Impeachment 4: The Orange Boil Has Not Been Removed, But He's Forever Impeached

[GreyhoundFan]

9 hours ago, JMarie said:

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/republican-senators-tried-to-stop-trump-from-firing-impeachment-witness/ar-BBZNiFx?ocid=spartanntp

 

Too bad all they will do is warn, then shake their heads and cluck about how they're "concerned" or "disappointed".  The Rs won't rise up against Twitler. Truly, it is up to voters to stop him.

[fraurosena]

20 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

The People’s House will continue to defend democracy for the American people.

I love her use of the term The People's House.

12 hours ago, JMarie said:

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/republican-senators-tried-to-stop-trump-from-firing-impeachment-witness/ar-BBZNiFx?ocid=spartanntp

 

Cowards, the lot of them. First they give him free rein to do what he wants and then when he does they weakly clutch their pearls in mock surprise. 

[fraurosena]

And so it begins. Fanning the flames of hatred, riling up the base, inciting violence, simply because someone had the temerity to disagree with the party. Making an example of what will happen to you if you don’t tow the party line. It’s not about politics anymore, it’s about taking sides. Either you’re with Trump, or you’re an enemy.

 

[SilverBeach]

On 2/7/2020 at 11:36 AM, GreyhoundFan said:

I think this applies to almost every repug:

 

Quite a few of your links are not showing up.

[GreyhoundFan]

26 minutes ago, SilverBeach said:

Quite a few of your links are not showing up.

I don't know what to say, I see the posts. I use the Pale Moon browser and I'm on a laptop.

This was the content of the post you quoted.

[SilverBeach]

@GreyhoundFan,I see your latest post just fine, thanks for reposting. Have no clue what's been happening. I appreciate your posts so much, along with the others in this thread that are keeping me informed.

Edited February 10, 2020 by SilverBeach

[AmericanRose]

Whenever I see articles about Republicans doing some hand-wringing about Trump, I just can't seem to forget that they could have stopped Trump from even becoming a candidate for President.

[laPapessaGiovanna]

5 hours ago, SilverBeach said:

@GreyhoundFan,I see your latest post just fine, thanks for reposting. Have no clue what's been happening. I appreciate your posts so much, along with the others in this thread that are keeping me informed.

When you can't see embedded content try clearing the cache.

[GreyhoundFan]

Lindsey has attained level 10,000 sycophancy:

 

[GreyhoundFan]

From George Conway: "Trump is right. We might have to impeach him again."

Spoiler

George T. Conway III is a lawyer and is also an adviser to the Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump super PAC.

“So we’ll probably have to do it again.”

So said the already-once-impeached President Trump on Thursday in the East Room, musing about the possibility he could become the first president to be impeached more than once. And on the very next day, as though he were competing for it, Trump showed precisely why he could be destined to achieve that ignominious fate.

With essentially no pretense about why he was doing it, the president brazenly retaliated Friday against two witnesses who gave truthful testimony in the House’s impeachment inquiry. He fired Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman and U.S. Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland. And he also fired a third man, Lt. Col. Yevgeny Vindman, merely for being the brother of the first. Trump essentially admitted his retaliatory motive on Saturday, when he tweeted that he sacked Vindman in part for having “reported contents of my ‘perfect’ calls incorrectly.”

If this were a criminal investigation, and Alexander Vindman and Sondland had given their testimony to a grand jury, this Friday Night Massacre could have been a crime. At the very least, it ought to be impeachable: If Richard M. Nixon was to be impeached for authorizing hush money for witnesses, and Trump himself was actually impeached for directing defiance of House subpoenas, then there should be no doubt that punishing witnesses for complying with subpoenas and giving truthful testimony about presidential misconduct should make for a high crime or misdemeanor as well.

But it’s really not about this one day, or this one egregious act. It’s about who Trump is, who he always was and who he always will be. It’s about the complete mismatch between the man and the office he holds.

It’s about the fact that the presidency is a fiduciary position, the ultimate public trust. And that Trump’s narcissism won’t allow him to put anyone else’s interests above his own, including the nation’s. Indeed, he can’t even distinguish between his interests and the nation’s — and doesn’t need to, according to his lawyers and now the judgment of the Senate. For Trump, it’s always L’état, c’est Trump, as many observers have trenchantly put it.

Or, as Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.) said during the impeachment trial, “you know you can’t trust this president to do what is right for this country. You can trust he will do what is right for Donald Trump. He will do it now. He has done it before.”

