impeach 2 bak

see imperial presidency

no merri

see ukraine 2 also ukrn tag

see fox 4: hanity tucker and ingram core/ wall defense, holds base (grafix override verbal testimony/nuance/negative)

bret k won by loud; jordan, nunes, scalise whip sciff stunt pizzagaetz

intel comm, judiciary, oversight comms

bak 1119

we now know that there was no investigation of ----?

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al green 9 26 23 counts?

// hegseth by massie

SEE RECISSION

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MILES T DIESEL STAR LINK?

AN 10 26

On Thursday, a whistleblower from President Donald Trump’s first administration laid out the pattern of Russian collusion that has extended across both terms. According to Miles Taylor – who served as the Deputy Chief of Staff in Homeland Security and leaked White House secrets – Trump’s actions regarding Ukraine amount to “treason” worthy of impeachment.

As Taylor notes, this week has brought a flurry of controversy prompted by Trump’s actions regarding Russia and Ukraine. It began on Tuesday, when Russian ballistic missiles struck Ukraine without warnings that would usually come via U.S. satellites, killing and injuring dozens of Ukrainians. While American officials claimed the detection failed due to “bad weather,” Ukrainian officials said someone in the U.S. was “playing” with the system.

Then the next day, Starshield – the military version of Elon Musk’s Starlink, which Ukrainian troops use to fly drones and intercept Russian attacks — was suddenly throttled without warning. Ukrainian President Zelenskyy was furious and warned that “people will die.” Musk surprised everyone by putting the blame on the White House, posting, “Any limits on speed or usage are decided by the U.S. military and ultimately POTUS.” The White House has not denied his claims.

“Are we to believe this was a coincidence?” asks Taylor. “Missile warnings and battlefield communications all coming down at the same time? Was it all ‘the weather’? Not even a fool would accept that conclusion. Look at last week, and you can surmise exactly what happened. And it may well be criminal.”

Days before, explains Taylor, Trump held a “suspicious” phone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin, after which he announced a deal to buy millions of tons of Russian diesel, breaking sanctions he himself signed into law mere weeks earlier. Even Republican Senators have warned that he broke the law by giving a financial gift to the U.S. adversary. On the same day, Trump’s envoys told Ukraine that if Kyiv didn’t stop striking Russian oil refineries, Washington would cut off intelligence.

Then on Saturday, after Russian glide bombs killed 20 people in Ukraine, Trump said something that Putin “has been dreaming of, declaring, “It’s time for Ukraine to get a new president.” Finally, late Wednesday, FBI Director Kash Patel responded to reports that he’s planning to visit Moscow to meet with the FSB, the successor to the KGB, with the taunt, “From Russia, with Love…”

According to Taylor, “There are very serious questions here, with very serious implications for the Trump presidency. What did the president know, and when? What did Putin ask of Trump in that phone call? Did Donald Trump agree to give Putin a financial boost and buy his oil? Did Putin suggest it might help Trump in the midterms by lowering gas prices? Did Trump offer to weaken Ukraine’s defenses for Putin? Did Trump then personally order the Pentagon to restrict Ukraine’s satellite communications while Ukrainian cities were under attack? Did he order American agencies to sit on intelligence about incoming strikes? What, exactly, did the two men say to each other on Friday?”

As Taylor notes, Trump has actually already been impeached previously, in 2019, over this exact issue: withholding military support for Ukraine in order to extract a political benefit for himself in a “perfect phone call” with the Ukrainian leader. At the time, he froze foreign aid that was supposed to go to Ukraine in order to get leverage over them to help his re-election. Now he’s doing it again, though Taylor asserts the matter is “more serious” this time. “After a very suspicious phone call with Vladimir Putin,” writes Taylor, “Trump may have shut down early warning systems and battlefield communications — by literally switching them off while civilians slept in their apartments in Ukraine, in the crosshairs of Russia — in order to pressure Ukraine into a bogus ‘energy ceasefire’ in order to herald lower gas prices before the U.S. midterm elections.”

While this situation doesn’t precisely fit the Constitutional definition of treason, in Taylor’s estimation, “a president who puts his allies in mortal danger with favors to an enemy and for personal benefit has essentially done what treason describes. And impeachment doesn’t require a statute. Indeed, the words ‘high crimes and misdemeanors' were written to allow Congress to impeach a president for abuses of the public trust, and there’s no clearer abuse than a commander in chief using American intelligence as leverage against the people it was built to protect, on behalf of the dictator trying to kill them.” Trump has been impeached over such actions before. Now, writes Taylor, “The question our country must confront is whether the leader of the United States lowered the shield so that Putin could carry out murder and so that he could secure some political wins. In 2017, it took a special counsel to find out what Trump and Russia were doing together. In 2026, it might get blown open over an alleged lie about a weather report. The collusion is real.”

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see recission

9 26 1b$ clawback dei AI bs

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AN 4 25

resident Donald Trump has reached the 100-day mark of his second term, and already administration officials are preparing for an impeachment defense—despite the fact that the House and the Senate are under Republican control, and the midterm elections are more than 18 months away.

Trump's advisors "are seriously considering the likelihood that he would be impeached again if Democrats take the House next year," Axios reports.

"I'm certain," Trump's longtime pollster, John McLaughlin, told Axios—an opinion reportedly shared by others in Trump's "orbit."

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt blasted U.S. Rep. Shri Thanedar (D-MI), who filed seven articles of impeachment against President Trump on Monday.

IFrame Content

"Who the hell is this lunatic?" the Press Secretary asked, according to Axios.

U.S. Senator Jon Ossoff (D-GA) on Friday signaled support for a Trump impeachment, becoming the first swing state Senator to do so.

"The threat of impeachment has added urgency to the Trump administration's push to get as much of his agenda through Congress as possible before the 2026 midterms — especially his plan to extend his 2017 tax cuts," Axios noted.

"We need to pass the tax cuts and avoid a recession," McLaughlin said. "That's the high stakes here. We cannot lose the midterms."

Some economic experts say a recession may now be the best possible outcome, not just in the U.S., but globally, driven by President Trump’s tariff and trade wars. Others are raising alarms about the risk of "stagflation."

Trump insiders reportedly also feel an impeachment threat could help solidify the MAGA base, and be a fundraising boon.

"Trump’s attacks on due process, birthright citizenship, humanitarian aid, and the courts are not 'politics,'" Congressman Thanedar wrote on Monday. "They are a direct attack on our democracy. Enough is enough."

Meanwhile, at The Bulwark, Jill Lawrence writes that she took a "look at all the impeachment articles against presidents and figure[d] out how many Trump has already matched or surpassed."

"Spoiler: It has not been fun. And the answer is pretty much all of them—from Andrew Johnson in 1868 to the charges in Trump’s own pair of impeachments a few short years ago. How do we know? Because it’s all unfolding publicly and blatantly in real time."

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AN 4 25

Faced with two primary challengers and growing public support for impeaching U.S. President Donald Trump a historic third time, Congressman Shri Thanedar on Monday filed seven articles of impeachment against the second-term Republican.

"Donald Trump has repeatedly demonstrated that he is unfit to serve as president and represents a clear and present danger to our nation's constitution and our democracy," Thanedar (D-Mich.) said in a statement. "His unlawful actions have subverted the justice system, violated the separation of powers, and placed personal power and self-interest above public service. We cannot wait for more damage to be done. Congress must act."

Thanedar explained the seven articles of impeachment included in his resolution in a brief video, which he shared on social media.

As a statement from the congressman's office details, Trump's alleged constitutional violations are:

Obstruction of Justice and Abuse of Executive Power: Including denial of due process, unlawful deportations, defiance of court orders, and misuse of the Department of Justice.
Usurpation of Appropriations Power: For dismantling congressionally established agencies and impounding federal funds.
Abuse of Trade Powers and International Aggression: Including imposing economically damaging tariffs and threatening military invasion against sovereign nations.
Violation of First Amendment Rights: Through retaliatory actions against critics, media, and attorneys exercising constitutionally protected speech.
Creation of an Unlawful Office: By establishing the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and unlawfully empowering Elon Musk to unilaterally violate the Constitution.
Bribery and Corruption: Involving dismissing criminal cases, soliciting foreign emoluments, and extortionate settlements for personal and political gain.
Tyrannical Overreach: Seeking to consolidate unchecked power, erode civil liberties, and defy constitutional limits on presidential authority.

IFrame Content

Earlier this month, Thanedar called for Trump's impeachment over his administration's failure to comply with a 9-0 Supreme Court ruling about facilitating the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia from a prison in El Salvador to the United States.

"We must take action now," he said at the time. "Donald Trump and members of his administration are deporting people with limited evidence and no due process to horrific megaprisons in a foreign nation. As a member of Congress, I have a responsibility to uphold the checks and balances that safeguard the integrity of our democracy and prevent a slide into authoritarianism. This must be a red line. Otherwise, we risk Donald Trump continuing to defy the Constitution in his own interest, rather than the interest of the nation."

"Enough is enough," Thanedar declared. "We can not allow this obvious authoritarian power grab to continue. I urge my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to stand up for the Constitution and the American people and join the call for impeachment."

While Thanedar had expressed support for impeachment prior to Monday, his resolution came as a second primary challenger announced his candidacy for Michigan's 13th Congressional District. State Rep. Donavan McKinney (D-11) joined former state Sen. Adam Hollier (D-2), who has twice tried to oust the congressman and is trying to do so again next year.

McKinney is backed by the progressive group Justice Democrats, whose executive director Alexandra Rojas said in a statement earlier Monday that "Democratic voters in the face of unprecedented attacks on our livelihoods and liberties are fed up with a Democratic Party overrun by do-nothing career politicians who are totally unequipped to lead in this moment. Donavan represents the future the Democratic Party should be fighting: working-class people taking our power back from multimillionaires to deliver for everyday people."

After Thanedar announced the impeachment resolution, Business Insider senior politics reporter Bryan Metzger said on social media Monday that it is "always interesting to see how primary challenges affect members' behavior, though usually it's a bit more subtle than this."

Recent polling has found that a majority of voters disapprove of how Trump is handling his job and would support a historic third impeachment. In response to one survey, Free Speech for People's Alexandra Flores-Quilty—whose group is leading a nonpartisan Impeach Trump Again campaign—declared Friday that "it's up to Congress to do their job, defend the Constitution, and impeach and remove Donald Trump from office for his grave abuses of power."

Trump is the only president to be impeached twice by the House of Representatives—though in both cases during his first term, he was acquitted by the Senate. Republicans now narrowly control both chambers of Congress.

While Republicans haven't yet signaled a willingness to stand against the president, U.S. Rep. Al Green (D-Texas) told attendees of an early April anti-Trump rally that "within the next 30 days, I'm bringing articles of impeachment."

Axiosnoted Monday that "Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) also privately floated impeaching Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, National Security Adviser Mike Waltz, and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard over Signalgate."

NOW READ:Only one thing is going to stand in Trump's way — and he knows it

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oops context

an 4 24

house Oversight Committee Chair James Comer (R-KY) recently told a GOP colleague, according to CNN, that he just wanted to be ‘done with' his 15-month-long impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden.

CNN reported last week that the Kentucky lawmaker has already begun to set his eyes on other goals — "ambitions to run for higher office one day, including potentially running for governor, according to lawmakers who have spoken to him."

In a Sunday, April 28 op-ed published by MSNBC, author and journalist Paul Weldman suggests Comer, his GOP colleagues, and Fox News media allies want the public to somehow forget about the probe, and just how unsuccessful it was — despite the fact their nominee for president is swimming in pools of the "corruption" they've been looking for.

"You might recall that [former President Donald] Trump was first impeached for pressuring Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to open a sham investigation of Biden in order to discredit him ahead of the 2020 election," Weldman writes."Comer and House Republicans delivered what Zelenskyy refused to."

The "White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy" author emphasizes, "Again and again, they’d find some new piece of information, rush to the cameras to proclaim that they had located the smoking gun, then watch as their claims collapsed when the mundane truth came out."

Weldman writes:

*And yet, despite the best efforts of the House GOP’s worst people, the investigation did not find any corruption. That’s not to say Biden is a paragon of ethical purity; he’s done a few questionable things, like taking a position at the University of Pennsylvania after his vice presidency that involved a healthy salary and few responsibilities. That kind of sweetheart deal may be a little unseemly, but it’s neither illegal nor particularly uncommon for someone in his position.

Corruption, however, is something very different — and there’s never been any credible evidence that Biden is corrupt at all. The fruitless quest to find something criminal Biden did is particularly ironic given that Republicans are working so hard to return possibly the most corrupt president in history to the White House. Even now, they support him as he argues to the Supreme Court that presidents must be immune from prosecution for any crimes they might commit while in office. So if they want to find corruption, they know where they can look.*

"Things have not worked out the way Comer and his colleagues wished," the Boundary Issues podcast host adds. "The only ones humiliated were the bush-league Javerts of the GOP."

Weldman emphasizes, "And Republicans — and their media allies — are hoping you forget all about it."

*Welman's full op-ed is availablehere.

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mitt r says gop MOC wd not vote consc b/c cd not afford pvt sec he has

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cdv 12 12 22

When right-wing Christians, especially evangelicals, start talking about "demons" and "the devil" attacking Donald Trump and that they need to use "spiritual warfare" against Trump's "enemies," what do they mean?

Evangelicals have always talked about demonic forces in the world andspiritual warfare.In their minds, God and Satan are still battling with each other, and then one day at the great battle of Armageddon or something akin to it, Satan will be defeated and we'll move into a new heaven. For evangelicals, the world is always enchanted. There are always angels and forces of evil and devils and demons and so forth. That's how they see the world around them. What's fascinating about these discussions of spiritual warfare, though, is that they normally take place behind the closed doors of churches. Now evangelicals are bringing this type of talk and logic to American public life in defense of Donald Trump.

Evangelical leaders such as Franklin Graham and others have recently been saying, "There are forces out there that are trying to undermine this president." If someone who is not a Christian evangelical were to hear the word "forces," they would think that means the Democrats or the deep state. But any evangelical who hears someone like Franklin Graham say that knows exactly what those forces are. These are demonic forces.

After the impeachment, evangelicals upped their game. "Demonic" and "spiritual battle" and "the devil" did not come into the public discourse in the way they are at present until Donald Trump was impeached. When the impeachment inquiry started, you had all these people saying that this is the devil at work trying to undermine God's anointed. Devils are trying to undermine a nation and its president who is trying to bring that nation back to its godly roots.

If right-wing Christian leaders are saying that the Democrats are demonic forces, is that an encouragement to violence?

Perhaps I am naïve, but I guess I have enough faith in my fellow evangelicals to prevent this from moving towards violence. But to affirm what you're saying, I think you're right. The logical implications of this certainly could be, at this point, very harsh, un-Christian like attacks on people who do not support Trump.

What do right-wing evangelicals and other Christians want? What is the Christian right's dream for America?

There's a theological concept in the New Testament known as the "Kingdom of God." Many non-evangelicals and non-Christians become very concerned when they hear Trump cabinet member Betsy DeVos or someone else with power saying, "We want to bring about the Kingdom of God." Outsiders see that as a kind of dominionist, reconstructionist, theocratic kind of statement. But when evangelicals theologically talk about the Kingdom of God, they're normally talking about what the world would be like if Jesus was King and if you put Jesus on the throne of the so-called Kingdom of God. We're all citizens of this kingdom as believers. I think they've confused this idea of a Kingdom of God" with some form of American exceptionalism or the idea that America is a "City on a Hill" and that God has specially blessed us.

When they talk about the nation becoming more Christian, again, it's all filtered through this recent history of the last 40 years. So how do we create a Christian nation? Well, we fight against abortion. We fight for religious liberty for our views only. We try to privilege Christianity, our version of Christianity, above everything else. If you push many of these Christian right leaders, it is hard to find an answer as far as what they actually want this vision to look like in practice.

For example, they are against abortion. What does that look like in practice? Do you want to take every woman who had an abortion and put her in prison? Put abortion doctors in prison? What is the logical outcome of these kinds of policies? And they would immediately back off and say, "Oh, no, no, no. We don't want to create a theocratic state, or a state governed by the teachings of the Bible." But in some ways, they do.

Most evangelicals, because they've committed to this notion of reclaiming America as a "Christian nation," have no model for pluralism. They cannot grasp any idea of a pluralistic society in which there are people who differ from them and question what American evangelicals believe. How do white evangelicals live together in a society with people who have deep differences on a variety of issues?...

https://www.npr.org/**2019/10**/09/768556474/how-a-political-hit-job-backfired-and-led-to-trumps-impeachment-peril

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. The nation's attention is riveted on the drama unfolding in Washington, where House investigators are assembling evidence for their impeachment inquiry, and President Trump is refusing to cooperate. Our guest, Bloomberg Businessweek columnist Joshua Green, says that, ironically, Trump's impeachment peril is the unintended result of an effort to help him.

Last spring, a book came out called "Secret Empires: How The American Political Class Hides Corruption And Enriches Family And Friends." Its author was Peter Schweizer, the head of the Government Accountability Institute, a think tank founded by Schweizer and Steve Bannon. The book includes information about Hunter Biden, the son of Joe Biden and his activities in Ukraine when his father was the vice president.

The book raises questions about possible ethical violations and corruption related to Hunter Biden's activities in Ukraine. The book received a lot of attention on Fox News, where it came to the attention of President Trump and led Trump to send Rudy Giuliani to Ukraine to pressure the new government there to investigate the claims in Schweizer's book.

Joshua Green notes in a new article how this echoes the playbook that Schweizer and Bannon successfully used with their 2015 book "Clinton Cash," which raised questions about the propriety of Hillary Clinton's financial dealings and those of the Clinton Foundation. It led to investigations by the mainstream media. Joshua Green writes about politics for Bloomberg Businessweek and is the author of a book about Steve Bannon called "Devil's Bargain." He spoke with FRESH AIR's Dave Davies.

DAVE DAVIES, BYLINE: Joshua Green, welcome back to FRESH AIR. You write that the allegations of corruption involving Joe Biden and his son Hunter in Ukraine were first aired in a book published last year by something called the Government Accountability Institute. What is the Government Accountability Institute?

JOSHUA GREEN: Well, the Government Accountability Institute is registered as a nonpartisan research organization. It was founded in 2012 by Steve Bannon, Donald Trump's former chief strategist, and Peter Schweizer, who, I believe, is now the president and still works there. And it bills itself as an investigatory outfit that investigates money and politics, corruption and that sort of thing.

