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The 2019-2020 Impeachment, Trial and Acquittal of Donald John Trump

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  • Originally posted by Mihais View Post
    Frankly,Trump's presidency has been a failure,even when it comes to fulfilling his base's aspirations to an acceptable degree.But there is no ending of the issues that saw him elected in the first place,only of emphasizing them.
    Shhhh! Quiet! Don't say that out loud! Trump's base doesn't like to hear things like that. As far as they know, Trump has done everything he's promised. Like putting a big beautiful wall in Colorado...which is over 1000 miles from the Mexican border. But hey, let's build it anyway.
    “He was the most prodigious personification of all human inferiorities. He was an utterly incapable, unadapted, irresponsible, psychopathic personality, full of empty, infantile fantasies, but cursed with the keen intuition of a rat or a guttersnipe. He represented the shadow, the inferior part of everybody’s personality, in an overwhelming degree, and this was another reason why they fell for him.”

    Comment


    • Support for Trump impeachment rises as 59% say he pursued personal interests in Ukraine, poll finds

      WASHINGTON – Support for the impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump's dealings in Ukraine continue to grow, as does support for his removal from office, a Quinnipiac University poll released Wednesday found.

      A 55% majority of registered voters said they approved of the inquiry, while 43% said they disapproved. A week ago, 51% of voters said they approved and 45% disapproved. Quinnipiac has found support for the inquiry to be in the low-50% range since it was announced at the end of September.

      The poll found that slightly less than half of Americans support impeaching Trump and removing him from office, though support for such a move has been rising since the inquiry began.

      Currently, 48% support Trump's removal. That is 2 percentage points higher than last week and 11 points higher than on Sept. 25.


      But opinions on impeachment continue to divide sharply along party lines. Only 10% of Republican voters approve of the inquiry, and 88% disapprove, and just 6% think Trump should be removed. By contrast, 93% of Democrats approve of the inquiry while 7% disapprove, and 86% think Trump should be removed.

      Among independents polled, 58% support the inquiry and 37% oppose it. And 49% of independents favor removing Trump from office, while 41% oppose it.

      A CNN poll released Tuesday found 50% of Americans think Trump should be removed from office, up from September, when support for his removal was at 47%.


      Trump is accused of withholding military aid to Ukraine to pressure the country into investigating allegations related to former Vice President Joe Biden, a leading candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, and a theory that Ukraine was involved in 2016 election meddling.

      The president has denied there was any "quid pro quo" with Ukraine and said his focus was on combating corruption in that country before handing over aid. But only 33% of voters said they believe Trump was acting in the national interest, compared with 59% who believe he was pursuing his personal interests there.

      "Republicans remain rock solid in opposing both the impeachment of President Trump and the House impeachment inquiry. But when it comes to the president's motives in Ukraine, Republicans aren't all on the same page. Roughly 7 in 10 Republicans say the president was pursuing the national interest in his dealings with Ukraine. The rest say he was pursuing his own personal interest or they don't know," said Quinnipiac University polling analyst Mary Snow.

      Thirty-eight percent of respondents said they approved of the job Trump is doing as president, his lowest mark with Quinnipiac since August. Fifty-eight percent said they disapproved, his highest mark since July 2018.

      House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., had a higher job approval rating than the president at 45%, while 47% expressed disapproval. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell's job approval was at 24% and his disapproval was at 57%,

      "President Trump's overall job approval rating inches lower against a backdrop of intensifying scrutiny, the House impeachment inquiry and criticism over his decision to withdraw U.S. troops from northern Syria," Snow said. "A majority of Americans disapprove of his decision to remove U.S. military support from the Kurds, which includes about 3 in 10 Republicans."

      Fifty-seven percent of voters said Trump is making the world a less safe place, while 36% said he was making it safer. Fifty-two percent said Trump had weakened the U.S. standing as leader of the free world, while a third said he had strengthened it and 11% said he had not affected it.

      The poll was conducted from Oct. 17-21 with a margin of error of plus or minus 3.1%.
      __________________

      Doesn't look like this is going away like Trump had hoped. Tick-tock, tick-tock....
      “He was the most prodigious personification of all human inferiorities. He was an utterly incapable, unadapted, irresponsible, psychopathic personality, full of empty, infantile fantasies, but cursed with the keen intuition of a rat or a guttersnipe. He represented the shadow, the inferior part of everybody’s personality, in an overwhelming degree, and this was another reason why they fell for him.”

