was a detailed letter to Deutsche Bank from a senior official at the New York arm of the Federal Reserve, who was furious with the bank for its slipshod accounting. Trying to contain my excitement, I asked if I could write about the document. I braced for a negotiation, but all Mr. Broeksmit said was, “That’s cool. Please don’t tell anyone where you’re getting this info.” (He has since released me from that promise.)

Four days later, I published an article describing the Fed’s concerns. The bank’s shares fell 3 percent. Mr. Broeksmit told me he felt empowered by having dented Deutsche’s market value by more than $1 billion.

Val Broeksmit vs. David Boies

What makes a person crave the attention of journalists? Consider where Val Broeksmit comes from.

He was born in Ukraine in 1976, and his parents, Alla and Alexander, emigrated to Chicago three years later. Their marriage collapsed; Val and his father landed in a homeless shelter; and in 1982, Cook County took custody of the boy, placing the frightened 6-year-old in a foster home.

Meanwhile, Alla met and married Bill Broeksmit, who was then an up-and-coming banker. They moved to New Jersey and eventually extracted Val, then 9, from the foster care system. Bill adopted him — an angry, impulsive child with a strong anti-authority streak. A caseworker who visited the family noted that he insisted on calling his parents by their first names.

Val’s friends told me that he acted out through his boarding school and college years, compensating for what he described as his parents’ icy detachment. He was the guy trying to keep the party going with a little coke at 3 a.m., cajoling girls to make out with each other, stealing expensive gear from his college’s music department. (Mr. Broeksmit acknowledges all of this.) He wanted to be the center of attention, to prove that he mattered. That’s part of the reason he became a rocker — “It’s less lonely with an audience,” he once told me — but Bikini Robot Army never hit it big. When his father died and Mr. Broeksmit came into possession of his documents, he finally had an opportunity to make the world pay attention.

After his initial leak to me in the summer of 2014, Mr. Broeksmit started seeking out other big stories. Late that year, a group of North Korea-linked hackers, calling themselves the Guardians of Peace, penetrated the computer systems of Sony Pictures. When the hack became public, Mr. Broeksmit followed a bread crumb trail of links until he eventually came across an email address for the hackers.

“I’m interesting in joining your GOP, but I’m afraid my computer skills are sophomoric at best,” Mr. Broeksmit emailed the Guardians of Peace. (Typo his.) “If I can help in any other facility please let me know.” He doubted the hackers would reply, but an email soon arrived with a primer on how to access Sony’s stolen materials. As he waited for the hundreds of gigabytes to download, he sent another email. “Hey, you guys ever thought about going after Deutsche Bank?” he wrote. “Tons of evidence on their servers of worldwide fraud.” The hackers didn’t respond.

Mr. Broeksmit, leaning into his new persona as an exposer of corporate secrets, took to Twitter to post embarrassing Sony files: deliberations over who might direct a remake of “Cleopatra”; Brad Pitt freaking out about the edit of “Fury.” He wasn’t the only one airing Sony’s laundry, but his prolific postings set him apart.

David Boies — Sony’s attorney and arguably the most famous lawyer in America — sent Twitter a letter demanding that it shut down Mr. Broeksmit’s account. Another letter, from a Sony executive, warned Mr. Broeksmit that Sony would “hold you responsible for any damage or loss” stemming from the materials he had published. A few days before Christmas, a colleague and I published an article about the huge corporation and its powerful lawyer threatening this random musician.

For the first time, Mr. Broeksmit was in the public spotlight. Soon he was on the Fox Business channel. “It seems like somebody’s trying to make you the fall guy, doesn’t it, Mr. Broeksmit?” an anchor asked. The lesson was clear: The media had ravenous appetites for documents that exposed the guts of giant corporations. It even seemed virtuous to share juicy material. And Mr. Broeksmit had plenty of that.

