Tag: ImpeachmentTaskForce

Week 161 in Trump

Posted on February 28, 2020 in Politics, Trump

Guilty little witches.

There’s a perfect storm brewing. Russia is interfering in our primaries and in our general election this year, and the Senate keeps ejecting any attempts to secure our elections. Even though Attorney General Bill Barr told Trump to stop talking about his investigations, Trump continues to tweet and talk about Roger Stone, Bob Mueller, and Russia (he just can’t help himself), and he continues to remove appointees he thinks aren’t loyal enough to him. Finally, Barr has farmed out investigations into Trump’s perceived opponents to state attorneys. What could go wrong?

Here’s that and what else happened in politics for the week ending February 23…

Shootings This Week:

There were FIVE mass shootings in the U.S. this week (defined as killing and/or injuring 4 or more people). Shooters kill 7 people and injure 17 more.

  1. Students from Alcorn State University in Port Gibson, MS, are involved in a shooting that leaves 2 people dead and 2 more injured.
  2. A shooter injures 4 people on a busy street in Greensboro, NC.
  3. A shooter kills 2 people and injures 3 more in a murder-suicide at a senior living complex in Caldwell, ID.
  4. A shooter kills 3 people and injures 1 more at a private home in Clarkton, NC.
  5. A shooter injures 7 people at a family-friendly dance in Houston, TX.

Russia:

  1. Trump ignores Barr’s public advice to stop saying the quiet parts out loud, urging the judge in Stone’s case to grant him a new trial. Trump also says he’ll intervene if the courts don’t overturn Stone’s conviction.
    • The judge refuses to delay Stone’s sentencing and gives him a prison sentence of three years and four months, less than half of what DOJ prosecutors recommended before Barr stepped in and revoked their recommendation. It’s still commensurate though, and the judge delivers a blistering opinion on Stone’s behavior.
  1. Trump tweets that the whole Mueller investigation was illegal and based on phony evidence. He says that everything having to do with the investigation should be thrown out even though eight Trump associates either pleaded guilty or were convicted by a jury. And then he suggests he might sue over it.
  2. U.S. officials tell Bernie Sanders that Russia is trying to interfere in the Democratic primaries by assisting his campaign. Sanders’ response is unequivocal: “My message to Putin is clear: Stay out of American elections, and as president I will make sure that you do.”
  3. Intelligence officials also briefed the House last week that Russia is meddling again in the 2020 elections to sow discord and promote Trump, which pissed off both Republicans in the House and Trump.
    • Trump thought that only Adam Schiff was briefed about it, and then accuses Schiff of leaking it to the media (with no evidence). Paranoid much?
    • But then, higher-level officials say the briefing was an over-reaction and that there’s no evidence that Russia is helping Trump (though Trump does say they’re helping Sanders).
    • According to news sources, “some intelligence officials viewed the briefing as a tactical error, saying the conclusions could have been delivered in a less pointed manner or left out entirely to avoid angering Republicans.” So we shouldn’t learn the truth if it makes some people mad?
  1. A lawyer in Julian Assange’s trial says that in 2017, then-Representative Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) traveled to London to offer Assange a pardon. The pardon was conditioned on Assange agreeing to say that Russia didn’t have anything to do with the leaking of the DNC emails and documents.
    • Dana Rohrabacher corroborates the story. He was following up on his conspiracy theory that Russia didn’t hack the DNC. Dana thinks climate change is caused by dinosaur farts. I doubt he knows better than our intelligence agencies.
    • Trump’s press secretary says Trump barely knows Rohrabacher and that this is probably just a “total lie from the DNC, but here’s what Trump had to say about him in 2018: “Dana Rohrabacher has been a great Congressman for his District and for the people of Cal. He works hard and is respected by all – he produces! Dems are desperate to replace Dana by spending vast sums to elect a super liberal who is weak on Crime and bad for our Military & Vets!”
  1. Trump decides not to nominate Acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph McGuire to a permanent cabinet post after a member of McGuire’s staff briefed lawmakers about Russian interference in our 2020 elections. Trump blew up at him a few days before the announcement because of the briefing.
  2. Trump replaces McGuire with Richard Grenell, who is currently the U.S. Ambassador to Germany. Grenell doesn’t have an intelligence or security background, but this move does two things:
    • It puts a Trump loyalist in the position of overseeing and coordinating our intelligence agencies.
    • It puts the first openly gay man in a Cabinet secretary position.

Legal Fallout:

  1. The Trump administration reassigns deputy national security adviser Victoria Coates following rumors that she’s the “Anonymous” author of an op-ed about the administration in the New York Times who later published a book about it.
    • A literary agent involved with the book releases a statement saying Coates is not Anonymous.
    • Peter Navarro, Trump’s top trade advisor has been comparing different people’s writings to see if they match the style of Anonymous.
  1. The Department of Defense says its computer systems were hacked and personal information for around 200,000 people got exposed.

Impeachment:

  1. Remember Devin Nunes’ former aide Kash Patel who Trump thought was his Ukraine expert when his Ukraine expert was actually Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman? Well, he’s now a senior adviser for the new Acting DNI, Richard Grenell.
  2. Former national security adviser Susan Rice tells John Bolton that it’s inconceivable to her that she would withhold testimony if she had firsthand knowledge of abuse of presidential power, with or without a subpoena.
  3. Post-impeachment, Trump instructs the White House to find and force out anyone who isn’t deemed to be loyal enough to Trump. Trump says he wants “bad people” out of his government. Most presidents fill their staff with people who both agree and disagree with them because that’s good for governance.
    • Trump asks Under Secretary of Defense John Rood to resign. Rood certified Ukraine’s compliance with our anti-corruption requirements and warned Defense Secretary Mark Esper against withholding Ukraine’s aid. Rood agrees to step down.
    • Trump has a 29-year-old campaign aide working on this project.
    • In a surreal twist, the wife of a Supreme Court Justice has been suggesting who the White House should hire and fire. Ginni Thomas, Clarence Thomas’s wife, has been at it for a year and a half. Other conservative groups, including the Heritage Foundation, have been doing the same.
  1. The general counsel for the DNI resigns. He’s the guy who initially blocked the whistleblower’s report from getting to Congress.

Courts/Justice:

  1. The Federal Judges Association calls an emergency meeting to discuss interference in politically sensitive cases by the DOJ and by Trump.
  2. GOP lawmakers Mitch McConnell, Lindsey Graham, and Kevin McCarthy issue a statement supporting Barr after more than 2,000 former DOJ officials called for Barr to resign.
  3. Trump issues pardons and commutes sentencing for a group of white-collar criminals who are guilty of crimes like fraud, corruption, and racketeering. Great job draining the swamp, though!
    • He commutes Rod Blagojevich’s prison sentence. Blagojevich was sentenced to 14 years in 2011 for an attempted quid pro quo. He wanted to trade an appointment to Obama’s vacant Senate seat in return for campaign contributions. The Illinois GOP asked Trump not to do this because it sends a “damaging message” about efforts to “root out public corruption in our government.”
    • He pardons Edward DeBartolo Jr, owner of the San Francisco 49ers, who was convicted of gambling fraud.
    • He pardons Former NYPD Commissioner Bernie Kerik, who pleaded guilty to tax fraud after accepting a $250,000 “loan” from an Israeli billionaire.
    • He pardons financier Michael Milken, who pleaded guilty to tax evasion and insider trading. He was fined $600 million, if that gives you an idea of the extent of his fraud.
  1. Trump also pardons:
    • Paul Pogue, a construction consultant who pleaded guilty to tax fraud.
    • Ariel Friedler, a software CEO who hacked into competing companies’ software systems.
    • David Safavian, who was convicted of perjury in the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal.
    • Angela Stanton, a teacher who pleaded guilty to charges of inappropriate sexual activities with teenage boys.
  1. Trump commutes the sentences for:
    • Tynice Nichole Hall, who was convicted for multiple drug and firearm offenses including selling crack cocaine.
    • Crystal Munoz, who was convicted for her role in helping marijuana distributors get around a drug checkpoint. She got 18 years for drawing them a rough map.
    • Judith Negron, who was found guilty in a $205 million Medicare fraud scheme.

Health/Healthcare:

  1. The State Department and a top Trump health official go against the CDC’s advice and fly home 14 passengers infected with the coronavirus along with passengers who were not infected.
  2. As the coronavirus spreads globally, Trump’s ability to respond is hampered in part because he fired the entire pandemic response chain of command in 2018. Just another Obama creation that Trump felt compelled to dismantle. He also cut funding to programs designed to fight the spread of these infectious diseases.
  3. In response to bills in Alabama that severely restrict abortion access in the state, Democratic Representative Rolanda Hollis introduces a bill to force men to have vasectomies after they have three children or reach the age of 50. Hollis says both men and women should take responsibility for family planning.
    • It turns out that Ted Cruz isn’t a fan of government controlling your body after all. He tweets, “Yikes! A government big enough to give you everything is big enough to take everything…literally!” Sigh. Welcome to the world of being a woman in Alabama and Texas, Mr. Cruz.
  1. Florida passes a bill requiring parental consent for women under 18 to obtain an abortion. At least the bill has a waiver process for cases of abuse and incest or when the parent would cause more harm. This still lets other people force a young woman to have a baby.
  2. A panel of federal judges strikes down Mississippi’s “fetal heartbeat” bill, which would’ve banned abortions after six weeks of gestation.