      Comment


      • An MLB umpire tweeted about buying an assault rifle over the impeachment inquiry

        Major League Baseball is dodging another curveball this week after an umpire tweeted about buying an assault rifle over the impeachment inquiry.
        Umpire Rob Drake tweeted late Tuesday that he planned to buy an AR-15 rifle "because if you impeach MY PRESIDENT this way, YOU WILL HAVE ANOTHER CIVAL WAR!!! #MAGA2020," according to a copy of the tweet obtained by ESPN.
        It would be a very short war if it comes to it. The Republicans have overwhelming firepower since most of the gun nuts are in their camp. The Democrats might rue their anti-gun stance (though I personally agree with it).

        Comment


        • It would be a very short war if it comes to it. The Republicans have overwhelming firepower since most of the gun nuts are in their camp.
          lol, it wouldn't be a war, it'd be federal agents having to deal with a bunch of crackpots a la Waco.

          although the far more likely scenario is him watching One America, whacking off, and going to sleep.
          There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "My ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."- Isaac Asimov

          Comment


          • Donald Trump Has a Big Problem in the Senate
            A resolution meant to be a show of solidarity by Republicans with the president has instead become a sign of weakness.

            As the White House struggles to build an anti-impeachment strategy, President Donald Trump turned this week to Lindsey Graham, his staunchest ally in the Senate, to try to stiffen Republican spines in that chamber. It’s not going the way the president must have hoped.

            On Thursday, Graham announced that he’d put forward a resolution condemning the House impeachment inquiry. By mid-afternoon, when he actually announced it, the resolution had been watered down to a plea for a different and more transparent process, apparently a sop to GOP senators unwilling to go quite that far. And yet by Friday morning, only 44 of 53 Republicans in the Senate had signed on to the resolution. A gesture meant to be a show of solidarity by senators has instead become a sign of the weakness of the president’s position.

            The Senate was supposed to be Trump’s firewall in the Ukraine scandal, and there’s still not any reason to believe that there would be 67 senators willing to vote to remove the president. But with impeachment in the House an all-but-foregone conclusion, as I wrote earlier this week, the administration is turning its focus to the Senate, and it’s proving to be less of a redoubt than Trump wanted.

            The New York Times reports:

            After another private meeting Monday night with Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, Mr. Trump began complaining privately that he did not think Senate Republicans were doing enough to have his back. For days, some allies of the president’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., had agitated on Twitter for Mr. Graham to do more to try to counteract Democrats in the House.

            One line of pressure has been for Graham, who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee, to call witnesses in that chamber as a sort of counterprogramming, though on Thursday he said that made no sense to him.

            But Graham is not the problem; he’s signaled a willingness to stand by Trump through thick, thin, and horrific lynching analogies. The White House’s challenge is other senators. Some Republicans have been notably open to an impeachment inquiry, but most have been conspicuously quiet. Some use the time-honored excuse that they’d serve as jurors in a trial and therefore ought not to weigh in; many more are simply dodging questions. What they’re mostly not doing is mounting substantive defenses of the president’s behavior. A Daily Caller canvass found only seven of the 53 Republicans were willing to rule out voting to remove Trump.

            Republican senators have always been less tractable for Trump than representatives, though the GOP controls the Senate but not the House. The president has many rah-rah fans in the House, and House members are also more vulnerable to pressure from Trump-loving constituents if they get out of line with the White House. (Francis Rooney of Florida, the most outspoken Trump critic on the Ukraine matter in recent weeks, has announced he’s retiring.) Senators are more insulated from immediate political pressure, more rooted in Washington and the party structure, and less fond of the president.

            Nonetheless, it would take a major change in the evidence against Trump, or a vast shift in polling, for enough Republican senators to support conviction that the president would be in serious danger of removal in a Senate trial. Yet it’s clear that Trump does care a great deal about senators’ positions. The impetus for his hasty cancellation of plans to host the Group of Seven summit at this resort in Doral, Florida, was apparently the anger it provoked among Republican senators. In the past, Trump has been content to weather their displeasure, but this time he folded.