DAVIES: Right. Who funds it?

GREEN: Well, we don't know all the funders, but one of its chief funders is Rebekah Mercer, who is part of the Mercer family, headed by Robert Mercer, the former co-chair of Renaissance Technologies, the big hedge fund. The Mercer family was and still is a major right-wing donor to various different causes, big Trump supporters, and a family that has come into the spotlight since Trump's election - also involved in Cambridge Analytica and some of the outfits that became famous and even notorious after the 2016 election.

DAVIES: The funding certainly comes from partisan sources. You know, the co-founder was Steve Bannon. What's interesting, as you write, is that the work - the research that it produced and the books that it produced weren't intended particularly to reach the conservative media or core Republican voters. What was the purpose?

GREEN: Well, the purpose of GAI originally was to, you know, investigate politicians. But given the conservative band of people like Bannon and Schweizer and their funders, the focus often tended to be Democrats. And in my book, I write about howSchweizer and Bannon resolved to go after Hillary Clinton a couple of years before the 2016 election, knowing that she was likely to emerge as the Democratic nominee.

So through GAI and its investigators, its forensic data scientists, you know, they pored over public records, corporate filings, dark Web scrapings to compile, you know, a damning book about Bill and Hillary Clinton in their work through their nonprofit, the Clinton Foundation, that was published about a month before Hillary launched her presidential campaign. And that book, "Clinton Cash," became an instant New York Times [PARTNERSHIP?!] bestseller and really tarnished Hillary Clinton's image just as she was entering the presidential fray.

DAVIES: And the interesting thing is that, you know, Bannon was not interested in just generating material for the conservative media. It was important that mainstream media draw on this research and, you know, give it their imprimatur tour too.

GREEN: That's exactly right. You know, Bannon's critique of how Republicans deal with the media goes back to the 1990s and Bill Clinton's impeachment, when he thought that Republicans really just wound up talking to themselves in an echo chamber and they chased wild rumors and conspiracy theories and really put off ordinary voters. The media didn't listen to them. Voters didn't listen to them. OPPO RESEARCH

So with "Clinton Cash," he resolved to compile factual information that he wanted the mainstream media to pick up and amplify. And so he explicitly was not looking to reach a conservative audience, which is already going to be predisposed to dislike the Clintons, and was aiming to affect the votes in the views of independents and Democrats and the type of people that Hillary Clinton was counting on.It was important to Bannon that GAI's work be picked up and taken seriously by mainstream media outlets like The New York Times, The Washington Post, Bloomberg News.

DAVIES: And did those mainstream media organizations publish stories based on the research?

GREEN: Yeah, they did. I mean, famously, there was a New York Times story based on Schweizer's reporting. And it revealed this in the story, looking at a Clinton Foundation deal in a Russian-backed company called Uranium One that really took off and, I think, poisoned the public views of Clinton and the Clinton Foundation. And, as Bannon intended, a whiff of corruption attached itself to Hillary Clinton. Of course, that expanded as the media focused on her missing emails and Republicans pushed these ideas. But the book really succeeded in what Bannon had set out to do. And that was to raise doubts about the ethics and morals and fitness for the presidency of Hillary Clinton.

DAVIES: Right. And we should just note that there is nothing at all unusual about credible reporters getting tips and leads and information from partisan sources. They have to, of course, independently verify the information and assess its credibility. Were the books that the Government Accountability Institute writes generally accurate?

GREEN: Well, they were based on facts. And what these investigators did was go out and turn out examples of foreign donors that hadn't been disclosed and examples of behavior by former President Bill Clinton that seemed to be conducted on behalf of donors to the Clinton Foundation.You know, Schweizer's style is not to fabricate or allege illegality. Instead, he uses his reporting to lay out a suggestive timeline that leads readers to a conclusion that, hey, something is dirty here. This reeks of influence peddling. Something is not right. And it raises doubts about the subjects.

DAVIES: So the new book from Peter Schweizer and the Government Accountability Institute is called "Secret Empires: How The American Political Class Hides Corruption And Enriches Family And Friends." And it identified Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden as a target for some of the material. What did it find about Joe and Hunter Biden?

GREEN: Well, what it found was that Hunter Biden, the vice president's son, had become a highly paid director at a Ukrainian natural gas company called Burisma, a position that he didn't have any obvious qualifications for. But he did have a very famous last name, and the owner of the company was interested, I think, in building credibility. Schweizer also took a look at a private equity fund that Hunter Biden became involved in that drew a lot of money from Chinese investors at the same time that Hunter was flying to China on Air Force Two with his father, the vice president.

So in Schweizer's reporting, you know, this is made to look very fishy and possibly illegal and raise doubts about the ethics of Joe Biden and whether or not, you know, the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination really belongs in that position or, you know, is in some way corrupt because of his son's business dealings.

DAVIES: No direct evidence that Joe Biden did anything to assist his son in either of those ventures, right? But there's an association.

GREEN: No. No, there isn't. And Bloomberg News, my employer, has done a lot of reporting and has turned up no wrongdoing.Other outlets have taken a look. I mean, what is going on and what Schweizer is good at finding are situations like this where, you know, I think any objective reader would come to the conclusion that, you know, but for Hunter's last name, he would not be in this position. You and I would not be offered a $50,000 a month board seat at a Ukrainian gas company because our father isn't vice president.

So it's the sort of - it's what, you know, Schweizer calls corruption by proxy. There's nothing explicitly illegal, but it's sort of morally corrupt and an indictment of our system in a way that populist Republicans and Democrats like to criticize.

DAVIES: The Clinton book got a ton of mainstream media attention and had an impact on the Clintons themselves. This book, did it get a lot of mainstream attention? Did it hurt harm the Bidens?

GREEN: You know, it really didn't. It came out in 2018, and it kind of came and went. It - you know, it didn't attach itself to Biden. It didn't become - it didn't drive the political news cycle in the way that "Clinton Cash" drove the 2015-2016 presidential news cycle. It got a decent amount of attention in conservative media, but it never really broke out into the mainstream.

You know, and I speculated in my Businessweek piece, a couple of reasons for this - one, Joe Biden wasn't yet a candidate, and so there wasn't that kind of urgency to look into his past. There might have been had the book come out later on. It also didn't focus only on the Biden's; it focused on John Kerry, Barack Obama, the Republican Senate Leader Mitch McConnell.So I think that influenced how it was received. And of course, unlike "Clinton Cash," it wasn't focused on an actual Democratic presidential candidate; it was mainly focused on his son. And so there - it was sort of one degree removed from the primary actors.

I think all these things together help explain why the book didn't really break out until, that is, Donald Trump and his lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, became infatuated with it, started trying to investigate these things themselves and now has kicked off what has become an entire impeachment proceeding and put the book and the Bidens and Schweizer himself very much in the center of the 2020 presidential news cycle.

DAVIES: So when this book was launched with these stories, what were the ambitions of Peter Schweizer and the Government Accountability Institute?

GREEN: Well, I think the ambition was a reprise of what they'd seen with "Clinton Cash," that the mainstream media would look into this stuff and amplify it in the way that they had with the Clinton charges. You know, Steve Bannon, who kind of pioneered this model, has a phrase he likes to use - anchor left, pivot right. And what that means is you want to anchor this reporting on the left and the mainstream media - what Bannon considers the left - get them writing about it and then use the right-wing media to amplify what it is the mainstream media is saying and to kind of dominate the entire mediasphere.

So I think Schweizer and GAI were hoping that "Secret Empires," the Biden reporting, would be anchored in the mainstream media, and the whole process would repeat itself, but that never really happened with the second book.

DAVIES: So what did happen? Why do we know about it now?

GREEN: Well, we know about it now - it got a decent amount of attention in the right-wing media, onFox News, in the New York Post.And of course, some of - you know, one of the most loyal consumers of right-wing media is the president, Donald Trump, who according to reporting watches hours and hours of Fox News every day. So he was exposed to this reporting, exposed to the charges and the insinuations that Schweizer made. He's tweeted about the book. He's tweeted about Schweizer.

And, you know, based on everything we've heard from the whistleblower report, from the White House call transcript that was released at the end of September, Trump and Giuliani took it upon themselves to pick up the phone and try and advance Schweizer's reporting into the Bidens. I mean, essentially, calling the president of Ukraine and saying, hey,I know about this Biden stuff. I want you to look into this. I want you to investigate my political opponent. And, you know, if you don't, we're going to withhold this military aid - setting off all the alarm bells that have now led to the impeachment inquiry.

DAVIES: So it really was the president and Giuliani that took this and ran with it.

GREEN: It really was. I mean, the remarkable thing - a lot of people watch Fox News, watch right-wing media, get upset about the Clintons and the Bidens, but only one of them had the power to pick up the telephone, call the president of the Ukraine and put pressure on him to investigate the Bidens in hopes that they could turn up more damning information about Joe and Hunter Biden, knowing that Joe Biden was very likely to be his Democratic opponent in 2020.

DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR. And we're speaking with Bloomberg Businessweek columnist Joshua Green about the origins of the story about Joe Biden and his son Hunter in Ukraine, which drew interest from President Trump and has now led to an impeachment inquiry. Green is the author of a book about Steve Bannon called "Devil's Bargain."

So President Trump has said that Joe Biden, when he was vice president - I guess in 2016 - sought to get the Ukrainian prosecutor fired, who was, at that time, investigating the company associated with Hunter Biden, his son - in effect, kind of scotching an investigation into his son by getting the prosecutor fired. What's the truth of this?

GREEN: Well, it is true what Trump says, but it is wildly misleading. Vice President Biden played a central role in overseeing U.S. policy in the Ukraine. But Biden, the Obama administration, Republicans in the Senate, the International Monetary Fund, the European Union were all putting pressure on the Ukrainian government to root out corruption and, particularly, to fire the chief prosecutor at the time, Viktor Shokin, who was not - who was essentially beholden to the oligarchs, was not doing the kind of corruption investigations they wanted.

So Biden threatened to withhold up to a billion dollars in aid from Ukraine if Shokin wasn't fired because he was so deeply corrupt. So Biden and the Obama administration were putting pressure on the Ukraine government to do more investigating of corruption not less, as Trump and his allies are insinuating.

And it's also - I mean, just to be clear, they weren't in - Ukrainian prosecutors were never investigating Hunter Biden. They were investigating an oligarch who owned - who is the co-founder of Burisma, the gas company, on whose board Hunter Biden served.

DAVIES: Right. And is it clear whether, at the time that he was fired,this prosecutor, Victor Shokin, was actually investigating the company?

GREEN: You know, it isn't clear.There have been conflicting reports on this. There does seem to have been an investigation into Burisma. But, you know, they paid a fine. That went away. At no point was Hunter Biden ever implicated in any kind of corruption. And part of what, I think, Trump and Giuliani were trying to do was to reopen this investigation and steer it toward Hunter Biden in hopes that they could find or maybe create damaging material around the Bidens.

DAVIES: There is a new chief prosecutor in Ukraine and was quoted as saying that he had opened an audit of a bunch of old investigations, including one into Burisma Holdings, the company that Hunter Biden was associated with. What does this portend?

GREEN: Well, it's not clear. I mean, one of the things, I think, a lot of people don't understand about the whole Ukraine situation is that Hunter Biden was never investigated by Ukrainian prosecutors. What happened was that they were investigating an oligarch named Mykola Zlochevsky, who co-founded Burisma.And so reopening investigations would be investigations into Burisma Holdings. But they - from what we know, that wouldn't affect or have anything specifically to do with Hunter Biden or his situation there.

One of the things that Trump and Giuliani are pushing for in these text messages and these - in these meetings and phone calls is for Ukrainian prosecutors to go further and specifically investigate the Bidens in hope that they can turn up dirt that can be used in the 2020 presidential campaign.

And as far as we know, there's no basis for investigating anything. There is no evidence that I'm aware of or that anybody has reported that would suggest that there was wrongdoing there.And Schweizer himself, in fact, in the New York Times today, has an op-ed saying that, you know, what transpired actually wasn't illegal under U.S. law. It was unseemly. It might have been unethical - the idea of putting a politician's son on a board as a way of maybe trying to influence the political process - but there was nothing illegal here. And that's very much Schweizer's style is not to allege illegality but to insinuate that there is something corrupt going on there.

And, I think, part of the way that this entire story went sideways and went crashing into this impeachment inquiry is that Trump is very much susceptible to the insinuation that there is something, you know, perfidious going on here and took it upon himself to, you know, push and amplify and even threaten people in hopes of advancing the story.

DAVIES: You mentioned that Peter Schweizer, the author of this book that was funded by the Government Accountability Institute, has an op-ed in The Times. He's arguing that there's a Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which makes it illegal for an American company operating in a foreign country to engage in, you know, bribery or nepotism to secure favor from governments in which they operate but that there's a big hole in the law in that there's nothing to prevent a foreign government from hiring the family of U.S. officials or creating relationships in order to, you know, create an appearance which helps their business. Does he have a point?

GREEN: I think he's got a perfectly good point. And that's exactly what seems to be going on with Hunter Biden. He had no traditional, professional qualification for the job that he held with Burisma, you know, and that in itself doesn't seem right. I think that is what Schweizer is pointing to.

Now, Trump and Republicans have taken it a lot further, twisting a lot of the facts about what was investigated, what the Obama administration and Biden were pressuring the Ukrainian government to do in 2016. But the basic fact that Hunter Biden was on this board and was probably there for political reasons, because there weren't really any other good reasons for him to be on the board - what Scheizer has pointed out here and what he says in his New York Times op-ed is that what Hunter Biden did was perfectly legal, but that, in itself, is a problem.

GROSS: Joshua Green is a columnist for Bloomberg Businessweek. After a break, he'll talk with Dave Davies about how the controversy is affecting the Biden campaign and how Trump and his allies are fighting back with counter narratives that paint the president as the victim of Democratic attacks.

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. Let's get back to the interview FRESH AIR's Dave Davies recorded with Bloomberg Businessweek columnist Joshua Green. In a recent column, Green argues that President Trump's impeachment worries are actually the unintended result of an effort to help him. He says Trump picked up on research about Joe Biden developed by a conservative think tank and included in a book last year.

The material was intended to harm Biden's presidential campaign. But when Trump saw the story on conservative media and began urging Ukraine to investigate Biden, he created far bigger problems for himself. Trump is now the subject of an impeachment inquiry into whether he abused the authority of his office. When we left off, Green was talking about an op-ed published in The New York Times by Peter Schweizer, the author of the book with the allegations against Biden.

DAVIES: Are you surprised that The New York Times would publish an op-ed by Peter Schweizer, you know, who got funding from, you know, the Mercers and have a very strong political point of view?

GREEN: Yeah. You know, a little bit, given the controversy it kicked up in 2016 when Schweizer's reporting appeared on the front page - in other words, in the news pages. This piece today is in the opinion section, which I think is a little bit more appropriate for the author and the subject and the claims that he's making.

DAVIES: Right. And just going back to 2016, my understanding is that, you know, the author of the Times' reporting on the Clinton Foundations and the Uranium One story is reporting that they stand by, that they independently investigated all of this and found it credible and newsworthy. Do you disagree?

GREEN: No. I don't disagree with that at all. I mean, part of what made the GAI project so effective is that they didn't do what some conservative authors do, which is to, you know, fabricate or publish rumors. I mean, they're - all of this is based in fact. They certainly put their own spin on those facts. They insinuated that there was maybe more going on than was actually going on. But they really did turn up evidence of unreported donations, of relationships that just didn't seem right that, you know, any legitimate investigative reporter, were he or she to come across this information, would want to look into further. And that's exactly what happened.

So the fact that there is a grain of truth in a lot of what is written is one of the things that makes it so effective and that Bannon and Schweizer understood from the outset would get the mainstream media to pay attention and amplify these charges. I think what happened in 2016 that upsets liberals so much is that, you know, as this stuff was being published in the mainstream media, it was also being amplified and distorted in the right-wing media. And that was having a real effect on Hillary Clinton as a presidential candidate.

Her reputation was unquestionably tarnished. She was dogged by these charges and allegations. You add in the amplifying voice of Donald Trump as a presidential candidate calling her crooked Hillary and corrupt and I don't think there's any question - but that - it affected voters' views of her in a way that ultimately proved disastrous for Clinton's own candidacy and for Democrats.

DAVIES: One of the things that I think adds to the political potency is that the facts of a lot of these stories are so complicated, that it's really hard for an average reader to sort out what it all means. Was there subsequent reporting on the Uranium One story which cast the Clintons' actions in a different light?

GREEN: Nothing knocked it down. You know, the subsequent reporting - I mean, I think what a lot of Democrats objected to was the fact that this, frankly, partisan outfit and author and right-wing money had produced this information that had made its way onto the front page of The New York Times. And I spoke to the liberal activist David Brock at the time about Schweizer and Bannon. And he shook his head. And he Said, you know, looking at it from their point of view, the Times is the perfect host body for the virus - meaning, you know, the intention all along from these guys was to poison the public image of Hillary Clinton. And by getting these charges onto the front pages of The New York Times, they essentially accomplished that mission. I think everything that happened subsequently with Trump's attacks and Clinton's loss in the 2016 election back that up. And this time around, with Joe and Hunter Biden, they were looking to do the same thing.

DAVIES: In the op-ed, the Times doesn't mention Peter Schweizer's association with the Government Accountability Institute or its funders, you know, the Mercers.What do you think of that?

GREEN: You know, if I were running the op-ed page, I think that's something I would've disclosed based on, you know, his background, the political lineage and what we saw in the 2016 presidential cycle.

DAVIES: So is all of this affecting the Biden campaign?

GREEN: You know, it's not clear that it is. I mean, Biden had been on a bit of a downward trajectory before Trump and the Ukraine charges really came into the news cycle. But, you know, he is - he's starting to slip now. I mean, in the latest averages of polls, Elizabeth Warren has nudged ahead of him. So, you know, it's not clear that this is a deadly development for Joe Biden's candidacy, but it certainly isn't helping.

DAVIES: Since the whistleblower complaint emerged, there's been a lot of information and text and the summary of the phone call between President Trump and the president of Ukraine, which has led to this impeachment inquiry, which is clearly picking up steam. I mean, we're going to see, you know, testimony from other players in this including the former ambassador, Marie Yovanovitch. The Trump administration says it is not going to cooperate with this because, you know, it's a witch hunt. Where do you see this going?