International:

  1. Protests continue in Canada against the development of a natural gas pipeline.
  2. As Trump prepares for his visit to India, protests there continue against discriminatory changes to India’s citizenship laws.
  3. A hoax email about the coronavirus in Ukraine sparks violent protests and police standoffs, and protestors block the arrival of evacuees from China.
  4. Police use water cannons and tear gas against protestors in Chile.
  5. An Iraqi cleric works to quash the ongoing protests in Iraq by sending in counter-protestors.
  6. Sudanese security forces use tear gas against demonstrators protesting the dismissal of officers and soldiers who supported the overthrow of Omar al-Bashir last year.
  7. Gunfire breaks out when police officers in Haiti protest for fair pay.
  8. Protests continue in Algeria (for a year now) and Lebanon ( for five months so far)

Border Wall/Shutdown/National Emergency:

  1. The Department of Homeland Security wavies 10 contracting laws to speed up approvals for Trump’s border wall.

Travel Ban/Immigration/Discrimination:

  1. Following up on Trump’s decision to send Customs and Border Protection’s SWAT team to sanctuary cities, ICE starts arresting people in safe havens, like courthouses and churches, in California. These communities have worked to make sure immigrants feel safe reporting and testifying about crimes. If they’re afraid to go to courthouses, they’ll let the crimes go unpunished.
  2. New Jersey raises its threat level for white supremacist violence higher than the level for ISIS and Al Qaeda.
  3. The Republican attorneys general of five states—Tennessee, Alabama, Louisiana, Nebraska, and South Dakota—file a motion to block the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment. Democratic AGs, on the other hand, sue to have it ratified.
  4. South Dakota is looking at a slew of discriminatory bills that would ban certain medical treatment for transgender youth, stop enforcing policies on same-sex marriage, and allow medical personnel to refuse to provide care based on religious or moral grounds.
  5. In 2018, Trump ordered that the environmental impact studies that were blocking water diversion plans be re-evaluated.

Climate:

  1. While California has been working on solutions for distributing its water supply between urban and rural areas, Trump signs an order to re-engineer the state’s water plans.
    • Trump also says California doesn’t have a drought and has tremendous amounts of water. Except that we don’t. This has been a very dry year.
  1. The (Republican-run) USDA lays out goals to cut agriculture’s carbon footprint in half by 2050 while still increasing production.

Budget/Economy:

  1. The U.S. has seen a record 10 straight years of growth, seven years under Obama and three years under Trump.
  2. Mick Mulvaney of all people criticizes the GOP for being “a lot less interested” in deficits under Trump than they were under Obama. He says neither party cares about the deficit anymore and that the GOP is “evolving” on the issue.
  3. Mulvaney also says the U.S. is desperate for more people to fill jobs because of the tight job market and the administration’s clamping down on legal immigration.
  4. Trump promises more bailouts for farmers if the promised foreign purchases don’t kick in. He also says that it’ll be paid for out of the “massive tariff money coming into” the U.S., showing once again that he doesn’t understand how tariffs work. We consumers pay for them.

Elections:

  1. An appeals court in Florida upholds a lower court decision that the state can’t deny ex-felons the right to vote because of outstanding court fines, fees, and restitution.
  2. Elections are coming up and Russians are still meddling in them. Just thought you should know, in case you didn’t know.
  3. A Democratic Super PAC has filed several lawsuits against states the PAC claims are suppressing voter turnout. Trump’s re-election campaign and the RNC plan to spend over $10 million defending those states.

Miscellaneous:

  1. The Boy Scouts of America files bankruptcy, likely to protect their assets from an onslaught of sexual abuse allegations.

Week 160 in Trump

Posted on February 20, 2020 in Politics, Trump

>This was a big week. Andrew McCabe’s case is resolved, a Senate committee issues a new report on Russian interference, the DOJ (and maybe Trump) interferes in Roger Stone’s sentencing and in other cases, John Kelly spills some tea, the firings continue, Trump rolls out his budget, the House paves the way for the ERA to move ahead, and voting begins in the 2020 Democratic presidential primaries. All that, and so much more.

>Here’s what happened in politics for the week ending February 10…

Shootings This Week:

  1. There are SIX mass shootings this week (defined as killing or injuring 4 or more people). Shooters kill 3 people and injure 30 more.
    • A shooting in Dover, DE, leaves 1 person dead and 4 people injured.
    • A shooting at a gathering in an apartment in Chicago, IL, leaves 6 people injured.
    • A shooter in New Orleans, LA, injures 4 people during Mardi Gras celebrations.
    • Shooters in Memphis, TN, injure 7 people during a fight that broke out during a street race.
    • A shooter (or shooters) in Hartford, CT, kill 1 person and injures 5 more at a bar and lounge.
    • A drive-by shooting in Pensacola, FL, leaves 1 person dead and 4 people injured.
  1. Teachers unions and activist groups call for an end to active-shooter lockdown drills, saying they’re too traumatic for students.

Russia:

  1. Federal prosecutors decline to charge Andrew McCabe and officially close the investigation into whether he lied about leaking information to a journalist.
  2. The Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee releases a report on the government’s response to Russian interference in the 2016 elections.
    • The report says the Obama administration delayed their response, but also says the politicized environment prevented a more forceful response.
    • The report also places some of the blame on Mitch McConnell for being too skeptical and for resisting the administration’s request for a bipartisan statement.
    • Congressional leaders finally released a bipartisan statement in late September 2016, after much of the damage was done.
    • Obama’s administration directly warned Russia about the consequences of meddling five times, but the warnings weren’t effective.
  1. Federal prosecutors issue a sentencing recommendation of seven to nine years for Roger Stone. He was convicted of lying, witness tampering, and obstruction, and the recommendation is within the sentencing guidelines.
    • Trump tweets that this is horrible, unfair, and a miscarriage of justice.
    • But then, in an extremely rare move, the DOJ overrules the prosecutors recommendation and asks for a more lenient sentence. The DOJ calls their own prosecutors’ recommendation grossly disproportionate.
    • So then, all four federal prosecutors working the case withdraw from the case and two of them resign from the U.S. attorney’s office in D.C.
    • The DOJ claims to have decided to overrule the sentencing recommendation before Trump tweeted about it.
    • But then, Trump congratulates Barr on Twitter for “taking charge of a case that was totally out of control and perhaps should not have even been brought.”
    • The top prosecutor who signed off on the original recommendation is Timothy Shea, who was handpicked by Barr to replace outgoing U.S. attorney Jessie Liu, who is supposed to move to the Treasury Department. But the same day as the DOJ overrules the sentencing recommendation, Trump withdraws Liu’s nomination to a top Treasury position. Liu oversaw the investigation into Andrew McCabe, where they were unable to obtain criminal charges. Liu ends up resigning from the administration.
    • Anyhoo, this sets off a shit storm in the media and in the minds of thinking people who love their democratic institutions.
  1. Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) asks the DOJ’s inspector general to investigate the decision to change Stone’s sentencing recommendations. The Senate Judiciary Committee won’t call Barr in to testify about the situation, but the House Judiciary Committee does. Barr will testify at the end of March.
    • The House wants to hear about the decision to overrule prosecutors in Stone’s case, the removal of Jessie Liu as U.S. attorney, and what Barr calls an “intake process” for processing information from Rudy Giuliani about Ukraine.
  1. Trump criticizes the judge in Stone’s case for revoking Paul Manafort’s bail and for not treating Hillary Clinton harshly enough. AFAIK, Hillary has never appeared in this judge’s court.
  2. In an interview with ABC News, Barr says Trump’s tweets make it impossible to do his job and that Trump shouldn’t tweet about DOJ investigations. IMO, Trump’s just saying the quiet part out loud.
  3. Barr also says that Trump never asked him to do anything in a criminal case. So Trump tweets that he does have the legal right to influence the attorney general in a case.
  4. After Trump tweets that the foreperson in Stone’s trial had significant bias, Stone’s lawyers request a new trial, which the judge denies. This happens after the foreperson speaks out in defense of the prosecutors who quit.
    • Stone also says that a person in the jury was biased against him because they work for the IRS on criminal tax cases and that the court should’ve removed that juror. FWIW, the lawyers from both sides determine the jury, not the court. Plus, a D.C. jury is likely to have a higher than normal number of government employees.
    • The blowback from the right against the jury spurs one of them to write an op-ed defending their decision. The juror says the evidence was substantial and uncontested.
  1. Trump says that Mueller lied to Congress but doesn’t give any evidence to back it up.
  2. The New York City bar association sends a letter about Barr to the DOJ’s inspector general and the House and Senate Judiciary Committees. They call for investigations into the DOJ’s actions around Stone’s sentencing, and they say recent events give the appearance of Trump and Barr acting together to prevent Stone from being punished.
  3. It comes out that this isn’t the first time Barr has interfered in investigations into Trump’s associates.
    • DOJ officials intervened in Michael Flynn’s case to change his sentencing recommendations. And now Barr has appointed an outside prosecutor to review the Flynn case.
    • Barr appointed outside attorneys to review other politically sensitive cases, and they’ve already been interviewing prosecutors about them.
  1. More than 2,000 former DOJ lawyers and employees sign an open letter condemning the actions of Trump and Barr in the Stone case and pushing for Barr to step down. The lawyers come from across the political spectrum.
  2. Facebook removes the “Being Patriotic” page after finding out that it’s run by a group from Ukraine that spreads content used by Russia’s Internet Research Agency (the troll farm responsible for the social media disinformation campaign in 2016).

Legal Fallout:

  1. A conservative federal judge rebukes Barr for saying that a court’s decision in an immigration case was incorrect. The Board of Immigration Appeals used Barr’s statements as justification to deport someone against the court’s ruling.
  2. Amazon wants Trump and Defense Secretary Mike Esper to be deposed in a lawsuit over whether there were corruption and presidential interference in awarding a contract for cloud computing to Microsoft instead of Amazon. Amazon claims that Trump’s desire to punish founder Jeff Bezos influenced the contract,
  3. Stormy Daniels’ former lawyer, Michael Avenatti, is convicted on charges that he tried to extort up to $25 million from Nike. He has two more trials coming up on charges of financial malfeasance.