And he will do it again. He did do it again by firing the Vindmans and Sondland. He’s telling us he will do it again. And no one can seriously doubt it, even those who voted to acquit. The ever-hopeful Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), who said last week that she was voting to acquit partly because she thought Trump had learned “a pretty big lesson” from being impeached, quickly backtracked to say she was merely being “aspirational.” Such a lofty aspiration — that the president refrain from committing an impeachable offense.

“Fantastical” would better describe it, actually. On Thursday, Trump portrayed himself as the innocent victim: “Went through hell, unfairly. Did nothing wrong. Did nothing wrong.” “We were treated unbelievably unfairly.” “It was all bullshit.” It was “a very good phone call.” "I call it a ‘perfect call’ because it was.”

On the flip side, it was Trump’s opponents who did wrong. He called his impeachment “evil,” “corrupt,” “phony, rotten,” brought about by “dirty cops,” “leakers and liars" and, in general, “very evil and sick people” who were “vicious as hell.” “They made up facts.” “It was a disgrace.”

So just as we had Nixon’s enemies list, so we have had three years of Trump’s use of presidential power for vindictive ends. Long before the Vindmans and Sondland, the firing of James B. Comey as FBI director. Trump’s alleged directive to the Pentagon to “screw Amazon,” whose chief executive owns this newspaper, which, frankly, ought by itself to have been an impeachable offense. So, too, his threats against Google, Facebook and Twitter. His obvious punishment of Puerto Rico for its politicians’ criticisms of him. His attacks on a British ambassador who dared assess him critically. The Ukraine scandal itself, indeed, was partially an effort to attain vengeance for wrongs — Ukrainian “interference” — Trump imagines were done to him in 2016. He’ll use whatever means he has at his presidential disposal to redress his bottomless pit of grievances.

And he’ll only get worse. Narcissistic leaders such as Trump always do. As we’ve now seen, his rage leads to retribution and misconduct, which beget more criticism, and more investigation, and even more rage, retribution and misconduct. Over and over again.

So America beware: The state is Trump, and he’s very, very angry. We might, indeed, have to do it again.

 

[JMarie]

1 hour ago, GreyhoundFan said:

From George Conway: "Trump is right. We might have to impeach him again."

  Hide contents

George T. Conway III is a lawyer and is also an adviser to the Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump super PAC.

“So we’ll probably have to do it again.”

So said the already-once-impeached President Trump on Thursday in the East Room, musing about the possibility he could become the first president to be impeached more than once. And on the very next day, as though he were competing for it, Trump showed precisely why he could be destined to achieve that ignominious fate.

With essentially no pretense about why he was doing it, the president brazenly retaliated Friday against two witnesses who gave truthful testimony in the House’s impeachment inquiry. He fired Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman and U.S. Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland. And he also fired a third man, Lt. Col. Yevgeny Vindman, merely for being the brother of the first. Trump essentially admitted his retaliatory motive on Saturday, when he tweeted that he sacked Vindman in part for having “reported contents of my ‘perfect’ calls incorrectly.”

If this were a criminal investigation, and Alexander Vindman and Sondland had given their testimony to a grand jury, this Friday Night Massacre could have been a crime. At the very least, it ought to be impeachable: If Richard M. Nixon was to be impeached for authorizing hush money for witnesses, and Trump himself was actually impeached for directing defiance of House subpoenas, then there should be no doubt that punishing witnesses for complying with subpoenas and giving truthful testimony about presidential misconduct should make for a high crime or misdemeanor as well.

But it’s really not about this one day, or this one egregious act. It’s about who Trump is, who he always was and who he always will be. It’s about the complete mismatch between the man and the office he holds.

It’s about the fact that the presidency is a fiduciary position, the ultimate public trust. And that Trump’s narcissism won’t allow him to put anyone else’s interests above his own, including the nation’s. Indeed, he can’t even distinguish between his interests and the nation’s — and doesn’t need to, according to his lawyers and now the judgment of the Senate. For Trump, it’s always L’état, c’est Trump, as many observers have trenchantly put it.

Or, as Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.) said during the impeachment trial, “you know you can’t trust this president to do what is right for this country. You can trust he will do what is right for Donald Trump. He will do it now. He has done it before.”

And he will do it again. He did do it again by firing the Vindmans and Sondland. He’s telling us he will do it again. And no one can seriously doubt it, even those who voted to acquit. The ever-hopeful Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), who said last week that she was voting to acquit partly because she thought Trump had learned “a pretty big lesson” from being impeached, quickly backtracked to say she was merely being “aspirational.” Such a lofty aspiration — that the president refrain from committing an impeachable offense.

