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Impeachment 3: The MF Has Been Impeached! The Trial Has Begun!


GreyhoundFan

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I think all Trump and his cronies care about is him staying in office, and avoiding witness testimony and other evidence is the means toward that end.  I doubt they especially care how it looks.  Yeah, they might lose some votes in November but he'll still be in the game.

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I wonder if they were hoping they wouldn't be let back in.

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12 hours ago, fraurosena said:

Oh, I really hope they do that.  I'm already imagining the faces at the defense table. 

 

He is so fucking brazen. 

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6 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

Biden offered his verdict with quiet sadness. “I think it’s one of the things they’re going to regret,” he said, “when their grandchildren read in history books what they did.”

Why is everyone (not only Biden) so focussed on what the history books might say? Don’t they understand that people don’t care what happens in the long term? People don’t look past the immediate consequences of their conduct. What history will say after they are gone is not an argument that will persuade anyone to alter their behavior.
 

Plus, in the case of the trumplican party, they are convinced they are going to win. And if they do, who do you think will be writing those history books? What do you think they’ll say about themselves? 

No, pointing to what their legacy will be is not persuasive at all. A better argument is to point out the direct consequences of their actions: obliteration at the ballot box. Because that is the motivation behind everything they do: remain in power, whatever the cost. So if keeping their seats is what’s driving them, show them that they are endangering that.

Edited by fraurosena
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12 hours ago, Dandruff said:

I think all Trump and his cronies care about is him staying in office, and avoiding witness testimony and other evidence is the means toward that end.  I doubt they especially care how it looks.  Yeah, they might lose some votes in November but he'll still be in the game.

ITA. They really do not give any shits about how this looks corrupt. The GOP party is openly fine with corruption now. He won't lose republican votes over this. There is a lot of time between here and November and chances are this whole impeachment thing will not be at the fronts of a lot of minds. Just think of how many awful, corrupt things Trump has done that no one mentions anymore! The GOP is banking on this being old news by the time the election rolls around and I suspect they are right. 

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1 hour ago, formergothardite said:

ITA. They really do not give any shits about how this looks corrupt. The GOP party is openly fine with corruption now. He won't lose republican votes over this. There is a lot of time between here and November and chances are this whole impeachment thing will not be at the fronts of a lot of minds. Just think of how many awful, corrupt things Trump has done that no one mentions anymore! The GOP is banking on this being old news by the time the election rolls around and I suspect they are right. 

I quite agree that they are banking on this. They won't remove Trump*, and it's a given there will be more scandals in the coming months, and they will be counting on the forgetfulness of the American public.

But however bad -- evil even -- this may be, it will not change the surge of blue voters that will completely overwhelm the elections. So don't despair. Next year, your government will be blue.

*side note: do not discount the possibility of a second impeachment, or impeachment of his cronies -- remember, the House is still investigating. Trump just might be the first ever to be impeached twice. 

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1 hour ago, fraurosena said:

I quite agree that they are banking on this. They won't remove Trump*, and it's a given there will be more scandals in the coming months, and they will be counting on the forgetfulness of the American public.

But however bad -- evil even -- this may be, it will not change the surge of blue voters that will completely overwhelm the elections. So don't despair. Next year, your government will be blue.

*side note: do not discount the possibility of a second impeachment, or impeachment of his cronies -- remember, the House is still investigating. Trump just might be the first ever to be impeached twice. 

Desperately hoping for blue government and double impeachment. My financial and emotional resources are limited at the moment, but will do what I can to make the former happen.

Meanwhile, there's this:

https://www.cnn.com/2020/01/23/politics/fact-check-trump-false-impeachment-wednesday/index.html

Spoiler

President Donald Trump said at a press conference in Davos, Switzerland, on Wednesday that he opposed the impeachment of President Bill Clinton even though Clinton was doing bad things, like lying.

Trump added: "Now, with me, there's no lying."

That is itself not true.

Trump has been serially dishonest about impeachment and about Ukraine. Case in point -- he made at least 14 false claims related to these subjects at the Davos press conference and in interviews that aired Wednesday on CNBC and Fox Business -- plus a bunch of false claims on unrelated subjects, which we'll leave out of this particular article.

...

 

Edited by scoutsadie
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Holy shit - Rep. Nadler just quoted Alexander Hamilton, talking about the kind of dangerous leader that impeachment is meant to target - and it is Trump to a tee.