Impeachment:

  1. Trump suggests the military should look into disciplining Lt. Col. Vindman. The Pentagon says no, they won’t be doing that.
  2. Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) says he tried to stop Trump from firing Gordon Sondland.
  3. Senator Susan Collins (R-ME) says she regrets saying that she thought Trump had learned a lesson from the impeachment trial.
  4. Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) says there are no signs that Trump learned anything from being impeached.
  5. Contradicting his previous denials, Trump says he did send Giuliani to Ukraine to find damaging information about political opponents.
  6. Continuing on last week’s firings of witnesses, Trump withdraws Elaine McCusker’s nomination to be the Pentagon’s comptroller and CFO. McCusker advised Office of Management and Budget Officials on the legalities of withholding aid to Ukraine, and her advice tried to help the White House set policy while staying within the law. It’s not her fault it was outside the law.
  7. Chuck Schumer asks all 74 inspectors general to investigate retaliation against whistleblowers who report misconduct.
  8. Former chief of staff John Kelly speaks freely about his misgivings about Trump. Kelly says:
    • Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman is blameless and was just following his training.
    • Trump’s actions with Ukraine upended long-standing U.S. policy, and Trump did condition the aid upon investigations into the Bidens, which was “tantamount to an illegal order.”
    • Trump’s efforts with North Korea, including his two summits with Kim Jong Un, are futile.
    • The press isn’t the enemy of the people.
    • Migrants are overwhelmingly good people.
    • Trump shouldn’t have interfered in the case of Navy SEAL Eddie Gallagher, who was convicted of war crimes.

Courts/Justice:

  1. White-collar crime prosecutions are at their lowest level since 1998 when researchers began tracking them. And it’s not because fewer white-collar crimes are being committed, they’re just getting away with it more often.

Health/Healthcare:

  1. There was a rumor a while back that Trump told his aides that gutting medicare would be a fun second-term project. I didn’t report it then because it seemed like just a rumor, but his latest budget cuts spending for Medicaid and ACA subsidies by $1 trillion over ten years.
  2. China has confirmed nearly 60,000 cases of coronavirus infection.
  3. Trump says the coronavirus will miraculously go away when it gets a little warmer. While heat and humidity usually help crush the flu season, scientists don’t know if it will have the same effect on this virus.
  4. Mitch McConnell schedules two votes on anti-abortion bills, both of which will likely fail. This is seen as a move to rally the base. Democrats say the “Born Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act” is redundant because infanticide is already a crime everywhere in the U.S.
  5. Corteva, the largest manufacturer of chlorpyrifos, announces it’ll stop producing the pesticide by the end of the year despite the Trump administration loosening regulations. Chlorpyrifos is known to cause health issues and brain damage, especially in children.
  6. Utah’s public insurer sends patients to Mexico to buy medications. Even with the cost of the flight, it’s cheaper than getting those drugs in the U.S.

International:

  1. The Senate finally passes its resolution to limit Trump’s power to order military strikes against Iran without congressional approval. The House is likely to pass it (they’ve already passed a version) and Trump is likely to veto it.
  2. The number of troops with concussive and traumatic brain injuries following Iran’s retaliatory strikes on bases housing U.S. troops increases to 109. Trump says he won’t be changing his mind that these injuries are “not very serious.”
  3. The White House sends a memo to Congress that implicitly confirms there was no imminent threat involved in the decision to strike Iranian General Soleimani, contradicting Trump’s earlier assertions about the attack.
  4. Iowa isn’t the only place having trouble with their election app. A glitch in a voter outreach app used by Israel’s far-right Likud party leaks the personal information of around 6.5 million Israelis—every eligible voter in Israel. Israel’s third election in less than a year is on March 2.
  5. The U.S. and the Taliban reach a tentative agreement on ending the 18-year war in Afghanistan.
  6. Trump doesn’t want to hold another summit with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un until after our November election. In the meantime, though, North Korea resumes its tests of ballistic missiles.
  7. Mike Pompeo meets with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in Munich, though the State Department hasn’t mentioned the meeting and has offered no readout.
  8. Protestors in Ontario, Canada block a railroad track, disrupting service between Toronto, Montreal, and Ottawa. They’re protesting pipeline construction in British Columbia.
  9. Students continue their anti-government sit-in in Baghdad’s Tahrir Square. The protests forced out the Iraqi prime minister in December.
  10. Iraqi feminists march for women’s rights in nationwide rallies. Opponents criticize them, saying it’s unethical and immoral for women to protest.
  11. Hundreds of women protest in Mexico City over the brutal murder of a young woman by her boyfriend. Pictures of her mutilated corpse were leaked and posted by local media.
  12. Protests against social inequality in Chile continue.
  13. Hong Kong protests subside over worries about the coronavirus until the end of the week when people protest the quarantine locations.

Legislation/Congress:

  1. In a TV interview, Mitch McConnell says that, why yes, there are 395 bills awaiting passage in the Senate that are never going to be passed, including several bipartisan bills. So rather than working on amending bills on things like infrastructure, the Senate will be voting on anti-abortion bills.

Travel Ban/Immigration/Discrimination:

  1. Customs and Border Protection admits that “overzealous” agents detained hundreds of Iranians and Iranian-Americans for up to 10 hours at the Canadian border following the attack on Iranian General Soleimani.
    • They say it was an isolated incident at one location, but students from the Mideast have been detained and deported all cross the U.S.
    • CBP isn’t supposed to select travelers for further questioning based on their national origin.
    • Last month, CBP denied that Iran was the reason for the detentions, but an internal memo directed officers in that office to target travelers with links to Iran or Lebanon for “specialized vetting procedures.”
  1. Jared Kushner is trying to re-open discussions to reform our immigration system. I’m sure he’ll be just as fair as he was with the Mideast peace plan.
  2. The Trump administration has been rejecting valid asylum and U-visa applications if there are any missing fields on the application (U-visas protect victims of crimes who cooperate with law enforcement). For example, if you don’t have a middle name and you leave that field blank, they’ll deny it. The policy was announced last fall and originally affected only asylum applicants.
  3. A judge blocks Trump’s new policy that would change how immigration officials calculate visa overstays. The judge says it conflicts with immigration law.
  4. New York sues Trump over what they call a punitive ban on approving people for traveler programs.
  5. Border Patrol plans to deploy tactical agents to so-called sanctuary cities. The agents come from teams that normally fight smuggling at the border.
    • This includes members of BORTAC, the SWAT team of Border Patrol. They use things like stun grenades and snipers, and typically target violent criminals. But in sanctuary cities, they’ll be helping with run-of-the-mill immigration arrests. What could go wrong?
  1. The House votes to remove a 1982 deadline for states to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment. Virginia just became the 38th state to ratify the ERA, finally reaching the requirement to ratify. On the other hand, five states have tried to rescind their ratification, but it doesn’t seem like they can.
    • Republican lawmakers argue that passing the ERA would mean abortion could not be restricted. Not the best argument, IMO, because it shows they know that restricting abortion treats women unequally.
    • The ERA was first proposed in Congress in 1923 and was reintroduced every single year until 1972, when it passed.
    • It’s tied up in a few court battles already.
    • Enshrining the ERA in the constitution would mean that the rights of all genders would no longer be subject to the political whims of Congress or the president. Here’s the full text of the amendment:

Section 1. Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.

Section 2. The Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.

Section 3. This amendment shall take effect two years after the date of ratification.

Climate:

  1. A new study finds that the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010 was much worse than previously thought. The oil spread out over an area 30% greater than the original estimate of 92,500 miles, and it was more toxic to marine life than estimated as well. The Trump administration has pushed to expand permits for deep-sea drilling (it’s stalled in the courts right now) and has rolled back safety regulations for oil platforms.
  2. A court rules that the EPA can’t exclude scientists from EPA advisory panels just because they’ve received EPA research grants and are associated with universities. The case comes from changes made by former EPA head Scott Pruitt, who tried to exclude scientists with university ties but not those with ties to chemical or fossil fuel companies.
  3. House Republicans release a bill to address climate change, including things like reforestation and carbon capture technologies, but it doesn’t address the issue of curbing carbon emissions. However, it’s a start that they’re acknowledging we need to act.

Budget/Economy:

  1. With the current administration curbing the power of the federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, California’s governor proposes a new statewide Department of Financial Protection and Innovation to solidify consumer protections for the state.
  2. Trump brags a lot about the state of the U.S. economy, but he recently cut a scheduled pay raise for federal employees because of “serious economic conditions.”
  3. The Trump administration rolls out its new $4.8 trillion budget. It includes cuts to social safety programs and boosts defense spending.
    • The budget reduces access to SNAP, imposes new work requirements on Medicaid benefits, and makes it harder to access federal disability benefits. It caps increases on Medicaid spending at 3% (this ties in with his plan to implement Medicaid block grants).
    • Under the new budget, federal employees would have to pay more for retirement benefits, but those benefits would also be reduced.
    • The budget cuts spending on foreign aid by 21%, which could hurt our diplomatic efforts around the world.
    • It cuts the EPA’s budget by 26% and cuts research and development spending by nearly 50%.
    • The budget adds $3.4 trillion to the debt over the next four years. What kind of genius can’t figure out how to save more money during an economic boom? Even Obama managed to bring the annual deficit down to less than half of this budget’s projected deficit.
    • It targets a balanced budget by 2035, but that doesn’t match federal projections. The annual deficit has nearly doubled under Trump, even though he said he’d get rid of it.
    • The budget recommends eliminating subsidized federal student loans and ending the loan program completely.
    • Trump’s budget completely cuts funds for the Stevens Initiative, an organization dedicated to cultivating international exchange as a way to honor Ambassador Christopher Stevens, who was killed in the Benghazi attacks. Trump has removed it three years in a row, but Congress restores it each year.
  1. 2019 lost the largest number of work days in the U.S. to labor strikes in more than 15 years. There were 25 labor disputes, and 425,500 workers joined in work stoppages.
  2. OPEC reduces its projected growth in global oil demand by about 20%, largely due to the coronavirus outbreak.
  3. At a rally, Trump brags about his economy but neglects to mention that 1.5 million fewer jobs were created under him from 2017-2020 than were created under Obama in the three years prior (2014-2017).
    • That’s a decline of 19%, but it’s understandable given that the unemployment rate was already pretty low when Trump took office.
    • The Labor Department reports the lowest number of job openings in two years, with November and December seeing the largest two-month decrease on record. 2019 was the first calendar year that job openings declined since the recession in 2009.