GREEN: Well, you know, the irony here is that Trump, by involving himself, you know, essentially made this entire project blow up in his face and committed actions that, at the very least, have launched an impeachment inquiry and I think are very likely to lead to his impeachment in the House whether or not the Senate ultimately chooses to remove him.

But what the whistleblower report showed, what the subsequent text messages that have now been revealed between the U.S. ambassador to the EU, Gordon Sondland, and Bill Taylor, a top U.S. diplomat in Ukraine, that show that the U.S. apparently was withholding military aid to help a political campaign, as Taylor put it in his text. That is the quid pro quo that Democrats are alleging. And I think if there is a trial in the House, that's what it's likely to show. And the evidence we've seen so far certainly supports that.

So I think, from an impeachment standpoint, Trump is in real trouble. Whether or not he's ultimately removed from office, we'll see. I'm skeptical. But certainly this isn't the outcome that Schweizer and GAI and I think Trump and Giuliani expected to happen when they started making noise about this over the summer.

DAVIES: Right. Well, the president's defenders are aggressively promoting other narratives. I mean, Giuliani, a couple of weeks ago, was on the ABC weekend show waiving an affidavit from Viktor Shokin, you know, the prosecutor that was fired in 2016, in which alleges that, in fact, he was investigating the company Hunter Biden's - was associated with. There are certainly reasons to doubt his credibility in the eyes of a lot of people. And then, you know, last week, Senator Ron Johnson had a heated exchange with Chuck Todd on "Meet The Press" in which he was arguing that there's all this credible evidence that people in the Ukraine were trying to hurt Trump and help Hillary Clinton in 2016. [RUSSIAN DISINFO] It's a very aggressive strategy to - you know, bringing up other stuff. What do you think the effect will be?

GREEN: Well, I think the intention on the part of Republicans is to muddy the waters and to turn the charges of corruption against Trump that we've seen laid out in the whistleblower report and the text messages - turn them back against the Democrats.

What is troubling to a lot of people is that a lot of these charges are based on discredited conspiracy theories. What Ron Johnson was talking about was a conspiracy theory that Trump and Giuliani have propagated that it wasn't Russia that hacked the Democratic National Committee servers in the 2016 election but Ukraine.That's something that's been knocked down by every intelligence official, U.S. and otherwise, who's looked into this. And yet, this is what's being propagated by Trump.

And I think a lot of Republican politicians, fearful of Trump's wrath and eager to toe the partisan line, have found themselves forced or obligated to repeat these wild charges in a way that bears no relationship to reality but is nonetheless, I think, muddying the waters and shaping public opinion in a way that is intended to mitigate the damage of the charges against Trump.

DAVIES: Is Steve Bannon playing a role in stoking any of these allegations?

GREEN: You know, he really isn't anymore. I mean, Bannon had a very public falling-out with Donald Trump in 2017, where Trump sort of publicly humiliated him and excommunicated him from the Republican Party. He lost his position as the head of Breitbart News, was essentially sent out into the wilderness.

I mean, Bannon is still around on the scene. He is focused more on China these days and trying to, I think, strengthen Trump's resolve to conduct the trade war. Trump did tweet favorably about him a couple of months ago. But there isn't a close relationship there in the way that there was during the presidential campaign.

DAVIES: Yeah. I asked because you wrote a book about Steve Bannon and talked to him a lot. He was also going around Europe trying to kind of build a, you know, nationalist, populist movement. How did that go?

GREEN: Well, it basically failed. I mean, the nationalist movements in Europe weren't really interested in an American political strategist coming in and telling them what to do. They didn't perform nearly as well in the May European parliamentary elections as Bannon and some of the nationalist contingent were hoping for.

And so he's focused mainly these days on kind of beating the war drums against China, going out and publicly defending Trump's aggression against China when it comes to tariffs and the trade war and that sort of thing, and seeking to remain relevant in that way. But so far, there has been no reproach with Trump and the White House, or the Mercer family, for that matter. And so he's off on his own.

DAVIES: You know, looking at the strategy of the Government Accountability Institute with this book, you know, the idea was to kind of repeat the playbook that worked with the Clinton candidacy in 2016, where you develop information, it becomes adopted by the mainstream media and becomes a scandal. And in this case, it seems like another - kind of a different weird thing happened, which is that it turned into a scandal for the president himself when he pursued a theory and then engaged in conduct which has resulted in this impeachment inquiry.

At the same time, Peter Schweizer, the author of the book funded by the Government Accountability Institute, is being quoted. I mean, the story is out there. I wonder how they view this - how it's all worked out.

GREEN:Well, the irony here is that the target was supposed to be the Bidens, not the president. And by the president becoming involved, you know, the original plan has kind of blown up. What may wind up happening - as you say, you know, Biden and these charges are very much in the news. That was part of the intention, even if the negative attention toward Trump wasn't part of the plan. What we could see end up happening is a kind of a murder-suicide where Trump really does take out his strongest Democratic challenger, Joe Biden, only, he winds up, in the process, getting himself impeached.

DAVIES: Well, Joshua Green, thanks so much for speaking with us again.

GREEN: Thank you. It's always a pleasure.

GROSS: Joshua Green is a columnist for Bloomberg Businessweek and the author of a book about Steve Bannon called "Devil's Bargain."

https://www.alternet.org/2022/01/michael-flynn/

Retired army Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn's allies reportedly planned to gather "intelligence" on Republican electors in key states former President Donald Trump lost in hopes of distancing them from the election audits, Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agents and House Select Committee investigators have learned. GUK

Former whistleblower Everett Stern recently spoke with the investigating panel and FBI agents where he shared details about Flynn's associates.

Speaking to The Guardian, Stern, head of the Tactical Rabbit intelligence firm and a current Senate candidate, also revealed Flynn's allies reached out to him. He reportedly provided evidence, which included text messages, emails, and other correspondence to support his claims.

The individuals he was in contact with included Velma Anne Ruth, along with two additional Flynn allies: Al Hartman, a real estate mogul in Houston, Texas, and former army Green Beret Ivan Raiklin, both of whom advocated for election audits in multiple states.

Two of Flynn's associates, who are said to be part of a far-right extremist organization known as the Patriot Caucus, were the first to approach him back in April of last year. At the time, they were reportedly part of a "scheme to seek potentially damaging information on two Republican members of Congress to prod them to back an audit of the 2020 vote that Joe Biden won."

Stern revealed Flynn's associates were in search of incriminating campaign financial information and other negative intel on Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Penn.) and Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-Penn.), who both supported Trump's impeachment. They'd reportedly hoped the dirt would be a way to convince Toomey Fitzpatrick to support Trump's baseless claims of voter fraud which suggested that President Joe Biden's election win was illegitimate.

Per The Guardian:

"The efforts by Flynn’s Patriot Caucus allies were launched after Trump failed to block Biden from taking office, and are part of a wider drive by Trump loyalists and Flynn to help boost Trump’s political fortunes via more state audits nationwide into false charges that Biden’s win was rigged, and elect like-minded candidates in key states to top electoral offices."

Although Stern reached out to the FBI last June, it remains unclear whether or not the agency is still pursuing the allegations.

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Lev Parnas, a former business associate of Rudy Giuliani, made explosive allegations against outgoing Attorney General Bill Barr in a federal court filing on Tuesday. Parnas, who is under indictment for campaign finance violations and fraud charges, has accused Barr of timing his arrest last fall in order to prevent him from testifying at House impeachment hearings last fall....

===

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/democrats-say-the-gops-attempt-to-smear-biden-accidentally-exposed-a-trump-officials-corrupt-scheme/

igor salon

the Republican report aimed at raising questions about the dealings of Democratic nominee Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden in Ukraine appears to have accidentally implicated former Energy Secretary Rick Perry in an energy scheme in the foreign nation, according to the top Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee.

Republicans led by Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., released their much-hyped report on Hunter Biden’s role at the Ukrainian energy firm Burisma on Wednesday. However, it found no evidence of actual wrongdoing and relied largely on debunked claims, old statements and narratives pushed as part of a Russian disinformation campaign.

But the report did find new evidence related to Perry’s actions in Ukraine while he served in President Donald Trump’s Cabinet.

Amos Hochstein, a member of the supervisory board at the state-owned Ukrainian energy firm Naftogaz, told lawmakers that Perry “inappropriately pressured the Ukrainian government” to place Texas oil executive Robert Bensh on the board of the company while officials at the Department of Energy pressured the government to sign a deal with a “private business entity connected to Mr. Bensh,” according to a :{letter Wyden:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}::{ sent to Department of Energy Inspector General Teri Donaldson:(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}:.

perry also pressured the Ukrainian government to place one of his longtime campaign supporters, Michael Bleyzer, on the board during a trip to Ukraine for President Volodymyr Zelensky’s inauguration in 2019, Wyden wrote. Bleyzer and his partner were later awarded a drilling contract in the country.

“Mr. Bleyzer’s contract that he was awarded was despite the fact that he was not the highest bidder in the process,” Hochstein told lawmakers. “Other . . . bids were higher, and therefore, Ukraine chose a bid that paid itself less.”

The heads of the state-owned Naftogaz conglomerate have since filed a lawsuit seeking to overturn the contract, arguing that the Ukrainian government acted “illegally and with bias” in agreeing to the deal, Wyden noted.

“Witness testimony in this investigation has directly implicated former Secretary Rick Perry in alleged wrongdoing, and the department more broadly, in a scheme to undermine anti-corruption efforts that were implemented by Ukraine in partnership with the international community,” Wyden wrote.

Politico reported last year that Perry — who along with then-Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland and Ukraine envoy Kurt Volker were the “three amigos” who pushed a shadow foreign policy in Ukraine — played an active role in the Trump administration’s pressure on Zelensky, which ultimately led to the president’s impeachment.

ProPublica reported earlier this month that Perry repeatedly pushed deals that “were potentially worth billions of dollars to Perry’s friends and political donors” and could “stand to benefit” the secretary himself. Two of the deals, including one worth $20 billion, went to the Texas firm Energy Transfer. Perry served on the company’s board before and after his stint at the Energy Department and bought shares now worth about $800,000 three months after leaving his post, according to the report.

Ethics experts told the outlet that Perry’s efforts were violations of federal regulations. His actions also caught the attention of federal prosecutors, though he is reportedly not the target of any investigations.

The interview with Hochstein was part of the Senate Republicans’ investigation into whether Hunter Biden’s position at Burisma affected U.S. foreign policy. The report asserted that his position was “problematic and did interfere in the efficient execution of policy with respect to Ukraine.” However, it did not include any new evidence suggesting his role affected the Obama administration’s policy. It also acknowledged that “the extent to which Hunter Biden’s role on Burisma’s board affected U.S. policy toward Ukraine is not clear.”

Wyden, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, said the probe pushed “Russian disinformation.” He further described it as “an attempted political hit job facilitated by the State Department.”

A Finance Committee aide told Talking Points Memo that finding new evidence against the Trump administration “was certainly not Republicans’ goal.”

“While Republicans’ Ukraine investigation showed Vice President Biden did nothing wrong,” the aide said, “it succeeded in implicating former Secretary Perry in a corrupt scheme to pressure the Ukrainian government to change the board of Naftogaz.”

https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/how-the-wapo-backing-limited-impeachment-was-constitutional-disaster/

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How the WaPo backing limited impeachment was constitutional disaster

Written by Joshua Cho / FAIR February 28, 2020

FAIR (11/26/19, 2/4/20) has covered how one flagship ResistanceTM newspaper, the New York Times, trivialized the importance of the impeachment process as a check on authoritarianism by covering it as a partisan competition, littered with false equivalences, and underplaying the danger Donald Trump and the rest of the Republican Party poses to whatever tatters of democracy the US has left. Instead of raising critical questions about impeachment that would inform their audience of the ways the Democratic Party could function as an effective opposition party, the Times merely regurgitated uncritical “he said, she said” statements, without making the effort to determine whether one side had greater credibility.

Another critical flaw with corporate media’s coverage of impeachment was how it obscured the extent of the Trump administration’s litany of impeachable offenses. The political case for expanding the scope of impeachment, going beyond the Democratic establishment’s narrow attention to abuse of power and obstruction of Congress in the Ukraine case, to all of Trump’s crimes, has been made in several places (e.g., Intercept, 9/26/19; Current Affairs, 2/5/20). Renowned attorney Ralph Nader and constitutional scholars Bruce Fein and Louis Fisher presented no less than 12 impeachable offenses in the Congressional Record (12/18/19).

They range all the way from violations of the Constitution’s Declare War and Treaty clauses, when Trump waged war in countries like Libya and Syria, and unilaterally terminated the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty with Russia, to violations of the Appropriations and Appointments clauses, as when he spent billions in excess of what Congress appropriated for the US/Mexican border wall, and appointed “acting” Cabinet officials not confirmed by the Senate.House Democrats impeaching Trump exclusively for his dealings with the Ukrainian president, and for preventing Congress from investigating that isolated incident, was a form of unilateral disarmament that implied Trump was not guilty of anything else, and journalists were under no obligation to stick to that script.

A look at how impeachment was covered by another crusading ResistanceTM publication, the Washington Post, shows how the paper obscured the credible case for impeaching Trump on a variety of other grounds, endorsing the Democrats’ tunnel-vision approach.

The Post’s “For Impeachment, Quick and Narrow Is the Way to Go” (12/9/19), by deputy editorial page editor Ruth Marcus, argued:

Narrow is better because the president’s bad conduct with respect to Ukraine was significantly worse than his bad conduct elsewhere, including his demonstrated efforts to obstruct justice in the special counsel’s probe into Russian meddling….

Sooner is better than later, even though that means lawmakers and the public will be deprived of important, potentially revelatory, testimony that Democrats might be able to compel through court proceedings. The reason is that, even assuming such litigation would succeed, going to court to compel testimony from such recalcitrant witnesses as former national security adviser John Bolton or acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, and then determining the permissible scope of that testimony, would likely take months.

Post columnist Jennifer Rubin (12/9/19) likewise argued that the Democrats’ fixation on abuse of power and obstruction of Congress was powerful precisely because it was the “tightest possible case,” and that testimonies from Donald McGahn and John Bolton were unnecessary to make a “razor-sharp case,” because the “central misdeed is provable from Trump’s own words.”

Another Post op-ed (12/4/19), by Watergate Era Judiciary Committee member Elizabeth Holtzman, argued that there are “good reasons” for “including non-Ukraine-related abuses in the charges against Trump,” because focusing “only on Ukraine suggests that Trump’s impeachable offenses are limited to this one matter.” But although it mentioned that Trump’s “abuses are staggering and continuous,” it suggested that other issues—her focus is on Trump’s “impeding the Russia investigation”—could be included in “a broader article of impeachment against Trump for hindering Congress in its constitutional role in conducting an impeachment inquiry.” This would obviate the need for “further investigation”—but also limit the charges against Trump to a circular complaint that he prevented Congress from bringing substantive complaints.

When the Washington Post (12/10/19) explained the House’s articles of impeachment, it mentioned that the House’s allegations of abuse of power were specifically confined to Trump’s dealings with Ukraine in order to launch investigations into political opponent Joe Biden. However, the Post left out other ways Democrats could go after Trump’s abuse of power. One example that Nader, Fein and Fisher’s list of Trump’s offenses included in the category of abuse of power was Trump’s making “presidential lies as routine as the rising and setting of the sun” and “confounding civil discourse truth and public trust.” This has precedent, as the House cited Richard Nixon’s “false or misleading public statements for the purpose of deceiving the people of the United States” as part of its articles of impeachment in 1974.

In another report, the Post (9/25/19) parroted the “private discussions” Democratic officials were having regarding the scope of impeachment, where they asserted that the “evidence was incriminating enough,” and “easy enough for voters to understand,” that “narrowing the investigation, if only in terms of political messaging, made sense.” Why does the Post take Democratic officials at their word when they claim to be pursuing this approach to impeachment for the sake of easing understanding, or leave their strategy unchallenged? The Post doesn’t need to rely on Democratic officials to inform their audience of the possible impeachment strategies Democrats could pursue.

Later, the Post (10/10/19) reported that “recent revelations” were “testing the limits of House Speaker Pelosi’s narrow impeachment strategy, leading some Democrats to wonder whether the probe should be expanded beyond the Ukraine scandal.” It claimed that by “solely focusing on Ukraine, Democrats could miss the opportunity to build a stronger case against the president,” but restricted the potential broadening of the case to Trump trying to enlist then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s aid in stopping the prosecution of a Turkish-Iranian gold trader, and to Trump’s public request to the Chinese government to investigate the activities of Hunter Biden. Apparently, the Post doesn’t consider things like Trump initiating the withdrawal of the US from the Paris climate agreement—and sabotaging international efforts to avoid further climate catastrophe—as a “high crime” and an impeachable offense, as legal scholar Marjorie Cohn does (Truthout, 6/6/17).

When the Post (12/2/19) reported on Democratic officials potentially drafting additional articles of impeachment related to obstructing Mueller’s Russia investigation and using the presidency to enrich himself, it euphemized Trump’s unconstitutional refusal to divest himself from his businesses as an “unorthodox decision,” and uncritically parroted other Democrats absurdly claiming that “the evidence is not there to support such an indictment.”

Journalist Christian Parenti (Jacobin, 1/9/20), by contrast, reported that the Democrats were uncomfortable with going after Trump on his blatant violations of the emoluments clause—forbidding him from receiving gifts from foreign powers and limiting presidential remuneration solely to the presidential salary—because it would inevitably open a discussion on the legal bribes the Democrats take from the same corporations that patronize Trump’s hotels.

This suggests that the Democrats pursued such a disastrous approach to impeachment—not out of incompetence or in good faith—but as a cynical spectacle of faux resistance. When the late historian Howard Zinn discussed how the Democrats and the media handled President Richard Nixon’s impeachment, he observed that they didn’t want to emphasize elements of his behavior “found in other presidents” that “might be repeated in the future,” leaving things like “corporate influence on the White House,” and the “power of the president to do anything he wanted in the name of ‘national security,’” intact:

Valuable information came out of the investigations, but it was just enough, and in just the right way—moderate press coverage, little television coverage, thick books of reports with limited readership—to give the impression of an honest society correcting itself.