‘I am eternally sorry and condemned’

Spelunking through his Deutsche files, Mr. Broeksmit encountered detailed information about what was going on deep inside the bank. There were minutes of board meetings. Financial plans. Indecipherable spreadsheets. Password-protected presentations. And evidence of his father’s misery.

Here was the elder Broeksmit scolding his colleagues for not taking the Fed’s annual “stress tests” seriously. Here he was, in the months before his suicide, pushing executives to deal with the American division’s alarming staff shortages. Here he was talking to a criminal defense lawyer.

Mr. Broeksmit concluded that all this might help explain why his father had hanged himself. He told his therapist, an addiction specialist named Larry Meltzer, that he was on a quest to understand the suicide. Mr. Meltzer told me that he encouraged the inquiry. He also persuaded Alla Broeksmit to increase her son’s monthly stipend from $300 to $2,500.

Figuring that more information about his father’s death might be lodged in Alla’s email accounts, Mr. Broeksmit consulted some online tutorials and broke into her Gmail. Inside, he found an extraordinary demonstration of corporations’ power to control what the public knows.

In his mother’s inbox was a scan of the elder Broeksmit’s suicide note to Anshu Jain, at the time the co-chief executive of Deutsche Bank. It was four sentences, handwritten in black ink on white printer paper.

Anshu,

You were so good to me and I have repaid you with carelessness. I betrayed your trust and hid my horrible nature from you. I can’t even begin to fathom the damage I have done.

I am eternally sorry and condemned.

Bill

Mr. Broeksmit could feel his father’s anguish. It left him in tears — and baffled. Why had his father been sorry? When had he ever been careless? How had he damaged the bank?

Mr. Broeksmit read on. He learned that his father had once looked into the conduct of some Deutsche Bank traders and concluded — mistakenly — that nothing was amiss. It turned out the traders were manipulating a benchmark known as Libor. The elder Broeksmit feared he could become a target of government investigators because he had failed to detect the fraud; spiraling, he consulted his physician and a psychologist.

Those doctors wrote to the coroner investigating Mr. Broeksmit’s suicide. One described the banker as having been “extremely anxious” over the Libor affair. The other added: “He was catastrophising, imagining worst case outcomes including prosecution, loss of his wealth and reputation.”

The coroner, Fiona Wilcox, scheduled a public hearing to discuss her findings. She intended to read aloud from the doctors’ letters. But on the morning of the inquest, at the courthouse, lawyers that Deutsche Bank had hired for the Broeksmit family took her aside and urged her not to do so in order to protect the family’s privacy.

Ms. Wilcox, who declined to comment, acquiesced. Nearly everything about Mr. Broeksmit’s specific anxieties was expunged. Where the psychologist had written that his patient imagined prosecution, the words were crossed out and replaced with “He imagined various issues.” The physician had originally described Mr. Broeksmit’s worry “about going to prison or going bankrupt even though he knew he was innocent. He kept on thinking back over all the thousands of emails he had sent over the years. He knew how lawyers can twist things round.” It was replaced with: “He told me he had been extremely anxious.” All of this — the originals, and the whitewashed version — had been emailed to Alla Broeksmit. Now they were in her son’s hands.

Dinner with Moby

Mr. Broeksmit’s antics escalated. He fished his mother’s American Express details out of her email and bought laptops, a plane ticket to Paris, rooms in luxury hotels. He told friends he was investigating his father’s death, but I wondered if he just wanted to tell people (and himself) that he was on a noble mission. At one point, Mr. Broeksmit filled out a form on the Justice Department’s website: “I’m writing in hopes of speaking to someone at the DOJ in reference to the evidence I have showing major fraud at one of the world’s largest banks.” He got a note that his message had been passed to the F.B.I.’s New York field office, but no other acknowledgment.

