Impeachment Inquiry

[fraurosena]

You can find the letters they sent here.

Edited September 30, 2019 by fraurosena
I wish there was an option to prevent posts merging!

[fraurosena]

Of course they did.

Kremlin says disclosure of Trump-Putin phone calls would need Russian consent

Quote

The Kremlin said on Monday that Washington would need Russian consent to publish transcripts of phone calls between U.S. President Donald Trump and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin.

Congress is determined to get access to Trump’s calls with Putin and other world leaders, the U.S. House Intelligence Committee’s chairman said on Sunday, citing concerns that the Republican president may have jeopardized national security.

Asked about those comments, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters Russia would be prepared to discuss the issue with Washington if it sent Moscow a signal, but that such disclosures were not normal diplomatic practice.

“Of course their publication is to some extent only possible by mutual agreement of the parties. This is a certain diplomatic practice,” Peskov said.

“To be more specific, perhaps, diplomatic practice in general does not envisage their publication. If there are some signals from the Americans, then we will discuss (them).”

The Democratic-led House last week launched an impeachment inquiry into Trump in the aftermath of a whistleblower complaint alleging that Trump had solicited interference by Ukraine in the 2020 U.S. election for his own political benefit.

The White House released a memo summarizing Trump’s July 25 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy after the allegations set off a U.S. domestic political storm.

 

[Alisamer]

On September 28, 2019 at 8:31 AM, FundamentallyShocked said:

I live with a trump-er. I do not believe that what has come out this week is sufficient. Until FoxNews turns on him, nothing will sway his base. Sigh.

A large percentage of Trump's supporters are surprisingly uninformed. I know one who watches Fox news literally the entire time she's awake, and that is the sole source of her news information. Her husband just watches a little in the evening, and seems unaware of a large number of things we've discussed here in detail. Some of them just don't have a clue how serious things are. 

Some of them are pigheaded and won't change their minds once they've made them, no matter what. Some of them are bigots who, while claiming to be "patriots", will willingly overlook blatant treason - their idea of patriotism is "white americans first". Russians are stereotypically white, right? A surprising number of them will vote blatantly against their own interests just to go against the "libs", and consider "liberal" a grave insult. Some lack critical thinking skills. Some just vote how their peers vote, to fit in. Some are frankly just that stupid.

I agree, to even make a dent in his base, Fox News is going to have to turn on him, and even then some of them will be reluctant to believe them. 

On September 28, 2019 at 4:45 PM, AmericanRose said:

Yep. They see Democrats as 'frantically grasping at straws' and think it's part of their 'obsession' with kicking Trump out of office.

Yeah many just see this as the "witch hunt" Trump claims it is. These are often the same people who will go after a democrat for any made up story about them "supporting terrorists" or whatever they can think of. No critical thinking.

7 hours ago, fraurosena said:

Oh, he wants to meet with people who accuse him, does he? Well in that case, I believe there are about 20 women out there whom he'd have to meet too. Big consequences, indeed.

That's what a trial is for! He'll get to meet them during the impeachment hearings, I would assume. They'll be testifying.

[Dandruff]

Does Trump get help with his tweets or is the GOP constantly on eggshells, wondering what he might come out with next?  Can't imagine that they wouldn't feel vulnerable with him on the loose.

[fraurosena]

51 minutes ago, Dandruff said:

Does Trump get help with his tweets or is the GOP constantly on eggshells, wondering what he might come out with next?  Can't imagine that they wouldn't feel vulnerable with him on the loose.

I don't think anyone in the GOP itself is using his phone to send out tweets.

I have the impression, based on the language used, that Trump sends out most of the tweets himself. But there are times when the language is so decidedly different (in spelling, capitalisation, and tone) that it makes me think somebody else is typing the tweet. It's often after Trump has stuffed up and things have to be sanitized and straightened out. Sometimes, based on the message, I think it's Jared or Ivanka (or maybe even Fredo-dumb), and sometimes, when the tweet is absolutely dripping in arrogance and superiority, I believe it's Stephen Miller.

The GOP have been vulnerable with him on the loose since they decided to give him the candidacy, so I don't think they cared about that very much. They thought they could handle him, constrain the effects of his presiduncy, and get their own agenda implemented (stacking the courts) in the meanwhile. Now that they're finding out that they haven't constrained his influence at all and instead have a viper in their bosom, I think they might be beginning to regret that attitude.