That might be why the Post’s later report (2/5/20) on the Democrats’ failure to remove Trump from office contained no insights on whether impeachment would have had more political success if the Democrats pursued a broader investigation into Trump’s crimes. Of course the Senate was never going to convict; the point was to hold the president accountable—and win over public opinion in the process—by operating as an effective opposition party possessing moral integrity.

Journalist Aaron Maté (Le Monde Diplomatique, 11/19) discussed how the Russiagate conspiracy theory and the Ukraine scandal were both focused on protecting the unsavory conduct of establishment Democratic figures, and portraying Trump as an incompetent steward of the US empire. Maté concluded that the Democrats pursued such a shallow impeachment process because in Washington, elites generally face consequences for the harm they cause not to the general population but to other members of the club. The standard was laid bare in Watergate (1972–74), when Richard Nixon faced impeachment, not for mass murder in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, but for targeting the opposing elite faction and trying to cover it up. George W. Bush could have been impeached for the Iraq invasion in 2003 had this crime not been carried out with bipartisan support.

Ever since the election of Donald Trump, the Washington Post has always presented itself as one of the crusading publications leading the ResistanceTM movement against the current administration. It even adopted the “Democracy Dies in Darkness” motto on its masthead as a marketing gimmick to attract more subscribers. Yet it’s clear that the Post’s impeachment coverage served more to preserve the stability and legitimacy of US institutions—rather than their integrity—by obscuring the extent of the Trump administration’s crimes and impeachable offenses, and endorsing a fatally narrow scope of impeachment.

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For Republicans in Trump’s cover-up, it was all about the money

Susan Collins image via MSNBC.

Written by Joan McCarter / Daily Kos February 18, 2020

In the latest Daily Kos/Civiqs poll, fully 60% of Americans disapprove of how the U.S. Senate conducted Donald Trump’s impeachment trial. The behavior of Senate Republicans following that trial probably won’t get many cheers, either. The three most closely watched Republicans during the trial, those who pretended to be open-minded and committed to doing their jobs, have all popped up in the last few days with slathering praise for the Trump administration which let loose all the money once the trial was done. It turns out the issue wasn’t the threat of heads on pikes at all. It was all about the bribes.

Retiring Sen. Lamar Alexander tweeted to thank Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue and Trump for the investment of “$9 million in Tennessee to provide and improve high-speed broadband infrastructure projects for 3,744 rural households, 31 businesses and 41 farms.”

Sen. Lisa Murkowski had Transportation Secretary and Moscow Mitch spouse Elaine Chao to thank for “a $20M Port Infrastructure Development Program grant to the Port of Alaska to help offset the 1st phase costs of the Port’s desperately-needed modernization program, enabling safe, cost-effective, & reliable Port operations.” That’s a whole 1% of the estimated cost for the port. Was it worth a vote to keep the worst president ever to sit in the Oval Office?

You know, of course, who else is getting in on the action:

Sen. Susan Collins

@SenatorCollins

Great news! 19 Housing Authorities in Maine have been awarded more than $9.5 million to preserve & modernize affordable housing units that serve individuals with disabilities & low-income individuals and families.https://www.collins.senate.gov/newsroom/senator-collins-announces-more-9500000-maine-housing-authorities …

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Senate Republicans are implicated in Trump’s authoritarian organized crime outfit

President Donald J. Trump and First Lady Melania Trump disembark Air Force One Wednesday, Aug. 7, 2019, at El Paso International Airport greeted by Texas Governor Greg Abbott, Senators John Cornyn and Ted Cruz, and El Paso Mayor Dee Margo. [wearing a star badge?]

Written by Joe Conason / Creators Syndicate February 14, 2020

Authoritarian governments almost always operate in a style that resembles organized crime outfits. Despite their ostentatious populism, such regimes exist to enrich thuggish rulers and enable corruption in high places. The Trump administration is a perfect example.

But in order to maintain an aura of legitimacy, especially in a country with democratic norms and traditions, authoritarian bosses constantly proclaim their devotion to justice, their determination to right wrongs, and their adherence to law and order. So even as President Donald Trump and his attorney general, Bill Barr, pervert the legal system to cover up official crimes and protect presidential cronies, they are creating a narrative of justification for those acts.

From the very beginning of the Russia-collusion investigation, Trump has aimed to derail investigations of appointees and associates who might implicate him in criminal activity. He urged James Comey, then the FBI director, to bury the investigation of former national security adviser Michael Flynn’s unlawful conduct. Then he fired Comey, and later he repeatedly tried to get rid of special counsel Robert Mueller. The Mueller report describes in appalling detail a dozen attempts by Trump to kill the investigation.

At the same time, Trump and his lawyers sent clear messages to all the gang members caught up in the Russia investigation: Don’t talk. We’ll take care of you. They “dangled” pardons to buy silence, with Trump openly considering clemency for the potential witnesses he praised as “brave” and “strong.” His former campaign manager Paul Manafort signed and then violated a cooperation agreement with Mueller. So did Flynn. Longtime adviser and dirty tricks specialist Roger Stone never talked, although he knows everything.

While Trump’s efforts to stop the investigation continued behind the scenes, the public face of his propaganda apparatus declared incessantly that the Russia probe was “a hoax.” Not only was there no reason to investigate Russia; according to Trump, the real culprit in 2016 was Ukraine, which Trump also blamed for framing Manafort. (Discovering, or perhaps inventing, evidence that will “exonerate” Manafort is among the chief preoccupations of Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani’s trips to Ukraine.)

Never mind the meticulously documented findings of nearly every U.S. intelligence agency and official including his own FBI director, the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee and the Mueller investigation. And never mind the multiple convictions of Flynn, Manafort, Stone and others in Trump’s orbit.

The logic of Trump’s ongoing campaign is plain: If the investigation was a fraud, then the prosecutions of Trump associates that emerged from that investigation were, by definition, unjust. But the president can rectify those “injustices” — by granting pardons to the men who could have testified against him.

It’s as if a mob boss had the authority to pardon any underlings who might implicate him (instead of having them whacked).

Emboldened by the Senate’s impeachment acquittal, despite his obvious guilt, Trump now feels free to fulfill the obstruction conspiracy. He is certain that the Senate Republicans — not to mention his wholly owned attorney general — will do nothing to oppose the brazen scheme. They are all implicated in his criminality now.

By uttering a few little squeaks of protest, they help him create a scrim of normality around his gangsterism. So various senators tut-tutted Trump’s latest intervention in the sentencing of Stone as “inappropriate.” And so, Barr himself complained publicly that Trump’s tweeting about the Stone prosecution makes his job “impossible,” which simply means that Barr and the Republicans prefer assaults on democratic norms to occur in the back room, without too much noise.

When lawful government is restored someday, Trump may have to answer for having misused the pardon power for obstruction of justice. There was firm precedent in the Justice Department’s investigation of former President Bill Clinton’s pardon of fugitive financier Marc Rich. Until then, the American system of justice and constitutional liberty will remain in the gravest jeopardy.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/trump-let-slip-a-new-admission-that-undermined-his-impeachment-defense/

no lnx

Trump let slip a new admission that undermined his impeachment defense

Written by Igor Derysh / Salon February 14, 2020

President Donald Trump contradicted his legal team’s impeachment defense Thursday when he admitted that he sent his personal attorney Rudy Giuliani to Ukraine to hunt for damaging information on his political rivals.

Trump made the comment during a podcast interview with Fox News’ Geraldo Rivera despite previously claiming that he “didn’t direct” Giuliani to go to Ukraine.

“Was it strange to send Rudy Giuliani to Ukraine? Your personal lawyer? Are you sorry you did that?” Rivera asked.

“No, not at all,” Trump replied. “Here’s my choice: I deal with the Comeys of the world, or I deal with Rudy.”

“One of the things about Rudy — number one, he was the best prosecutor. You know, one of the best prosecutors and the best mayor,” Trump continued. “But also, other presidents had them. FDR had a lawyer who was practically, you know — was totally involved with government. Eisenhower had a lawyer. They all had lawyers.”

“And it’s really circumventing . . . but very legally and maybe getting things done faster,” he added. “But Rudy is a high-quality guy who by the way has a treasure trove of information.”

Pres. Trump admits says he sent his personal attorney Rudy Giuliani to Ukraine:

Geraldo Rivera: “Was it strange to send Rudy Giuliani to Ukraine? Are you sorry you did that?”

Pres. Trump: “No. Not at all.” https://t.co/7nA4Hu3wYR

— Alex Salvi (@alexsalvinews) February 14, 2020

The remarks come after Trump, newly emboldened by his acquittal in the Senate, purged his administration of officials involved in the impeachment investigation. At the same time, Attorney General William Barr has reportedly intervened in cases related to Trump and created a process for Giuliani to transmit any dirt he found on former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter to the Justice Department.

Trump denied that he had anything to do with Giuliani’s trip during the impeachment proceedings.

“Well, you have to ask that to Rudy,” Trump told former Fox News host Bill O’Reilly in November when asked what his lawyer was doing in Ukraine. “But Rudy . . . I don’t even know . . . I know he was going to go to Ukraine, and I think he canceled the trip.”

Trump also suggested that Giuliani could have been working for others.

“Rudy has other clients other than me,” Trump said.

“So you didn’t direct him to go there on your behalf?” O’Reilly asked.

“No,” Trump claimed.

While Trump alleged that Giuliani had a “treasure trove of information,” his personal attorney appeared Thursday on Fox Business to push his same conspiracy theories debunked months ago.

Giuliani scrolled on his iPad to insist to host Trish Regan he had “reports” and a “letter” corroborating his discredited claims of Democratic corruption in Ukraine, though he never showed the documents.

“We are going to reveal the whole thing,” he claimed. “It’s not just Biden. [It’s] a bunch of Democrats.”

Despite Trump’s congressional allies warning that Giuliani’s information might not be legit and an internal Fox News briefing warning that his claims were “disinformation,” Giuliani told the network that he has compiled so much evidence that his life is allegedly at risk.

“That’s why they are so crazy on the subject of Ukraine and why they want to literally kill me,” he said.

When Regan pressed him on basic details, Giuliani responded with a string of contradictions.

“Why were you over there?” Regan asked.

“I haven’t been in Ukraine in two years,” Giuliani said, before immediately contradicting himself. “I went to the Ukraine for the first time, like, three weeks ago to interview a witness.”

Giuliani continued to scroll through his iPad, insisting it contained proof of Democratic involvement in “corruption” and “money laundering.”

“Give me a copy of that,” Regan said. “I want to see it.”

“This is a smoking gun,” Giuliani claimed.

But even Republicans have warned that Giuliani’s “evidence” may not support his allegations.

“I called the attorney general this morning, and Richard Burr, the chairman of the Intel Committee, and they told me, ‘Take very cautiously anything coming out of the Ukraine against anybody,'” Graham told CBS News earlier this week. “When it comes to documents coming out of the Ukraine, the Republicans and Democrats: Be very cautious. Turn anything you’ve got over to the Intel Committee.”

An internal Fox News briefing went further, saying Giuliani had a “high susceptibility to disinformation.”

“The timeline in its entirety,” wrote senior Fox News researcher Brian Murphy, “makes clear the extensive role played by Rudy Giuliani and his associates . . . in spreading disinformation.”

https://theconversation.com/after-the-trials-over-president-trumps-impeachment-battles-could-determine-who-holds-real-power-in-the-us-government-129485

4 myths the Trump team promoted about Andrew Johnson

Paul Harvey, University of Colorado Colorado Springs

Falsehoods about Andrew Johnson have become a staple of Republican arguments opposing the impeachment of Trump.

raLLY on impeachment

Rev. William Barber: Mitch McConnell Is Bringing Old Southern Justice to U.S. Senate

https://www.alternet.org/2020/01/stop-lying-white-house-attorneys-bogus-defense-of-trump-summarily-discredited-by-observers-with-readily-available-facts

...deputy White House Counsel Mike Purpura (photo) has been making the majority of today’s arguments – they have decided that not enough people will be watching on TV so Saturday’s defense will last not eight but just two hours.

Purpura is not doing a good job – unless his job is to lie to U.S. Senators and the American people. ...Republican Senators are likely glad to hear yet again the lies spread on Fox News by the White House and its allies, but the American people know better. They know they are lies, and they were only too happy to discredit and debunk them in real time moments after Purpura uttered them on the Senate floor...

https://www.alternet.org/2020/01/your-head-will-be-on-a-pike-gop-senators-were-reportedly-threatened-to-remain-loyal-to-trump/

https://www.alternet.org/2020/01/mitch-mcconnell-mulling-kill-switch-that-will-allow-him-to-pull-plug-on-trump-impeachment-at-any-time-report/

https://www.alternet.org/2020/01/here-are-7-stunning-new-pieces-of-impeachment-evidence-just-released-by-the-house/

no lnx

Here are 7 stunning new pieces of impeachment evidence just released by the House

Written by Cody Fenwick January 14, 2020

House Intelligence Committee Chair Adam Schiff, a California Democrat, dropped a new slate of deeply revealing evidence Tuesday night in the impeachment case against President Donald Trump.

Though the evidence doesn’t change the basic narrative of the case against Trump — that he and a group of his cronies used the administration in various ways to put pressure on Ukraine to announce investigations into his political rivals as the 2020 campaign heated up — it adds more color and detail to the story and should make the president’s culpability in a disturbing plot even harder for his Republican allies to deny.

Here are seven stunning new facts the new evidence revealed:

Rudy Giuliani told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky he’s working with Trump’s “knowledge and consent.”

Writing to Zelensky on May 10, when Giuliani was trying to plan a trip to Ukraine to pressure the country into investigating former Vice President Joe Biden, the president’s lawyer wrote that he is acting with Trump’s “knowledge and consent.” This claim fundamentally undercuts the argument some defenders of the president have been inclined to make that Giuliani was operating as a rogue agent.

In the same letter, Giuliani says he is acting in his “capacity as personal counsel to President Trump.”

“I am private counsel to President Donald J. Trump,” Giuliani wrote. “Just to be precise, I represent him as a private citizen, not as President of the United States.”

This confirms, as many have argued repeatedly, that Giuliani’s efforts in Ukraine were clearly for Trump’s personal benefit, not the country’s. That’s part of the reason why it was so grossly wrong, and indeed impeachable, for him to use the powers of his office to induce Ukraine to announce an investigation into Biden and other political opponents.

Kyle Cheney

@kyledcheney

Replying to @kyledcheney

The House released 50 pages of the evidence here, but it’s just a portion of the materials: https://intelligence.house.gov/uploadedfiles/20200114_-hpsci_transmittal_letter_to_hjc_-new_evidence_attachment.pdf …https://intelligence.house.gov/uploadedfiles/20200114_-_parnas_excerpts_translated_slide_deck.pdf …

Kyle Cheney

@kyledcheney

AMONG THE EVIDENCE: A letter from Giuliani to Zelensky seeking a May meeting which he says has Trump's "knowledge and consent."

Trump lawyer Jay Sekulow gave John Dowd, another attorney, permission from the president to defend Igor Furman and Lev Parnas, two of Giuliani’s associates who have been indicted on campaign finance charges, in part, for their Ukraine-related work.

Trump has claimed he doesn’t know who Furman and Parnas are, even though he has appeared in pictures with them. This evidence makes it harder to believe this is true and raises more questions about why he was trying to conceal his dealings with them.

Parnas wrote notes on Ritz-Carlton stationery suggesting he was directly involved with the Ukraine scheme.

“get Zalensky [sic] to Annonce [sic] that the Biden case will Be Investigated,” he wrote.

In a letter to House Judiciary Chair Jerry Nadler, Schiff said Parnas’ lawyer confirmed that he wrote the note.

5. Parnas texted with a man named Robert F. Hyde, believed to be the same person who is running for a House seat in Connecticut, about removing former Ukraine Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch.

Schiff explained:

In response to some articles, tweets, and videos accusing the Ambassador of being disloyal to President Trump, Mr. Hyde wrote “Wow. Can’t believe Trumo [sic] hasn’t fired this bitch. I’ll get right in that. Mr. Hyde then sent a series of text messages suggesting that he had Ambassador Yovanovitch under physical surveillance in Kyiv and that “They are willing to help if we/you would like a price.”

Parnas was also communicating with Ukrainian officials which, Schiff argued, demonstrated “that Mr.

Parnas served as a direct channel between President Trump’s agent, Mr. Giuliani, and individuals close to President Volodymyr Zelensky.”

Parnas tried to set up a meeting for Giuliani and Zelenksy in May 2019 via senior aides to the Ukrainian president, the texts show.

Giuliani tried to get a visa approved for a disgraced former Ukrainian prosecutor.

Parnas told Giuliani that formerProsecutor General Viktor Shokin, who has been feeding the unsupported allegations against Biden, was denied a visa to the U.S. Giuliani said in response: “I can revive it,” despite having no formal role at the State Department.

Cody Fenwick is a senior editor at AlterNet. He writes about politics, media and science. Follow him on Twitter @codytfenwick.

https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2019/12/political-ads-impeachment-fight-wesleyan/

anna m

Political candidates and groups shelled out millions on impeachment-related TV ads before the House impeached President Donald Trump Wednesday, according to a new report from the Wesleyan Media Project.

The analysis, produced in partnership with OpenSecrets, reveals that ads mentioning impeachment accounted for at least $16.9 million worth of TV ads in presidential, Senate and House races.

That spending is largely concentrated in the presidential contest. Billionaire Democratic presidential hopeful Tom Steyer spent $8.5 million on the air backing impeachment, with 18 percent of his ads mentioning the subject. Almost all of Trump’s TV ads since October — totaling $4.4 million — are focused on impeachment.

The Trump campaign is fundraising heavily off impeachment, sending out email blasts minutes after the House vote to impeach promising to triple-match donations during the next 24 hours with a hefty $4 million goal.

Impeachment has leaked into House races, too, where related TV ads are largely funded by “dark money.” Conservative dark money group American Action Network hammered swing district Democrats with roughly $2.4 million in. Pro-Trump nonprofit America First Policies, which also keeps its donors secret from the public, chipped in $664,000 to pressure House Democrats. This spending is not reported to the Federal Election Commission because the ads don’t expressly advocate for or against candidates.

America First operation also raked in significant cash fundraising off impeachment, raising a combined $6.9 million along with its affiliated super PAC America First Action in the week following House Democrats’ announcement of the impeachment probe.