Ms. Broeksmit eventually wised up to her son’s credit card theft, and by the end of 2016, he was running low on cash. (In a brief phone call last year, she told me that Mr. Broeksmit “is completely ostracized from the family.”) Word spread in journalism circles that the son of a dead Deutsche Bank executive had access to revelatory materials. In Rome on New Year’s Eve of 2016, Mr. Broeksmit shared the files with a reporter for the Financial Times, periodically excusing himself to snort 80-milligram hits of OxyContin, and the journalist later connected him with someone willing to pay for the documents. On the third anniversary of his father’s death — Jan. 26, 2017 — $1,000 arrived in his PayPal account.

The money was from Glenn R. Simpson, a former journalist who ran a research company called Fusion GPS. Weeks earlier, it had rocketed to notoriety as the source of the so-called Steele Dossier — a report by a former intelligence agent containing salacious allegations against Mr. Trump. Mr. Simpson was searching for more dirt and, Mr. Broeksmit told me, he agreed to pay $10,000 for the Deutsche materials. (Mr. Simpson declined to be interviewed.)

Mr. Simpson asked Mr. Broeksmit to start searching for specific topics. “Any Russia stuff at all,” he wrote on an encrypted chat program. “Let’s get you here asap.”

They met two days later in the U.S. Virgin Islands and began combing for material on Mr. Trump, Russia and Robert Mercer, a top Trump donor. They didn’t discover bombshells — more like nuggets. One spreadsheet, for example, contained a list of all of the banks that owed money to one of Deutsche Bank’s American subsidiaries on a certain date — a list that included multiple Russian banks that would soon be under United States sanctions.

Mr. Simpson asked Mr. Broeksmit to travel with him to Washington and meet some of his contacts. Mr. Broeksmit shared some of his files with a Senate investigator and — after snorting some heroin — a former prosecutor in the Manhattan district attorney’s office. The documents found their way to a team of anti-money-laundering agents at the New York Fed. Coincidence or not, a few months later, the Fed fined Deutsche Bank $41 million for violations inside the American unit that Bill Broeksmit had overseen. (A Fed spokesman declined to comment.)Mr. Broeksmit moved to Los Angeles to drum up Hollywood interest in his life story. Early this year, a producer invited him to a dinner party. Among the guests was Moby, the electronic music legend, who told me he was impressed by Mr. Broeksmit’s exploits and existential sadness.

Moby arranged an introduction to his friend Adam Schiff, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, which had recently opened an investigation into Deutsche Bank’s relationship with Mr. Trump.

Mr. Schiff’s investigators badly wanted the secret Deutsche files. Mr. Broeksmit tried to extract money from them — he pushed to be hired as a consultant to the committee — but that was a nonstarter. An investigator, Daniel Goldman, appealed to his sense of patriotism and pride. “Imagine a scenario where some of the material that you have can actually provide the seed that we can then use to blow open everything that [Trump] has been hiding,” Mr. Goldman told Mr. Broeksmit in a recorded phone call. “In some respects, you — and your father vicariously through you — will go down in American history as a hero and as the person who really broke open an incredibly corrupt president and administration.” (Mr. Broeksmit wouldn’t budge; eventually, Mr. Schiff subpoenaed him.)

It was around this time that Mr. Broeksmit had his meeting at the F.B.I.’s Los Angeles field office. Someone at the bureau had finally noticed his submission to the Justice Department’s website. After the three-hour session, Mr. Broeksmit still needed some stroking, and the F.B.I. agents obliged. They told Mr. Broeksmit he could have a special advisory title. They promised to keep him in the loop as their investigation proceeded. They let him tell the world — via this article — that he was a cooperating witness in a federal criminal investigation. They even helped procure a visa for his French girlfriend.

I had to tip my hat to Mr. Broeksmit. The man whom everyone had discounted and demeaned had managed to get his information into the hands of the Federal Reserve, Congress and the F.B.I. Even if the documents ultimately prove underwhelming to these powerful investigators, Mr. Broeksmit had accomplished one of his life’s goals: He mattered.

 

[Dandruff]

46 minutes ago, Alisamer said:

I just hope enough "never Hillary" people are willing to vote for whichever Democrat runs to make up the electoral college difference.

