Impeachment Becomes a Reality as UkraineGate Unfolds
UPDATE: Rep. Nancy Pelosi has done the deed. The impeachment process is now for real. I'm seeing a lot of "what aboutism" and false optimism on social media.
REMEMBER: Impeachment is a process. Lots of different results can come about and it is TOO SOON to say what the end will be. There are only two things we can be sure of: 1) More crimes will be revealed and 2) Donald Trump will fight dirty. Get ready for bots, lies, mainstream media fu's, and disappointments. The point we need to remember is to continue to resist.
We now return you to the story published before the official announcement was made...
Pick any metaphor you’d like… the dam has broken...we’ve turned a corner...we may have crossed the Rubicon. Despite a reluctance on the part of their leadership, Congressional Democrats are moving towards the ‘I word,’ as in impeachment.
Reports that he urged a foreign leader to investigate Joe Biden, who the President sees as a serious rival in the 2020 presidential election, have rocked Washington and intensified calls for Trump to be impeached.
As is true with just about everything happening in Washington, things will not move as fast as advocates would prefer. There are rules to be followed, asses to be covered, and no amount of ranting on Twitter will change that reality.
From “‘Seismic change’: Democratic hold-outs rush toward impeachment” at Politico:
Pelosi spent all weekend and Monday working the phones, including reaching out to House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler, as she sought to take the temperature of the caucus on impeachment. She's set to meet with the six committee chairmen investigating Trump on Tuesday afternoon to discuss Democrats' next steps…
...Democratic leaders have also called a full caucus meeting for Tuesday afternoon, where the discussion is expected to center on their response to the episode, and which comes after a dozen new lawmakers embraced an impeachment inquiry.
Democratic leaders now view a House Intelligence Committee hearing on Thursday featuring Trump's top intelligence official — as well as a deadline that day for the State Department to turn over related documents potentially implicating the president and his personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani — as the deciding factor over whether to move forward with impeachment proceedings.
On Monday, a dozen Democratic lawmakers came out in favor of moving ahead with impeachment — either conditionally or outright. This group includes vulnerable freshmen, as well as long-time Pelosi supporters who’d until now were sticking to her script.
Seven freshmen in what the GOP considers flippable districts with backgrounds in national security published a joint op-ed on Tuesday calling the new allegations "a threat to all we have sworn to protect."
“We have devoted our lives to the service and security of our country, and throughout our careers, we have sworn oaths to defend the Constitution of the United States many times over,” the group, all lawmakers who previously served in the U.S. military or defense and intelligence agencies, wrote in the op-ed in The Washington Post. “Now, we join as a unified group to uphold that oath as we enter uncharted waters and face unprecedented allegations against President Trump.”
Twenty out of the 44 frontline Democratic Congress members have now spoken out in favor of impeachment hearings. As of this writing, the total number of House Dems in that camp totals 157
UPDATE--they’re buying in fast today--: 162 169 200+ Here's a link to the list, which now includes San Diego's last Democratic holdout, Rep. Susan Davis.
The President and his camp are going through their battlefield tested script for shutting down the investigation at the root of Democratic unrest.
The whistleblower complaint by an intelligence official --which we do NOT know the actual content of-- has now been referred to by the President as a "political hack job."
Trump has admitted having a phone call with the President of Ukraine, which he called “totally innocuous.”
Sources have told at least three news organizations that Trump pushed Ukraine's president in a phone call to work with Rudy Giuliani, his personal attorney, who was advocating for an investigation into former Vice President Joe Biden's son Hunter.)
https://twitter.com/th3j35t3r/status/1176327084945420289?s=20
Rudy Guiliani...what a joke he’s become. Here’s a snip from the Guardian:
In a disjointed interview with Fox News Sunday, Giuliani also tried to link the former vice-president to the billionaire philanthropist George Soros; to the production of a notorious dossier on Trump by Fusion GPS; and to “the $1.5bn that the Biden family took out of China while that guy was negotiating for us”, all without offering evidence.