            Perhaps Trump believes that a unified GOP Senate response will persuade Democrats not to vote to impeach; I am skeptical that will work. Or perhaps Trump worries about the political damage if a majority of the Senate voted to convict, even if it didn’t lead to removal. It would take only four GOP defections to reach a majority for conviction in the Senate. [Majority, yes. But not the 2/3 needed to remove Trump. Still, a majority would be pretty remarkable - TH]

            There’s little precedent that can help forecast what the political fallout might be. A majority of senators voted to convict President Andrew Johnson, but they fell one vote short of removal; Johnson’s presidency never recovered. More recently, the Senate voted 45–50 and 50–50 to acquit President Bill Clinton, without a majority for conviction in either case. Even so, that result was arguably ruinous for his Democratic Party in the 2000 election. It would be a powerful talking point if Democrats headed into the 2020 campaign season with a vote for conviction in the Senate that had garnered a majority with Republican support, even without removal, so Trump’s worry is rational.

            Graham may eventually be able to cajole the rest of the Republican caucus into signing on to his resolution condemning the House process. The final vote isn’t the point, though. Graham’s resolution was intended to send a message about Senate support for Trump—and it already has.
            ___________________

            I've always thought of the Senate as a dead end for removing Trump: Any Articles of Impeachment sent over by the House would be DOA, with every GOP senator voting to dismiss the charges before the trial even started.

            Hell, this could still happen, but the fact that Trump is squealing like the little crybaby that he is....It's rather interesting.
            “He was the most prodigious personification of all human inferiorities. He was an utterly incapable, unadapted, irresponsible, psychopathic personality, full of empty, infantile fantasies, but cursed with the keen intuition of a rat or a guttersnipe. He represented the shadow, the inferior part of everybody’s personality, in an overwhelming degree, and this was another reason why they fell for him.”

            Comment


            • In the meantime has Giuliani developed laryngitis? Beginning to miss the guy along with Baghdad Bob. They were always worth a laugh. I'm surprised ol' Bob hasn't capitalized on his notoriety ala Trump. Money, money, money...
              Last edited by tbm3fan; 25 Oct 19,, 21:47.

              Comment


              • Originally posted by tbm3fan View Post
                In the meantime has Giuliani developed laryngitis? Beginning to miss the guy along with Baghdad Bob. They were always worth a laugh. I'm surprised ol' Bob hasn't capitalized on his notoriety ala Trump. Money, money, money...
                Hm, funny you should ask!
                ______________

                Former Federal Prosecutor Reveals Telltale Sign Rudy Giuliani Is In Major Trouble
                Former federal prosecutor Mimi Rocah said there’s a sure sign that Rudy Giuliani, personal attorney to President Donald Trump, knows he’s in serious trouble.

                “He’s apparently been declining to go on TV and give interviews,” Rocah, former assistant U.S. attorney in the Southern District of New York, said on MSNBC on Thursday.
                “When I saw that, I thought Giuliani actually knows that there’s real trouble.”

                Rocah added: We’ve talked for two years about Giuliani can’t stay off of television and doing interviews and admitting things left and right. So he’s finally quiet, which tells me that he knows he’s in some hot water here.

                Earlier in the day, former U.S. attorneys Barbara McQuade and Joyce Vance published a column as a “thought experiment” that outlined three charges Giuliani could face based on the public record: conspiracy to interfere with the fair administration of elections, conspiracy to commit bribery and contempt of Congress.

                According to The New York Times, Giuliani is a “person of interest” in two federal investigations.
                _______________

                Sounds like Rudy's in a spot of trouble! He's probably going to need metric shit ton of cash to lawyer up for this legal Götterdämmerung. I wonder how he's doing financially....

                _______________

                Giuliani butt-dials NBC reporter while talking about money problems and Biden

                Rudy Giuliani made two accidental phone calls to NBC reporters while discussing his need for cash and bashing former Vice President Joe Biden.

                Late last Wednesday, Giuliani, 75, left a three-minute voicemail on the phone of NBC reporter Rich Schapiro. In the phone call, Giuliani was heard speaking to another person about money needed to address a problem in Turkey.

                Tensions between the United States and Turkey have been high since American soldiers left northern Syria and Turkish troops moved in, attacking Kurdish soldiers in the process.
                The NBC reporter noted that Giuliani was speaking about one of his former clients, Robert Mangas, a registered agent of the Turkish government.

