Announcement

Collapse
No announcement yet.

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

Collapse
X
 
  • Filter
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts

  • Tops, the jihadi mention is linked to the TBM’ post before yours referencing religious warfare. Then you went off with the “cult” statement reaffirming what he had posted.

    Comment


    • Click image for larger version

Name:	38755.jpeg
Views:	2
Size:	32.1 KB
ID:	1478620

      Comment


      • Originally posted by surfgun View Post
        Tops, the jihadi mention is linked to the TBM’ post before yours referencing religious warfare. Then you went off with the “cult” statement reaffirming what he had posted.
        Gonna need your help on this one....Control + F search doesn't show "Jihadi" or "Jihadi's". Where did you see either of those two words?

        Or did you just mean the reference to religious warfare in general. Because that was provided by Donald Trump:

        "Tell your congregation that ... we have 350 million people in our country. They're proud Americans, and they respect what we're doing, even those that you don't think so much, like us, respect us, want to be with us," Trump said. "They're respecting our fight. And we are in a fight. Religion in this country and religion all over the world, certain religions in particular, are under siege. We won't let that happen."

        Yeah, there's some symptoms noted all right.
        “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


        • Trump donor accused of spying on Yovanovitch hands 'everything' to Congress, reports say

          A donor to Donald Trump who was accused of "stalking" the former ambassador to Ukraine at the behest of Rudy Giuliani's associates has provided documents to Congress as it opens its investigation into the ousting of Marie Yovanovitch, a crucial witness in the president's impeachment.

          The Daily Beast reports that Robert Hyde, a Republican congressional candidate from Connecticut, gave "everything" he had between himself and Lev Parnas, an associate of Rudy Giuliani who has been indicted for campaign finance violations involving foreign money.

          Mr Hyde told the outlet he gave the House Foreign Affairs Committee "everything that I had between Parnas and I". He said the committee wanted to "talk about Parnas and how I know him" and said that "you should look into Parnas. Bad man".

          Messages given to House Democrats last month showed Mr Hyde's communication with Mr Parnas suggested that Ms Yovanovitch was under physical surveillance before she was recalled from her post last year, allegedly at Mr Giuliani's urging. Mr Hyde says he was only "joking around" in those messages, and that Ms Yovanovitch was not being stalked.

          The ambassador was allegedly an interference in the president's efforts to pressure Ukrainian president Volodymr Zelensky​ to find politically damaging information on former vice president and political rival Joe Biden, whose son was on the board of a Ukrainian energy company.

          That scheme was at the heart of the abuse of power charge in Mr Trump's impeachment, which also included an obstruction of Congress charge for the ensuing alleged cover-up.

          In a recently released audio recording captured by Mr Parnas, Mr Trump can be heard telling him and Igor Fruman to "get rid of her" and "take her out".

          In his 25 July phone call with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, which was at the heart of his impeachment, Mr Trump said of Ms Yovanovitch: "Well, she's going to go through some things."

          In the weeks leading up to her departure from Ukraine, Ms Yovanovitch was the target of a smear campaign, partly in coordination with a reporter from Washington website The Hill, intended to discredit the ambassador and legitimise her removal.

          Congress continues to investigate Mr Giuliani's efforts despite the president's acquittal in his impeachment trial in the Senate, where Republicans blocked efforts to bring witnesses to the stand or introduce any newly emerged evidence.

          After she left Ukraine, Ms Yovanovitch became a senior state department fellow at Georgetown University, then announced her retirement in January. She served as an ambassador in several countries under three presidents before her appointment to Ukraine, where she served from August 2016 until her removal in May 2019.

          She gave testimony to the impeachment hearings late last year, receiving a round of applause from observers as she left the chamber.
          _________________

          As promised, more of Trump's bullshit keeps coming to light. Gonna be a loooong summer for Team Trump.
          “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


          • Devastating Court Ruling Allows White House To Block Testimony From Former Counsel Don McGahn

            A federal appeals court in Washington, D.C., on Friday dismissed a lawsuit from House Democrats who were seeking testimony from former White House counsel Don McGahn as part of a broader investigation into President Donald Trump.

            In a 2-1 decision by a three-judge panel, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit said it lacked jurisdiction to hear the case, agreeing with the Trump administration’s position that the U.S. Constitution forbids federal courts from resolving interbranch information disputes.

            “The Committee’s suit asks us to settle a dispute that we have no authority to resolve,” the opinion states.