So do I.  It would be nice if the Trump voters could be at loosely categorized/counted by their motivation to support him.  At the least, it would help target future anti-Trump ads.

I know some "never Hillary" people and some others who liked Trump.  Most are women over 50.  The rest are men over 50.  The younger people I've spoken with about politics seem to uniformly loathe Trump but a few have mentioned aggressive, young pro-Trumpers stirring things up around college campuses.  Something to watch.

A woman I know well voted for Trump because she hated Hillary.  She tends to defend him but also said that the Democratic party could have put in just about anyone else and she would have voted for that person.  She said she'd vote for Biden in a heartbeat.  I doubt she represents the majority of Trump voters, though.

It's hard to rein in evil.  I believe Trump is validating some very dark impulses in people and they appreciate that - probably more than whatever they think "MAGA" means.

[Ozlsn]

6 hours ago, fraurosena said:

What everybody is also forgetting, is that Hillary Clinton got more votes than Trump did

But not in the 'right' areas. Urban areas, sure. Rural? Not so much.  As long as the electoral college continues in its current form candidates are going to need to appeal across both areas, because as @Alisamer said above the rural votes end up effectively counting for more than the urban ones.

(I have to say I never really understood the Hillary hate (or, in my own sphere the Shorten/Gillard hate). I know here at least some of it here is Murdoch press beat up, but the number of people who 'just didn't like' Shorten without being able to say what it was they didn't like amazed me.)

[fraurosena]

1 hour ago, Dandruff said:

 

It's hard to rein in evil.  I believe Trump is validating some very dark impulses in people and they appreciate that - probably more than whatever they think "MAGA" means.

Evil is reined in the moment it isn’t validated anymore. Just look at how after  WWII the nazi’s melted away, and all of a sudden no one wanted to be associated with that ideology anymore.
People are social animals and have an inherent need to belong, preferably to the currently perceived strongest group favored by one’s peers. When another, stronger or better group comes into power, people want to belong to that group, mostly because they think they will personally profit from belonging to them. Most people are sheeple, who can be whipped up into a frenzy by bad actors, or inspired to do good by motivational leadership. On the whole, only a small percentage of people is fanatical and truly evil. 
So I’m not afraid of what will happen when the current administration is toppled. Most people will shift their opinions to fit in with the powerful.

Those that do not, need careful watching. 
 

Note: I know am oversimplifying the psychological inner workings of people, and that individual people are always way more complicated than one can describe in a few sentences.

[fraurosena]

Sweet Rufus. Witness tampering anyone? And way to show consciousness of guilt there, Pompeo. 

 

I think the above might have something to do with this:

It’s a good thing Trump didn’t succeed in firing all the IG’s like he wanted to in 2017. 
 

Could this press conference be related?

 

[Dandruff]

10 hours ago, fraurosena said:

So I’m not afraid of what will happen when the current administration is toppled. Most people will shift their opinions to fit in with the powerful.

Those that do not, need careful watching.

I agree that most will likely shift their opinions and those who do not will need careful watching.

10 hours ago, fraurosena said:

Evil is reined in the moment it isn’t validated anymore. Just look at how after  WWII the nazi’s melted away, and all of a sudden no one wanted to be associated with that ideology anymore.

I think plenty of people were willing to be associated with the ideology after the war, just not openly.  The evil is still loose.  Almost seventy-five years after the war ended we had Charlottesville. The neo-Nazis may not step out much, since it tends to cost them, but they're still meeting and recruiting or there would be no open demonstrations at all.  They're validating each other.

Edited October 2, 2019 by Dandruff
spelling

[fraurosena]

Guess who's feeling the heat and is now owning up to the facts? He knows everything is going to come out, and is scrambling to defend himself. It's only a matter of time before the pressure will get to him, or somebody else in the administration, and he, or they, starts cooperating with the inquiry and volunteering information just to save themselves.