                Giuliani was heard asking, “Is Robert around?”

                The other man heard on the call claimed Mangas was in Turkey.

                “The problem is we need some money,” Giuliani said, adding, “We need a few hundred thousand.”

                The other man on the line offered options on how to handle the situation, to which Giuliani replied, “Yeah, give me options.”


                The remaining context of the conversation was unclear, as much of it was inaudible and the voicemail recording was limited to just three minutes.

                Accidental phone calls are a recurring problem for Giuliani, who called Schapiro a few weeks prior, again leaving a three-minute voicemail. In that voicemail, Giuliani is believed to be discussing Biden.

                “I expected it would happen,” Giuliani was heard saying. “The minute you touch on one of the protected people, they go crazy. They come after you.”

                Another person in the room was recorded saying, “You got the truth on your side.”

                “It’s very powerful,” Giuliani responded. He continued to elaborate on the Biden investigation, calling it “sad” and claiming Biden has been allowing his family to profit off his name for years.

                “There’s plenty more to come out. He did the same thing in China. And he tried to do it in Kazakhstan and in Russia,” he said, adding, “It’s a sad situation. You know how they get? Biden has been trading in on his public office since he was a senator.”

                He also bashed Biden’s son Hunter, pointing out that the vice president’s son has battled with addiction problems.

                “When he became vice president, the kid decided to go around the world and say, ‘Hire me because I’m Joe Biden’s son.’ And most people wouldn’t hire him because he had a drug problem,” Giuliani was heard saying.

                Giuliani claimed that Hunter Biden had made “somewhere between 5 and 8 million” and alleged that $3 million had been “laundered.” He explained to the other people on the voicemail that former Secretary of State John Kerry’s stepson worked for the same company Hunter Biden was hired by.

                “His partner was John Kerry’s stepson. Secretary of state and the vice president for the price of one,” Giuliani said.

                At the end of the voicemail, Giuliani claimed that no one would investigate the Biden family so he hoped the situation would “force them” to investigate Hunter’s business arrangements.

                Giuliani is the president’s personal attorney. He is also under investigation for his conversations with Ukrainian leaders.
                _________________

                Um. Wow lol. Ol' Rudolph needs a few hundred grand, so he's apparently going to ask a registered agent of the Turkish government for the dough?

                I guess it really is true, you either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain.
                “He was the most prodigious personification of all human inferiorities. He was an utterly incapable, unadapted, irresponsible, psychopathic personality, full of empty, infantile fantasies, but cursed with the keen intuition of a rat or a guttersnipe. He represented the shadow, the inferior part of everybody’s personality, in an overwhelming degree, and this was another reason why they fell for him.”

                Comment


                • When Trump leaves office do people think he will give Lindsay Graham back the jar with his genitals in it? I was never a huge Lindsay fan, but his grovelling over the past few years has been truly pathetic.
                  sigpic

                  Win nervously lose tragically - Reds C C

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                  • Originally posted by Bigfella View Post
                    When Trump leaves office do people think he will give Lindsay Graham back the jar with his genitals in it? I was never a huge Lindsay fan, but his grovelling over the past few years has been truly pathetic.
                    Doubtful lol. I wonder how long it'll take Graham to flip-flop on Trump (again). Those approval ratings aren't looking so good.
                    “He was the most prodigious personification of all human inferiorities. He was an utterly incapable, unadapted, irresponsible, psychopathic personality, full of empty, infantile fantasies, but cursed with the keen intuition of a rat or a guttersnipe. He represented the shadow, the inferior part of everybody’s personality, in an overwhelming degree, and this was another reason why they fell for him.”

                    Comment


                    • Judge validates Trump impeachment inquiry, orders Mueller document release

                      (Reuters) - A U.S. judge on Friday validated the legality of the Democratic-led impeachment inquiry against President Donald Trump and ordered his administration to hand over an unredacted copy of former special counsel Robert Mueller's report detailing Russian meddling in the 2016 election.

                      U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell, handing a major victory to the Democratic-led House of Representatives, undercut an argument that Trump's fellow Republicans have made in attacking the impeachment inquiry. The judge said the House need not approve a resolution formally initiating the effort.