Elections:

  1. Three more Democratic presidential candidates drop out of the race after the New Hampshire polls close—Andrew Yang, Senator Michael Bennet, and former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick.
  2. Bernie Sanders wins the New Hampshire primary with 25.7% of the vote, Pete Buttigieg comes in second with 24.4%, and Amy Klobuchar has a surprise surge to end in third with 19.8%. Elizabeth Warren, Joe Biden, and Tom Steyer trail with single-digit support.
  3. Senate Republicans block three bills related to election security. The bills would require campaigns to alert the FBI and FEC about foreign offers of assistance, increase election funding, and prevent voting machines from being connected to the internet. Ten bills related to election security are currently stalled in the Republican Senate.
  4. Virginia is on track to get rid of a holiday celebrating confederate generals and replace it by giving people a day off to vote.
  5. Sheldon Adelson plans to donate $100 million to Trump’s re-election and GOP congressional races. Meanwhile, the Koch network of political organizations is now as large as the RNC.

Miscellaneous:

  1. Former Trump aide Hope Hicks is returning to the White House, this time to work for Jared Kushner.
  2. The administration also brings back Sean Spicer and Reince Priebus. They’ll be part of the President’s Commission on White House Fellowships.
  3. A Tennessee Republican lawmaker introduces an amendment to recognize CNN and the Washington Post as fake news, saying they’re “part of the media wing of the Democratic party.” The irony is rich.
  4. The Pentagon cuts all federal funding for the military publication Stars and Stripes, which is distributed to troops deployed around the world.

Polls:

  1. It’s way too early to trust the polling, but here are the results of Quinnipiac’s recent polls of head-to-head competitions between Trump and Democratic presidential candidates:
    • Bloomberg beats Trump 51 – 42%
    • Sanders beats Trump 51 – 43%
    • Biden beats Trump 50 – 43%
    • Klobuchar beats Trump 49 – 43%
    • Warren beats Trump 48 – 44%
    • Buttigieg beats Trump 47 – 43%

Week 159 in Trump

Posted on February 13, 2020 in Politics, Trump

What a tense week with the State of the Union address falling right in the middle of impeachment hearings. But we all knew the Senate wouldn’t remove him, so there was no real suspense over that. But then the firings start, and that gets a little tense. Both Lt. Col. Vindmand and his brother are removed, and Gordon Sondland is fired. So far, that’s it, but I’m pretty sure there will be more.

Here’s that and what else happened in politics for the week ending February 9…

Shootings This Week:

  1. There were SEVEN mass shootings in the U.S. this week (defined as killing and/or injuring 4 or more people). This week, mass shooters kill 13 people and injure 14 more.
    • A shooter in Machias, ME, kills 3 people and injures 1 other. He knew all the people though he killed them in separate homes.
    • A shooter opens fire in a Greyhound bus in Lebec, CA, killing 1 person and injuring 5. The bus pulls over and lets the shooter out on his request. He leaves the gun behind.
    • A shooter in Indianapolis, IN, kills 4 young adults, aged just 19, 20, and 21.
    • A shooter in Waco, TX, kills 1 person and injures 3 more. Police think it’s a drug deal gone wrong.
    • A shooter in Houston, TX, kills 1 person and injures 3 others. Police think it might be gang-related.
    • A shooter in Youngstown, OH, kills 3 people and injures 2 more.

Russia:

  1. FBI Director Chris Wray tells the House Judiciary Committee that Russia is already engaged in information warfare for the 2020 elections, just like they were in 2016.

Legal Fallout:

  1. A federal appeals court throws out the weakest of the three emoluments lawsuits against Trump. The lawsuit was brought by Democratic members of Congress, and the court didn’t rule that they were wrong; just that they didn’t have enough plaintiffs to represent either chamber of Congress.

Impeachment:

Including all this info just makes this too long, so I moved it out into its own post. You can skip right over to it if that’s your focus.

Courts/Justice:

  1. Attorney General William Barr issues new rules for politically sensitive investigations. He himself must approve any inquiry into a presidential candidate or campaign. He also must approve investigations into illegal contributions and donations by foreign nationals to presidential and congressional campaigns.
  2. Barr confirms that the DOJ created a special process for evaluating information that Rudy Giuliani obtained from Ukraine sources about the Bidens.

Healthcare:

  1. Trump claims that he saved coverage for people with pre-existing medical conditions, even though this was required coverage under the very ACA that Trump is trying to gut. In fact, Trump’s DOJ is in court right now trying to end the ACA.

International:

  1. Boris Johnson and Trump have a contentious phone call that ends with Trump slamming the phone down.
    • Trump has been threatening to withdraw from certain agreements if Johnson doesn’t do as Trump wants.
    • Johnson and other U.K politicians have been criticizing Trump lately, with Johnson saying that Trump is “failing to lead” and that he’s “letting the air out of the tires of the world economy.”
    • Johnson pushes his planned trip to Washington back to March.
  1. Trump lifts Obama’s ban on our military‘s use of land mines in places other than the Korean Peninsula. More than 160 countries prohibit land mines, and several condemn Trump’s decision. Land mines kill and injure thousands each year, mostly civilians.
  2. A shooter wearing an Afghan uniform and carrying a machine gun kills two U.S. troops in Afghanistan during a joint operation between U.S. and Afghan forces. The shooter injures six others.
  3. Protests in Hong Kong quiet down after a series of arrests and injuries (and possibly due to fears of the spreading coronavirus).
  4. How’d I miss this? Protests have been going on in Algeria for just shy of a year. They want the president, who was just elected to a fifth term, to resign.
  5. A U.S. airstrike killed al-Qaeda leader Qassim al-Rimi last week in Yemen.

Legislation/Congress:

  1. The Network Lobby for Catholic Social Justice scores the Senate and House each year on legislation passed that advances social or economic justice. This year is the first time in 47 years that the group is unable to create its annual scorecard for the Senate because Mitch McConnell has obstructed every single vote. There were no voting records to compile.

Border Wall/Shutdown/National Emergency:

  1. Construction crews in Arizona bulldoze and blast hills at the border in Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument in preparation for new border wall sections. The monument is a UN-designated International Biosphere Reserve and is part of our national parks system.
    • Most of the work is being done in the Roosevelt Reservation, an area designated by Teddy Roosevelt to remain free of obstruction.
    • Some of the work is disturbing Native American burial grounds.

Travel Ban/Immigration/Discrimination:

  1. Human Rights Watch releases a report on what happens to El Salvadorans to whom we deny asylum. At least 138 were killed and at least 70 disappeared or suffered sexual violence or torture after their return. The study includes asylum seekers who were deported under Trump and under Obama.
  2. The FBI finally raises racially motivated violent extremism (for example, white nationalists and neo-Nazis) to the same threat level as ISIS. These groups are a threat here and abroad.
    • Two weeks ago, the FBI arrested eight members of the neo-Nazi group The Base. FBI Director Chris Wray says there are more arrests in the pipeline.
  1. White nationalist members of the Patriot Front march through the National Mall in Washington D.C. wearing white masks. They get a police escort.
  2. California Governor Gavin Newsom issues a posthumous pardon for Bayard Rustin, a civil rights leader who was imprisoned and forced to register as a sex offender for having sex with another man. Rustin was one of the organizers of the historic March on Washington in 1963. Newsom plans to pardon others who were convicted for similar reasons.
  3. The Department of Health and Human Services issues a waiver to allow religious foster care agencies in South Caroline to deny services to LGBTQ and non-Christian couples. These agencies are federally funded, which means they are supposed to adhere to the federal government’s non-discrimination policies.
  4. Witnesses testify to the House Subcommittee on Immigration and Citizenship that political interference in immigration courts has eroded due process. The Executive Office for Immigration Review has also been hiring judges with no immigration law background; it’s not even in the job description.
  5. In retaliation for New York State’s law that limits ICE agents’ access to drivers license information, the Department of Homeland Security temporarily blocks all residents of the state from enrolling in Trusted Traveler Programs. The administration threatens to kick 175,000 New York residents out of the program by the end of the year and threatens to retaliate similarly against other states.

Climate:

  1. January 2020 is the warmest January on record, and Antarctica hit a record high temperature of 65 degrees. Not just its warmest January temperature, but its warmest temperature ever recorded.
  2. Swarms of young locusts in southern Somalia lead experts to predict one of the worst “plagues of locusts” in recent history.
  3. The Interior Department completes its plan to open up areas of southern Utah to drilling, mining, and grazing. These areas were once protected as national monuments. I wonder if this would be happening if the monuments were designated by Republican presidents.
  4. Extreme temperatures are causing a decline in the bumblebee population in North and Central America and in Europe.
  5. The Department of Energy had $823 billion to spend on clean and renewable energy development last year, but it hasn’t spent any of it yet. The DOE canceled another $46 million designated for solar research and development.
  6. Britain is phasing out cars running on fossil fuels, and by 2035, will only allow sales of electric and hydrogen cars.

Budget/Economy:

  1. China takes a page out of our playbook and injects 1.2 trillion yuan into its markets to ensure liquidity. That’s about $174 billion. Similar actions by our own Fed have bolstered the stock market for several months now.
  2. The number of farms going bankrupt increased by 20% in 2019. It’s the fifth consecutive year of increasing bankruptcies.
  3. 1.5 million public school students experienced homelessness during the 2017-2018 school year. That’s the highest number since they started recording it in 2004. This doesn’t mean they’re living on the streets—some are in shelters, some are staying with friends or relatives, and some are waiting for foster care.
  4. Trump threatens to veto a $4.7 billion emergency aid package for Puerto Rico passed by the House. Puerto Rico experienced a series of damaging earthquakes in December with aftershocks continuing even now.
  5. The U.S. added 225,000 jobs in January, bringing the unemployment rate up a tick to 3.6%.