Despite pressure from conservative groups, all but two Democrats voted to impeach Trump for abuse of power. Rep. Jared Golden (D-Maine), a freshman representing a conservative leaning district, voted for the first article but voted against the obstruction of Congress charge. Republicans believe they can take back House seats in Trump-won districts from Democrats who supported impeachment.

Defend American Democracy is the biggest pro-impeachment group spending on TV ads. The dark money group, which is backed by the liberal dark money network Sixteen Thirty Fund, spent at least $178,590 on TV ads urging House Republicans to impeach Trump.

No Republicans voted for impeachment Wednesday. Rep. Justin Amash (I-Mich), who left the GOP in July over its defense of Trump, voted for both articles of impeachment.

“It seems that Republicans are going on offense when it comes to the issue of impeachment, while Democrats are remaining mostly quiet on the issue,” said Travis Ridout, co-director of the Wesleyan Media Project. “The one exception here is Democrat Tom Steyer who has long advocated for impeaching the president.”

Limited transparency

Groups that do not disclose their donors sponsored more than 90 percent of all ads from outside groups in Senate races and at least three out of every four ads in House races.

Nearly three times as many Senate dark money airings in 2019 came from liberal groups than conservative. This follows the first election cycle where liberal dark money groups reported more spending than their conservative counterparts to the FEC.

A mysterious pop-up dark money group called Doctor Patient Unity has spent roughly $28 million on ads, purchasing more ads mentioning federal candidates than any other group this year, followed by American Action Network and America First Policies on the right then House Majority Forward and Majority Forward on the left. Not a single group in the top-10 list of ad sponsors based on the number of ads purchased discloses its donors.

Digital ads take on TV among presidential hopefuls

The 2020 election cycle has seen more than $150 million in political ad spending from presidential candidates on broadcast TV on top of another $40 million airing on cable, according to Welseyan’s report in partnership with OpenSecrets.

Digital ad spending by 2020 presidential campaigns alone has topped $100 million. Compared to TV and radio ad buys, digital ads make up more than a third of all 2020 presidential election ad spending.

Trump’s re-election campaign, boosted by its joint fundraising committee’s spending, continues to be the top-spending online ad sponsor in the 2020 election. Trump’s re-election effort spent more than $40 million on digital ads since tech companies and social media platforms started releasing their advertising data in 2017. But that dynamic may change now that other wealthy candidates like Michael Bloomberg and Steyer have thrown their hats in the ring.

Steyer has spent roughly $20 million on digital ads since his campaign launched in July, according to an OpenSecrets analysis of digital ad data from Google, Facebook, Twitter and Snapchat. In the weeks since his campaign launched, Bloomberg has already poured more than $12.7 million into digital advertising.

Bloomberg’s roughly $90 million combined TV and digital ad spending during the last month put his campaign ahead of every other presidential contender as well. The second biggest overall ad spender among presidential contenders during the last month and overall is Steyer.

Bloomberg and Steyer each spent more on ads than all other current presidential candidates combined this year, including Trump.

https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/trumps-most-fanatical-right-wing-followers-are-going-ballistic-over-impeachment-and-talking-of-civil-war

https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/republican-senators-desperately-search-for-a-safe-space-on-impeachment

[smart]

...so the chances of any of them adopting the position I’ve described is vanishingly small. That’s a sad commentary on our times. At the same time, the fact that Trump is making it impossible for these senators to occupy the most politically advantageous position for themselves also means they are more likely to lose to Democratic challengers next November. So, maybe it’s not so sad after all.

Paul Glastris is the editor in chief of the Washington Monthly. He was an editor at the magazine from 1986 to 1988.

https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2019/12/political-ads-impeachment-fight-wesleyan/

The analysis, produced in partnership with OpenSecrets, reveals that ads mentioning impeachment accounted for at least $16.9 million worth of TV ads in presidential, Senate and House races.

Impeachment has leaked into House races, too, where related TV ads are largely funded by “dark money.” Conservative dark money group American Action Network hammered swing district Democrats with roughly $2.4 million in.Pro-Trump nonprofit America First Policies, which also keeps its donors secret from the public, chipped in $664,000 to pressure House Democrats. This spending is not reported to the Federal Election Commission because the ads don’t expressly advocate for or against candidates.

No Republicans voted for impeachment Wednesday. Rep. Justin Amash (I-Mich), who left the GOP in July over its defense of Trump, voted for both articles of impeachment.

Limited transparency

Groups that do not disclose their donors sponsored more than 90 percent of all ads from outside groups in Senate races and at least three out of every four ads in House races.

A mysterious pop-up dark money group called Doctor Patient Unity has spent roughly $28 million on ads, purchasing more ads mentioning federal candidates than any other group this year, followed by American Action Network and America First Policies on the right then House Majority Forward and Majority Forward on the left. Not a single group in the top-10 list of ad sponsors based on the number of ads purchased discloses its donors.

Digital ads take on TV among presidential hopefuls

Bloomberg and Steyer each spent more on ads than all other current presidential candidates combined this year, including Trump.

https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/here-are-10-fake-facts-that-trump-supporters-believe-about-impeachment

no lnx

Here are 10 fake facts that Trump supporters believe about impeachment

March 4, 2017 // About 700 people gathered at the Minnesota capitol building to show support for Republican President Donald Trump. This was part of "March 4 Trump events around the country. Around 100 people were also there protesting against Donald Trump. // This man was yelling, "TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMMMMMP!" // 2017-03-04 This is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution License. Credit: Fibonacci Blue

Written by Cody Fenwick December 15, 2019

As President Donald Trump’s impeachment seems to be all but a forgone conclusion in the House of Representatives, the Republican Party is still desperately spinning the damning facts of the case.

At every opportunity, they lie, distract, and distort the record in a brazen attempt to cover up for Trump’s misconduct in the Ukraine scandal. Unfortunately, because a major section of the news media is organized in order to promote a right-wing agenda, millions of Americans have been deluged with lies about impeachment and never offered any substantial corrective.

Here are 10 fake facts that Republicans have tried to convince themselves and others of to protect the president:

Trump’s call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenksy shows “no conditionality”

The president and his defenders have brazenly adopted the tactic of urging people to read the partial transcript of Trump’s infamous July 25 call with Zelensky, despite the fact that it contains damning evidence against the president. During a meeting of the House Judiciary Committee, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) said: “We saw the call transcript, and there is no conditionality.” In essence, he was arguing that Trump never made his request for investigations of former Vice President Joe Biden and the Democratic National Committee conditional on U.S. military aid.

The problem is the call record shows the opposite. Zelensky brings up military aid, and Trump, who had just been discussing how the U.S. had been generous to Ukraine, even though the generosity had not always been reciprocated, said: “I would like you to do us a favor though …” He then went on to detail the requests for the investigations. Mentioning reciprocation, and asking for a “favor though” after a request from Zelensky, is clear conditionality, even if Gaetz refuses to see it.

Trump cares about corruption

Another claim Republicans make in defense of Trump is that his call was acceptable because he really just cared about fighting “corruption” in Ukraine. But almost all the known facts cut against this interpretation. He shows no interest in fighting corruption in other countries, like Russia. Trump wanted to cut money to federal programs fighting corruption abroad, including in Ukraine. In both of his two calls with Zelensky, Trump neglected to mention general “corruption” once, despite the fact that his advisers had urged him to. And Trump cares little about corruption domestically, as he personally tries to profit off the presidency, tolerates rampant corruption in his Cabinet, and has made no moves to promote anti-corruption policy in Congress.

Allegations about the Bidens and the DNC are actually about Ukrainian corruption

Related to the defenses above is the idea that the investigations Trump wanted of both Bidens and the DNC out of a genuine desire to fight corruption in Ukraine. But this is a complete non sequitur. Even if the trumped-up allegations about the Bidens and the DNC were true, it would be appropriate for the U.S. Justice Department to look into their conduct. Ukrainian corruption largely has to with corrupt actors in Ukraine itself — and, of course, their ties to Russia — rather than political figures in the United States. This line of plausible deniability have worked for Trump figures who only mentioned an investigation of “Burisma,” a Ukrainian oil company, in conversations with the country’s officials. But in his call, Trump explicitly makes clear that he cares about the Bidens, not Burisma.

And Trump made no mention of corruption in Ukraine from anyone who isn’t also a political rival of his in the United States. The idea that these are genuine worries about Ukrainian corruption, and not his own re-election chances, are, once again, nonsense.

Impeachment reverses the outcome of an election.

There’s another common trope among anti-impeachment Republicans — though it has, unfortunately, been spouted by Democrats and others at different times. This is the idea that impeachment “reverses” the outcome of the previous election.

But one of the results of the 2016 election was the Mike Pence was elected president. And if Trump were removed from office, Pence would become the president — yet another consequence of the 2016 result. Nothing Trump did as president — pardons issued, judges appointed, laws signed — would be undone. Impeach isn’t a reversal, but a response to misconduct, a form of punishment, and a lesson to future presidents about what kind of conduct will be considered unacceptable.

All the money was given to Ukraine before the Sept. 30 deadline.

By claiming that Ukraine eventually got the military aid that Trump delayed while he was seeking to pressure the country to open investigations into his rivals, Republicans suggest something along the lines of “no harm, no foul.” Since Ukraine eventually got the money, they say, it would be ridiculous to impeach Trump for withholding it.

There are many problems with this claim. Most commonly, Democrats point out that just trying to withhold congressionally authorized funds for personal gain is an impeachable offense; they also say that Trump only appears to have reversed himself after the scheme was exposed. But even more fundamentally, the claim that Ukraine got its money in the end is wrong. A significant portion of the money still hadn’t made its way to Ukraine long after the September 30 deadline, as administration officials had feared. It’s not clear it has yet made it to Ukraine. This indicates that the Trump administration likely violated the law by withholding it passed the deadline for an unauthorized reason.

Biden did the same thing.

One favorite claim among Trump defenders is that Biden did the same thing as vice president that the Democrats now accuse Trump of doing: withholding aid to meddle in an election.

There’s a kernel of truth to this, which is why the claim has gained traction. As Biden has said publicly, and as was widely known at the time, he told Ukraine in 2016 that it had to fire its prosecutor general in order to get U.S. aid.

But this is not the same as what Trump did. Biden’s effort was part of the Obama administration’s official policy toward Ukraine, not a backchannel deal run by his personal lawyer. It was also part of an international push for anti-corruption efforts in Ukraine because the prosecutor general was widely seen as corrupt. It wasn’t done out of Biden’s personal interest but as part of a considered public policy, and for that reason, no Republicans raised objections at the time. Trump’s actions, on the other hand, were clearly designed to serve his venal interest.

Ukraine meddled in the 2016 election.

Many Republicans have jumped on board with the Russian-backed disinformation campaign that Ukraine interfered in the 2016 election. While they don’t necessarily embrace the most conspiratorially minded versions of this view — that Ukraine interfered but Russia didn’t — their claims have served to create an equivalency between the two countries and to suggest that Democrats were just as guilty as Trump in welcoming foreign help.

But this isn’t so. As Fiona Hill explained in her testimony to the House Intelligence Committee, nothing Ukraine did in 2016 was remotely comparable to the Russians’ criminal interference campaign. Many of the things Ukrainian officials have been maligned for — writing an op-ed criticizing Trump’s comments about Ukraine, lambasting him on social media — were actually common in the international community and not even in violation of robust norms.

Trump’s conduct is not impeachable.

Some have argued that while Trump’s conduct may be bad (something the president himself refuses to admit), it’s not impeachable conduct.

While it’s ultimately a judgment call for senators when they vote on whether to remove Trump, the claim that his conduct doesn’t fall into the category of potentially impeachable acts is just not supported by the historical evidence. Constitutional scholar Noah Feldman, who testified before the House Judiciary Committee for the Democrats, has argued that Trump’s conduct is precisely what the framers of the Constitution had in mind:

The takeaway from this historical evidence is that abuse of office for personal gain is the archetype of a high crime and misdemeanor under the Constitution. Thus, if the facts show that President Trump sought his own personal gain when he solicited Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to announce investigations of the Bidens and of Crowd Strike, then he has undoubtedly committed an impeachable offense.

Impeachment is completely partisan.

In addition to arguing about the facts, Republicans have also repeatedly railed against the process of impeaching Trump. One of their key complaints has been that the impeachment is a purely Democratic campaign, revealing the partisan nature of the process.

But this argument is undercut by the fact that Rep. Justin Amash (I-MI) has been a vocal supporter of impeachment for months now — not only with regard to the Ukraine matter but also the Mueller report. Amash was a Republican, but he left the party and became an independent largely because of his support for impeachment. But whatever else you can say about Amash, it would be ridiculous to say that he’s simply supporting impeachment out of partisan hatred. In fact, it’s his complete lack of partisan devotion that led him to support impeachment and leave the GOP in the first place.

The Ukrainians were unaware of a quid pro quo.

This was one of the core claims of House Intelligence Committee Republicans’ who wrote a rebuttal to the Democrats’ case for impeachment. But as Susan Simpson wrote for Just Security:

The minority report suggests that no quid pro quo could have existed, because the Ukrainian side was never informed that such a quid pro quo existed. However, the undisputed testimony of Morrison, Sondland, and Taylor established that the Ukrainians were in fact aware of a link between the security assistance and the investigations, because Ambassador Sondland directly informed them of this on September 1, when Ambassador Sondland told a senior Ukrainian official “that the security assistance money would not come until President Zelensky committed to pursue the Burisma investigation.”

hmm redstate: hit vuln dems: tv ad, dark post; rad left witchunt: acu schalpp, heritage action, fredomworks, presidential colaitionm am 1st pol, cfg; censure schiff, text msg dirty 30--> 75K calls to congress;

van drew nj defects, but already in trouble abandon by dems?

djt calls his goons "warriors" [// evang?]

https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/gops-propaganda-circus-lies-yelling-and-conspiracy-theory/

no lnx

GOP’s propaganda circus: Lies, yelling and conspiracy theory

Written by Heather Digby Parton / Salon December 13, 2019

Speaker Nancy Pelosi first announced that the House would formally take up an impeachment investigation on Sept. 24. Sometime on Friday, the House Judiciary Committee will almost certainly vote to send two Articles of Impeachment to the full House. If a whistleblower hadn’t stepped up and set this ball in motion, we would still be seeing President Trump at his rallies screaming about the Ukrainian government’s interference in the election and the corruption of Joe Biden — and the mainstream media would be chasing the story like it was a private email server. Team Trump was only days away from getting away with it.

From the moment he stepped on to that escalator in June of 2015, Donald Trump’s unethical, illegal and immoral behavior has been leading toward this day. Assuming that the full House votes to impeach and sends the case to the Senate, his name will always have the scarlet asterisk next to it as the third president in U.S. history to be impeached, a fact which reportedly upsets him greatly. In a just world, he would be the first president to be impeached, convicted and removed from office. That’s not the world in which we live, unfortunately.

The hearings this week were long and tedious, but they served an important purpose nonetheless. The two sides had different goals. The Democrats laid out the case with which most of us following this event are familiar and managed to be serious and respectful while doing it. Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., kept the proceedings from careening out of control and there was even some persuasive rhetoric and memorable oratory.

Republicans had a different goal. They presented a number of defenses, much of them consisting of emotive hand-wringing, faux exasperation and yelling. As former Breitbart editor and Republican House aide Kurt Bardella wrote for NBC, this is a long-standing strategy:

Revisit the 11-hour grilling that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was subjected to by Republicans during the Benghazi hearing and you’ll see the now familiar sight of Republicans yelling and badgering their witness. As Rep. Adam Smith, R-Wash., observed that day, the Republicans’ strategy was to try and “wear you down.”

This was obviously their goal during Thursday’s marathon hearing, and it worked. It was long and tiring, mostly because Republicans kept offering amendments, many of them barely making sense, after which the whole committee had to debate them and then vote on whether to adopt them. All were voted down along party lines, votes, the final vote coming after 14 hours of debate. Clearly the Republicans had planned all along toprolong the process so they could say that the Democrats had voted to impeach in the dead of night when nobody would see it. Nadler called their bluff announcing that the committee’s final vote would be postponed until Friday morning. The Republicans melted down into full-blown hysteria, but by that time no one was listening.

Bardella writes that Republicans’ “script is built on misdirection and moving the goalposts as their paltry strategy shifts to incorporate various conspiracy theories and outlandish claims,” observing that they consciously treat every member’s time as if he were appearing on a Fox News segment.

I think that’s literally what they are doing. They are using the formal setting and the national attention to introduce people to the alternative reality that only people who watch Fox News usually see.

Take, for instance, the big signs Republican committee members have printed up and set on easels behind them. They feature things like pictures of Rep. Adam Schiff, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, on a milk carton with the words “Where’s Adam?” obviously pushing their absurd demand that Schiff be compelled to testify as a witness. (Nobody showed up in an official Trump campaign “Where’s Hunter” T-shirt, thank goodness.) Another was titled “Coastal Impeachment Squad” featuring a picture of the Democratic leadership spelling out that they are from New York, California and Massachusetts, clearly implying they are not Real Americans. At one point, they displayed the message “0 DAYS SINCE ADAM SCHIFF FOLLOWED HOUSE RULES” but removed it when thousands of people pointed out on Twitter that zero days since something occurred, in fact, means that thing occurred today.

Knowing that the Senate will not convict Trump under any circumstances offers Republicans an opportunity to use these nationally televised hearings to spread their conspiracy theories, memes and smears to a much wider audience. They are taking full advantage.

GOP members deployed their patented “process” argument constantly, of course. That was led by Rep. Doug Collins of Georgia, ranking member of the Judiciary Committee, who former GOP campaign adviser Rick Wilson aptly described on MSNBC as a “screeching histrionic drama queen.” Others repeatedly insisted that the Democrats should go through the courts rather than charge the president with obstruction of Congress. Nadler finally put that one to bed by pointing out that “no privileges have been asserted. There’s nothing for a court to review.”

Perhaps one of the most startling speeches came from Rep. John Ratcliffe, R-Texas, who took the position that Trump did nothing wrong to a new level, asking, “Is it ever OK to invite a foreign government to become involved in an election, involving a political opponent? The answer is ‘yes.’ It better be — we do it all of the time.” He later tried to explain that “involve” doesn’t mean “interfere.” It was not convincing in the least. But acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney was almost certainly relieved to see someone other than him make such an incriminating comment before the whole country.