[fraurosena]

If you want to know more about the theories spouted by Trump and his GOP defenders concerning Crowdstrike and Hunter Biden, this thread by Seth Abramson explains them.

Here's the unrolled version: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1178688719064313856.html

 

[fraurosena]

I wonder what bombshells Rudy will drop during his testimony?

I imagine it will go something like this:

"I didn't do it!" 

"I think you did."

"You're damn right I did! And I can prove it too!"

"You can?"

"Oh yes. I've got my phone here, and look... it's all here. And I'll tell you what else, I wasn't the only one!"

"You weren't?"

"Of course I wasn't, you moron! What are you, some kind of idiot? Everybody was doing it. Pompeo for one, and that idiot Billy Barr, and Pence!"

"You mean, the vice-president?"

"Are you deaf or something? Didn't I just tell you Pence was in on it? Manafort didn't push him to be VP for nothing you know!"

 

[fraurosena]

What’s this, just as I’m getting ready to sleep?

If this is going to pan out, this is going to be one hell of an impeachment, where there will be such an overload of incriminating evidence that the only recourse will be removal from office.
 

Interesting and historic times.

More stuff coming.

 

More details 

Edited September 30, 2019 by fraurosena

[kpmom]

15 minutes ago, fraurosena said:

What’s this, just as I’m getting ready to sleep?

 

 

Asking foreign officials to help with discrediting US intelligence agencies? 

To quote something I read on Twitter very recently, "Arrest for treason?"

[Dandruff]

1 hour ago, kpmom said:

"Arrest for treason?"

Arrest is one step.  Conviction and dealing with the potential for pardons are others.

[WiseGirl]

Not sure where to drop this.

[Dandruff]

20 minutes ago, WiseGirl said:

Not sure where to drop this.

I think they all should be dropped into the same dark hole.

[fraurosena]

6 hours ago, WiseGirl said:

Not sure where to drop this.

Are we sure they’re coming back?

[fraurosena]

Strictly speaking maybe he wasn’t lying. It could be true that he hadn’t seen that report. 
But it’s pretty clear Pompeo is up to his eyeballs in all of it. Like I’ve said before, everybody who is willingly working in this administration is complicit.

 

[laPapessaGiovanna]

Cliff Notes  of yesterday's shenanigans. Hour by hour Impeachment Inquiry Day 7.

Spoiler

6:08 a.m. Seven days into the impeachment morass, former government officials have begun to speak up without hewing to partisan talking points. On Sunday, the new face was President Trump’s former homeland security adviser Thomas Bossert, who went on ABC News to say he was “deeply disturbed” by Trump’s call to Ukraine. He also said it was “far from proven” that Trump withheld foreign aid as part of an effort to dig up dirt on former vice president Joe Biden. Today the new voice is former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine John Herbst, a veteran of the George W. Bush administration, who tries to drop some historical context on NPR listeners. “This is highly abnormal,” Herbst says of Trump’s July call with Ukraine.

6:12 a.m. Herbst also contradicts the Trump argument that Biden did something wrong by pushing to fire Viktor Shokin, a Ukrainian prosecutor who once investigated a company that employed Biden's son. Herbst says Shokin was an untrustworthy “corrupt prosecutor,” who the United States, the European Union, the International Monetary Fund and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development all wanted out of the job. Herbst also notes that the Shokin affidavit saying Biden’s concerns over his son’s company caused his firing was written to aid attorneys for Dmytro Firtash, an oligarch U.S. officials are seeking to extradite on a warrant of bribery. “The folks who are pushing this conspiracy theory are citing this as proof,” Herbst says of the affidavit. “And in fact it undermines their position.”

8:32 a.m. Kate Bedingfield, Biden’s deputy campaign manager, is asked a question that will not go away anytime soon. Does the former vice president have any regrets about not keeping son Hunter Biden from working for the Ukrainian firm while Biden oversaw Ukrainian policy at the White House? “No, because he didn’t do anything wrong,” Bedingfield says of the younger Biden on CNN’s “New Day.”

8:46 a.m. Former senator Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), who quit after undermining his reelection hopes by opposing Trump, calls on other Republican senators “to risk your careers in favor of your principles.” In a Washington Post opinion piece, he describes removing Trump from office through impeachment as a tough call, but argues that opposing Trump’s reelection is a moral necessity. “Trust me when I say that you can go elsewhere for a job,” he writes. “But you cannot go elsewhere for a soul.”