Elections:

  1. The Democratic presidential primaries begin with a slow-moving car crash. The Iowa Democratic Party contracted to use a new app to tally vote totals but failed to train volunteers on it and apparently failed to test it.
    • The app crashes, so precinct captains use the backup plan and phone in the results. Apparently one of the issues is that the app is unable to report a three-way tie, which some precincts had.
    • But the phone lines are jammed for hours at a time, so we don’t have any results until a few days after the caucus.
    • But it turns out the backup on the phone lines wasn’t all their fault. A far-right group trolled the phone lines to deliberately disrupt the caucus counts. Good job and well done for Democracy, you morons.
    • In the end, Bernie Sanders has a slight popular vote lead and Pete Buttigieg has a slight delegate lead. Elizabeth Warren and Joe Biden follow in third and fourth place, respectively.
    • The Nevada caucuses were contracted to use the same app, but they scrap those plans.
    • Trump and his grown sons suggest that the system is rigged. Same old 2016 tricks.
  1. Republican Joe Walsh drops out of his race to challenge Trump and asks fellow Republicans to support Democrats. Walsh says he was “booed off the stage by primary voters when I said we should expect decency and honesty from our President.”
  2. A federal judge rules against Georgia Governor Brian Kemp in a voter restrictions lawsuit. The judge rules that Georgia’s voting procedures in the 2018 election, specifically the restrictive “exact match” law for voter names, violate voting rights for a large group of people who are predominantly minorities.
    • If you remember, Kemp was the Secretary of State who oversaw voting procedures for his own race for governor.

Miscellaneous:

  1. The Trump administration fires Veterans Affairs deputy secretary James Byrne because VA Secretary Robert Wilkie had lost confidence in his ability to carry out his duties. The VA has been in a bit of disarray since a staff member said she was sexually assaulted at a VA hospital.
  2. The former welfare director for Mississippi, four of his colleagues, and a former pro wrestler are all charged with fraud and embezzlement in a scheme that siphoned millions of dollars of public money from needy families.
  3. After Trump’s acquittal, thousands of people take to the streets at more than 200 ”Reject the Cover-Up” protests across the country.
  4. Trump complains that Hillary Clinton was never prosecuted, and he then refers to former members of the FBI as scum.

State of the Union:

  1. I’m not sure where to start here. As is usual for most of Trump’s appearances, his State of the Union address is part campaign rally, with Republican members of Congress chanting “Four more years!” Here’s an in-depth annotated version of the speech, if you’re interested.
  2. The night gets off to a rocky start when Trump ignores Pelosi’s outstretched hand to shake it. He doesn’t shake Mike Pence’s hand either.
    • Trump and Pelosi haven’t been face-to-face since their altercation at a White House meeting in October.
  1. The speech includes quite a few falsehoods, half-truths, and exaggerations. I won’t go into all of them here.
  2. Trump says he turned the economy around. Here’s the actual GDP chart for the past 12 years. I’m not denying that the economy is doing well under this administration, but no one should deny the growth that occurred under the previous administration.

  3. He touts the low unemployment rate and says if he hadn’t reversed the failed economic policies of Obama, we wouldn’t be seeing this success. Here’s the actual unemployment trend for the past 12 years.

  4. Interestingly, even though he’s right that the participation rate in the workforce increased under him (by 1 percentage point), we still have a lower rate than we did in the 1990s and lower than most other developed nations.
  5. He takes credit for rising wages for lower-income workers, but that’s partly attributable to states raising their minimum wages dramatically.
  6. Trump speaks about a young girl in Philadelphia who’s trapped in a failing public school and awards her an opportunity scholarship on the spot. Except that she actually attends a highly competitive charter school that does not charge tuition.
    • This is what Trump said, “For too long, countless American children have been trapped in failing government schools.” It sounds like he doesn’t want us to have any public schools.
  1. In the middle of the speech, Trump awards the Medal of Freedom to Rush Limbaugh, who does a terrific job of acting surprised. Limbaugh has been fighting lung cancer. If you’re wondering why people are appalled by this, here’s a taste of the bigotry Rush has let fly over the past 30 years.
  2. Trump says he’s working to end our wars in the Middle East and bring home troops, but in reality, he’s been sending thousands of troops there in recent months. However, he does bring home one U.S. soldier and orchestrates a reunion with his family in the middle of the speech.
  3. Trump invites Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaidó as his guest. Guaidó has bipartisan support from Congress. So after a unifying and bipartisan standing ovation for Guaidó, Trump calls out Socialism, something he continually accuses Democrats of embracing.
  4. Trump says he’s increased the border wall by 100 miles. He’s increased it by 1 mile and replaced 99 miles.
  5. Trump points out that he released a groundbreaking Mideast peace plan last week, but Palestinians weren’t involved at all and they’ve rejected the plan outright.
  6. Trump repeats his laundry list of violent crimes allegedly committed by immigrants. It would take him much longer to list the crimes committed by native-born Americans.
  7. To his credit, Trump doesn’t mention the impeachment proceedings.
  8. When Trump speaks about protecting the Second Amendment, the father of a Parkland shooting victim yells, “What about my daughter?” Security removes him from the chambers. I wonder why Joe Walsh didn’t get removed for yelling “You lie!” during Obama’s SOTU?
  9. And then at the end of the speech, Nancy Pelosi deliberately rips up her copy of the speech, and later calls it a manifesto of mistruths.
    • House GOP members introduce a resolution to condemn Pelosi’s actions.
    • And after the speech, more people are talking about Pelosi than about Trump. That’s a first.

Week 159 in Trump – Impeachment News

Posted on February 13, 2020 in Impeachment, Trump

Here’s the last installment on impeachment, as the Senate votes to acquit almost right along party lines. The only dissenter from the GOP is Mitt Romney, who after a stirring speech, votes to remove on the first article of impeachment. I’m sure there will be more impeachment news still to come, but I’ll include it in my regular recap going forward. I’ll leave you with this trove of all the publicly available documents related to the impeachment, including those released from FOIA requests: https://www.justsecurity.org/67076/public-document-clearinghouse-ukraine-impeachment-inquiry/#RelatedLitandFOIA

Here’s what happened on the impeachment front for the week ending February 9

General Happenings:

  1. Here’s a good round-up of the House managers’ arguments for impeachment and the legal defense’s arguments against.
  2. On Monday, House managers and Trump’s defense give closing arguments in the impeachment trial, and senators debate the issue.
  3. On Tuesday, Trump gives the State of the Union on Nancy Pelosi’s invitation.
  4. On Wednesday, the Senate votes to acquit with nearly all senators voting along party lines (with the exception of Mitt Romney, who breaks ranks with Republicans to vote to impeach on the first article).
  5. The acquittal was widely expected, as there was no way the needed number of Republicans would vote to remove (I think 20 Republicans would’ve needed to vote for that).
  6. Moderate Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV) proposes that the Senate censure Trump as a way for the body to unite across party lines and formally denounce Trump’s actions around Ukraine.
    • That proposal doesn’t pick up any steam, so Manchin does vote to remove in the end.
    • This would’ve been a way out for moderate Republicans and Democrats both, but even the Senate is too divided to support it.
  1. Recently released court documents reveal that in October, an Arizona man was indicted for issuing a death threat to Adam Schiff. He left this message on Schiff’s voicemail: “I’m gonna fucking blow your brains out you fucking piece of shit.”
  2. Remember last week when Chief Justice Roberts did the right thing by refusing to read Rand Paul’s question that named the alleged whistleblower? Well, apparently Rand Paul is super eager to get the name into the Senate record because he uses his debate time on the Senate floor to read the name aloud. Most Republicans say they’re fine with that; a handful of Republican senators say it wasn’t right to name him.
    • I shouldn’t have to remind anyone that the person who’s alleged to be the whistleblower by the right has been receiving threats of death and violence since they started outing him.
    • Trump’s son Donald Jr. has tweeted out the name.
    • Rand Paul believes there was a government plot to bring the president down, ignoring that, according to Mueller’s report at least, Trump has been committing impeachable offenses since a few months after he took office.
  1. Fox contributor Andrew Napolitano says the acquittal is a “legal assault on the Constitution.”
  2. John Bolton’s book alleges that Trump tried to pressure Ukraine starting in early May 2019, and that White House Counsel Pat Cipollone is a fact witness. Unsurprisingly, the White House is trying to prevent Bolton’s book from being published.
  3. Ukraine requests its money back because we’ve delayed $30 million worth of arms transfers to the country for nearly a year.

