Impeachment Today: Like the Sopranos, Only Cheesier
Republicans should have been careful about what they were asking for. Now that the transcripts of depositions taken by the House of Representatives are being released, there are tons of juicy details.
And they all add up to one thing, best said in the transcript of former Ukraine Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch
Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney (D-N.Y.) summed up her predicament: “You were an obstacle, it seems, to President Trump’s political interests and the financial interests of Mr. Giuliani’s now-indicted associates. Is that the sum and substance of your testimony today?”
“That appears to be how events have unfolded,” Yovanovitch said.
When the Ambassador realized she was being smeared, she was told to tweet something nice about the president. Really? Yes, really.
Here’s Dana Milbank at the Washington Post:
Yovanovitch detailed a Hollywood-ready tale about how Giuliani and two of his now-indicted goons hijacked U.S. foreign policy as part of a clownish consortium that also included Sean Hannity and a corrupt Ukrainian prosecutor. Their mission: to oust the tough-on-corruption U.S. ambassador who threatened to frustrate Giuliani’s plans to get Ukraine to come up with compromising material on Joe Biden and the Democratic Party.
Mike Pompeo has a cameo as the feckless secretary of state who refuses to stand up for his diplomat out of fear of setting off an unstable Trump. It all culminated in a 1 a.m. call from State’s personnel director telling Yovanovitch to get on the next flight out of Kyiv. Why? “She said, ‘I don’t know, but this is about your security. You need to come home immediately.’ ”
Yovanovitch, overcome with emotion at one point in her testimony, said she later learned that the threat to her security was from none other than Trump, who, State officials feared, would attack her on Twitter if she didn’t flee Ukraine quickly.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo called Fox News host Sean Hannity find out about the attacks with no basis in fact aimed at the ambassador. Yes, really.
Ms. Yovanovitch (from the transcript) What I was told by Phil Reeker was that the Secretary or perhaps somebody around him was going to place a call to Mr. Hannity on FOX News to say, you know, what is going on? I mean, do you have proof of these kinds of allegations or not? And if you have proof, you know, tell me, and if not, stop. And I understand that that call was made. I don’t know whether it was the Secretary or somebody else in his inner circle. And for a time, you know, things kind of simmered down.
Now we’ve learned that EU Ambassador Soundland DID confirm the Quid Pro Quo in his --updated, once he learned he was in danger of being charged with perjury--testimony, saying it was clear the Trump-Zelensky meeting was conditioned on announcing investigations into the Bidens and 2016.
We now know that one goal for Team Trump, in addition to manufacturing smears about the Bidens, involved getting Ukraine to validate a conspiracy theory absolving Russia of 2016 sabotage. This validates reports about Attorney General William Barr seeking foreign help to discredit U.S. Intelligence reports about interference in the 2016 election.
As Greg Sargent at the Washington Post concluded:
All this comes at a time when new documents from the special counsel are underscoring just how eager Trumpworld was to profit from the Russian interference effort.
We still haven’t gotten our arms around the mind-boggling scale of corruption on display here. Multiple government agencies are actively helping Trump absolve Russia of sabotaging the last presidential election on his behalf — thus burying his own campaign’s eagerness to benefit from it — and helping him cover up his effort to solicit more foreign help in cheating his way to victory in the next one.
A new witness? It seems as though Giuliani “associate’ Lev Parnas is offering to cooperate with the government. How fun, if true.
From the New York Times:
The turnabout occurred after Mr. Trump denied knowing Mr. Parnas when he was arrested.
“Mr. Parnas was very upset by President Trump’s plainly false statement that he did not know him,” said Mr. Bondy, whose client has maintained that he has had extensive dealings with the president.
After federal prosecutors in Manhattan announced charges against Mr. Parnas and three other men, Mr. Trump told reporters that he did not know Mr. Parnas or Igor Fruman, another Giuliani associate who also worked to help Mr. Trump in Ukraine and was among those charged with campaign finance violations. The two men had contributed extensively to political committees supporting Mr. Trump and appeared with the president in pictures posted on social media.
https://twitter.com/JRubinBlogger/status/1191442533303406592?s=20
The administration’s response to the growing impeachment story is best characterized as uncoordinated desperation.
Kentucky’s number two Trump toady, Senator Rand Paul all but begged the media from the podium at last night’s election rally to out the whistle blower’s name. He thinks he knows the name, but isn’t willing to break the law protecting witnesses, so he’s asking “the enemy of the people” to do his dirty work.
Having no facts to bolster their case for the President, Republicans have opted to silence people clamoring for justice.
From the New York Times:
The Republican National Committee paid to generate thousands of calls to the congressional offices of nearly three dozen House Democrats in recent weeks, an effort that was aimed at both shaping opinion around the impeachment inquiry and tying up the phone lines of the elected officials, according to two people briefed on the effort.
The calls were part of a broader effort by Republicans to influence public opinion around the investigation into President Trump. The Trump campaign and the Republican committee have taken the lead on political messaging defending Mr. Trump at a moment of political vulnerability, using television and digital ads, as well as the phone calls.
Some of Rudy Giuliani’s other associates have started whispering campaign aimed at former White House strategist Steve Bannon. It seems as though his suggestions about the president needing to reconsider his legal team’s makeup have struck a chord, resulting in an anonymous memo making vague claims about Bannon’s background.
From the Daily Beast:
That memo was sent on the condition of anonymity. But The Daily Beast has since learned that another person involved in crafting and circulating the Bannon attacks is Jennifer Kerns, a conservative pundit and political strategist who was previously a spokesperson for the California Republican Party and the successful 2008 ballot initiative banning gay marriage in the state.
The full extent of the anti-Bannon campaign was not immediately clear, but The Daily Beast confirmed that the memo was sent to producers at Fox News last week.
Neither Bannon nor Giuliani responded to requests for comment on the memo. The effort comes at a perilous time for President Donald Trump and his allies as Democrats move forward with a House impeachment inquiry and it shows that elements of Trumpworld are preoccupied by internal disputes even as the president is on the verge of being impeached.
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OMG. No really. Oh, my God…
https://twitter.com/nowthisnews/status/1191495086581792768?s=20
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