9:44 a.m. Attorneys for the whistleblower who launched this process share a letter sent Saturday to the Director of National Intelligence. “The purpose of this letter is to formally notify you of serious concerns we have regarding our client’s personal safety,” it reads. The concerns were created by Trump. “I want to know . . . who’s the person that gave the whistleblower the information, because that’s close to a spy,” the president said Thursday at an event in New York. “You know what we used to do in the old days when we were smart? Right? With spies and treason, right? We used to handle them a little differently than we do now.”

11:07 a.m. Letters have become as hip as tweets. Republican Sens. Charles E. Grassley (Iowa) and Ron Johnson (Wis.), release a new missive, dated Friday. The senators ask Attorney General William P. Barr to reveal any Justice Department investigation into alleged efforts by Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign or her allies to get Ukrainians to help dig up dirt on Trump and his former campaign manager, Paul Manafort. “Ukrainian efforts, abetted by a U.S. political party, to interfere in the 2016 election should not be ignored,” the senators write. Ukrainian officials have denied any effort to help Clinton in the 2016 election.

11:18 a.m. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) goes on CNBC to confirm what his office has previously made clear. If the House impeaches Trump, the Senate must hold a trial under Senate rule and precedent. “I would have no choice but to take it up,” McConnell says. This will come as a disappointment to Diamond and Silk, who call themselves “Trump’s Most Loyal Supporters” on Twitter. A few hours ago, they called on the GOP to “enforce the rules to end the games,” by which they meant McConnell should ignore the rules and not take up impeachment.

11:21 a.m. Ukraine’s former top law enforcement official Yuri Lutsenko, who took over after Shokin was fired, recounts yet again the efforts by Trump to pressure him to investigate the Biden family. In an interview in Kiev with the Los Angeles Times, Lutsenko says he told Trump lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani there was no evidence that the former vice president or his son had broken Ukrainian laws. “I told him I could not start an investigation just for the interests of an American official,” he said. This restates comments he made to The Post last week. Earlier this year, Lutsenko told a conservative columnist for The Hill newspaper that he would be happy to share what he knew with Barr.

12:36 p.m. Trump’s Twitter tally today stands at 13 so far. He has denounced the “witch hunt,” called the whistleblower “Fake Whistleblower” and declared “the Bidens were corrupt!” He also raised the possibility that Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.) should be arrested “for treason” for using words Trump never spoke to dramatize the president’s call to Ukraine. Trump tweets #fakewhistleblower in an effort to get the hashtag trending, but at the moment the top trending tags include #civilwarsignup and #civilwar2, both references to another tweet the president sent Sunday quoting a pastor warning of a “civil warlike fracture” if Trump is ever removed from office. Most of these tweets are not from Team Trump.

12:49 p.m. Another data point from the political twitter wars: Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) has about 25,700 retweets on his reaction to Trump’s civil war tweet, which reads, “@realDonaldTrump I have never imagined such a quote to be repeated by a President. This is beyond repugnant.” Trump’s original tweet, by contrast, only has 17,200 retweets.

2:39 p.m. In an Oval Office pool spray, Trump makes television of his morning tweets. “We’re trying to find out about a whistleblower,” Trump says. This may run counter to the whistleblower protections that are codified in law and rule. “In recognition of the importance of whistleblowing and whistleblowers to the effectiveness and efficiency of government, whistleblowing is protected by Federal laws, policies and regulations,” reads a Web page maintained by the Director of National Intelligence. “These protections ensure that lawful whistleblowers are protected from reprisal as a result of their Protected Disclosure.”

3:05 p.m. A national poll by Quinnipiac University finds that the share of American voters who support impeaching Trump has grown from 37 percent to 47 percent over one week. Among closely watched independents, the share opposing impeachment fell from 58 percent to 50 percent over the same period, while the share supporting impeachment rose from 34 percent to 42 percent. In a separate question, voters support the impeachment inquiry of Trump by a margin of 52 percent to 45 percent. That number closely tracks with Trump’s overall approval in the poll, with 53 percent disapproving of the way he is handling his job and 41 percent approving.

3:30 p.m. Schiff signs a fundraising text for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. “Rest assured I won’t back down from holding the president accountable, and neither will my Democratic colleagues,” he writes. “That’s why I’m reaching out.” The ask is $5.