What Senators Are Saying:

  1. Here are a few quotes from those august senators who know what Trump did and are letting it slide:
    • Lamar Alexander: “There is no need for more evidence to conclude that the president withheld United States aid, at least in part, to pressure Ukraine to investigate the Bidens; the House managers have proved this with what they call a “mountain of overwhelming evidence.””
    • Ban Sasse: “I believe that delaying the aid was inappropriate and wrong and shouldn’t have happened. A number of us have said that.” Sasse also thinks removing Trump from office would tear America apart.
    • Lisa Murkowski: “The President’s behavior was shameful and wrong. His personal interests do not take precedence over those of this great nation… The President has the responsibility to uphold the integrity and the honor of the office, not just for himself, but for all future presidents. Degrading the office by actions or even name-calling weakens it for future presidents and it weakens our country.” She also says, “I don’t think any of us are challenging [Trump] enough.”
    • Susan Collins: Always one to shirk her duty, Collins says, Trump’s call with Zelensky was “improper and demonstrated very poor judgment.” But she will acquit because “we should entrust to the people the most fundamental decision of a democracy — namely who should lead their country,” and Trump “learned from this case” and he’ll “much more cautious in the future.”
    • Marco Rubio: Rubio has always assumed the charges were true but he says, “Just because actions meet a standard of impeachment does not mean it is in the best interest of the country to remove a President from office.”
    • Mike Rounds: “The framers did not intend impeachment proceedings to be brought every time an abuse of power is alleged.” Wow… I’m pretty sure that’s what they did intend.
    • Cindy Hyde-Smith: “Rejecting the abuse of power and obstruction of Congress articles before us will affirm our belief in the impeachment standards intended by the founders.” I’m wondering if she’s read the impeachment clause?
    • Rob Portman: “While I don’t condone this behavior, these actions do not rise to the level of removing President Trump from office and taking him off the ballot in a presidential election year that is already well underway.” He’s also said for months that Trump’s actions were inappropriate.
    • Joni Ernst: Irony alert. Remember how just last week Ernst bragged about how Trump’s requests for investigations into the Bidens are already succeeding in the political aim of hurting Joe in the Iowa caucuses? She says, “This process was fraught from the start with political aims and partisan innuendos that simply cannot be overlooked.”
  1. Numerous senators claim that impeachment was an attempt to overturn the 2016 election, which is an argument I simply don’t understand. Trump has been in office for three years—you can’t overturn that. And even if he’s removed from office, his duly elected Vice President, Mike Pence, would take office.
  2. After a bunch of Republicans senators who think what Trump did was inappropriate but rationalize their vote to acquit because they think Trump learned from this and will behave better, Trump says he did nothing wrong and “it was a perfect call.”
  3. Mitt Romney delivers a heartfelt speech about why he is voting to impeach and how he came to that decision. It’s definitely worth a listen. It’s notable that there were only FOUR senators in the room while he spoke. No one in the Senate did their job.
  4. Adam Schiff closes his case with this:
    “It is midnight in Washington […] You can’t trust this president to do the right thing, not for one minute, not for one election, not for the sake of our country, you just can’t. He will not change and you know it. […] A man without character or ethical compass will never find his way.”

Aftermath:

  1. Lindsey Graham says a counteroffensive is “going to happen in the coming weeks,” including investigations into Burisma and Biden, as well as pursuing the whistleblower.
  2. House Democrats consider picking up the investigation where they left off, calling new witnesses, like John Bolton and Lev Parnas, to testify.
  3. An hour after the vote to acquit, Chuck Grassley announces a review of Hunter Biden’s activities during Obama’s administration, and the Treasury is fully cooperating with requests for information without requiring subpoenas. 
It turns out the inquiries were opened last fall.
    • The Treasury has handed over the highly confidential material requested.
    • The Treasury has been non-compliant in all requests and subpoenas for information about Trump. Those requests are still tied up in court.
  1. Trump’s press secretary says that Trump’s impeachment opponents should pay a price. And then Trump starts firing some of the folks who testified:
    • He doesn’t just remove Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman from his White House job; he also fires Vindman’s twin brother who was legal counsel at the White House. And he doesn’t just remove them, he has them very publicly escorted out, a move obviously designed to embarrass the two decorated war veterans.
    • He fires Gordon Sondland, U.S. Ambassador to the EU. Sondland said during testimony that Trump requested a quid pro quo and that everyone was in the loop.
    • This whole thing causes a fight among people who don’t know better over whether government employees are “at-will” employees. They aren’t, but both Sondland and Vindman served at the pleasure of the president. But still, some legal experts argue that the firings are illegal retribution.
    • A group of Republican senators tried to stop Trump from firing Sondland—not because it was wrong, but because they thought it would look bad. Some of the senators who reached out are the same ones who previously said they thought Trump learned his lesson.
    • Here are the other witnesses who left their jobs for various reasons: Marie Yovanovitch (recalled from her post early and then left the foreign service completely last week), Bill Taylor (recalled from his post early), Jennifer Williams (returned to DOD), Fiona Hill, and Kurt Volker.
    • Several former employees are beginning to give interviews, and some are exploring book options.
  1. Trump backs the idea of having his impeachment expunged if the GOP takes back the House this year.
  2. At the National Prayer Breakfast following his acquittal, Trump lambasts the impeachment process calling it corrupt and evil. He calls his political opponents dishonest and corrupt.
    • The prayer breakfast is typically a time for bipartisanship. His speech was preceded by scripture readings and calls for unity.
    • Trump goes on to criticize Mitt Romney, saying, “I don’t like people who use their faith as justification for doing what they know is wrong.’’ I redirect you to Romney’s speech above.
    • He accuses Nancy Pelosi of lying when she says she prays for the president.
    • Trump boasts about the economy and his approval rating and urges the audience to vote.
    • Pelosi, in contrast, speaks about the poor and persecuted.
    • The person who spoke right before Trump says, “Ask God to take political contempt from your heart. And sometimes when it’s too hard, ask God to help you fake it.” When Trump gets up to speak, he says he disagrees with that speaker.
  1. And then in a speech that rambles on for more than an hour, Trump :
    • Takes credit for the rising stock market under Obama.
    • Calls this a celebration because impeachment worked out for him.
    • Says he and his family went through hell.
    • Says the Russia investigation was all “bullshit” and that he won on that investigation. (Might be good to point out here that, so far, eight people pleaded guilty or were convicted in that investigation.)
    • Says the Mueller report ruined people’s lives. (Um, they ruined their own lives when they decided to break the law.)
    • Talks about his 2016 campaign.
    • Calls Adam Schiff corrupt, and calls Pelosi, Schiff, and Comey vicious and mean.
    • Defends the transcript of the Ukraine call. (It’s a summary, not a transcript.)
    • Calls out a bunch of Republican senators to praise them.
    • And oh-my-goodness I’m really trying to read this whole thing, but it’s a stream of consciousness. You can give it a shot here.
  1. Let’s compare all this to what Clinton said following his impeachment trial:
    “I want to say again to the American people how profoundly sorry I am for what I said and did to trigger these events and the great burden they have imposed on the Congress and on the American people.’’

Words of Wisdom:

I leave you with these words from former Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch:

The events of the past year, while deeply disturbing, show that even though our institutions and our fellow citizens are being challenged in ways that few of us ever expected, we will endure, we will persist and we will prevail.”

Week 158 in Trump

Posted on February 6, 2020 in Politics, Trump

Before the U.S. attack on Iran’s General Soleimani, Saudi Arabia and Iran were working on diplomatic solutions to ease Middle East tensions. They took a step back after the attack. For years Trump has called the JCPOA (Iran deal) the worst deal ever made. Conservatives criticized the deal because it didn’t address state-sponsored terrorism, just nuclear weapons. But now, Trump is following Obama’s playbook exactlyimposing harsh sanctions to pressure Iran into a new nuclear deal (again, without addressing state-sponsored terrorism). It’s dangerous when someone who doesn’t understand policy rips up policies and agreements just because he doesn’t like the person who approved them. It puts our international relationships in peril, our national security in peril, and our global climate in peril.

That’s my rant for the week, and here’s what happened in politics for the week ending February 2…

Shootings This Week:

  1. There were SIX mass shootings in the U.S. this week (defined as killing and/or injuring 4 or more people). Shooters kill 2 people and injure 23 more.
    • A drive-by shooting near a Bridgeport, CN, courthouse leaves 4 people injured.
    • A shooter in Merced, CA, injures 4 people.
    • A shooter in Shreveport, LA, injures 4 teenagers who were walking down the street.
    • A shooter in Boynton Beach, FL, kills 1 person and injures 3 others.
    • A shooter in Delano, CA, kills 1 person and injures 4 others.
    • A shooter in Philadelphia, MS, injures 4 people.
  1. Following Virginia’s pro-gun rally and Virginia’s State legislature passing gun reform bills, armed gun owners rally at the Kentucky Capitol. Protestors can’t enter the capitol with umbrellas or sticks to hold protest signs, but they can bring in guns and rifles.

Russia:

  1. Former Trump campaign aide Carter Page files a lawsuit against the DNC for allegedly bankrolling the Steele dossier, which he claims led to the FISA warrant on him.
    • We now know that the FISA warrant wasn’t based on the dossier.
    • Republican groups first commissioned Fusion GPS to do opposition research on Trump. It was later picked up by Democratic groups after the Republican convention.
    • Weirdly, the same lawyer who represents Page also represents Tulsi Gabbard in her lawsuit against Hillary Clinton.
    • Page recently had a defamation lawsuit against media outlets thrown out by the courts. He also sued the DOJ to be allowed to review the inspector general’s report on the FISA warrants before it was made public. And then when he didn’t get that, he sued the DOJ for overreach. Then he says he’ll file a lawsuit against the FBI.
    • He also claims to have been a CIA asset.

Impeachment:

Including all this info just makes this too long, so I moved it out into its own post. You can skip right over to it if that’s your focus.

Healthcare:

  1. Trump pushes forward with a plan to let states convert some of their Medicaid funds to block grants. The plan is intended to curb spending and it places caps on spending.
  2. The day before rolling out the plan, Seema Verma says that the administration isn’t trying to undermine the ACA, even though Trump supports a lawsuit that could end the ACA.
  3. Around 200 Americans who evacuated from Wuhan, China, land at March Air Reserve Base in California. They’ll stay there until health officials can screen and clear them all.
  4. The World Health Organization declares a global emergency over the coronavirus, and the State Department issues travel warnings for China.
  5. The virus has infected around 10,000 people and killed at least 213. The most at risk are infants, seniors, and folks with impaired immune systems.
  6. The State Department authorizes diplomatic staff in China to evacuate.
  7. Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross says that the coronavirus will help speed up the return of jobs to the U.S. from China. When life hands you lemons… amiright?
  8. The CDC confirms the first person-to-person transmission of the virus.
  9. Four years ago, the CDC was committed to fighting infectious diseases like Ebola. This year, they’re cutting their programs for preventing epidemics in 39 of 49 countries because funds are drying up.
  10. Insurance companies are taking advantage of Trump’s changes to the ACA that allows them to sell cheap insurance policies that offer insufficient coverage. Already people are being caught off-guard with unexpected healthcare bills.