The two congressmen who really carried the ball for the president over and over again were Matt Gaetz of Florida and Louie Gohmert of Texas. Here are just a couple of examples of how each of them aggressively played to the cameras with Fox News talking points:

Breitbart News

@BreitbartNews

Rep. @MattGaetz (R-FL) doesn't hold back on Hunter Biden.

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6,507

2:19 PM - Dec 12, 2019

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CNSNews.com

@cnsnews

.@RepLouieGohmert : ‘We’re Here Because of Fraud, Not by the President,’ But Within the DOJhttp://www.cnsnews.com/article/washington/melanie-arter/gohmert-were-here-because-fraud-not-president-within-doj …

– Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) said that it is because of fraud within the Department of Justice (DOJ), not fraud by President Donald Trump,...

cnsnews.com

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Louie Gohmert

@replouiegohmert

“They [Democrats] talk about “abuse of power” but they were willing to obscure evidence in a basement hearing over and over. They are willing to block witnesses from coming in here and testifying before Congress ..." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-b3HkuOvB2o&feature=youtu.be …

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Those are just a few examples of the smears and lies those two shared on national TV on Thursday. They were bravura performances, which the president liked very much. He broke his previous record for tweets in a day, many of them retweets of the worst commentary from the Republicans on that committee.

Whether anyone who lives outside the Fox News universe would be impressed is hard to know. As I’ve written before, it doesn’t really matter. The point is to give oxygen to their disinformation and propaganda by any means necessary so it may live on. Republicans have achieved that goal. And I’m pretty sure the impeachment trial won’t be the last we hear of any of it.

Heather Digby Parton, also known as “Digby,” is a contributing writer to Salon. She was the winner of the 2014 Hillman Prize for Opinion and Analysis Journalism.

"healthy beard"

https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/internet-mocks-infowars-protestor-who-interrupted-impeachment-hearing-to-scream-trump-is-innocent/

will sommer InfoWars host Owen Shroyer gets ejected from the impeachment hearing

https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/impeachment-endgame-buckle-up-its-gonna-get-uglier/

no lnx

...So it looks like it’s going to be up to Republican members on the committee to make his case for him. Judging from what we’ve heard from various prominent Republicans over the weekend, we can expect that this next phase will see a ratcheting up of resistance to the proceedings and more antics from the backbenchers on the Judiciary Committee. They have some real characters who are ready to turn this into a wild and crazy trip down the rabbit hole.

We don’t yet know how Nadler plans to run the hearings but I think everyone hopes he follows Schiff’s example. A draft of possible impeachment proceedings from September indicates that Nadler plans to allow committee staffers “designated by the chairman and ranking member” to “ask questions of witnesses for a total of one hour, equally divided across the parties (in addition to the normal questions from members),” so it’s likely that the hearings will at least have an hour or so of meaningful exchanges.

But that’s going to be tough. This committee is one of the most rancorous in the House and it has twice as many members as the Intelligence Committee. Many of them are showboating egomaniacs on a good day. Both Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, and Rep. John Ratcliffe, R-Texas, who were highly combative during the Intelligence Committee hearings, also sit on Judiciary, so we can expect more of their red-meat performances. And we can be sure that Trump’s most loyal guard dog, Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida, along with borderline crackpot Rep. Louie Gohmert of Texas, will be looking for ways to upend the proceedings.

As Judiciary member Rep. Andy Biggs, R-Ariz., told Fox News on Sunday, “it’s a bunch of brawlers sometimes on the Judiciary Committee, so it should get pretty hot and under the collar as we go along. I don’t think things have been done the way they’ve been done in the past, Mike, and so it causes some rancor and it should be pretty — much more feisty, I would say than the Intel Committee was.”

Nadler has his hands full, to say the least. But if anyone thinks that the circus atmosphere will be over once the House votes on impeachment and it moves to the more staid and dignified Senate, they should think again. Republican senators are behaving little better than Gaetz and Gohmert. Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., has vowed to call Hunter Biden to testify on the premise that “we’re not going to live in a country where only one party gets investigated.” (Which must have made Bill Clinton shake his head in wonderment, considering that Graham was one of the House managers of his impeachment trial.)

But Graham has to battle another Southern senator for the role of most outrageous Trump defender. That would be Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana, who has been currying favor with Trump by appearing on the Sunday shows making rash claims about Ukraine interfering in the 2016 election.

Ben Rhodes

@brhodes

Republicans literally spreading Russian disinformation manufactured on some troll farm. https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1201183435554992129 …

Aaron Rupar

@atrupar

.@SenJohnKennedy: Dr Hill is entitled to her opinion

TODD: When does opinion become fact?

K: I believe reports Poroshenko worked for Clinton

T: My goodness, you just did exactly what the Russian op is trying to get Americans to do! Are you worried you've been duped?

K: No.

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This is crazy talk, but it’s very likely where the impeachment process is headed both in the House and the Senate. The most sober and dignified part of the process is probably behind us, unfortunately.

Heather Digby

https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/justice-department-laying-groundwork-for-criminal-investigation-into-trump-based-on-ukraine-bombshell-report/

https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/impeachment-a-struggle-to-save-democracy-from-the-pathological-cult-of-donald-trump/

Impeachment: A struggle to save democracy from the pathological cult of Donald Trump

Paul Rosenberg / SalonDecember 1, 2019

quite long, see big picture?

There are many different ways to view the Trump impeachment process, but perhaps the most important, if least recognized one is to view it as a part of struggle to…

no lnx

Inside the GOP cult: How House Republicans spied on, smeared and ambushed a dissenter within their ranks

Francis Rooney, United States Congress

Written by Kerry Eleveld / Daily Kos December 1, 2019

There was no room in the House GOP caucus for the growing doubts of Florida Rep. Francis Rooney. Since taking office in 2017, Rooney had vented privately about Donald Trump’s comportment as president, as is the practice of nearly all GOP lawmakers on the Hill. But Rooney was perhaps more troubled than most by the findings of the Mueller report earlier this year, and the more recent Ukraine scandal had finally pushed him into pondering a no-go zone for Republicans: impeachment.

House Republicans, according to a frightening piece in Politico Magazine, started monitoring Rooney very closely as an enemy to their cause—which clearly had nothing to do with living up to their oaths of office. Their only goal was closing ranks around Trump, but they struggled to address the impending desertion of Rooney, since he hadn’t said anything on the record yet. “Rooney could go nowhere, say nothing, without the eyes of the party on him,” writes Politico’s Tim Alberta. “House Republican leaders, having been made aware of Rooney’s agitating, deputized lawmakers to monitor the malcontent.”In essence, Rooney’s colleagues started spying on him. And having caught wind of his dissent at the White House, Trump was incredulous. “Who the hell is this Rooney guy?” Trump asked during a phone call with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.

House GOP leaders settled on starting a “whisper campaign” against Rooney, questioning his fealty to Trump in preparation for when he finally broke ranks. The idea was to sow the seeds of discontent in his blood-red Florida district so his constituents would be primed to go ballistic when Rooney finally aired his misgivings publicly. And that’s exactly what happened after Rooney appeared onCNN on Oct. 18, saying he couldn’t rule out impeaching Trump for his actions on the July 25 call with the Ukrainian president. He even offered up a Nixon analogy.

“I’m very mindful of the fact that back during Watergate everybody said, ‘Oh, it’s a witch hunt to get Nixon,’” he told CNN. “Turns out it wasn’t a witch hunt. It was absolutely correct.”

Hoo boy. That sure unleashed the attack dogs. Just imagine being a Republican lawmaker who had to look in the mirror after one of your own finally admitted the truth everyone had been studiously ignoring. Rooney’s matter-of-fact bravery cast the others as craven opportunists by comparison. His colleagues spent the rest of the day furtively creeping around the Capitol in desperate avoidance of an unwanted encounter with a reporter. But in the Republican Party, no good deed goes unpunished, and so it was for Rep. Rooney.

“The blowback from the people in Southwest Florida was something. I mean, I had people down here in the local Republican leadership mad at me, yelling at me, telling me nothing should happen to make me waver in my support of Donald Trump. Nothing,” Rooney told Politico. “Now, I’m pretty immune to pressure. I’ve got a great company, a great family, I’ve done some wonderful things in my life. [SOUNDS LIKE DEATH?!] So, the fact that I got criticized by some local Republican officials doesn’t bother me one bit. But still … ”

That’s when Rooney’s voice faltered—even he was a little thrown by the fallout. The day after Rooney’s CNN appearance, he announced he wouldn’t be running for reelection. There obviously isn’t a place in the GOP for anyone who isn’t a glass-eating Trump cultist. That’s exactly the message GOP leadership had hoped to send: Anyone who dares stray from the party line will be unceremoniously excommunicated.

When it came time for the procedural vote laying out the rules of engagement on Democrats’ impeachment inquiry, the entire GOP caucus had clearly gotten the memo. Not a single Republican voted with Democrats to pass the resolution, while two Democrats actually joined Republicans to vote against it.

Several blocks up Pennsylvania Avenue, Trump exulted in his win, believing it to mean Republicans were all falling in line. But Rooney says he merely considered that vote procedural, not substantive.

“I’m not going to show my hand on impeachment until we get all the facts out there,” he said, insisting that he’s not the only House Republican who decided to hold their fire till a later date. “There are a lot of Republicans who feel varying levels of disquiet at the idea of using American foreign policy power to gin up domestic political investigations.”

After conducting dozens of interviews, Politico agreed with Rooney’s assessment, writing, “There is a sizable number of Republican senators and representatives who believe Trump’s actions are at least theoretically impeachable, who believe a thorough fact-finding mission is necessary, who believe his removal from office is not an altogether radical idea.”

Even so, the numbers seem unlikely to add up to Trump’s impeachment from office. Nonetheless, House GOP leaders are working closely with the White House to stem the number of potential defections to as few as possible. Trump, quite frankly, can’t stand any disloyalty, even if it’s politically advantageous to a Republican trying to keep their seat.

But if you’re wondering what it’s like to speak out of turn in GOP circles these days and actually tell the truth, Rooney’s experience is telling.

ref quite good, long:

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/11/08/trump-impeachment-republicans-congress-229904

see rooney politico on impeach:

...

This could prove to be Trump’s salvation. Even among those Republicans not predisposed to defending him, there is the silhouette of an emerging consensus: That the president’s dealings with Ukraine were foolish, unbecoming and unfortunate—but not impeachable.

Even Sanford admits that if he were still a voting member, he wouldn’t be ready to support impeachment. “I think there’s a very weighty, complex judgment to be made here,” he says. “I object to this president on a variety of levels. But I would still say another shoe has to drop.” Sanford pauses. “Then again, this is a guy who said he could shoot somebody on 5th Avenue and get away with it, and he was pretty clairvoyant on that front. So, I don’t know what that shoe would have to look like.”

Mark Sanford, a former South Carolina congressman and governor, campaigns in Manchester, New Hampshire, in Sept. 2019. Sanford is running against Donald Trump for the 2020 Republican presidential nomination.

Amash, who voted for the House inquiry to proceed, is wrestling with that same question. “I think we’ve seen plenty of evidence that the president is abusing his power, abusing the office of the presidency,” he says. The independent congressman understands that his former GOP comrades disagree, or at least say they disagree, with him on that front. What he wonders is what, if anything, could change their minds; whether even a smoking cannon of misconduct linked directly to Trump could convince them of their responsibility to impeach.

Just as we sit discussing this mystery inside Amash’s congressional office, the nearby television flickers to life with a CNN breaking news bulletin: “White House admits to quid pro quo with Ukraine.” A short while earlier, Mulvaney—one of Amash’s closest friends during their time together on Capitol Hill—had taken to the White House press podium to declare, among other things, that Ukraine’s military funding had indeed been held up at Trump’s behest and that people should “get over it.”

Amash shakes his head. “I mean, I’ve known Mick for a long time, but I don’t really know what his life is like at this point, and what he’s thinking, and how much just being in that world warps your view of things,” he says. “The administration’s approach with a lot of things is to put out really bad information and then pretend like it’s not bad. It’s sort of a different way of covering up. It’s gaslighting—just put out the bad stuff and then tell everyone it’s not bad, and that you’re shocked that anyone would think it’s bad. ... Trump understands that. He’s figured out that he can say and do pretty much anything and people will cover for him.”

“The administration’s approach with a lot of things is to put out really bad information and then pretend like it’s not bad. It’s sort of a different way of covering up.”

—REP. JUSTIN AMASH

Both Sanford and Amash, once integral players inside the conservative House Freedom Caucus, say that if the roles were reversed—if Barack Obama were asking foreign nations to investigate Mitt and Tagg Romney—that Jim Jordan, the group’s founding chairman, would be leading the charge toward impeaching the Democratic president.

“Oh, no doubt,” Sanford laughs.

“100 percent,” Amash says.

With Sanford and Amash exiled, and Trump’s alliance with the House Freedom Caucus strong and symbiotic, it’s unclear whether even a single member of the organization—one founded on the order of principles over party—will consider a vote for impeachment. Jordan and Mark Meadows, his wingman and Trump’s soothsayer on the right, have so thoroughly transformed the identity of the group from feverishly independent to ferociously partisan that it’s difficult to imagine any of their lieutenants stepping outside of what’s become a Trump-topped chain of command.

There is, however, one conservative who continues to be monitored closely: Chip Roy.

A former federal prosecutor who made a name for himself in Washington as Ted Cruz’s original Senate chief of staff, Roy is a true believer who was sharply critical of Trump throughout 2016. When Roy decided to run for Congress in 2018, in fact, he was reminded to scrub his social media of attacks on the president. With so many of his Freedom Caucus colleagues springing to the president’s defense in recent months, Roy’s silence has been a subject of growing concern. Although the freshman congressman hasn’t indicated that he’s prepared to impeach Trump, he hasn’t soothed anxieties by ruling it out, either.

Freshman Republican Rep. Chip Roy speaks at a press conference outside the Capitol.

Freshman Republican Rep. Chip Roy speaks at a press conference outside the Capitol. | Tasos Katopodis | Getty Images

In an interview, Roy tells me he has yet to see evidence supporting a case for Trump’s impeachment. That said, he is clearly uncomfortable with the reflexive attempts by his colleague to insulate Trump at every turn, often resulting in sloppy and self-contradicting arguments.

“I have not associated myself with any of the defenses of my colleagues on this issue, because I’m going to make my own assessment and frame it however the facts present themselves,” he says. “I’ve got my own views on this, and I don’t necessarily believe the arguments I’ve heard to date have been the best arguments, because people are just firing on the fly without thinking it through.”

Roy acknowledges his reluctance to speak on the matter. He explains that he has been marking up hundreds of pages of documents and building a prosecutor’s case file from which to draw his ultimate conclusions. Unlike some of his colleagues, Roy says, he sees “a line” that needs to be enforced as a matter of precedent. It’s just that Trump, from everything he’s gathered thus far, has not crossed it.

The president’s allies have long believed his greatest threat from within the Republican Party comes from the middle; that given the cultish devotion he enjoys on the right, a moderate with lukewarm constituents could get away with defying him before a conservative with MAGA-clad constituents could. This thinking had led Trump and his team to keep a close eye on certain individuals, such as Adam Kinzinger and John Shimkus and Fred Upton, who fit the description of the centrist, traditional, Bush-friendly Republican who have been known to voice their displeasure with the president. And indeed, both Kinzinger and Shimkus leaped off the radar in recent weeks due to their broadsides against Trump. But their invective had more to do with abandoning the Kurds than pressuring the Ukrainians...

Christian TV pastor Rick Wiles: Impeachment is a "Jew coup"CORY DOCTOROW

https://www.politico.com/news/2019/11/06/impeachment-defense-bill-jim-inhofe-067150

11/06/2019 07:43 PM EST

Annual defense policy legislation would be in jeopardy if House Democrats move forward with the impeachment of President Donald Trump, the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee warned on Wednesday.

https://www.alternet.org/2019/11/senate-prepares-a-mock-trial-with-a-stacked-deck-of-jurors/

dc rept

no lnx

Senate prepares a mock trial with a stacked deck of jurors

Written by Terry H. Schwadron / DC Report November 27, 2019

Donald Trump now says he wants a public trial, an impeachment trial—so long as he has loaded dice among majority Republican senators.

Sure, and I want to go to Vegas with an iron-clad agreement to win at the gaming tables.

Trump called into a Fox & Friends airing to argue that a trial would clear him, of course, and allow the public airing of his grievances about 2016 election interference by Ukraine—the stuff of conspiracy theorists—and to bring the real villains, the Bidens, to account.

I have questions.

Neither Republican nor Democratic senators have been holding back much on their opinions about the outcome of an impeachment trial unless they are Republicans facing a tough re-election in states less tomato-red than Kansas or Mississippi. And so, as the senators split exactly along party lines on the question of whether Trump should remain in office, we’re approaching the idea of an impartial jury trial as if we’re walking into the back room at Rick’s Casablanca bar.

Any minute now, we can expect that Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) will start begging futilely for various rule requests from Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) about how to conduct such a trial before Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. Then McConnell can quote the very imperialism he and others saw in Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) running the House Intelligence Committee and simply sit on his hands—or his majority’s hands.

But by then, it almost assuredly will be too late, since key Republicans already have started meeting with Trump in the White House to discuss just what kind of an impeachment trial he would like to see. Can you imagine any other jury members meeting with the accused perp before the trial begins to determine who they would like to see as witnesses, to pre-determine how many days the trial will last, to see if their rules comport with the accused criminal’s idea of what he would like to see happen?

In the Senate

The amazing thing is that the Senate seems to lack 51 votes to simply decide magically that the charges that Trump abused his office and obstructed justice in seeking to hold up a White House meeting and military aid for agreement by a vulnerably new Ukrainian president to commit publicly to open investigations for Trump’s personal political advancement. Republicans like Mitt Romney of Utah, Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Thom Tillis of North Carolina, Joanie Ernst of Iowa and Cory Gardner of Colorado apparently are making it known behind the scenes that they at least want the cover of an actual trial, making instant dismissal impossible.

Instead we will look forward to about two weeks of trial, according to Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), just long enough for Republicans to call and unmask the whistleblower, to confront Schiff for perceived, unduly aggressive handling of committee hearings and unfounded reports that he had met with the whistleblower and Joe Biden, whose candidacy for president was the target of Trump’s demand for Ukrainian investigation.