3:55 p.m. The House Intelligence, Oversight and Foreign Affairs committees release a subpoena demanding documents from Giuliani and three of his business associates. The documents concern 23 separate items, including communications about potential meetings with Barr or any of his associates.

3:30 p.m. Schiff signs a fundraising text for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. “Rest assured I won’t back down from holding the president accountable, and neither will my Democratic colleagues,” he writes. “That’s why I’m reaching out.” The ask is $5.

3:55 p.m. The House Intelligence, Oversight and Foreign Affairs committees release a subpoena demanding documents from Giuliani and three of his business associates. The documents concern 23 separate items, including communications about potential meetings with Barr or any of his associates.

4 p.m. CNN releases new national polling that closely tracks the Quinnipiac numbers. Young people are particularly drawn to the effort, with 65 percent younger than 35 saying they want to impeach and remove Trump from office, compared with 43 percent who felt that way in May.

4:07 p.m. The afternoon news dump begins. The Wall Street Journal reports that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo took part in the July phone call between Trump and the new president of Ukraine. The source is a senior State Department official.

4:19 p.m. The New York Times reports that Trump pushed Australia’s prime minister to help gather information that he hopes will discredit the investigation by former special counsel Robert S. Mueller III. The sources are two American officials with knowledge of the call. Australian officials tipped off the FBI in 2016 to alleged Russian overtures to a Trump campaign foreign policy adviser. The Russians were said to have boasted about having dirt on Clinton.

5:11 p.m. The Post reports that Barr has held private meetings overseas with foreign intelligence officials seeking their help in a Justice Department inquiry that Trump hopes will discredit U.S. intelligence analysis of Russian interference in the 2016 election. This includes overtures to British, Australian and Italian officials. The sources are people familiar with the matter.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"Why is this Trump scandal different from all previous Trump scandals?"

Spoiler

In its premiere episode this season, Saturday Night Live aired a funny, nihilistic sketch about the meaning of the latest Ukraine scandal engulfing the Trump administration:

The thing is, it already seems like something is going to happen. Indeed, consider what has happened in the past week alone:

• House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced a formal impeachment inquiry.
• The White House released a memorandum of the incriminating conversation between President Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
• The whistleblower complaint was also released.
• Trump’s acting director of national intelligence testified before Congress that he thought the whistleblower had acted appropriately and found the report to be credible.
• Rudy Giuliani tied U.S. special envoy Kurt Volker to his efforts to gin up dirt on the Bidens, forcing Volker’s resignation.
• The Post’s Shane Harris, Josh Dawsey and Ellen Nakashima reported that “President Trump told two senior Russian officials in a 2017 Oval Office meeting that he was unconcerned about Moscow’s interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election because the United States did the same in other countries.”
• In between the time I started writing this list and now, stories broke about the extent to which both Attorney General William P. Barr and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo are involved in this mess.
• The House Intelligence Committee subpoenaed Pompeo, Volker, and Giuliani, among others.

Even by Trump standards this has been an insane week.

What is particularly remarkable is how quickly the political ground has shifted for Democrats. A week ago, Politico’s David Siders reported, “outside Washington, there’s creeping anxiety throughout the party [impeachment] might only help the president clinch a second term.” Monday, Politico’s Burgess Everett and James Arkin report that “Senate Democrats are growing increasingly giddy at the prospect of seeing a half-dozen vulnerable senators squirm for weeks and months about Trump’s behavior before eventually being forced to go on the record to convict or acquit Trump if he’s impeached by the House.”

Polling now suggests most Democrats and a nonzero fraction of Republicans support an impeachment inquiry (though see FiveThirtyEight’s Mark Blumenthal for a caveat). Multiple Republicans in Congress, as well as former Trump officials, are castigating the president for his behavior.

The rapidity with which all this has happened stands in stark contrast to the two-year Mueller investigation. In the words of Marvin the Martian, after the Mueller report dropped there was the distinct lack of an “Earth-shattering kaboom.” Some wags are even suggesting that the past week shows that Mueller was actually a bad investigator.

So it is worth asking: Why is this the scandal that will lead Trump to be impeached rather than all of his previous scandals?