            The House Judiciary Committee subpoenaed McGahn in 2019 as part of its investigation into Trump’s potential obstruction of former special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia probe. McGahn previously told Mueller’s grand jury that Trump ordered him to direct the Department of Justice to fire Mueller in 2017 in order to end the probe. He did not carry out the order. This incident appeared as one of 10 potentially obstructive acts committed by Trump in Mueller’s final report.

            Democrats sought to bring McGahn before the committee to get his testimony on this alleged obstruction. But the White House declared that the president and his direct aides had an “absolute immunity” from congressional investigation and ordered McGahn not to honor the subpoena. The administration never made a formal declaration of executive privilege over McGahn’s testimony.

            The court said Democrats will just have to find some other way to force the administration to comply with their demands.

            “Congress (or one of its chambers) may hold officers in contempt, withhold appropriations, refuse to confirm the President’s nominees, harness public opinion, delay or derail the President’s legislative agenda, or impeach recalcitrant officers,” the court wrote. “And Congress can wield these political weapons without dragging judges into the fray.”

            Democrats haven’t embraced the use of hardball legislative tactics to gain leverage. For a time last year, they entertained the idea of using their own power to arrest or fine recalcitrant administration officials, but ultimately rejected using the so-called “inherent contempt” power.

            The majority opinion is clear to state that its decision only applies to certain interbranch disputes and not subpoenas issued by Congress to private individuals or entities. ”[W]e may adjudicate cases concerning congressional subpoenas if they implicate the rights of private parties, as in Mazars,” the opinion reads, noting a key case currently before the Supreme Court where a congressional committee has subpoenaed Trump’s personal financial records from his accounting firm. The opinion also does not overrule any future attempt by Congress to pass a law enabling it to bring disputes with the executive branch to the federal judiciary.

            The court acknowledged there are several past instances of Congress using courts to settle disputes between Congress and the White House, including a favorable decision House Republicans got in the Fast and Furious case against former Attorney General Eric Holder. But the court said “the legal basis for that practice is dubious.”

            Circuit Judge Judith W. Rogers dissented from the opinion, writing that the majority’s ruling “removes any incentive for the Executive Branch to engage in the negotiations process seeking accommodation, all but assures future Presidential stonewalling of Congress, and further impairs the House’s ability to perform its constitutional duties.”

            A concurrence to the majority opinion filed by Judge Karen L. Henderson directly addressed the claim of “absolute immunity” to state that it “rests on shaky legal ground.”

            The decision will have immediate implications for Democrats’ efforts to get President Trump’s tax returns. The administration refused their formal request last year, and the case has been stuck in a lower court. The judge in that case paused the proceedings to wait for an outcome in the McGahn case. Now that the appeals court has dismissed it, the lower judge is likely to say Democrats lack standing to sue for the president’s taxes.

            Shortly after the McGahn ruling dropped, the judge in the tax case ordered a hearing for next week.

            A federal judge had previously ruled that McGahn must comply with the subpoena, writing that “Presidents are not kings” and were subject to congressional oversight.
            _______________

            Another brick in the Trump stonewall. Huge surprise.

            Funny how the judges claimed that Congress could wield "political weapons" without dragging judges into the fray.
            “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


            • Fired ambassador, apparently lied in her testimony.
              https://www.foxnews.com/politics/sta...ite-testifying

              Comment


              • 'We Are FUCKED’: New Book Reveals How GOP Senators Bailed Out Trump During 1st Impeachment Trial
                The ineptitude of Trump’s legal team reportedly forced GOP senators to take matters into their own hands by choreographing his Ukraine trial defense.

                Republican senators were more deeply involved in orchestrating President Donald Trump’s defense in his first impeachment trial than previously known, according to excerpts from a forthcoming book shared exclusively with HuffPost.

                In “Unchecked: The Untold Story Behind Congress’s Botched Impeachments of Donald Trump,” due out Oct. 18, Politico’s Rachael Bade and The Washington Post’s Karoun Demirjian offer a behind-the-scenes look at the two failed efforts to remove Trump from political power.

                The first attempt, which began in 2019 and culminated in an early-2020 Senate trial, dealt with Trump’s withholding of aid to Ukraine on the condition that the country’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, would announce an investigation into Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden. The House impeached Trump for abuse of power, but the GOP-controlled Senate acquitted the president with just one Republican dissent: Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah.

                Trump and his defense team maintained he did nothing wrong throughout the January 2020 trial and that no “quid pro quo” had taken place, even though he was caught on tape telling Zelenskyy to “do us a favor” by launching a probe of Biden ahead of the 2020 presidential election.