                      The U.S. Constitution gives the House wide latitude in handling impeachment. Democrats began the inquiry without putting such a resolution to a vote.

                      The judge gave the Justice Department until next Wednesday to provide the blacked out material from the Mueller report that was subpoenaed by the House Judiciary Committee.

                      "The reality is that DOJ and the White House have been openly stonewalling the House's efforts to get information by subpoena and by agreement, and the White House has flatly stated that the Administration will not cooperate with congressional requests for information," the judge wrote, using an acronym for the Justice Department.

                      The department had argued that the redacted information could not be disclosed because it contained material from grand jury proceedings that was required to be kept secret, but the judge strongly disagreed.

                      "DOJ is wrong," Howell said, adding that the committee's need for disclosure of the materials "is greater than the need for continued secrecy."

                      "Impeachment based on anything less than all relevant evidence would compromise the public's faith in the process," added Howell, a former federal prosecutor appointed to the bench by Trump's Democratic predecessor Barack Obama.

                      Howell also ruled that the House has undertaken a legal and legitimate impeachment inquiry and criticized efforts by the Justice Department and the committee's ranking Republican Doug Collins to argue that Democrats had not met the legal threshold.

                      "Blocking access to evidence collected by a grand jury relevant to an impeachment inquiry, as DOJ urges, undermines the House's ability to carry out its constitutional responsibility with due diligence," the judge added.

                      The Democrats sought access to the redacted materials as part of their effort to build a case for removing Trump from office.

                      The committee, Howell ruled, "has presented sufficient evidence that its investigation has the preliminary purpose of determining whether to recommend articles (of) impeachment," referring to formal charges that the House could approve that would trigger a trial in the Senate on whether to remove Trump from office.

                      A Republican resolution introduced in the Senate on Thursday criticized the process that House Democrats are using in the impeachment inquiry. It argued that a resolution is needed to initiate such an inquiry. The judge disagreed.

                      "Even in cases of presidential impeachment, a House resolution has never, in fact, been required to begin an impeachment inquiry," the judge wrote.

                      'THOUGHTFUL RULING'

                      Democrat Jerrold Nadler, the panel's chairman, lauded the ruling.

                      "The court's thoughtful ruling recognizes that our impeachment inquiry fully comports with the Constitution and thoroughly rejects the spurious White House claims to the contrary," Nadler said.

                      Kerri Kupec, a Justice Department spokeswoman, said the department is reviewing the decision.

                      Mueller submitted his report to U.S. Attorney General William Barr in March after completing a 22-month investigation that detailed Russia's campaign of hacking and propaganda to boost Trump's candidacy in the 2016 election as well as extensive contacts between the Trump campaign and Moscow.

                      But when Barr, a Trump appointee who Democrats have accused of trying to protect Trump politically, made the 448-page report public the following month, some parts were blacked out, or redacted.

                      Mueller said his investigation found insufficient evidence to establish that Trump and his campaign had engaged in a criminal conspiracy with Russia.

                      Trump's administration has refused to comply with subpoenas from House committees in the impeachment inquiry seeking documents and testimony. But some current and former administration officials have defied the White House and testified in the impeachment inquiry.

                      The impeachment inquiry centers not on the Mueller report but on Trump's request that Ukraine investigate a domestic political rival, Democrat Joe Biden.
                      _________________

                      Nice to see Donald Trump and the Republican Party's Obstruction of Justice spelled out so clearly by a judge.

                      Man, those "meaningless" process crimes will just bite you in the ass so hard!

                      I wonder what the Trump-appointees and other conservative Justices on the Supreme Court will do when this eventually gets dumped in their laps.
                      Not like there's a clear-cut unanimously-decided precedent for this sort of thing....
                      “He was the most prodigious personification of all human inferiorities. He was an utterly incapable, unadapted, irresponsible, psychopathic personality, full of empty, infantile fantasies, but cursed with the keen intuition of a rat or a guttersnipe. He represented the shadow, the inferior part of everybody’s personality, in an overwhelming degree, and this was another reason why they fell for him.”

