Impeachment Today: White House, Russians Twisted 'Truths'
Following devastating testimony by European Union Ambassador Gordon Sondland, which made it clear that there was an extortion effort aimed at getting the Ukraine to help President Trump’s 2020 reelection campaign, the White House has issued a statement headlined "Ambassador Sondland Completely Exonerates President Trump of Any Wrongdoing."
Say what?
Sondland testimony: “Everyone was in the loop. It was no secret...Was there a quid pro quo? As I testified previously, with regard to the requested White House call...the answer is Yes."
He implicated multiple cabinet officials in this scandal, which has now become a whole lot bigger.
Democrats plans to keep this investigation short and sweet may have been dashed. The House of Representatives is now fully entitled to hear from, at a minimum: Pompeo, Bolton, Mulvaney, and Vice President Pence.
https://twitter.com/JuddLegum/status/1197241318243737607?s=20
And the only thing Sondland didn’t fess up to was putting words in the President’s mouth ordering the wrongdoing.
https://twitter.com/markknoller/status/1197275542044758019?s=20
We’re in Baghdad Bob territory now, folks.
(He was Iraqi dictator Sadam Hussein’s spokesperson, famous for being oblivious to what was demonstrably happening.)
Here's Dana Milbank on how the GOP took the bad news:
Unloading on his boss and colleagues seemed to energize the ambassador. Under the table, his feet tapped out a steady drum roll as he talked. Others in the administration had testified about the “Gordon Problem” that was interfering with Ukraine policy. Now, the one with a Gordon Problem is Trump.
At the first break in Sondland’s testimony, Rep. Devin Nunes (Calif.), the committee’s ranking Republican, turned to the minority counsel, Steve Castor, with a look as though his favorite uncle had died. In the audience, Rep. Lee Zeldin (R-N.Y.), one of Trump’s biggest defenders, stroked his forehead as though trying to ease a migraine. Republicans in the audience filtered out. Several Republican members of the panel decamped to a staff room — presumably to revise strategy.
Apparently, the resulting consensus was that Sondland would have to be discredited. “You don’t have records, you don’t have notes, you don’t have a lot of recollections,” Castor later told Sondland. “This is the trifecta of unreliability.” Alas for Castor, Sondland’s testimony came with incriminating emails and text messages.
Speaking of untruths, the Russian news agency Interfax ran a story based on a pro-Putin Ukrainian legislator’s press release:
The Ukrainian Office of the Prosecutor General has drawn up an indictment against the owner of the Burisma Holdings energy company, ex-Ecology Minister Nikolai Zlochevsky, that contains information that the son of former US Vice President Joe Biden, Hunter, as a Burisma board member along with his partners received $16.5 million for their services, Ukrainian Verkhovna Rada MP from the ruling Servant of the People party Alexander Dubinsky told a press conference on Wednesday, citing the investigation’s materials. According to him, the money came from duplicitous criminal activity.
Needless to say, Gateway Pundit, Zerohedge, TASS and a bunch of random right wing blogs are linking to each other in an attempt to make this bit of malarkey look credible.
Nobody in the Ukraine government knows about this “news”, which the author says was released to the public last week and ignored by the media.
From NBC News:
Within an hour of ZeroHedge publishing its story, the claim of an indictment had been spread on Twitter by tens of thousands of users. According to results on the Twitter analytics tool Hoaxy, the indictment claims were propelled by Charlie Kirk, the leader of the conservative group Turning Point USA, as well as a conspiracy theorist, Jack Posobiec, and the anonymous @BreakingNLive, an account that has become notorious for spreading misinformation. The account also boasts of being retweeted by the president.
More than 10,000 users engaged with the ZeroHedge story on Facebook, which was shared to dozens of pages that totaled more than 3 million followers.
One minute before the ZeroHedge article was published, the anonymous account that inspired the QAnon conspiracy theory — generally known as “Q” — linked to the same Interfax-Ukraine article.
Finally, Papa Putin’s supporters never rest…
As public impeachment hearings kicked off in Washington last week, a meme featuring Rep. Adam Schiff spread across Facebook.
Within minutes of one another, at least 23 pages with state-themed names such as Ohio Supporters for President Donald J Trump and Iowa Supporters for President Donald J Trump shared an image of Schiff with the words “Lock Up Adam Schiff for Treason” and “Make American Great Again” encircling his head. This was one of two anonymously run pro-Trump networks of pages identified by a researcher and BuzzFeed News that share memes and stories, some of which are false or misleading, in a coordinated fashion. When contacted for comment, Facebook told BuzzFeed News the two networks do not violate its policy against coordinated inauthentic behavior.
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