                Former law professor Alan Dershowitz, a lawyer for Trump, went so far as to argue before the entire Senate that Trump could have done whatever he wanted to get himself reelected if he believed that his own reelection would be in the public interest, a sweeping claim of executive power.

                The outlandish line of defense alarmed a number of Republican senators who sat in the chamber for weeks as “jurors” in the impeachment trial, according to “Unchecked.”

                Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) told Trump’s team afterward to fire Dershowitz on the spot, while Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) warned them to switch tactics.

                “Out of one hundred senators, you have zero who believe you that there was no quid pro quo. None. There’s not a single one,” Cruz reportedly said at one point, contradicting what Republicans were saying publicly about the charges at the time.

                Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) also fumed at Trump’s legal team after they fumbled responding to a senator’s question about calling new witnesses. Trump’s attorneys said that it was simply too late to do so, a line Graham worried would lose Republican votes.

                “We are FUCKED. We are FUCKED!” Graham, a top Trump ally, reportedly said afterward as he walked into the GOP cloakroom, a private chamber adjacent to the Senate floor.

                Publicly, many GOP senators refrained from commenting on the substance of the proceedings, telling reporters doing so would be inappropriate because of their responsibility to remain neutral as jurors. But privately, the ineptitude of Trump’s legal team forced them to take matters into their own hands, Bade and Demirjian report.

                Their goal was to convince a small group of moderate GOP senators to vote against hearing testimony from witnesses like Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton, who had claimed in a book that Trump specifically told him that he withheld military aid from Ukraine in order to obtain an investigation into Biden and his son. The book’s release had rattled the entire GOP conference.

                Then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell played a pivotal role in convincing GOP Sens. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Lamar Alexander of Tennessee to vote against hearing from witnesses in the trial ― an outcome he feared would split the caucus and cost it control of the Senate, but which ended up happening anyway in large part due to the man he was working to protect.

                “This is not about this president. It’s not about anything he’s been accused of doing,” McConnell told his caucus, according to the book. “It has always been about November 3, 2020. It’s about flipping the Senate.”

                McConnell sent Murkowski examples of attacks Democratic groups launched against Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, who presided over the trial. His argument to Murkowski boiled down to this: If she voted to allow witnesses, the motion would tie at 50-50, forcing Roberts to break the tie and make a decision that would politicize the court and anger one side or the other.

                At one point during the Q&A portion of the trial, McConnell’s top legal counsel Andrew Ferguson dictated an answer to an overtly leading question posed by Republican senators and urged Trump’s legal team to deliver it before the Senate. The answer essentially conceded that even if Trump had done what Democrats alleged, it wasn’t impeachable. The book recounts:
                The group gathered around a laptop to weigh in as Ferguson typed. “Assuming for argument’s sake that John Bolton were to testify in the light most favorable to the allegations…isn’t it true that the allegations still would not rise to the level of an impeachable offense? They agreed to ask. “And that therefore…his testimony would add nothing to this case?”

                But the senators were worried. Trump’s lawyers had already proven themselves unreliable, even when lobbed the easiest softball questions. “Is Trump’s team going to answer this the right way?” Graham asked.

                “I will go down there and tell them to answer it the right way,” Ferguson vowed.

                Trump’s team answered it as intended and the motion to hear witnesses ultimately failed in a 51-49 vote. Romney and Sen. Susan Collins of Maine were the only Republicans to join Democrats in voting for witnesses.

                The book also details how Murkowski struggled with her decision on witness testimony after publicly calling out McConnell over his pledge to act in “total coordination” with the Trump White House as the trial unfolded. McConnell cited as precedent President Bill Clinton’s contacts with Democratic senators during his 1999 impeachment trial. But Murkowski blasted McConnell over his view that jurors aren’t really impartial, saying in an interview before the trial kicked off that she was “disturbed” by his comments.

                The interview earned Murkowski an “angry” email from McConnell the next day, according to the book.

                In an interview with the book’s authors, the Alaska Republican, who is facing reelection next month, compared her Trump-dominated party to an animal native to her state:
                .
                To Murkowski, the party had transformed into a mindless herd of Arctic musk ox: eight-hundred-pound beasts that form a protective circle around their young, with their horns turned outward and their rears tucked inside. Republican leaders, much to her frustration, were constantly telling their rank and file: “You gotta circle. You gotta circle together to protect one another here” – which meant, of course, circling to protect Trump. Just like musk ox, Murkowski thought.
                _________


                “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

                Working...
                X