                      Comment


                      • Politics for $2000

                        Originally posted by TopHatter View Post
                        “I expected it would happen,” Giuliani was heard saying. “The minute you touch on one of the protected people, they go crazy. They come after you.”
                        Alex, who is Donald Trump

                        Comment


                        • Republicans Enabled The Impeachment Process They're Now Criticizing

                          The Republican criticism of impeachment is all about process: It’s too secretive, since all interviews are behind closed doors, and only around 100 members of Congress from both parties are able to observe depositions.

                          Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., called it a “star chamber” process this week, and even Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, who is one of President Trump’s most vocal critics inside his own party, said he would like to see a vote in the full House of Representatives authorizing the inquiry.

                          But the biggest problem with Republican critiques is that Democrats in the House are following a playbook for investigations that was first written by Republicans in large part over the past several years.

                          Depositions held behind closed doors? That’s what happened with the congressional investigation into the 2012 attack on a U.S. diplomatic facility in Benghazi, Libya.

                          “Of the 50-some odd interviews we have done thus far, the vast majority of them have been private,” said Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., who chaired the House Select Committee on Benghazi, in 2015.

                          “The private ones always produce better results,” Gowdy said.

                          Gowdy also kept a close hold on transcripts rather than releasing them, as House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff, the California Democrat overseeing the inquiry, is doing now.


                          Subpoenas issued without consultation with the minority? That too was part of the Republican playbook. Most committee chairs didn’t even have the power to do that until Republicans held control of the House from 2010 to 2018. In their zeal to investigate the Obama administration, House Republicans doubled the number of committees where the chair could issue unilateral subpoenas demanding witnesses come to testify or be deposed.

                          And while chairing the House Oversight Committee, Republican Darrell Issa of California issued more than 100 subpoenas without minority input during his investigations into the Obama administration.

                          Democrats did complain about the ways that Republicans were expanding the power of committee chairs to go after a Democratic president.

                          Drew Hammill, a spokesman for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, said in 2015 that expanding subpoena power would lead “inevitably to widespread abuses of power as Republicans infect the other committees with the poisonous process that Issa has so abused during his chairmanship.”

                          Republicans say their expansion of committee power was in response to a lack of cooperation from the Obama White House.

                          And as to the calls for a full House vote? In fact, that was done in 1974 and 1998 — in the run-up to the impeachment hearings of Presidents Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton — because a full House vote was required to authorize committee staff to conduct depositions, which occur behind closed doors. Republicans, however, got rid of that requirement.

                          Democrats allowed one committee — House Oversight and Government Reform — to set its own rules for staff depositions in 2007. Republicans then extended that power to almost all committees in 2017.

                          Republican complaints that the president’s attorneys have not been allowed to sit in on the depositions have had more resonance, since Nixon’s attorneys were part of the House Judiciary process in 1974.

                          But comparisons to the 1998 impeachment of Bill Clinton are of limited value on this point. Much of the investigative work into Clinton was done by independent counsel Ken Starr, and the House moved quickly to impeachment without much of an investigative process.

                          Molly Reynolds, a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution, said that the House is now “still very much in a fact-finding inquiry” at this point.

                          That could soon change, as public hearings may commence as soon as mid-November, bringing in for public testimony some individuals who have spoken to staff.

                          But for now, Reynolds said, the question to ask is, “What stage of the process are we at and what level of transparency is appropriate for that?”
                          ______________________

                          For all the Trump supporters, keep in mind that every part of the Constitution that Trump tramples on, and GOP and his supporters enable, every law that he flouts, and GOP and his supporters enable, every precedent that he sets that makes even you uncomfortable, and GOP and his supporters enable: Some Democrat will be able to take advantage of that in future. And you'll have only yourselves to blame for your helplessness and impotent rage.
                          “He was the most prodigious personification of all human inferiorities. He was an utterly incapable, unadapted, irresponsible, psychopathic personality, full of empty, infantile fantasies, but cursed with the keen intuition of a rat or a guttersnipe. He represented the shadow, the inferior part of everybody’s personality, in an overwhelming degree, and this was another reason why they fell for him.”

                          Comment


                          • US Impeachment Investigators Want Bolton To Testify

                            Washington (AFP) - The leader of the US impeachment investigation of President Donald Trump said Sunday he wants former national security advisor John Bolton to testify but acknowledged the White House was likely to fight it.

                            Bolton, who resigned last month, was reported to have expressed alarm over secret administration efforts to pressure Ukraine, acidly referring to it as a "drug deal."