The article below is from 2017, but today is the first time I've heard the quote and this came up when I googled it:

https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2017/03/not-to-be-that-guy-but-this-alexander-hamilton-quo.html

Here is the quote: 

"When a man unprincipled in private life desperate in his fortune, bold in his temper, possessed of considerable talents, having the advantage of military habits [well, not DJT] —despotic in his ordinary demeanour—known to have scoffed in private at the principles of liberty—when such a man is seen to mount the hobby horse of popularity—to join in the cry of danger to liberty—to take every opportunity of embarrassing the General Government & bringing it under suspicion—to flatter and fall in with all the non sense of the zealots of the day—It may justly be suspected that his object is to throw things into confusion that he may “ride the storm and direct the whirlwind.”"

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2 hours ago, fraurosena said:

But however bad -- evil even -- this may be, it will not change the surge of blue voters that will completely overwhelm the elections. So don't despair. Next year, your government will be blue.

What is being done to prevent tampering?

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LOL!

Nadler just used Dershowitz's arguments for impeachment-- from 1998 -- and showed a video of Dershowitz saying it. :pb_lol:

 

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Pardon me for not looking it up myself, but does anyone happen to know when is/are the deadline(s) for determining whether each state will hold a Republican primary?

I can't help but wonder, regardless of the outcome of the Senate trial, whether Republicans might regret and wish to reverse their apparent plan to not have any R run against DJT...

California's primary is March 3.  I would guess the ballots are being printed now if they're not already done.  So is this decision already a done deal?  Maybe states with later primaries can still change their plans?

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1 hour ago, church_of_dog said:

Pardon me for not looking it up myself, but does anyone happen to know when is/are the deadline(s) for determining whether each state will hold a Republican primary?

I can't help but wonder, regardless of the outcome of the Senate trial, whether Republicans might regret and wish to reverse their apparent plan to not have any R run against DJT...

California's primary is March 3.  I would guess the ballots are being printed now if they're not already done.  So is this decision already a done deal?  Maybe states with later primaries can still change their plans?

Every state has a different deadline.

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"Schiff asked GOP senators a tough question. The answer is awful."

Spoiler

As Rep. Adam Schiff continued building his case against President Trump late into Wednesday evening, Trump fired off one angry Twitter missive after another, until he finally crossed the 140 mark, perhaps his most prolific day of tweeting and retweeting ever.

All those tweets, many of which amplified the preposterous claim that Trump did nothing whatsoever wrong, sent GOP senators and their staffers an unmistakable message: Trump is watching the proceedings very carefully. If you vote to allow new witnesses and evidence, there will be absolute hell to pay.

At one point, Schiff, the California Democrat who is leading the team of House impeachment managers, asked GOP senators a question.

“The truth is going to come out,” Schiff said. “The only question is: Do you want to hear it now? Do you want to know the full truth now?”

This argument has been ubiquitous, including on this blog: GOP senators who vote against subpoenaing new witnesses and documents run the risk that more damning revelations will come out after any such vote, and after their inevitable acquittal. This could allow those revelations to be hung around their necks, as examples of what they sought to help Trump cover up.

But it’s now clear we’ve been looking at this from the wrong angle. The truth, plainly, is that in this scenario, the fact that the votes on evidence and acquittal will come before any future revelations is a feature of doing it this way.

That’s because a vote for acquittal (which, again, is inevitable) before more damning revelations are unearthed is politically less costly than a vote for acquittal after any such revelations.

Yes, future revelations will stand as evidence of what GOP senators covered up. But that’s still politically less risky, from their perspective, than taking the chance that new evidence could be still more damning than what’s already known, and that they’d have to then acquit at that point.

This is why the argument that Schiff and many of us have made has been a bit like shooting spitballs into a concrete wall.

The obvious reason for the blockade has been that Republicans want to help Trump execute the coverup. But the raw incentives for senators themselves also tilt against new witnesses and evidence, especially given the likelihood of new revelations later. Senators can try to dismiss future revelations with a wave of the hand — Trump has already been acquitted; we’ve moved on.

New reporting from CNN’s Manu Raju underscores the point. As Raju reports, no GOP senator wants to be the 51st and decisive vote for new witnesses and evidence. So the only way we’ll get new evidence is if a larger bloc of GOP senators breaks toward this outcome, resulting in, say, 54 or 55 votes for it.

But as Raju notes, “at the moment, that is not within the realm of possibility.”

Plainly, the prospect of being the 51st vote for transparency, accountability and the full truth would constitute a betrayal of loyalty to Trump that will not be countenanced.