“This will be a lot bigger than Spiro Agnew,” Giuliani said, perhaps ill-advisedly referring to Richard Nixon’s vice-president who resigned in 1973, amid the Watergate scandal that would bring down the president.
Giuliani has admitted seeking to pressure Ukrainian authorities. The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday that in a 25 July call with Zelenskiy, Trump asked eight times for the Bidens to be investigated.
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“If a Republican ever did what Joe Biden did, if a Republican ever said what Joe Biden said, they’d be getting the electric chair right now." --the President of the United States, referring to a potential opponent in front of reporters at the United Nations.
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The president has grown even more defiant since the Mueller report, almost as if having avoided charges, he is daring Democrats to come after him again.
https://twitter.com/julianzelizer/status/1176477680084160513?s=20
Today there is reporting from multiple outlets indicating President Trump directed the acting White House Chief of Staff to freeze more than $391 million in aid to Ukraine in the days before Mr. Trump was scheduled to speak by phone with the new Ukrainian president.
Mr. Trump, buffeted by questions earlier in the day at the United Nations about his conduct, denied that he withheld the aid from Ukraine in an attempt to press President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine to dig up dirt on the former vice president.
“No, I didn’t — I didn’t do it,” Mr. Trump told reporters. But just moments before, he suggested that there would be nothing wrong with linking American funding for Ukraine, a former Soviet republic that is fighting Russian-backed separatists, to a corruption inquiry about Mr. Biden and his family.
“Why would you give money to a country that you think is corrupt?” Mr. Trump said.
Say what? For those of you who need to get up to speed on what has happened and is happening in the Ukraine, here are some bullet points:
Russia, which annexed Crimea in 2014, backs separatists in the Donbass region of Ukraine. The Washington Post cited a former senior US official as saying Trump thought military aid to Ukraine “was pointless and just aggravating the Russians”.
At the 2016 the Trump campaign--whose leader at the time (Paul Manafort) had extensive financial connections to the Ukraine--intervened to soften the GOP platform on resisting Russian aggression in the region.
A whistleblower, working in US intelligence, filed a formal complaint in August. The unnamed whistleblower is said to have seen or heard something that raised “urgent concern”.
Numerous news outlets have reported that Trump pressured the Ukrainian President to investigate Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, who served on the board of a Ukrainian energy company. According to the Wall Street Journal, Trump asked Zelenskiy eight times to investigate Hunter Biden.
About a month after the call, the US delayed $250m in promised assistance. The money was released this month, after the existence of the whistleblower complaint became public.
It is illegal for a political campaign to accept a “thing of value” from a foreign government. The investigation into a political opponent – for which Trump appears to have been pushing – would clearly be something of value.
There is no factual basis for Trump’s assertions of a scandal.
From CNN
There is no evidence of wrongdoing by Biden or his son Hunter. The then-Ukrainian prosecutor general Yury Lutsenko said in May that Burisma Holdings, a major energy company, did not violate Ukrainian law by having Hunter Biden on its board and paying him.
Trump's claims that Biden pushed for the firing of a Ukrainian prosecutor because he investigated a business for which his son served as a board member have previously been found to be false. The prosecutor was seen as corrupt by multiple governments and international institutions, not just the former vice president.
Here’s the bottom line: "You want the money ... you investigate Biden."
"It is a deeply serious time, and I think we have a constitutional crisis and I think there is only one remedy at this point," Rep. Pramila Jayapal, co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, said in an interview Monday. "I think there are many people across the spectrum of the caucus who are feeling that way."
"At the core of all of this is not the question of what happens if we move forward," Jayapal said. "It’s the question of what happens if we do not move forward." --Quoted in Politico
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In other news from the ‘How Low Can You Go Front,’ Trump’s mocking response to climate activist Greta Thunberg’s impassioned speech at the United Nations.
“She seems like a very happy young girl looking forward to a bright and wonderful future. So nice to see!”
https://twitter.com/goldengateblond/status/1176224399986290690?s=20
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