I may be just a small-town political scientist, but I reckon that there are multiple reinforcing answers to this question:

1) This is a presidential scandal. Trump’s treatment of women, his tax fraud, even the Mueller investigation primarily concerned Trump’s activities prior to becoming president. The Ukraine business is entirely about his abuse of presidential power for personal gain. This is not (really) about his staff or subordinates; it’s about him.

2) Trump’s staffers are making everything worse and not better. As the Mueller report concluded, “The President’s efforts to influence the investigation were mostly unsuccessful, but that is largely because the persons who surrounded the President declined to carry out orders or accede to his requests.” It is a credit to those staffers that in refusing Trump’s orders they helped stop him from, you know, committing crimes.

That was then, and Trump’s current support staff is of lower quality. Their response to the Ukraine call was to try to cover up its contents. The whistleblower wrote that he “learned from multiple U.S. officials that senior White House officials had intervened to ‘lock down’ all records of the phone call.... The transcript was loaded into a separate electronic system that is otherwise used to store and handle classified information of an especially sensitive nature. One White House official described this act as an abuse of this electronic system because the call did not contain anything remotely sensitive from a national security perspective."

In attempting to conceal information, Trump’s staff has successfully added a coverup to the original scandal. This is in direct contrast to Ty Cobb’s strategy of giving the Mueller investigation every document it wanted. This time around, Trump’s staff is clearly off-balance.

3) Trump is making everything worse. Maybe Trump believed that after the Mueller investigation he was bulletproof. This time around, however, every Trump response has been a disaster. If he thought the release of his conversation with Zelensky would put this all to rest, he was mistaken. His Twitter attacks on the whistleblower, on Adam Schiff, on anyone in the line of fire have only added another possible article of impeachment to the list.

One GOP congressional aide told The Post’s Ashley Parker, “It’s such a cliche that Trump doesn’t think anyone can defend him the way he can defend himself, but they need to try, because right now it’s just him tweeting about Adam B. Schiff.” The aide is right.

4) The White House’s talking points stink. Jake Tapper filleted Jim Jordan. Chris Wallace vivisected Stephen Miller. Scott Pelley pantsed Kevin McCarthy. Rudy Giuliani beclowned himself multiple times. The reasons for this are unsurprising, as White House talking points cannot obscure Trump’s abuse of power. Efforts to muddy the waters have not really succeeded. As Esquire’s Charles Pierce correctly notes, “And these guys are the best they’ve got. Wait’ll Louie Gohmert and Matt Gaetz get to center stage.” NOTE: We don’t have to wait.

Finally...

5) Previous Democratic reticence gives this more meaning. No one can say that Nancy Pelosi wanted to take this path. She had been the primary brake on impeachment since January. Now she is saying that pursuing impeachment would be worth losing the House in 2020. GOP partisans will dismiss her previous reluctance, but for everyone else, that switch in her rhetoric is a powerful signal.

Maybe SNL is right and nothing is going to happen. But getting impeached is definitely something, and given the evidence that everyone already has, it sure seems like it is going to happen.

 

[fraurosena]

It's about time someone said this, and in these unmistakable words.

Trump’s Claims About Biden Aren’t ‘Unsupported.’ They’re Lies.

Quote

On Sept. 24, 2015, Geoffrey Pyatt, then the American ambassador to Ukraine, spoke in Odessa about the scourge of corruption. It was about a year and a half after what is sometimes called the Revolution of Dignity, when Ukrainians overthrew the kleptocratic, Russian-aligned regime of Viktor Yanukovych. The country was trying to move in a more liberal, European direction. Corruption, said Pyatt, threatened to hold the new Ukraine back.

Pyatt called out the office of Viktor Shokin, then the prosecutor general of Ukraine. “Corrupt actors within the prosecutor general’s office are making things worse by openly and aggressively undermining reform,” he said. Pyatt specifically lambasted Shokin’s office for subverting a British case against a man named Mykola Zlochevsky, Yanukovych’s former ecology minister.

In 2014, as part of a money-laundering investigation, British authorities froze $23 million Zlochevsky had in London. They requested supporting documentation from Shokin’s office. Instead, it intervened on Zlochevsky’s behalf. “As a result the money was freed by the U.K. court and shortly thereafter the money was moved to Cyprus,” said Pyatt.

“Shokin was seen as a single point of failure clogging up the system and blocking corruption cases,” a former official in Barack Obama’s administration told me. Vice President Joe Biden eventually took the lead in calling for Shokin’s ouster.