I’m waiting to hear Schumer at least try to challenge the impartiality of Senate jurors. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) may even be a witness for Trump, to report on meetings he had with Ukrainian leaders. How does he then sit as a juror on the validity of his own testimony? For that matter, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) was in some of the same meetings, with the opposite takeaway, also sitting as a juror.

Five senators are running to be the Democratic opponent to Trump. Do we truly expect that they will be impartial here?

Where’s the Outrage?

What is startling in these prospects for a circus trial is exactly the vehemence of the House Intelligence Committee Republicans who attacked that body’s attempt at fact-finding for failing to include their partisan efforts to unearth the whistleblower and call the Bidens. This is exactly the same, with a different majority rule—and now it is perfectly fine?

Since the outcome of the trial is a foregone conclusion, should we already be focusing more on what happens to the underlying Constitutional principles here? Are the Republicans at all worried about the expanding power base of presidential reach and the diminution of Congressional oversight? Are they prepared to accept that when a Democrat wins next November?

Worse, are the rest of us ready for a Trump re-election with an impeachment victory under his belt to resist any questions about what his administrations do with policy or personnel appointments?

Oh, I know, the check here is that should Trump win re-election, he is sure to run afoul of the Constitution again—and become the first president to be impeached twice.

no lnx

House committee sues AG Barr in wake of judge’s ruling that declared ‘presidents are not kings’

Written by David Badash / The New Civil Rights Movement November 26, 2019

The House Oversight Committee wasted no time in filing a lawsuit against Attorney General Bill Barr and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, suing both Trump appointees for failure to respond to subpoenas demanding documents.

Declaring “President Trump and his aides are not above the law,” Oversight Chairwoman Carolyn Maloney on Tuesday announced, “I am filing this enforcement action today because the Trump Administration’s brazen obstruction of Congress must not stand.”

Politico reports Maloney is seeking documents related to the 2020 Census, and the Trump administration’s attempts to add a citizenship question to the constitutionally-mandate survey.

That question was the brainchild of a Republican strategist, now deceased, who wrote it would depress participation in the Census by minorities, effectively granting Republicans greater representation in the House and other areas – including where $675 billion in federal funds are spent.

One federal judge declared if the citizenship question made it onto the census, “hundreds of thousands — if not millions — of people will go uncounted.”

The Trump administration has ignored many subpoenas from House Democrats. On Monday a federal judge ruled former White House Counsel Don McGahn could not ignore a subpoena and must testify before Congress.

“Stated simply, the primary takeaway from the past 250 years of recorded American history is that Presidents are not kings,” Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote in her 118-page ruling Monday.

kurt v

https://www.alternet.org/2019/11/a-gop-picked-witness-just-buried-republicans-bogus-conspiracy-theories-about-joe-biden/

impeachment is a pivotal moment in our history but the press still covers it like a horse race

an 1119

...Depending on who your ask, the testimony so far has been either “very damaging” to the president or “the worst show on earth.” It was “substantive, but it wasn’t dramatic.”

The views expressed in that first sentence are courtesy of the two conflicting faces of Fox news, represented by Chris Wallace (“very damaging ) and Sean Hannity (the “worst show” part).

The opinion in the second is the assessment of an analysis posted on NBCNews.com written by Jonathan Allen, a Washington-based national political reporter.

“There’s time for Democrats to tell a more compelling version of the story,” Allen writes, “keeping in mind that the attention span of most Americans doesn’t match that of most C-SPAN viewers.”

....

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impeachment_inquiry_against_Donald_Trump

An impeachment inquiry against Donald Trump began after U.S. president Donald Trump and other top government officials pressured the leaders of Ukraine and other foreign nations to publicly announce investigations of former U.S. vice president and leading 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden and his son Hunter^[1][2] and release alleged evidence that Ukraine interfered in the 2016 U.S. election.^[3][4][5] The inquiry revolves around a phone call between Trump and Ukranian President Volodymyr Zelensky implying that U.S. military aid to Ukraine was to be withheld until Zelensky gave in to the aforementioned demands.^[1][3][6] These allegations have been corroborated by many witnesses, including U.S. top-envoy-to-Ukraine Bill Taylor,^[7] Laura Cooper (the top Pentagon official overseeing Ukraine-related U.S. policy),^[8] former White House official Fiona Hill^[9] and at least six additional White House officials.^[10][11] The reports implicate Trump and his personal attorney Rudy Giuliani—as well as Gordon Sondland, Kurt Volker, Lev Parnas, Igor Fruman, and others—in taking part in a quid pro quo campaign to pressure the Ukrainian government to take actions which would be helpful to Trump's 2020 presidential campaign.^[10] Based on the alleged abuse of power of the presidency by Trump to advance his personal political interests,^[12][13] House Speaker Nancy Pelosi initiated the impeachment inquiry on September 24, 2019.^[14][15][16] Additional alleged misconduct was reported in the days after the announcement,^[12] with Trump subsequently publicly urging Ukraine and China to investigate the Bidens.^[17][18]

A whistleblower's complaint which revealed the phone call was given to Congress on September 25, 2019, and released to the public the next day.^[19] The White House corroborated several of the allegations, including that a record of the July 25 call between Trump and Zelensky had been stored in a highly restricted system.^[20][21] A non-verbatim transcript confirms that Trump asked Zelensky to investigate the Bidens and release evidence that Ukraine interfered in the 2016 U.S. election,^[3] and repeatedly urged him to work with Giuliani and Attorney General William Barr on those matters.^[22][23] On October 9, the White House officially responded to the impeachment proceedings in a letter from Counsel Pat Cipollone to Pelosi that it would cease all cooperation with the investigation due to concerns including that there had not yet been a vote of the full House and that interviews of witnesses were being conducted behind closed doors.^[24][25] A few days later, White House acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney said Trump had withheld military aid to Ukraine over its supposed corruption, but that there had been no quid pro quo.^[26]

During the depositions, Ambassador Taylor testified that he had been told that U.S. military aid to Ukraine and a Trump–Zelensky White House meeting were dependent on Zelensky publicly announcing investigations into the Bidens and alleged Ukrainian interference in the 2016 election.^[4] Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman, the National Security Council's Director of European Affairs, testified that he had heard the phone call and that he had shared his concerns about the president's remarks with a White House lawyer.^[27] On October 31, 2019, the House voted 232–196 to establish procedures for public hearings,^[28] which started on November 13.^[29] As hearings began, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff asserted that Trump may have committed bribery, which is specifically mentioned in the Constitution as an impeachable offense.^[30][31][32]

Background

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1119 devin nunes in opening of impeach raise dems use of steele doss, he met w/ rudy?!

no lnx

an 1119

Here’s why Republican impeachment theatrics — as buffoonish as they are — serve a purpose for the GOP

Rep. Jim Jordan, ABC's "This Week" Screengrab

Written by Alex Henderson November 15, 2019

Liberal and progressive pundits — and some Never Trump conservatives as well — have been highly critical of the silly, buffoonish theatrics that Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, Rep. Devin Nunes of California and other far-right House Republicans brought to the first public testimony in the impeachment inquiry against President Donald Trump. But then, Jordan and Nunes weren’t trying to win over liberals, progressives or anti-Trump conservatives on Wednesday, November 13, when they aggressively attacked the testimony of two diplomats: Ambassador William B. Taylor (top U.S. ambassador to Ukraine) and the U.S. State Department’s George P. Kent (deputy assistant secretary for European and Eurasian affairs). They were playing to Trump’s hardcore MAGA base, pushing emotional buttons rather than relying on substance.

For that matter, Jordan and Nunes weren’t trying to win over independents either. They were preaching to the converted, determined to show pro-Trump voters that they still have their backs.

Rep. Adam Schiff, Democratic chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, knew what he was doing with Taylor and Kent’s testimony — and that testimony made a strong case for impeaching Trump. Schiff and other House Democrats showed exactly why Trump deserves impeachment: during a phone conversation on July 25, Trump tried to pressure Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky into investigating a political rival — former Vice President Joe Biden — as well as his son, Hunter Biden. The testimony demonstrated that Trump withheld military aid to Ukraine and made an investigation of the Bidens a condition of that aid.

Jordan and Nunes never disproved anything that Taylor or Kent had to say. Instead, they angrily insisted that the entire impeachment inquiry is one big fabrication on the part of partisan Democrats — and the way in which they said it was more important than the substance (of lack thereof) of what they were saying. Their inflammatory rhetoric, while short on facts, was clearly designed to fire up the MAGA base as much as possible.

During the testimony, Jordan and Nunes both promoted the ludicrous Crowdstrike conspiracy theory, which claims that the real interference in the 2016 presidential election came not from the Russian government and President Vladimir Putin, but from the Ukraine government. Never mind the fact that former Special Counsel Robert Mueller, in his in-depth report for the Russia investigation, made it abundantly clear that Russian officials aggressively interfered in the 2016 election.

Nunes referenced “Ukrainian election meddling” more than once. But when Kent was asked if there was any evidence of Ukraine interfering in the 2016 election, the U.S. State Department diplomat responded, “To my knowledge, there’s no factual basis” for that claim. Kent even said, “To be honest, I had not heard of Crowdstrike” until after he read the transcript of Trump’s July 25 conversation with Zelensky.

Evidently, Kent doesn’t spend a lot of time listening to conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’ “Infowars” show.

Nunes indignantly insisted that Trump’s July 25 conversation with Zelensky was perfectly innocent, asserting, “We’re supposed to believe that President Trump committed a terrible crime that never actually occurred.”

Jordan asserted that it is horribly unfair that Schiff hasn’t told him the identity of the intelligence whistleblower who made the complaint that led to the impeachment inquiry. But the whistleblower’s identity, at this point, is irrelevant because Taylor’s testimony backed up everything in the whistleblower’s complaint.

Saying that Nunes and Jordan’s theatrics were silly and devoid of substance, however, is not saying that they weren’t effective as far as reaching the people they were intended to reach: the MAGA base. And so many of their talking points have been echoed in the right-wing media: the impeachment inquiry is a sham, Trump’s conversation with Zelensky was perfectly innocent, Crowdstrike is a real concern, Democrats are pursuing impeachment because they refuse to accept the 2016 election results.

Liberal Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson has described Trump’s rhetorical style as a form of “gaslighting”: Trump and his sycophants will repeat nonsense over and over — and the goal is to overwhelm those who are listening. The type of “gaslighting” that Robinson describes works well if one watches Fox News religiously, lives in a Trumpian bubble and never seriously listens to what anti-Trump voices have to say.

That type of “gaslighting” was very much in evidence on November 13 with Nunes, Jordan and other House Republicans. Their theatrics were clearly aimed at the far-right Fox News/AM talk radio/Breitbart News audience. It’s easy to debunk much of what they Nunes and Jordan have had to say about the impeachment inquiry, but for those House Republicans, such theatrics serve a purpose: whipping the MAGA base into a frenzy at every turn and giving them reasons to get to the polls in November 2020. And one need only spend some time watching Fox News to see that it’s working.

an 1119

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Russian state media is outing the alleged whistleblower after Rand Paul’s reckless outbursts: report

Written by Matthew Chapman / Raw Story November 6, 2019

President Donald Trump’s allies are trying to retaliate against the whistleblower whose complaint triggered the Ukraine scandal. And no one is doing so more enthusiastically than Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), who tweeted out a link to a right-wing article in Real Clear Investigations that purported to reveal the whistleblower’s name, occupation at the CIA, and photograph.

Thus far, although that article has been live for several days, the mainstream media has ignored it, resisting any effort to spread information about the whistleblower that would compromise their federal legal protections and open them up to reprisal or threats.

But according to The Daily Beast, there is one group of media outlets that is eagerly promoting Paul’s reckless attempt to out the whistleblower: Russian state media.

Not only did sites like Russia Today, TASS, and Rossiya-1 disseminate this same information shortly after Paul did, one of the sites falsely claimed that the original source was the Washington Post rather than Real Clear Investigations, apparently to give the information more legitimacy.

This, notes The Daily Beast, marks the latest in a long string of efforts by Russian propaganda networks to boost Trump and attack the impeachment investigation — which in addition to attempting to remove a president Russian officials broadly think is strategically useful to them, also centers on his apparent efforts to extort the government of Ukraine, a nation which Russia is violently occupying and from which they are annexing land.

https://www.rawstory.com/2019/11/impeachment-probe-looking-into-mulvaney-involvement-with-ukraine-before-trump-phone-call-report/

according to a report at the Daily Beast, Democrats are asking questions about acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney’s curious decision to hold up a weapons shipment to Ukraine before Donald Trump’s phone call with President Zelensky.

The report notes that Mulvaney, in his other job as head of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), held up the sale of Javelin anti-tank missiles to Ukraine even after the Trump administration had approved the sale...

https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/these-democratic-senators-could-actually-vote-to-save-trump-heres-what-theyve-been-saying/

https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/fox-news-guest-calls-impeachment-a-secret-ritual-conducted-by-a-cult-headed-by-high-priestess-pelosi/

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Fox News guest calls impeachment a ‘secret ritual’ conducted by a ‘cult’ headed by ‘high priestess’ Pelosi

Written by David Badash / The New Civil Rights Movement October 30, 2019

Fox News Business channel’s Maria Bartiromo Wednesday morning interviewed pro-Trump guest Lee Smith who told the top anchor the House impeachment inquiry is a “secret ritual” where Speaker Pelosi is the “high priestess” and Chairman Schiff the “high priest.”

“Here is how I see what we’re calling the impeachment process, inquiry — I see it as a secret ritual conducted by a cult,” Smith told Bartiromo (video below). “I mean, they’re doing most of this in secret. And I think it’s worthwhile thinking of Speaker Pelosi as the high priestess of the cult, and Adam Schiff as a high priest of the cult.”

“And the purpose of the cult is to protect the swamp and what the swamp has done,” he adds.

Smith appears to not understand how investigations are conducted, or how President Trump has grown the swamp.

Smith is author of the book, “The Plot Against the President: The True Story of How Congressman Devin Nunes Uncovered the Biggest Political Scandal in U.S. History,” which is currently number one on Amazon’s list of Political Commentary & Opinion books. It does not appear to be listed as fiction.

The Amazon page for his book says he was given “unprecedented access to Congressman Devin Nunes, former head of the House Intelligence Committee, to expose the deep state operation against the president–and the American people.”

Last year The Daily Beast ran a profile of Maria Bartiromo, declaring: “Once a titan of apolitical financial reporting, Bartiromo has made an unmistakeable pivot toward conspiratorial and occasionally alt-right-assisted Trump cheerleading.”

Eric Kleefeld

@EricKleefeld

Fox Business guest: "Here is how I see what we're calling the impeachment process, inquiry — I see it as a secret ritual conducted by a cult … And I think it's worthwhile thinking of Speaker Pelosi as the high priestess of the cult, and Adam Schiff as a high priest of the cult."

Embedded video

charaCTER assassination on all witnesses eg vindman, taylor ...

https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/dont-sleep-on-the-gop-strategy-republican-attacks-on-impeachment-process-have-a-clear-goal-in-mind/

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Don’t sleep on the GOP strategy: Republican attacks on impeachment ‘process’ have a clear goal in mind

Written by Heather Digby Parton / Salon October 28, 2019

President Trump left the safe bubble of his properties and his rallies to venture out into a world where people don’t cheer ecstatically whenever he appears. He attended the fifth game of the World Series on Sunday night at Nationals Park in Washington, and was lustily booed by the crowd, some of whom also held up impeachment banners and chanted “Lock him up.” Trump is not used to that sort of thing and he had a hard time hiding his discomfort.

Look how Trump’s face changes when he realizes an entire stadium is booing him pic.twitter.com/E46rzbzmbl

— Arlen Parsa (@arlenparsa) October 28, 2019

He probably thought he was going to be received as a hero since earlier in the day he’d announced that U.S. Special Forces had staged a raid in Syria that led to the death of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. (Who has been declared dead several times before, to be fair.) No doubt he was gravely disappointed to turn on the TV and see that the impeachment inquiry that is bedeviling him remains at the top of the news. If he had it in his head that wagging the (“beautiful, talented”) dog would tamp down impeachment talk, by the time he got into his jammies on Sunday night he must have realized that it didn’t work.

Last week we saw the absurd protest staged by Trump’s favorite court jester, Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., and several dozen other GOP members of Congress who stormed the secure facility where witness depositions are taken in private session. They made a big show of claiming that the process is being used improperly by House Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff, D-Calif,, because Republicans like Gaetz are not allowed in the room to ask questions and transcripts are not being released to the public.

This is ridiculous, of course, since all members of the House Intelligence, Oversight and Foreign Affairs committees, of both parties, are allowed to participate and ask questions. According to the Washington Post, Republicans, led by Intelligence Committee ranking member Devin Nunes, R-Calif., have been quite active during these long depositions. Mostly they seem to be trying to find out the name of the CIA whistleblower, and to further conspiracy theories about Ukraine supposedly working with Hillary Clinton to sabotage Trump in the 2016 election. They also want to know if these witnesses are loyal to Trump because, as we know, anyone who fails to declare fealty to him cannot be trusted to tell the truth. With his usual dignity and grace, Trump recently suggested that at least some of these witnesses were “human scum.”

Meanwhile, we had Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., fatuously declaring that the impeachment inquiry is unfair and offering a resolution to condemn it in the Senate. That was a meaningless gesture, more or less designed as a test vote to reassure the president that he doesn’t have to worry about being convicted in an impeachment trial. As of Sunday, only three Senate Republicans had failed to sign on.

But some of them have gone even further, such as Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., who told CNN’s Jake Tapper that he believes Schiff and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi want to give Trump “a fair and impartial firing squad.” (Kennedy sees himself as a clever and colorful character.)

Sen. John Cornyn of Texas just went for it:

What if, just what if, the Obama administration, including the leadership of the Justice Department and FBI unlawfully coordinated with the DNC and the Clinton campaign to “go after” an opposing presidential campaign? No problemo?

— Senator John Cornyn (@JohnCornyn) October 25, 2019

That’s odd, considering that Cornyn signed the recent Senate Select Committee on Intelligence findings confirming that Russia was behind the 2016 election interference. So he knows better. But he’s up for re-election in Texas next year and is playing to the big rube in the White House, who was no doubt pleased.