 

[fraurosena]

The question is, will they listen?

 

[fraurosena]

Now I want to know what 'this packet' is.

 

[fraurosena]

Sheesh, this was what all the hullabaloo was about? Really?

 

More info.

 

[onekidanddone]

1 hour ago, fraurosena said:

Now I want to know what 'this packet' is.

 

Jamie is my congressman 

[GreyhoundFan]

"Here’s the next fake scandal Trump thinks will save him"

Spoiler

President Trump and Republicans are excitedly drawing attention to a breaking story in the New York Times that reports that the whistleblower gave advance notice to Rep. Adam Schiff about the subject of his complaint, before filing it to the intelligence community’s inspector general.

In a way, you can’t blame them for getting excited, because the Times piece claims its new reporting will “thrust” Schiff “forcefully” into more “controversy,” without saying whether that outcome would be legitimate or valid, based on the known facts.

And it won’t be legitimate or valid based on the known facts, no matter how hard Trump and his allies spin to make it so.

What the Times piece says

The core news is that the whistleblower approached an aide on the House Intelligence Committee (which Schiff chairs) with his concerns, after growing worried that his initial effort to air his allegations might get frustrated.

That aide conveyed some vague amount of that (but not the whistleblower’s identity) to Schiff, but urged the whistleblower to get a lawyer and file a complaint with the inspector general.

The Times piece explicitly says that in so doing, the aide was “following the committee’s procedures.” There’s no evidence Schiff was told of the whistleblower’s identity, or even that he knows it now, in the Times piece or anywhere else.

Trump is lying to create a fake scandal

Trump wasted no time in lying about this new report. He claimed it shows Schiff collaborated with the whistleblower on the complaint, calling it a “scam.” The story says no such thing, and there is nothing whatsoever in it to undercut the substantive complaint itself.

House minority leader Kevin McCarthy also claimed Schiff and the whistleblower got caught “orchestrating” the complaint, and that Democrats “rigged” this process.

But there’s nothing in the story that says anything about Schiff having any substantive input into the whistleblower’s complaint. It says Schiff’s aide reported to him some of what the whistleblower said, and that the aide told the whistleblower to get a lawyer and go to the inspector general.

In so doing, the aide advised the whistleblower on how to follow the law. That’s not “rigging” the process. It’s the opposite.

Indeed, the Times piece itself describes the significance of this news by claiming it shows “how determined” the whistleblower was to make his allegations known. This, by itself, does not raise doubts about his motives or truthfulness, or about the complaint itself, in any way. All it does is underscore how serious the whistleblower thought the allegations were, and how adamant he was about getting it to Congress.

That outcome is precisely what Trump’s top officials did work so hard to block, so the whistleblower was right to be worried that it might not get to Congress.

What the law requires of the whistleblower

Here there is some gray area, and it’s possible the whistleblower might be vulnerable in one way. The statute says any “employee” who wants to report questionable information “may” report it to the inspector general, who then evaluates it, and if he finds it “credible” and “urgent” as defined in the statute, the director of national intelligence “shall” pass it to Congress.

“This strictly and solely provides an authorized proper channel,” Bradley Moss, a national security lawyer and advocate for whistleblowers, tells me.

Moss tells me it’s not unusual for would-be whistleblowers to first go to a congressional intelligence committee for advice on how to proceed. This is what the whistleblower did.

It is possible, Moss noted, that the whistleblower’s initial move might cost him some protections against retaliation afforded whistleblowers under the statute. But even this is uncertain, Moss said. If the CIA brass were to learn the whistleblower’s identity, it might try to fire him by arguing he stepped outside procedure.

But even then, the whistleblower could challenge that administratively at the agency, and would stand a decent chance of prevailing, Moss said.

But, crucially, Moss added that the fact of this procedural vulnerability, in and of itself, simply doesn’t show that the whistleblower abused the process. That’s because, as noted, this is not unusual, and because after getting advised, the whistleblower did actually follow what the law requires. What’s more, the inspector general actually did find the complaint credible and procedurally legitimate.