As all this was happening, Biden’s son, Hunter, sat on the board of Burisma Holdings, a natural gas company that Zlochevsky co-founded, at some points earning $50,000 a month. Zlochevsky might have thought he could ingratiate himself with the Obama administration by buying an association with the vice president. All available evidence suggests he was wrong.

Turning this history on its head, Trump has accused Joe Biden of coercing Ukraine to jettison Shokin in order to protect Hunter. He has pressured Ukraine’s current president to open an investigation into the Bidens, which would make Trump’s charges seem more credible. As the president faces impeachment, his surrogates are parroting his attack on Biden, and his campaign is reportedly spending a staggering $10 million on an ad to amplify the smear.

Journalists, perhaps seeking to appear balanced, have sometimes described Trump’s claims about Biden as “unsubstantiated” or “unsupported.” That is misleading, because it suggests more muddiness in the factual record than actually exists. Trump isn’t making unproven charges against Biden. He is blatantly lying about him. He and his defenders are spreading a conspiracy theory that is the precise opposite of the truth.

Like most effective conspiracy theories, this one is built around a speck of something real. Hunter Biden’s place on Burisma’s board was untoward, even if it’s preposterous for Trump to complain about nepotistic corruption. Biden’s son doesn’t seem to have broken any laws, but the way he traded on his name was still sleazy.

Joe Biden appears to have been uncomfortable with his son’s involvement with Burisma; in a New Yorker profile, Hunter recalled his father saying, “I hope you know what you are doing.” Hunter said they never spoke further about the issue; Biden has made a point of not talking to his son about his business dealings.

It’s not hard to imagine why Biden didn’t press Hunter. The Biden boys and their father had been through hell together. Hunter has said his first memory was waking up in the hospital next to his older brother, Beau, after the car crash that killed their mother and baby sister. He grew up to be a troubled man, his life pockmarked by addiction and failure.

Beau died of brain cancer a few months before Biden traveled to Ukraine to push the government to crack down on corruption. It’s not shocking that, at a moment when his family was consumed by grief, Biden wasn’t inclined to confront his surviving son.

But even if you’re not inclined to empathize with Biden — even if you assume the worst about him — Trump’s conspiracy theory makes no sense. To believe it, you’d have to first believe that the foreign affairs apparatus of the Obama administration was willing to put its credibility on the line in service of the black sheep of the Biden family. After all, Joe Biden wasn’t freelancing in Ukraine; he was carrying out White House policy.

Further, if the Trump administration truly believes that Obama’s Ukraine policy was crooked, one might ask why it has Pyatt, who helped accomplish that policy, representing America as ambassador to Greece.

Most important, getting rid of Shokin made an investigation of Burisma more likely, not less. “He didn’t want to investigate Burisma,” the Ukrainian anti-corruption activist Daria Kaleniuk told The Washington Post. “Shokin was fired not because he wanted to do that investigation, but quite to the contrary, because he failed that investigation.”

However bad the optics around Hunter Biden, Joe Biden was not serving his son’s interests. If anything, they were working at cross-purposes.

As I’ve written multiple times, I don’t want Biden to be the Democratic nominee. There’s much in his legislative record that troubles me, and I don’t think he’s as electable as his champions claim. In some ways, my preferred political outcome would be advanced if Trump’s Ukraine scandal ends up tarring Biden as well.

But Trump’s weaponized disinformation is corrosive to democracy no matter whom it targets. Like many authoritarians, he depends on getting people to accept a big lie or to give up on the idea of truth altogether. If he succeeds in defaming Biden today, he’ll be even more audacious in using the same strategy against anyone else who threatens him. What’s at stake isn’t just Biden’s political future. It’s how much Trump can erode the political salience of reality, and how much the media helps him.

 

[fraurosena]

This is a wonderfully snarky article by the conservative Sarah Longman.

Trump’s PR Meltdown

Quote

If the facts are against you, argue the law.

If the law is against you, argue the facts.

If the law and the facts are against you, pound the table and yell like hell.

― Carl Sandburg

Hi Republicans.

Long time, no talk. You and I used to do a fair amount of work together. But since the party took a collective hit off of a crack pipe and nominated a morally bankrupt reality show host to be president, I haven’t been around much.

Because if there’s one thing you guys don’t need, it’s help on the PR front. Trump is a communications genius! He’s his own press secretary! Look at all those Twitter followers, amirite?

