Trump IMPEACHED by the US House; US Senate Trial Allows No New Witnesses & Acquits Trump

☑︎#VoteDemocrat

The Original
Bushed
WOAT
Supporter
Joined
Dec 9, 2012
Messages
305,928
Reputation
-34,259
Daps
616,281
Reppin
The Deep State
:wow:





nytimes.com
Opinion | Republicans’ Big Lie About Trump and Russia
By Michelle Goldberg
6-8 minutes
Collusion wasn’t a hoax and Trump wasn’t exonerated.



  • Nov. 25, 2019

merlin_165033837_b23f771e-62ef-4d68-a79d-4c4fec1ad666-articleLarge.jpg

Peter Fritsch, left, and Glenn Simpson, the founders of Fusion GPS, the research firm that investigated Donald Trump during the 2016 campaign.Credit...William B. Plowman/NBC/NBC NewsWire, via Getty Images
There are two very big lies that Donald Trump and his sycophants have used, through aggressive, bombastic repetition, to shape the public debate about impeachment, and about Trump’s legitimacy more broadly.

The first big lie is that “the people” elected Trump, and that the constitutional provision of impeachment would invalidate their choice. In fact, Trump is president only because a constitutional provision invalidated the choice of the American people. Trump lost the popular vote and might have lost the Electoral College without Russian interference, and yet many Democrats and pundits have been bullied into accepting the fiction that he has democratic, and not just constitutional, legitimacy.

The second big lie is that Russia didn’t help elect Trump, and that the president has been absolved of collusion. It’s true that the report by Robert Mueller, the former special counsel, did not find enough evidence to prove a criminal conspiracy between Trump’s campaign and Russian state actors. But the Mueller report found abundant evidence that the campaign sought Russian help, benefited from that help and obstructed the F.B.I. investigation into Russian actions. His investigation resulted in felony convictions for Trump’s former campaign chairman, deputy campaign chairman, personal lawyer, first national security adviser, and longtime political adviser, among others.

Had public life in America not been completely deformed by blizzards of official lies, right-wing propaganda and the immovable wall of Republican bad faith, the Mueller report would have ended Trump’s minoritarian presidency. Instead, something utterly perverse happened. Democrats, deflated by the Mueller report’s anticlimactic rollout, decided to move on rather than keep the focus on Trump’s world-historic treachery. Republicans, meanwhile, started screaming about a “Russia hoax” ostensibly perpetrated on their dear leader. Among them was the House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, who in 2016 was surreptitiously recorded telling his congressional colleagues that he thinks President Vladimir Putin of Russia pays Trump. “Swear to God,” he said at the time.

This brings us to where we are now. Democrats understand that the Ukraine scandal is an outgrowth of the Russia scandal — as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said last month, with Trump, “all roads seem to lead to Putin.” Yet they’ve made the political calculation that reopening the broader story of how Trump has been compromised by Russia is a political loser.
In her closed-door deposition last month, the former White House Russia expert Fiona Hill suggested that Putin may have targeted Trump well before he entered politics. Representative Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland, tried to clarify: “Why do you believe that Putin was targeting Donald Trump from his days as a businessman?” Hill responded, “Because that’s exactly what President Putin and others were doing.” No one followed up on this when Hill testified publicly.

Rather, it’s Republicans, with their heroic capacity for shamelessness, who want to talk about Russia. They’ve set out to investigate the investigators, trying to make efforts to uncover the truth about Trump’s Russia connections, rather than the connections themselves, into a scandal. And now they’re trying to expand their big lie about Russia to cover Ukraine as well. The president, McCarthy said last month, “was trying to get to the bottom, just as every American would want to know, why did we have this Russia hoax that actually started within Ukraine.”

Because Republicans have been so successful in shrouding the origins of the Russia investigation in a miasma of misinformation, I hope some talented filmmaker makes a movie out of the new book by Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch, “Crime in Progress: Inside the Steele Dossier and the Fusion GPS Investigation of Donald Trump.” Simpson and Fritsch are the co-founders of Fusion GPS, the research firm that investigated Trump during the 2016 campaign, first for the conservative Washington Free Beacon, and then for a lawyer for the Hillary Clinton campaign. It was Fusion GPS that hired the British ex-spy Christopher Steele to look into Trump’s Russia connections, and it sits at the center of countless pro-Trump conspiracy theories. When Republicans controlled the House, Fritsch told me on Monday, “The only bank records that were subpoenaed by the House Intelligence Committee were ours.”

“Crime in Progress” is the best procedural yet written about the discovery of Trump’s Russia ties. It demolishes a number of right-wing talking points, including the claim that the Steele dossier formed the basis of the F.B.I.’s counterintelligence inquiry into Trump. (The Justice Department inspector general’s report on the origins of the Russia investigation will reportedly disprove this canard once and for all.) But it also makes plain what many Republicans knew before the 2016 election, even if they’ve now pretended to forget it. For years, Trump was financially entangled with organized crime as well as with Kremlin-friendly oligarchs, and by keeping those entanglements secret, he gave Putin leverage over him from the moment he took office.

Write Simpson and Fritsch, “In the end, the Mueller probe sidestepped the question that so unnerved Fusion GPS and Christopher Steele in the summer of 2016: Was the president of the United States under the influence of a foreign adversary?” Republicans have used all the power at their command to defame people who’ve asked this question. Perhaps that’s because otherwise they’d have to take seriously all the evidence that the answer is yes.


:wow:
 

Blackfyre

Veteran
Supporter
Joined
Oct 30, 2017
Messages
17,124
Reputation
3,074
Daps
67,277
Reppin
Earthrealm

@mkraju
Per House Budget summary of docs OMB provided: First time in writing that Ukraine aid had been withheld was evening of July 25 by career official - same day as Trump-Zelensky call. Top political appointee (Duffey) continued to place holds til Sept. 12 Documents: Trump administration officially put hold on Ukraine aid same day as Trump call - CNNPolitics

Documents: Trump administration officially put hold on Ukraine aid same day as Trump call
The Office of Management and Budget's first official action to withhold $250 million in Pentagon aid to Ukraine came on the evening of July 25, the same day President Donald Trump and Ukrainian...
cnn.com
13:08 - 26 Nov 2019
 

King Static X

The Realest King (የተከበረው ንጉሥ)
Supporter
Joined
Aug 18, 2017
Messages
17,355
Reputation
8,807
Daps
83,153
Reppin
Kings County
Damn, remember when Thanksgiving week was one of the slowest of the year?

*Congress was on recess (as they usually are around this time)
*No real major news except about the weather and travel advice/warnings
*President Obama would just make some dad jokes and then pardon a turkey on Thanksgiving Day.
*NFL games on Thanksgiving Day

And that was it....


Now, with Trump, there is some major news every damn day.

*Trump pardoning 3 war criminals
*Giuliani being investigating for being a foreign agent and many other things
*Rick Perry continuing to be an idiot by calling Trump "The Chosen one"
*Guiliani and Trump associate Lev Parnas turning over audio and video to Congress relating to them.
*Country bumpkin GOP senator blaming Ukraine for 2016 election interference
*Hush money payments by Trump still being investigated

This sh!t just never ends :beli:
 
Top