No GOP senator wants to suffer such horrifying ignominy. And the inevitable vote to acquit will be easier, the less one knows about just how corrupt Trump’s scheme really was.

The coverup will mostly fail. Here’s why.

Still, time is working against Trump. What has already been demonstrated by House Democrats is incredibly damning. But since the impeachment vote, digging by good-government groups, supplemented by investigative reporting, has shown that concerns inside the administration about the illegality and impropriety of Trump’s corrupt freezing of military aid to extort Ukraine ran far deeper than we knew.

More is coming. The nonprofit group American Oversight just received reams of new emails, pursuant to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, from the White House budget office showing that on the day Trump pressured the Ukrainian president, White House officials were still working to justify the aid freeze’s legality, creating previously unknown internal tensions.

But many of those documents are heavily redacted.

Austin Evers, the executive director of American Oversight, tells me the group will be negotiating with the White House budget office about getting some redactions lifted, and if it doesn’t sufficiently comply, it’s back into court. It’s perfectly plausible, though hardly guaranteed, that a ruling may lift many redactions in the next few months.

One can envision numerous possibilities emerging from those documents. For instance, it’s plausible that the redactions cover up internal conversations, or additional concerns, about Trump’s rationale for freezing the aid.

Remember, when the Just Security website was able to peer under the redactions in a previous batch of emails, it was very revelatory.

What’s more, American Oversight is suing for still more documents. According to the group, two new batches are due from the State Department in February. Those requests concern, among other things, communications to and from Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and other top officials regarding Trump lawyer Rudolph Giuliani’s escapades in Ukraine to unearth dirt smearing Joe Biden.

Those, too, will be redacted. But if necessary, American Oversight will go to court on that as well, and an eventual ruling in the group’s favor is a genuine possibility. The point is that it’s very likely that more incriminating information will indeed come out.

There is a strangely ingrained media narrative that tends to treat Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell as the deviously clever and all-controlling wizard behind the Senate curtain. And, yes, McConnell may persuade GOP senators to answer Schiff’s question with a resounding “no,” in an effort to carry Trump’s coverup to completion.

But McConnell’s control over what we end up learning is not absolute. And neither is Trump’s.

 

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3 minutes ago, GreyhoundFan said:

 

Sniveling coward.

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"Marsha Blackburn slams Purple Heart recipient as unpatriotic"https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/impeachment-trial-live-updates/2020/01/23/ac685e4e-3dce-11ea-baca-eb7ace0a3455_story.html#link-7YZPONZLGQ4U3MKBJJOBMQ2GHE

Quote

Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) went after Schiff on Twitter for “hailing Alexander Vindman as an American patriot” during his testimony.

“How patriotic is it to badmouth and ridicule our great nation in front of Russia, America’s greatest enemy?” Blackburn tweeted.

In a second tweet, she continued her degradation of Vindman calling him vindictive over her allegation that he leaked the contents of the July 25 call to the intelligence agency whistleblower.

This isn’t the first time Blackburn has questioned Vindman’s loyalty to America. After he testified in the House impeachment probe in November, she derisively called him the whisleblower’s “handler.”

Vindman, who is Soviet-born and serves as director of European Affairs at the White House National Security Council, received a Purple Heart after he was injured from an IED during the Iraq War.

Blackburn, who was seen reading a book during the proceedings this morning, was roundly criticized on Twitter for going after Vindman.

Tim Miller, former campaign spokesman for Jeb Bush’s 2016 presidential campaign and frequent Trump critic, tweeted:

“1. The president you’re running interference for ridiculed our military intelligence officers & groveled before Putin in front of the world.

2. Vindman has shrapnel in his body from an IED attack he suffered fighting for our country.

It’s reprehensible how low you have gone.”

 

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There is a Dutch saying that applies so well here. Those you associate with, contaminate you.

Oh, and while we’re on the topic of the delightful Ms Blackburn...

In reaction to her egregious attacks on Vindman the whistleblower’s attorney has called for her resignation from the Senate Whistleblower Protection caucus.

 

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4 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

On MSNBC this evening, former Sen. Claire McCaskill really hit back on that - I'll see if I can find a clip. It was great.

ETA - here we go:

https://www.msnbc.com/11th-hour/watch/claire-mccaskill-to-marsha-blackburn-i-think-you-meant-to-criticize-trump-77437509862

Edited by scoutsadie
Added clip
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