                            House investigators are looking into whether Trump abused power by withholding military aid to Ukraine to get it to launch investigations that would benefit him politically.

                            Adam Schiff, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee leading the impeachment investigation, said Bolton "is a very important witness."

                            "We already know from the testimony of others that this was someone that was concerned that people in the State Department (...) were cooking up a 'drug deal,' and by that he meant a corrupt deal," Schiff said on ABC's "This Week."

                            "Obviously, he has very relevant information and we do want him to come in to testify," he said.

                            So far witnesses have been interviewed behind closed doors, drawing fire from Republicans who charge the process is unfair.

                            Schiff, who heads one of three committees investigating Trump, said he thought the panels will be moving soon to hold public hearings.

                            "I don't want to give precise timing because, in part, we are struggling with the White House's continuing effort to obstruct our investigation, to obstruct our witnesses coming in," he said.

                            "My guess is that they are gonna fight us having John Bolton in, for example."
                            _________________

                            Heh, that'll be an entertaining show: Bolton testifying to the House.

                            Speaking of testifying, didn't Lindsay Graham want to have Rudy tell his side of the story to the Senate? I wonder what could've possibly happened that...
                            “He was the most prodigious personification of all human inferiorities. He was an utterly incapable, unadapted, irresponsible, psychopathic personality, full of empty, infantile fantasies, but cursed with the keen intuition of a rat or a guttersnipe. He represented the shadow, the inferior part of everybody’s personality, in an overwhelming degree, and this was another reason why they fell for him.”

                            Comment


                            • Pelosi Announces Full House Vote On Impeachment Inquiry

                              WASHINGTON — House Speaker Nancy Pelosi sought Monday to deprive President Trump of a legal and political argument against the Democrats’ impeachment inquiry, announcing she would hold a vote in the full House this Thursday that “affirms the ongoing, existing investigation.”

                              “We are taking this step to eliminate any doubt as to whether the Trump Administration may withhold documents, prevent witness testimony, disregard duly authorized subpoenas, or continue obstructing the House of Representatives,” Pelosi said in a written statement. “Nobody is above the law.”

                              Pelosi said the Trump White House has made a “baseless claim that the House of Representatives’ impeachment inquiry ‘lacks the necessary authorization for a valid impeachment proceeding.’”

                              That was a quote from a letter that Trump’s White House counsel, Pat Cipollone, sent to Congress on Oct. 8 rejecting cooperation with the impeachment inquiry.

                              “They argue that, because the House has not taken a vote, they may simply pretend the impeachment inquiry does not exist,” Pelosi said. “Of course, this argument has no merit.”

                              Much of the reason that the House held votes in 1974 and 1998 to begin impeachment proceedings against President Richard Nixon and President Bill Clinton was because such a vote was needed to do the investigative work of issuing subpoenas and holding depositions. Over the last decade or two, the rules of Congress have changed so that a full House vote is no longer necessary.

                              Nonetheless, Pelosi’s announcement is both a strategic tactic and perhaps also a concession that Democrats were seeing the legitimacy of their inquiry weakened somewhat by Republican arguments that they should keep with precedent and hold a vote in the House to get every member of the chamber on record, even though another vote to approve articles of impeachment is likely to come to the House floor in the next several weeks.

                              Pelosi’s office said it will announce more details on Tuesday about the next phase of the impeachment inquiry, including when public House committee hearings will be held and the process for the release of deposition transcripts.
                              _____________

                              Cue Donald Trump's immediate response, as seen below:

                              Click image for larger version

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                              “He was the most prodigious personification of all human inferiorities. He was an utterly incapable, unadapted, irresponsible, psychopathic personality, full of empty, infantile fantasies, but cursed with the keen intuition of a rat or a guttersnipe. He represented the shadow, the inferior part of everybody’s personality, in an overwhelming degree, and this was another reason why they fell for him.”

                              Comment


                              • Pelosi has been smart about this. Impeachment is a divisive issue & has the potential to cause problems for Dems in 'purple' seats. By taking testimony & letting a few tidbits from credible sources out before taking a vote she has ameliorated that problem as best she can. She has also let Trump set up a bogus defence of his obstruction that can be knocked down easily. She plays this game pretty well.
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                                Win nervously lose tragically - Reds C C

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