The Beltway conventional wisdom, repeated like a mantra dozens of times a day, is that the Republicans aren’t winning on the facts of impeachment so they are reduced to attacking the process. That assumes this is some sort of wild Hail Mary pass without any hope of accomplishing anything. Pundits and analysts marvel at the fact that the White House doesn’t have an “impeachment war room” and that the president serves as his own communications director, assuming that means the process is thoughtlessly chaotic and purposeless. Axios reports that an informal impeachment meeting now takes place daily in the White House, but it doesn’t appear to be geared toward a disciplined response to the onslaught of revelations because that’s simply not possible. Donald Trump is uncontrollable and there’s no use even trying.

That doesn’t mean there isn’t a plan. It might not be fully articulated or laid out in a PowerPoint presentation. But for all of Trump’s many failings he does have one talent: personal survival. He has been dancing as fast as he can his whole life, and he is highly skilled at getting out of trouble. In this case, we can see how he thinks he’s going to do that, because he has already done it once during his presidency.

People underestimate how well the “No collusion, no obstruction” and “Witch hunt!” strategy worked with the Mueller investigation. When Robert Mueller took that job he was considered the single most honorable, straight-arrow lawman in the nation, and was widely praised by prominent members of both parties. But through sheer repetition, echoed by his media minions, Trump managed to convince millions of people that Mueller, a lifelong Republican, and his team of prosecutors were a bunch of vengeful Democratic hacks out to take him down for partisan reasons. With the help of Attorney General William Barr, that narrative was reinforced upon the release of Mueller’s report, and it solidified the “witch hunt” meme that Trump and his supporters continue to push to this day.

I think most people who aren’t in the TrumpWorld bubble were taken aback that the Mueller report didn’t pack a bigger punch. After all, it laid out a case that the president had welcomed election interference by a foreign adversary on his behalf, and then repeatedly broke the law trying to cover it up. But Democrats in the House seemed unimpressed and the public more or less shrugged it off. True or not (and of course it wasn’t), “no collusion, no obstruction” pretty much stuck.

Trump and his henchmen are running the same game with the impeachment inquiry into Ukraine. They’re denigrating the witnesses, attacking the investigation as a partisan witch hunt, and saying that Trump’s phone call with the Ukrainian president was “perfect” over and over again. It is apparent that they expect the president to be impeached in the House, but they will acquit him in the Senate — not on the merits of the case, but because the process was supposedly illegitimate.

The point is to rally their white working-class voters by stoking their rage and resentment, and trying to convince what remains of their white college-educated vote to stay the course. Imagine the feral, frothing-at-the-mouth Lindsey Graham of the Kavanaugh hearings leading the charge, with a smirking Mitch McConnell by his side. Ted Cruz and Rand Paul and Tom Cotton will give soaring speeches railing against the Democrats’ illegal crusade to depose the duly elected president, echoing the Trump’s robotic messages once again. Perhaps there will be a couple of defectors who vote to convict — Mitt Romney and one or two others — but nonetheless, Trump will be acquitted and will spin it as “total exoneration” once again.

Will it work? Who knows? If I had to guess I’d say it won’t be persuasive to the Independent and suburban voters he’s going to need to eke out another win in the Electoral College. But it’s a mistake to assume that Trump and the Republicans are flailing around without any purpose, and attacking the process for lack of any other options. They’re doing this because it’s worked before, and they figure they might just get away with it again.

Heather Digby Parton, also known as “Digby,” is a contributing writer to Salon. She was the winner of the 2014 Hillman Prize for Opinion and Analysis Journalism.

https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/at-american-priority-conference-speakers-sowed-distrust-peddled-conspiracy-theories-and-called-for-civil-war

Joshua Feuerstein took the main stage at the American Priorities Festival and Conference at the Trump Doral National Miami resort to deliver a message: the Civil War was here.

Feuerstein, a former evangelical pastor, used his sermon voice to recall the original Civil War, which he called the “turning point of America,” the battle of Gettysburg, which he deemed the “turning point of the war,” and the men who fought in Pickett’s Charge, which he labeled “the turning point of Gettysburg.” He paced the stage in his navy blue suit, passing by the large red “AMP” letters on the screen behind him, and painted a picture of heroic men and hand-to-hand combat during Pickett’s Charge. “Those men did not think it anything special,” he said.

“I need you to know that 2020 is a civil war that will change the face of America forever,” Feurestein said, his voice rising, as the crowd began to applaud. “And it’s God, ladies and gentlemen, it’s God that calls the qualified, that qualifies those that are called, that are willing to step up in the moment that matters, that has greatness thrust upon them. And tonight, together here in this place to say that we are willing to fight, we may think ourselves insignificant, but that we will stand together in 2020, and we will win the war that will change the face of America.”

Feurestein’s declaration of war wasn’t the only one at the conference. Earlier in the evening, evangelicalPastor Mark Burns had called for war; “We’ve come to declare war!” he said, and attendees in the back of the ballroom replied with “War! War!”

Over three days, speakers at the pro-Trump conference sowed seeds of distrust in nearly every American institution imaginable and cited conspiracy theories to bolster their case for the use of such civil war rhetoric, as they perpetuated sentiments of victimization and loathing. The conference could have been dismissed as a meeting of the fringe, but big-ticket speakers like Don Trump Jr. and Sarah Huckabee Sanders lent legitimacy to the conference,as did more respectable Republican groups like the Leadership Institute, which held a series of trainings in side rooms. By the time Don Trump Jr. took the stage on Friday evening, he simply invoked themes hammered into the audience throughout the day using subtler language, and it worked the crowd into a frenzy.

In this Trumpian, upside-down world, it’s hard to understand where one has landed until you take one conspiracy at face value: the “deep state.” The so-called deep state is supposedly comprised of supporters of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama in high-rank positions in different government agencies who aim to sabotage Trump at every opportunity and eventually overthrow him. Originating on the fringe, the conspiracy theory has now entered the mainstream GOP and has become a staple of right-wing media messaging. At the American Priority Conference, the speakers legitimized the deep state, and layered more conspiracy theories on top.

Perhaps most telling was the “Unmasking the Russian Hoax” panel with Tom Fitton of Judicial Watch, a right-wing “investigative” organization, conservative activist Ned Ryun, George Papadopolous, who went to federal prison for making false statements to FBI agents about the timing of his contact with Russian intermediaries in 2016, and Corey Lewandowski, former Trump campaign manager and author ofTrump’s Enemies: How the Deep State Is Undermining the Presidency. Tracy Beanz, abooster of the QAnon conspiracy theory, moderated the panel.

In Fitton’s world, bad actors had been planning a coup before Trump was even elected.

“Anytime you heard the word impeachment, you can substitute the word coup, because that’s what’s going on here,” Fitton said. “It began during the campaign, when they weaponized intelligence agency against Trump, people like George [Papadopoulos], and who knows who else, to protect Hillary Clinton, to protect Barack Obama, and as Mr. Strzok said, to have an insurance policy if Mr. Trump won.”

The “insurance policy” Fitton references isa conspiracy theorybirthed on 4chan message boards that Democrats had a ready-to-go scheme to impeach Trump if he won.Amplified by right-wing media, the conspiracy theory has reached the White House and influenced the president’s policy making.

“They [Congress] weren’t getting the traction they needed, so the intelligence agencies, it looks like, that were targeting him to begin with, came up with another smear operation,” Fitton continued. “They had a leak they wanted to get out on this Ukrainian conversation, but they recognized doing it would be illegal, so they gussied it up in a whistleblower complaint and illegally communicated classified information, it looks like, with Adam Schiff and lied about it. And now it’s led to the coup operation of President Trump.“

Papadopoulos floated the deep state theory as well. “Some of the same spies that went after Michael Flynn in 2015 were after me in 2016,” he said. As for the whistleblower report, Papadopoulos noted that it came out when WIlliam Barr was, he said, trying to investigate the previous administration. “This was a preemptive strike by the deep state,” Papadopoulos said, suggesting that it was an effort by deep state actors to protect themselves.

Lewandowski focused on the FBI.“I look at the fact that they spied on American citizens who were participating in the political process, because they didn’t like our politics,” Lewandowski said. “What we know see over the course of the last three and a half years is that Jim Comey, and Andy McCabe, and the lovers, Dr. Page, which Trump talked about last night, James Baker who is the general counsel at the FBI, they use their badges and guns to go after American citizens because they don’t like our politics.”

The bad actors need to punished, the panelists agreed. “People have to go to jail,” Ryun said, to which an audience member yelled: “Barack Obama!”

According to the panelists, the media was among the bad actors, conspiring with Democrats. “The media intentionally wanted to brainwash all of you. They wanted to create chaos and division, and attempt a silent coup,” Papadopoulos said.

Later that evening, Charlie Kirk of Turning Point USA warmed up the stage for Don Trump Jr.He zoomed in on the Jussie Smollett story, an actor who apparentlystaged a hate crime against himself, claiming it was indicative of the Democratic situation and “Democratic privilege,” where Democrats, like Smollett, are never prosecuted for wrongdoings. Kirk used the Smollett story to sow doubt—if Smollett fabricated a hate crime, what else could they lie to you about?—and bolster another debunked conspiracy theory that Adam Schiff changed the whistleblower laws just before the whistleblower filed his complaint.

“Guess what happens when we don’t hold them accountable? What happens is Congressman Adam Schiff then flies his staffer up to Ukraine, changes the whistleblower laws, uses a friend that he has in the CIA, and then do it all over again, just with a different country,” Kirk said.

Kirk then moved on to other supposed deep state actors. “If [Trump] would’ve won and did the typical Republican thing … maybe the deep state actors would’ve just stayed at bay. But the fact that they’re relentlessly going after him should give you renewal and confidence that this president actually doing what he said he was going to do,” Kirk said.

When Don Trump Jr. walked out onto the stage Friday night following Kirk, he wasted no time in getting to the Smollett story and attacking Schiff and the media.“Adam Schiff is the Jussie Smollett of Congress on steroids,” he said as his girlfriend, Kimberly Guilfoyle, stared at him adoringly from her chair on stage. “And he gets away with it because people in the media protect him.”

“On paper, 2020 should be over, but it’s not, because we’re not in a fair fight,” Trump Jr. said, claiming that “the mainstream media has made a conscious decision to be the marketing team of the opposing party.”

While Trump Jr. didn’t go as far as to call for civil war or double down on the deep state, he didn’t need to. His presence lent legitimacy the conspiracy theories floated all day. It’s this very type of environment that civil war rhetoric on the right has grown. In early October, it appeared to reach Trump himself, who went as far as toquote Fox News contributor Pastor Robert Jeffress on Twitter saying, “If the Democrats are successful in removing the President from office (which they will never be), it will cause a Civil War like fracture in this Nation from which our Country will never heal.”

In an upside-down world, where a deep state is conniving to imprison administration officials just doing their jobs, continues to get away with spying and crimes, and stages a coup against a democratically elected president, calling for a civil war doesn’t seem like that big of a leap.

Metaxas: 'It's the End of America' if Investigations Against Trump Don’t Stop

https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/with-propaganda-channel-fox-news-creating-firewall-for-trump-critics-says-mass-mobilization-needed-to-oust-president/

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With ‘propaganda channel’ Fox News creating firewall for Trump, critics says mass mobilization needed to oust president

Written by Julia Conley / Common Dreams October 23, 2019

A new survey released Sunday reveals just how impenetrable President Donald Trump’s level of support among regular Fox News viewers is, and suggests that a mass mobilization among those who support impeaching and removing Trump from office may be the only way Congress will finally hold him to account.

The Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) polled 2,000 people and found that among Republican voters who use Fox News as their regular news source, 55 percent said that no action taken by Trump could cause them to oppose him.

The findings bolstered the president’s statement, made during the 2016 election, that he “could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and [he] wouldn’t lose any voters.”

But the results varied for Republicans who don’t regularly turn to Fox for their news; only 29 percent of them said there was nothing Trump could do to lose their approval, and only 39 percent said they strongly approve of the president.

Ninety percent of Republicans who don’t watch Fox regularly said they don’t support impeachment and removal of Trump from office, compared to 98 percent of those who do watch Fox.

The former number “is overwhelmingly high,” Washington Post columnist Greg Sargent wrote, “but suggests that among this group, at least, Trump could suffer losses on the margins as the inquiry turns up worse revelations.”

As journalist Mehdi Hasan wrote on Twitter on Tuesday, Fox News is “not just a conservative news outlet. It is a propaganda channel for the president and his party, and there is no liberal or centrist equivalent to it.”

Mehdi Hasan

@mehdirhasan

This is what a lot of well-meaning liberals don’t understand about Fox - it’s not just a conservative news outlet. It is a propaganda channel for the president and his party, and there is no liberal or centrist equivalent to it. https://twitter.com/millicentsomer/status/1186288529938104320 …

Lili Loofbourow

@Millicentsomer

“The poll ... finds that an astonishing 55% of Republicans who watch Fox News as their primary news source say there is almost nothing Trump could do to lose their approval. By contrast, only 29% of Republicans who don’t cite Fox as their primary source say this.” https://twitter.com/brianbeutler/status/1186286472128880641 …

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8:31 PM - Oct 21, 2019

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Hasan later highlighted an on-air remark from Fox News host Mark Levin that “there hasn’t even been a hint of scandal” since Trump took office as further proof that the network offers “just pure and endless propaganda.”

@mehdirhasan

I said it last night and I will say it again: Fox News doesn’t even pretend to be a news channel anymore and is now just pure and endless propaganda on behalf of this scandal-ridden President. https://twitter.com/jasonscampbell/status/1186627394708365315 …

Jason Campbell

@JasonSCampbell

Mark Levin: "While [Trump's] been president there hasn't even been a hint of scandal. Not a hint."

Embedded video

Trump notoriously watches several hours of Fox News on a daily basis and has been known to regularly speak with host Sean Hannity after Hannity ends his nightly show.

As Sargent wrote in the Post, the network’s coverage of Trump’s recent plan to host next year’s G7 summit at his resort in Doral, Florida—a violation of the Constitution’s Emoluments Clause—played a role in reversing the president’s decision:

Trump pulled the plug on his corrupt scheme to host the Group of Seven summit at his Doral resort after getting informed that some moderate Republicans—the ones he needs to keep in line on impeachment—didn’t want to defend it, amid indications that it would become part of the case for impeachment. He also witnessed some Fox News personalities disapproving of it…That’s when Trump concluded the jig was up on Doral, the New York Times reports.

According to Sargent, with both Trump and his most loyal supporters tuning in to Fox News on a regular basis, the network serves to reassure his base that Trump has done nothing wrong to deserve the impeachment inquiry House Democrats have initiated, while protecting the president from real accountability:

It’s difficult to say whether Republicans watch Fox because they’re already in lockstep with Trump, or whether they’re inclined that way because of what Fox tells them. But these things seem to reinforce one another—and that may prove a significant factor in keeping GOP lawmakers in line behind him.

[…]

This hermetically sealed-off version of reality has created a space in which Republicans are backing Trump because he’s only done right.

In recent days, Trump critics including New York Times columnist David Leonhardt and Crooked Media editor Brian Beutler have argued that with Fox News at the president’s disposal and Fox‘s Republican viewers showing no sign of abandoning Trump, the president is essentially protected from impeachment unless a mass mobilization is begun by the at least 50 percent of Americans who do support his removal.

“The Fox effect is protecting Trump from removal, and mass mobilization is likely the only way for impeachment supporters to overcome it,” Beutler tweeted.

Leonhardt on Sunday wrote that Fox‘s hold on Republican voters makes it increasingly unlikely that their Republican representatives in Congress will defect and announce their support for impeachment.

“Protest may be more important than in the past, because the elite institutions that helped bring down Richard Nixon, like political parties and the national media, are weaker today,” he wrote.

A mass protest “can wake up more Americans to the gravity of the situation,” Leonhardt added. “It can mobilize progressives to work as hard as they did during the 2018 midterms. It can confront congressional Republicans with their cowardice.”

https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/beyond-parody-matt-gaetz-and-dozens-of-his-gop-colleagues-try-to-barge-into-secret-hearing-in-latest-anti-impeachment-stunt/

...more than two dozen House conservatives rail on Schiff and the process outside the closed impeachment proceedings, and have now entered the SCIF - and they are bound to be kicked out bc they don’t serve on the three committees conducting the probe. It is being led by Matt Gaetz...

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difference between Nixon and Trump is Fox Newsby Nicole Hemmer

Fox News shields President Trump. But his love for their conspiracies might bring him down.

Impeachment is the latest chapter in the battle between democracy and white supremacyby Carol Anderson

The connections aren’t as obvious, but America’s front lines remain the same as they’ve always been.

mma 1019

As the last credible journalist to have a daily show on Fox News, Shep Smith probably should have resigned a long time ago. The network has been a right-wing propaganda network for years, and under Trump has turned into regime TV. On Friday, he finally did resign, and initial reports have indicated that his actions were driven by how bad the network has gotten.

Smith's resignation comes shortly after Fox News executives reportedly sided against him in an on-air feud with Fox News host Tucker Carlson over the seriousness of Trump's behavior in regards to Ukraine. In the end, Carlson said thatSmith was giving partisan opinion and not news. The entire episode was extremely telling: Tucker Carlson portrayed Smith's show -- at first implicitly and then explicitly -- as leftist fake news, much the same way he does nightly with CNN and MSNBC, even teaming up with close Trump ally Joseph diGenova. And Fox News executives were fine with it.

Smith's departure is a disaster for Fox News. As Media Matters' Matt Gertz wrote in the wake of Smith's announcement, "Smith’s willingness to push back against the misinformation rampant elsewhere on the network had made him extremely valuable to Fox. It provided the network’s executives with a fig leaf they could wave whenever critics argued that Fox was nothing more than a propaganda apparatus on behalf of the president and his allies. That fig leaf is gone. Fox belongs to the Seans Hannity and Lous Dobbs. And now, everyone knows it."

Gird your loins: Fox News is about to get even worse.

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/trump-attacks-congresswoman-tlaib-for-suggesting-democrats-jail-lawbreaking-white-house-officials/

...Trump is off and tweeting on Sunday morning, turning his ire on Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) after she admitted that Democrats are considering detaining White House officials who are refusing to comply with subpoenas.

According to a report from The Hill, Tlaib, “revealed in a new interview that House Democrats have discussed jailing allies of the president who do not comply with congressional subpoenas, an escalation of the House’s efforts to force White House compliance with an impeachment inquiry.”