And yet, I can’t help but think the old comms strategy could use a tune up. So I thought I’d send along a few thoughts:

• Stop putting Rudy Giuliani on television. He’s drunk. Or maybe just addled? I don’t know—but it doesn’t matter because he’s going to get you all sent to prison by reading text messages from State Department officials out loud on Laura Ingraham’s show. Go to the zoo. Find an adorable penguin. Put that little guy on instead.
   
• I see you have talking points. Great! Now all you have to do is not send them directly to Nancy Pelosi’s office. Oops. But let’s turn this negative into a positive by using it as an opportunity to come up with talking points that don’t insult the intelligence of wax fruit. Why don’t you try, “What the president did was unquestionably wrong and we apologize for abusing the power of the presidency for his personal political gain. It won’t happen again.” That’s not hard, is it?
   
• It’s great that you’re going on offense against Joe and Hunter Biden, that’s the right move. Republicans are the anti-corruption party, right? We cannot have an elected official occupying one of the highest offices in the land while simultaneously having his children profit from his office. So maybe—just spitballing here—you should have Ivanka, Jared, Eric, and Don Jr. shut down their White House money-printing machine for a couple of months so people forget that this president is the least credible person in the world to make that argument about the Bidens.
   
• Buy Jim Jordan a suit jacket. I know you’re running low on people willing to publicly debase themselves for the party, but television is a visual medium. And if Jordan is going to let Jake Tapper put him in a figure-four leg lock on national TV, he should at least look like his wife hasn’t kicked him out of the house and he’s sleeping on his office couch.
   
• Bench Kevin McCarthy altogether. He may have many gifts as a political leader, but he is really not good at going on TV.

• Someone tell Lindsey Graham that his “hearsay” talking point is a bad hill to die on. The argument that the whistleblower didn’t hear things first hand isn’t exculpatory. It’s actually just another good reason to investigate the whistleblower’s claims and talk to the primary sources.
   
• Evergreen advice: Take Trump’s phone, smash it with a hammer, and then hit any pieces leftover with BleachBit. Whatever it takes to make him to STOP. TWEETING.

Tweeting things like:

Maybe the MAGAheads like this stuff, but your job is to keep all of the marginal Republican office-holders onboard so that you don’t risk a stampede on the off-chance that some of them decide that they can’t not do the right thing. And tweets like that are only going to push the marginal R’s away from Trump. Witness Illinois Republican Rep. Adam Kinzinger, responding with:

Now, I know what you’re thinking: “Hey, this playbook worked for us the first time around with that whole Russia thing. A deft combination of whataboutism, obfuscation, preemptive framing, and misdirection is all we need to pull this off.”

Here’s the problem: Unlike the two-volume, 430-page Mueller report, the whistleblower report is 9 pages long. The central allegation is clear-cut and easy to understand. And it has already been proven true with the release of the call summary between Trump and Ukraine’s president.

You can try to spin the facts and fall back on process-arguments—but the battlespace is much smaller and the tempo is much faster than the Mueller wars. Most people will be able to read the report and anyone who doesn’t can clearly understand what happened: The president was acting like a mafia don by talking about the kind of “help” he could give Ukraine and then asking for “favors.” I mean, even Chris Christie understands that this is a problem: In an attempt to pre-spin all of this before the call summary was released, Christie insisted that it would only be bad for Trump if he said something blatantly extortive. Like, “do me a favor.”

Oops. Again.

Also, the Democrats and the media may be on to you. They’ve seen you run this play before and they’ve made adjustments. And the American people aren’t so sure anymore, either. In fact, a majority of them now back the impeachment inquiry. Including nearly 1-in-4 Republicans.

When it comes to crisis communications there’s a strategy that most professional comms people live by: Tell the truth. Tell it all. Tell it fast.

It’s good advice for most people. But some clients are constitutionally incapable of it. Trump is one of them. Obviously. For him, telling the whole truth, quickly, was never really going to be an option.

Listening to some of you grumbling privately over the last 10 days, I can tell that you are frustrated by the president right now. I understand that frustration. But you shouldn’t be surprised.

On the stump, one of Trump’s favorite bits is to read a poem called “The Snake.” He does this a lot. Here’s one of his performances:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qSrOXvoNLwg

If you don’t want to watch it, I’ll just give you the punchline:

I saved you, cried the woman. And you’ve bitten me, heavens why?