And of course, the complaint itself has been confirmed in many details by the rough transcript of Trump’s call with the Ukrainian president that the White House itself released.

What Schiff did

There’s some suggestion that Schiff, due to the early heads up, ultimately went public more quickly about the blocked complaint. But this isn’t seriously problematic. The timeline here is that the inspector general first alerted the intelligence committees that he’d received the complaint and that the DNI had unlawfully refused to transmit it to them. It was after this that Schiff demanded the complaint.

“Schiff went public only after receiving a letter from the inspector general indicating the DNI had not followed process requirements,” Margaret Taylor, senior editor at LawfareBlog, told me. “And this process issue is irrelevant to the substance of the impeachment inquiry — the President’s own conduct, which he does not deny.”

There’s just nothing serious here. There is a convention in political journalism in which the neutral editorial voice will say something is newsworthy because one side will use it as “ammunition” against the other. Or, as the Times puts it, this will “thrust” Schiff into controversy.

But the known facts don’t render this “ammunition” for any legitimate criticism, and it shouldn’t “thrust” Schiff into any controversy, simply by virtue of the fact that Trumpworld will noisily try to make it the case. And we should all say so.

 

[SassyPants]

On 10/1/2019 at 9:36 AM, Alisamer said:

Ugh. I just spoke to two average Joe type (white, male, for the record) co-workers. They fully believe Hunter Biden committed a crime, and therefore there's no reason to impeach Trump for extorting other countries to investigate him. They support Trump, and think he shouldn't be impeached. "It's not like he had an affair or something, like other presidents have done." They think he's smart for "finding a loophole" by dragging his entire government entourage to his own properties nearly weekly, therefore making money off the government. They think he's self-sacrificing and generous for donating his entire government salary (because "no other president has done that, have they?!!". They think it doesn't matter that he seems to have never paid taxes. They think that all politicians are corrupt and liars, and every one of them is using loopholes and extorting people to make money, therefore Trump is the good guy for just being open about it. They think all other politicians should be impeached because they're all "corrupt", but Trump is just pointing out their crimes by keeping his out in the open. 

One of them also doesn't think people with insanely high amounts of money coming in should have to pay more taxes. "It's their money!" he says repeatedly. It doesn't matter that none of it is going back into our economy. It doesn't matter that these people would never even notice - there would be no change at all to their lifestyle - if half their income went away. It doesn't matter that it is literally impossible for them to spend as much as they are making. He sees no problem in someone making $50,000 a year paying the same in taxes as someone making $50,000,000. Nothing at all matters, "It's their money" is his answer to all of it.  

They just don't see Trump as the bad guy. They don't see what he's done as illegal, even when it is. They see him as a guy "playing the system" and are happy for him to profit off of the presidency. 

These are the people I'm concerned about. The rabid trump-bumpers are crazypants, but these are the people who elected Trump. 

They don't think he should be impeached. They don't understand that he has committed crimes. They think he's doing a fine job.

How come the person making $50,000 isn’t allowed to also keep their money? Who is suppose to pay the bills? 

Why should wealth be treated differently than income? 

 

[Dandruff]

Wonder if some new crisis is about to come out of left field to deflect attention away from the investigation.

[GreyhoundFan]

"Rahm Emanuel: On impeachment, Pelosi has many good options"

Spoiler

Rahm Emanuel is a former mayor of Chicago and a former Democratic congressman from Illinois. He served as chief of staff to President Barack Obama from 2009 to 2010.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has turned her carriers into the wind. She has taken the historic — and consequential — step of launching an impeachment inquiry against a U.S. president because he sought help from a foreign power in his campaign against a domestic political rival. And like the admirals of old, she like everyone else cannot know how this ends. Her majority and her legacy hang in the balance.