“Fantastical” would better describe it, actually. On Thursday, Trump portrayed himself as the innocent victim: “Went through hell, unfairly. Did nothing wrong. Did nothing wrong.” “We were treated unbelievably unfairly.” “It was all bullshit.” It was “a very good phone call.” "I call it a ‘perfect call’ because it was.”

On the flip side, it was Trump’s opponents who did wrong. He called his impeachment “evil,” “corrupt,” “phony, rotten,” brought about by “dirty cops,” “leakers and liars" and, in general, “very evil and sick people” who were “vicious as hell.” “They made up facts.” “It was a disgrace.”

So just as we had Nixon’s enemies list, so we have had three years of Trump’s use of presidential power for vindictive ends. Long before the Vindmans and Sondland, the firing of James B. Comey as FBI director. Trump’s alleged directive to the Pentagon to “screw Amazon,” whose chief executive owns this newspaper, which, frankly, ought by itself to have been an impeachable offense. So, too, his threats against Google, Facebook and Twitter. His obvious punishment of Puerto Rico for its politicians’ criticisms of him. His attacks on a British ambassador who dared assess him critically. The Ukraine scandal itself, indeed, was partially an effort to attain vengeance for wrongs — Ukrainian “interference” — Trump imagines were done to him in 2016. He’ll use whatever means he has at his presidential disposal to redress his bottomless pit of grievances.

And he’ll only get worse. Narcissistic leaders such as Trump always do. As we’ve now seen, his rage leads to retribution and misconduct, which beget more criticism, and more investigation, and even more rage, retribution and misconduct. Over and over again.

So America beware: The state is Trump, and he’s very, very angry. We might, indeed, have to do it again.

 

How George is still married to Worn Out Barbie (AKA Kellyanne) boggles my mind

[GreyhoundFan]

 

[GreyhoundFan]

Another great ad from the Lincoln Project:

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"Death threat to whistleblower’s lawyer points to Trump’s depravity"

Spoiler

“All traitors must die miserable deaths,” a man from Michigan allegedly wrote in an email to Mark Zaid, the lawyer for the whistleblower who got the scandal rolling that ultimately resulted in President Trump’s impeachment. The man added: “We will hunt you down and bleed you out like the pigs you are.”

The author of this email has now been charged by federal prosecutors with making a death threat, Politico’s Natasha Bertrand reports. This came after Trump tweeted about the whistleblower many, many times, after Trump suggested the whistleblower should be executed and after Trump ripped into the whistleblower’s lawyer at a rally.

Now that it’s public that Trump’s attacks on the whistleblower resulted in a threat to a person’s life, does anyone doubt for even a second that those attacks will continue?

Of course they will. And allow us to remind you of something: The whistleblower has been entirely irrelevant to Trump’s impeachment travails for months.

While we might not have learned about Trump’s efforts to strong-arm Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky into doing his corrupt political bidding if the whistleblower hadn’t come forward, needless to say, there is still zero justification for Trump to have responded to the whistleblower as he has.

But even putting that aside, since we first heard about the whistleblower’s complaint, just about every single fact in it has been verified by other sources.

Trump released the rough transcript of his call with Zelensky, confirming his shakedown effort. A parade of officials have since testified to the broad outlines of the scheme, to their deep alarm about it, to the efforts by people around Trump to keep the plot under wraps and to the roles that key players such as Trump lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani played in it.

Yet despite this, Trump and his allies have kept up the attacks on the whistleblower and have engaged in transparent efforts to place him in danger. House Republicans kept insisting that the whistleblower testify, and even as late as Trump’s trial, Senate Republicans were threatening to haul him in.

Trump himself kept demanding to know where he was, and even retweeted a tweet purportedly outing the whistleblower’s name.

Trump and his allies did this despite warnings from experts that such acts could discourage future whistleblowers from revealing wrongdoing. Indeed, they probably saw those warnings as a good reason to keep up the attacks.

And again, all of this happened although the facts in the whistleblower complaint were getting broadly confirmed by other sources. House Democrats didn’t seek the whistleblower’s testimony for a reason: not just to keep him safe, but also because the case against Trump had been broadly bolstered by a tremendous wealth of evidence on the public record.

There was obviously never any justification for these attacks. But it adds an additional layer of depravity to the whole affair that the whistleblower’s complaint has been utterly irrelevant to Trump’s legal travails for months. The only conceivable reasons for doing this are to discourage future whistleblowers from exposing wrongdoing and to extract naked revenge against the whistleblower for daring to expose Trump’s corruption in the first place.