You know your bite is poisonous and now I’m going to die.

Oh, shut up, silly woman, said the reptile with a grin.

You knew damn well I was a snake before you took me in.

Trump, of course, tells this story as a warning about the perceived dangers of immigration. Evidently Republicans never understood that it was also about them.

 

[fraurosena]

Pompeo is going to defy Congress and is pounding his chest in attempt to bully and stonewall them as much as he can.

"I need more time..."  Yeah, right. More time to try and come up with excuses, no doubt. Good luck with that.

 

[Alisamer]

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.

[formergothardite]

3 minutes ago, Alisamer said:

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.

These are the problem people I am worried there are way too many of them in America. 

[fraurosena]

2 minutes ago, formergothardite said:

These are the problem people I am worried there are way too many of them in America. 

Yes and no.

Yes, there are too many of them in America. Even a single one would be one too many.

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

 

I know it won't make a difference to rabid BT's, but to those who aren't that rabid, I would say:

It does not matter if Hunter Biden did something wrong or not. Hunter Biden could be a crazy axe murderer who deserves to be prosecuted and sentenced to the maximum punishment possible, and it would not matter. Trump extorted a foreign country. He illegally withheld money that a bipartisan Congress had voted that country should get (Congress votes for something, that something is law -- not doing it is illegal) and then blackmailed that country to give him something he wanted for personal gain. Not for America's gain, mind you, but for his personal gain. And now there is an inquiry if he should be impeached for acting illegally. 

Nobody is above the law. Not even a president. 

[Dandruff]

4 minutes ago, formergothardite said:

These are the problem people I am worried there are way too many of them in America. 

There were a lot of them in 2016, though most seemed to stay relatively quiet.  They seemed to be using the same playbook then.  I suspect they're continuing to get motivational messages from the Trump machine, probably more so now given the controversy.

2 minutes 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 think they need to be seriously accounted for, in preparation for the 2020 election (if Trump lasts that long).  The more outspoken, obnoxious ones get the public's attention.  They distract.  I believe there's a huge wave of more subdued ones waiting in the wings for their chance to vote again.

[formergothardite]

48 minutes ago, Dandruff said:

I believe there's a huge wave of more subdued ones waiting in the wings for their chance to vote again.

I agree. I know several people who will nod along with you if you talk about politics but quietly support Trump. You have to really press them to get them to confess this. These are the people who know his behavior is hard to defend so they keep super quiet about their support. These people truly believe that democrats are corrupt and therefore they won't believe anything that comes out of a democratic investigation. 

I suspect there is a very large number of the republican party who are this way. They stay quiet but will vote for Trump if they get the chance. They will not accept any evidence of his crimes. 

[fraurosena]

45 minutes ago, Dandruff said:

I'm not so sure.  I think they need to be seriously accounted for, in preparation for the 2020 election (if Trump lasts that long).  The more outspoken, obnoxious ones get the public's attention.  They distract.  I believe there's a huge wave of more subdued ones waiting in the wings for their chance to vote again.

I wonder about that though. I'm not saying you're wrong, but I think that the number of true Trumpers might be significantly lower than the number of disenfranchised and never-Hillary voters in 2016 . In other words, there were far more voters who voted for Trump because he's not Hillary, or because he has an R behind his name (sometimes holding their noses as they did so), or because they genuinely thought he might do some good (they bought into his con) than there were those that voted for him because they wholeheartedly stand by his conspiracy theories and will never change their minds no matter what the actual facts say.

I do agree with you that they need to be seriously accounted for, if Trump lasts --or not. 

4 minutes ago, formergothardite said:

I agree. I know several people who will nod along with you if you talk about politics but quietly support Trump. You have to really press them to get them to confess this. These are the people who know his behavior is hard to defend so they keep super quiet about their support. These people truly believe that democrats are corrupt and therefore they won't believe anything that comes out of a democratic investigation. 

I suspect there is a very large number of the republican party who are this way. They stay quiet but will vote for Trump if they get the chance. They will not accept any evidence of his crimes. 

True, the quiet ones could be dangerous. Then again, like I said above, I'm not so sure about their number. You are describing true BT's. Just not the vociferous ones. But... they could also be quiet because they are hedging their bets, and vote expediently, to whatever is the current political flavor. I do understand your apprehension though. And as @Dandruff said, they really need to be accounted for.