Pelosi’s initial reluctance to move forward suggests she knows what’s at stake. She intends to counter President Trump’s incessant and erratic tweeting about a “Witch Hunt” and “treason” with a strategy that is evenhanded and fully appreciative of the gravity of the moment. She knows that, while impeachment is an inherently political process, the public will recoil if it appears as though Democrats are waging a political campaign. Even as recent polling reveals that support for impeachment and removal has risen quickly, all Democrats will be smart to mimic her steadiness as they step forward, serious in their manner, strategic in their direction.

What we are about to witness is a balancing act for both parties: Pelosi needs to move the process expeditiously — but the process needs to be seen as fair, not just fast. The charges must be clear, and the evidence needs to prove beyond any doubt that any proposed punishment fits the severity of the crime. Democrats will do themselves no favors if they fail to hold the president accountable; but they should be wary of overstepping as well. Republicans may fear conservative voters will punish them for criticizing Trump. But the GOP could lose everything if their party is seen to be marching in lockstep with a president who violated his oath.

Pelosi has never been keen to explain her strategy in public; you don’t get to be speaker by oversharing. But because this is an impeachment inquiry — not an actual impeachment — the key for Democrats at this stage will be to focus their efforts on fact-finding, not yet making a case for conviction. Particularly in these early days, our posture needs to be about bringing sunlight to a murky reality, not convincing the public that it should support any given outcome. Over time, more facts will come out. And when they do, they could lead investigators in any number of directions.

If by mid-November, the evidence makes a clear case that Trump has used the power of his office to coerce a foreign government and advance his electoral interests, impeachment will undoubtedly be in order. In the unlikely scenario that this is all smoke and no fire, Congress would be wise to set the matter aside. But if investigators determine that the president should be admonished without being evicted from the White House, the House has a third option at its disposal: The House can sanction and censure the president, as the Senate did President Andrew Jackson nearly 200 years ago.

Republicans could have taken the censure route in 1998 against President Bill Clinton. Instead, they got greedy, becoming obsessed with political retribution. Their hatred of Clinton twisted their judgment and left them to lose five seats in midterm elections that, by historic patterns, should have been a boon for the GOP. That’s a lesson for everyone: voters have a role here, too. Ignore them at your peril.

Republicans, meanwhile, have been more conspicuously closemouthed than Breitbart and Fox News would have you believe. Some members are privately appalled by the rough transcript of Trump’s call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. There is no telling how many might support some kind of accountability if the Democrats conduct the proceedings fairly and equitably.

Pelosi is deftly navigating treacherous waters. Instead of splitting the inquiry among six committees, she has thrown her clout behind Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.), the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. That move promises to keep the inquiry focused on grave questions of national security and the invitation to foreign intervention in U.S. democracy.

If the House impeaches the president and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) shuts the proceeding down, Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) should demand a vote to censure the president instead. A count-by-count set of censure votes would be a difficult challenge for many Republicans. Each would have to make a stomach-churning choice between whitewashing despicable behavior and offending the president’s most ardent supporters.

No one is above the law. If other administration officials are implicated in the high crimes and misdemeanors, they too should face the appropriate consequences. But in these early days, Democrats will do themselves and the country the greatest service if they merely ensure the investigative process remains thorough, judicious and fair. There’s no shame in applying the lessons of 1834 and 1998 to today’s circumstance. And there’s no virtue rushing to judgment, no matter how much we believe Trump is running roughshod over the country.

 

[fraurosena]

Nancy Pelosi is not too subtly --and publicly-- schooling Kevin McCarthy.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

I hope Nancy sent Kevin some aloe for that burn!

[Smash!]

What the hell happened to the NYT?

[SilverBeach]

On 10/1/2019 at 2:22 PM, Alisamer said:

I really think that's a big part of how Trump got elected.

Trump got elected because of the Russians. He lost the popular vote by three million. 

[JMarie]

The whistleblower is a registered Democrat. This must be big news, because it's been brought up be everyone on Fox News.