Indeed, after Trump ousted former National Security Council official Alexander Vindman as retaliation for his powerful testimony, Donald Trump Jr. quite explicitly stated that anyone who is prepared to rat out the boss’s corruption will face punishment:

Now that it has been confirmed that the attacks resulted in an alleged death threat, the targeting will surely continue. Indeed, Senate Republicans are still considering whether to call the whistleblower to testify in the future, and they will surely keep agitating for this.

The larger context here is that Trump has already continued such attacks even when warned that they could have dire consequences. When reporters have personally appealed to Trump’s humanity by telling him they fear his attacks on the media could result in them getting harmed, he has basically shrugged.

Indeed, even after a man was arrested for allegedly threatening mass murder against journalists while repeating Trump’s “enemy of the people” language about the media, Trump kept using the same language.

Trump recognizes zero obligation of any kind to temper his rhetoric or conduct, even when — or especially when — he learns it could have the severest of consequences. So the attacks on the whistleblower will surely continue. After all, chilling the exposure of future wrongdoing is too important to allow any such qualms to get in the way.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

What a surprise /sarcasm

"Trump says he will fire intelligence watchdog at center of Ukraine allegations that led to impeachment"

Spoiler

President Trump notified Congress Friday evening that he intends in 30 days to fire the intelligence community inspector general, the official who alerted lawmakers to a whistleblower complaint last September that was at the center of allegations that led to the president’s impeachment.

The bombshell move to remove Michael Atkinson comes as the administration is struggling to cope with a coronavirus pandemic that has killed thousands of Americans.

The whistleblower complaint centered on Trump’s efforts last summer to pressure the Ukrainian government to undertake investigations of former vice president Joe Biden and his son Hunter, moves that would undermine a likely rival to Trump in his reelection bid.

Trump informed lawmakers in a letter late Friday night that he was removing Atkinson. “It is vital that I have the fullest confidence in the appointees serving as inspectors general,’’ he wrote in the letter, a copy of which was obtained by The Washington Post. “That is no longer the case with regard to this inspector general.”

Trump has faulted Atkinson repeatedly for letting the complaint reach Congress and also as enabling what he has called a “hoax” of an impeachment, administration officials said.

He has weighed for months removing Atkinson, whom he picked for the job in late 2017, but has been periodically talked out of it.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the reason for or the timing of the firing. Trump’s action drew immediate condemnation from senior Democratic lawmakers.

“Whether it’s Lt. Col. Vindman, Captain Crozier, or Intelligence Community Inspector General Michael Atkinson: President Trump fires people for telling the truth,” Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) said in a statement. “Michael Atkinson is a man of integrity who has served our nation for almost two decades. Being fired for having the courage to speak truth to power makes him a patriot.”

Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman was a Ukraine specialist on the White House National Security Council who testified during the House impeachment about listening in to Trump’s telephone conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. He was removed from his White House post days after Trump’s acquittal by the Senate.

Capt. Brett Crozier was the commander of the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt who was removed after the leaking of a blunt letter he wrote to his superiors about what he saw as insufficient measures to fight a coronavirus outbreak aboard the vessel.

“In the midst of a national emergency, it is unconscionable that the president is once again attempting to undermine the integrity of the intelligence community by firing yet another intelligence official simply for doing his job,” said Senate Intelligence Committee Vice Chairman Mark R. Warner (D-Va.). “We should all be deeply disturbed by ongoing attempts to politicize the nation’s intelligence agencies.”

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.) called the move “yet another blatant attempt by the president to gut the independence of the intelligence community and retaliate against those who dare to expose presidential wrongdoing.” Said Schiff: “At a time when our country is dealing with a national emergency and needs people in the intelligence community to speak truth to power, the president’s dead of night decision puts our country and national security at even greater risk.”

Atkinson, a respected government lawyer with more than 20 years’ experience, was informed Friday night that Trump intended to fire him and was placed on administrative leave effective immediately, according to a congressional aide who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak for the record. The statute technically requires that both intelligence committees be notified by the president 30 days before the effective date of the inspector general’s removal. But placing Atkinson on administrative leave effectively sidelines him immediately, the aide said.

“The firing of Atkinson, who was appointed by President Trump, is nothing but a delayed retaliatory action taken against an independent IG for his proper handling of a whistleblower complaint,” said Mark Zaid, the lawyer who previously represented the intelligence community employee who alleged that Trump had solicited Ukraine’s interference in the 2020 presidential election. “This action is disgraceful and undermines the integrity of the whistleblower system,” Zaid said. “It is time GOP members of the Senate stand up for the rule of law and speak out against this president.”

 

[LeftCoastLurker]

He fired him last night

[fraurosena]

Damn. 

 

[fraurosena]

Alexander Vindman's brother Yevgeny has filed a whistleblower reprisal complaint.