International:

  1. Israel’s attorney general formally indicts Benjamin Netanyahu in three separate corruption cases. He’s charged with bribery, fraud, and breach of trust. The charges come just hours before Netanyahu’s meeting with Trump for the announcement of Jared Kushner’s peace plan. The impeached president and the indicted prime minister.
  2. Netanyahu and Benny Gantz meet with Trump together.
  3. Jared reveals his long-awaited plan. Here are the highlights:
    • Israel has to give up some land in a land swap to make the size of the Palestinian state comparable to what it was before Israel seized the West Bank and Gaza. The map shows patchwork, noncontiguous enclaves that Kushner says will be connected by bridges and tunnels. Several Palestinian sections are completely surrounded by Israeli sections.
    • Jerusalem stays under Israeli control, and Palestine can establish a capital outside the city border.
    • Israel can immediately annex its West Bank settlements.
    • Palestine must be fully demilitarized and Israel will take care of security for both Israel and Palestine. Palestine can have its own internal security forces, but Hamas and other militant groups must disarm.
    • Israel will control all borders and monitor all crossings.
    • Palestinian refugees who were forced out in 1948 want the right of return, but Israel has always said no to that because it would destroy Israel’s Jewish character. The peace plan says Palestinian refugees cannot return.
    • The plan places extensive conditions on the Palestinians getting a state, and then limits how much they’ll be able to govern themselves if they do get a state.
    • Foreign governments’ response has mostly been muted, but I’m reading a lot of false claims of support.
    • U.S. officials in charge of negotiating the peace plan have actively supported Israeli settlements in Palestinian territory, and they don’t believe the West Bank is occupied.
    • Kushner doesn’t want anyone talking about a two-state solution, but Trump lauds the agreement as a “historic opportunity for the Palestinians to finally achieve an independent state of their very own.”
    • No Palestinian representatives were consulted in the process. They reject the plan outright, and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas says he’s cutting all ties with Israel and the U.S.
    • In an interview, Jared says this (emphasis mine): “If they screw up this opportunity—which, again, they have a perfect track record of missing opportunities—if they screw this up, I think that they will have a very hard time looking the international community in the face, saying they are victims, saying they have rights.”
    • He also says this: “The Palestinian leadership have to ask themselves a question: Do they want to have a state? Do they want to have a better life? If they do, we have created a framework for them to have it, and we’re going to treat them in a very respectful manner. If they don’t, then they’re going to screw up another opportunity like they’ve screwed up every other opportunity that they’ve ever had in their existence.
    • Trump warns Palestinians that this might be the last chance they ever have.
    • Trump has also proposed a new $50 billion economic investment plan as part of the peace plan, which he says will create one million new jobs over a decade.
  1. Following his meeting with Trump, Netanyahu travels to Russia to update Putin on the peace plan.
  2. Brexit becomes official. The U.K. is no longer part of the European Union and the 11-month transition period begins.
    • For now, Britain stays in the UE’s customs union and single market and must follow the same trade and travel rules.
    • Britain no longer has a voice in how decisions are made in the EU.
    • Immigration and trade rules will change at the beginning of next year. There are currently 3.5 million EU nationals in Britain and 1.3 million U.K. citizens in Europe. They’ll all likely have to adjust their status by the end of the year.
    • Britain owes the EU just over $50 million.
    • It’s been 3 1/2 years since British voters passed the Brexit referendum.
  1. After an aide to Boris Johnson banned certain reporters from a briefing, all the remaining journalists walked out with them. I wish all journalists would make overt stands like this.
  2. The Trump administration wants to let the U.S. military use landmines, which have been banned by more than 160 countries. Trump wants to allow self-destructing landmines.

Iran:

  1. Last week, the number of troops diagnosed with brain injuries in Iran’s retaliatory strikes against U.S. troops was at 34. This week it bumped up to 50 and then 64 by the end of the week.
  2. The Veterans of Foreign Wars group demands an apology from Trump for saying that these brain injuries aren’t anything serious.
  3. The State Department briefs senators on Iran in a closed-door session. Senators say afterward that there was nothing classified, so there was no reason to do it in private. It’s the second contentious briefing, and both the House and Senate are looking at resolutions to limit Trump’s war powers with regard to Iran. While the Senate has yet to pass anything, the House passes two measures this week, including a repeal of a 2002 military authorization passed after the 9/11 terror attacks.

Border Wall/Shutdown/National Emergency:

  1. Strong winds blow over newly installed panels at the border fence near Calexico, CA. The panels land on the Mexican side of the border. This is part of an improvement project and not new construction.
  2. The current border fence has floodgates that Border Patrol agents manually raise each year to avoid flash floods. The gates stay open during flood season. Due to the design of Trump’s planned wall, it would likely need to include such floodgates as well. Its current design would catch all the detritus from the flood water and wouldn’t be able to withstand the force of the water.
  3. Federal agents discover the longest known drug-smuggling tunnel along the southern border. It stretches 4,309 feet, starting in Tijuana, MX, and running to San Diego County, CA. The tunnel has ventilation, electricity, a rail and cart system, and elevators. It’s 70 feet under the ground.

Travel Ban/Immigration/Discrimination:

  1. From October 2014 to July 2018, migrant children reported 4,556 complaints of sexual abuse while in U.S. custody. The reports were made to and documented by to the Office of Refugee Resettlement.
  2. Republican legislators in Iowa introduce a bill to remove civil rights protections from transgender people.
  3. The Supreme Court lets the Trump administration proceed with its “public charge” migration rule, which is basically a wealth test for immigrants. This temporarily lifts a nationwide injunction put in place by a lower court while legal challenges play out in the lower courts.
  4. HUD Secretary Ben Carson plans to get rid of a policy that withholds funds from cities that don’t address segregation. On top of that, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau proposes reducing the data collected on home lending discrimination (black Americans are denied loans at a much higher rate than white Americans, and minorities are charged higher interest rates in general).
  5. Trump acts on his threat to add these countries to his Muslim ban: Kyrgyzstan, Myanmar, Eritrea, Nigeria, Sudan, and Tanzania. The original ban includes Iran, Syria, Libya, Venezuela, North Korea, Yemen, and Somalia. At least those are the countries the administration included in the ban after the Supreme Court told Trump how he could implement the ban without violating the law.
  6. The 11th Circuit Court of Appeals rules that you can refuse to hire someone because they have dreadlocks.
  7. Three venues in Britain cancel Franklin Graham’s appearances there because of what they perceive as hate speech, specifically against the LGBTQ community.
  8. Colin Kaepernick still doesn’t have a job with the NFL, but they just aired an ad to bring attention to his social justice message. Anquan Boldin’s cousin was shot and killed by an undercover police officer in 2015. His car broke down and he was unarmed. The ad highlights his story.
  9. Virginia’s House of Delegates repeals a ban on same-sex marriage.
  10. Florida’s private school voucher program was found to discriminate against LGBTQ students, so two of the largest banks in the U.S.—Wells Fargo and Fifth Third Bank—say they’ll stop donating millions to the program.

Climate:

  1. A group of U.S. institutional investors urges timber, energy, and mining companies not to take advantage of Trump’s environmental regulation rollbacks. They argue that abusing those rollbacks could put investors at risk of “stranded assets” should the changes be overturned by the courts.
  2. The Trump administration plans to drop punishments against gas and oil companies that kill birds “incidentally.” If you support this, I don’t want to hear any more arguments about how wind turbines kill birds.
  3. For the second year in a row, teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg gets nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.
  4. The Department of Energy announces nearly $300 million in research and development funds to go toward sustainable transportation, like electric, hydrogen fuel, and biofuel.
  5. Scientists in Antarctica record a glacier melting from the bottom. The water under the glacier is unusually warm. It’s part of a system of glaciers that holds back the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, which, if melted, would raise the oceans by about four feet.
  6. The Pacific Ocean has become so acidic it’s dissolving the shells of some species of crab.
  7. There are only 29,000 western monarch butterflies remaining in California, down from millions. But please, let’s build that wall right through a butterfly sanctuary.

Budget/Economy:

  1. Trump signs the updated NAFTA deal, which he calls the USMCA.
  2. The economy misses Trump’s projected 3% growth target for a second straight year. 2019 posted the slowest annual growth during his term. Yay for tax reform?
  3. Despite the $28 billion aid program for farmers, bankruptcies rose 20% in 2019, hitting an eight-year high.
  4. The Trump administration proposes cutting Social Security disability benefits by $2.6 billion over the next decade. Millions of recipients would need to file the paperwork to prove their disabilities all over again.
  5. Economists predict the U.S. budget deficit will be well over $1 trillion in 2020.

Elections:

  1. John Delaney drops out of the Democratic presidential race. He was the first candidate to announce. Now there are 11 left.

Miscellaneous:

  1. After last week’s spat between Mike Pompeo and NPR’s Mary Louise Kelly, the State Department drops NPR from Pompeo’s upcoming trip to Britain, Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan. Ironically, the journalist they dropped was Michele Kelemen, not Kelly.
    • In response, NPR requests clarification from the State Department on whether they actually did ban Keleman from Pompeo’s trip and if so, why.
    • Also, NPR saw a dramatic increase in donations following the spat.
  1. The Navy SEAL whom Trump pardoned against Navy officials advice takes his revenge on his SEAL teammates who testified against him. In a video, he includes their names and pictures, duty status, and current units (for those on active duty). He calls them cowards. As a matter of policy, the Navy doesn’t identify active-duty SEALs.
  2. Trump hires Eric Trump’s brother-in-law as chief of staff in the Office of Energy Policy and Systems Analysis. This office used to oversee efforts to fight climate change.
  3. E. Jean Carroll, the writer who accused Trump of raping her in the 1990s requests DNA sampling on the dress she was wearing during the alleged assault.

Polls:

  1. The University of Cambridge’s Centre for the Future of Democracy runs an annual poll on global attitudes toward democracy, interviewing four million people across the world. They find that dissatisfaction with democracy in developed countries is at its highest level in 25 years, with the U.S. and Britain specifically showing high levels of dissatisfaction.
    • The trend of the annual study suggests that possible causes might be the economic shock of the recession and the global refugee crisis.
  1. Impeachment seems to be giving Trump a little popularity boost. It hit an aggregate of 43.4% this week.

Week 158 in Trump – Impeachment News

Posted on February 6, 2020 in Impeachment, Trump

None of us should be surprised to hear that former Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch is retiring from the foreign service. I applaud her for sticking it out this long after all she’s been through with an agency head who refused to support her against a months-long smear campaign bolstered by the president. Yovanovitch came into the department 33 years ago during Reagan’s administration and served multiple presidents of both parties in several hardship posts. She’s widely respected among her peers, and is now another casualty of the administration’s conspiracy theories and lies.

Here’s what happened on the impeachment front for the week ending February 2…

Missed From Before:

  1. I think I missed this when it was first reported back in December. Olena Zerkal, a former deputy foreign minister for Ukraine, says that she received a cable in July saying that the U.S. had frozen the military aid. The cable came from Ukrainian officials in Washington.
    • This corroborates Laura Cooper’s testimony from the impeachment inquiry that Ukraine knew before the end of August about the hold on aid.
    • Trump’s legal team and supporters argue that Ukraine officials didn’t know until late August.
    • Zerkal also says Zelensky didn’t want the news to become public; he wanted to avoid getting pulled into a political debate.

General Happenings:

  1. As Trump’s impeachment trial gets underway, there is pretty much no one who really thinks Trump will be removed from office.
  2. According to a draft of John Bolton’s book, Trump told Bolton in August that he’d continue to withhold aid to Ukraine until Ukraine officials agreed to investigations into the Bidens. Trump also asked Bolton to help him with his pressure campaign against Ukraine by calling Zelensky.
    • The book implicates high-level officials who have tried to avoid being pulled into the scandal, including Mike Pompeo, Bill Barr, and Mick Mulvaney (though in fairness, Mulvaney did admit to the quid pro quo in a public press conference).
    • Bolton had concerns about Trump giving favors to autocrats involved in federal investigations.
    • It turns out the White House has had a copy of Bolton’s book since December 30, but failed to let congressional Republicans know about it and about what the book alleges. And here Mitch McConnell thought he was working in “total coordination” with the White House.
    • It’s standard practice for former officials to provide their manuscripts to the White House for review.
    • Former White House Chief of Staff John Kelly says he believes what John Bolton said in his book. Kelly says Bolton always gave Trump the unvarnished truth—probably one of the reasons Trump and Bolton didn’t get along so great.
    • Kelly also says that an impeachment trial without witnesses is only half done.
    • On the day that Bolton’s allegations come out, Lindsey Graham skips a scheduled press conference.
    • GOP senators suggest that senators be allowed to read Bolton’s manuscript in a secret room.
    • The White House issues a formal threat in a letter to Bolton’s lawyer to prevent him from publishing his book. They say the book includes top secret and classified information.
    • Trump’s tweets about Bolton suggest he knows the contents of the manuscript.
  1. Representative Eliot Engel (D-NY) says Bolton told him in a private conversation last year that his committee should look into the recall of former Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch (Engel is chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee).
  2. Trump tweets that Adam Schiff hasn’t paid the price yet [for impeaching him]. Meanwhile, right-wing outlets spread stories that Schiff’s daughter is dating the whistleblower (she’s not) and they spread pictures purporting to be the whistleblower with several prominent Democrats. None of the pictures are of who they think the whistleblower is; instead, they are of George Soros’ son.
  3. GOP Senator Joni Ernst suggests that the impeachment proceedings might hurt Joe Biden in the Iowa caucuses, accidentally letting slip that the smears against him by Giuliani, Trump, and other conservatives were actually intended to harm his chances in the 2020 presidential race.
  4. Some current GOP senators attended a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing in 2016 about ousting former Ukraine general prosecutor Shokin. These senators knew that Biden was working on removing Shokin, and didn’t bring up any objections to it during the hearing.
    • The GOP senators in attendance who are still in office today include John Barrasso (WY), Cory Gardner (CO), James Risch (ID), and David Perdue (GA).
    • The effort to oust Shokin was also included in testimony at a 2015 hearing of the same committee. What changed between 2015 and now?
  1. The DOJ submits a court filing that shows they’re holding back around two dozen emails about Trump’s involvement in withholding aid from Ukraine. It’s the first acknowledgment that this type of evidence exists.

Trump’s Defense Arguments (cont’d from last week):

  1. Trump’s legal team continues with its opening arguments. Their biggest arguments seem to be about the process instead of how Trump didn’t do it. They didn’t spend time defending what Trump did.
  2. Jay Sekulow shows a video of Nancy Pelosi handing out commemorative pens to signers of the articles of impeachment. This is standard operating procedure for historic legislation.
  3. The legal team says that Trump was cut out of the impeachment process, and that the House process was invalid, secret, and rushed. They say it was illegitimate from the beginning.
  4. The team falsely claims that the House ignored Trump’s right to due process and executive privilege.
  5. They also argue that it was legal for Trump to ignore House subpoenas for the impeachment and to order his staff to do the same.
    • That same day, DOJ lawyer says that the House can use its impeachment powers to enforce its subpoenas, shooting holes in the argument that he can’t be impeached for ignoring subpoenas.
  1. In the middle of their presentations, we hear about Bolton’s claims that Trump really was conducting a pressure campaign against Ukraine. Trump’s legal team dismisses the new revelations, and Sekulow argues that Bolton’s information is inadmissible.
  2. The legal team continues to assert that there isn’t any evidence that ties the security aid hold to the investigations. Dershowitz says that nothing Bolton alleges would rise to abuse of power.
  3. Kenneth Starr basically argues against impeachment in general. This is the guy who spent five years Investigating Bill Clinton in order to see him impeached over lying about an extra-marital affair.
  4. Michael Purpura argues that Zelensky did get his meeting with Trump. But Zelensky wanted a White House meeting and all he got was a side meeting at a UN gathering.
  5. The legal team falsely asserts that the House never subpoenaed Bolton during the impeachment proceedings.
  6. Jane Raskin tries to delegitimatize Rudy Giuliani by calling him a colorful distraction.
  7. Pam Bondi talks about what she thinks are Hunter and Joe Biden’s corrupt conflicts of interest around Burisma.
  8. And then the coup de gras. Eric Herschmann says Obama should’ve been impeached for the same abuse of power charges as Trump. Because what argument would be complete without bringing Obama into it?
  9. In the end, the legal team didn’t provide any support for the investigations Trump was looking for, nor did they mention CrowdStrike or the supposed server that’s allegedly being hidden in Ukraine.
  10. The legal team even says that Trump did what the House managers said he did, but it wasn’t wrong and it definitely isn’t impeachable.
  11. In closing, the legal team doesn’t address the charges against Trump, but does attack a litany of Trump’s perceived enemies, whether they were involved in the impeachment or not (most aren’t). They attack Joe and Hunter Biden, Obama, James Comey, Robert Mueller, Lisa Page, and Peter Strzok, among others.

Senator’s Questions:

  1. Following Trump’s legal team’s presentations, senators have two days to ask questions. They write the questions on pieces of paper that a page must go retrieve and bring down to Chief Justice Roberts to read. It makes for a lengthy process with long silences.
  2. Mostly senators feed prompts to their own side to give them more space to make their arguments.
  3. Rand Paul sends down a question that includes the alleged whistleblower’s name. Roberts refuses to read it on the Senate floor. But that’s OK because then Rand Paul goes out and does a press conference where he names the person that right-wing sources are alleging to be the whistleblower.
    • The alleged whistleblower has, of course, been receiving death threats and threats of violence. Members of Adam Schiff’s staff have received threats as well.
  1. In the Q&A period, Trump’s legal team pushes the idea of “mixed motives.” They say that it doesn’t matter if Trump had an ulterior, personal motive behind withholding the aid as long as he also had national security interests in mind. They say there’s a little of that in every political decision.
  2. Alan Dershowitz argues that anything the president does to get re-elected is A-OK because every president thinks that getting re-elected is in the public good so therefore it must be constitutional.
  3. Patrick Philbin says that the burden of proof for impeachment is “beyond a reasonable doubt.” Even the law professor cited by Trump’s legal team says that’s completely made up.
  4. Philbin also says that a president can’t defy his foreign policy because he makes foreign policy.

Witness Debate:

  1. The Senate and legal teams debate the need for additional witnesses in the trial.
  2. After leaks of Bolton’s book manuscript, some Republicans appear to be leaning toward subpoenaing Bolton.
  3. Just when it looks like there are enough votes to force McConnell to allow witnesses, Lamar Alexander pulls the rug out and says he’ll vote against witnesses.
  4. Lindsey Graham says Bolton should hold a press conference so senators can hear what he has to say. Except that would always be under question since Bolton wouldn’t be sworn in. You know who could vote to get his testimony under oath? The senate.
  5. In the end, the senate votes 51-49 not to bring in new witnesses or evidence. Only two Republicans vote for witnesses.
  6. Senators start offering rationalizations for not voting for witnesses, and also for acquitting. I’m saving them all up for next week.
  7. After voting against witnesses, the senate passes a resolution defining the rules for ending the trial. Closing arguments will be on Monday, Trump will give the State of the Union on Tuesday, and the Senate will likely vote to acquit on Wednesday.
  8. 75% of voters think witnesses should be allowed, yet Republicans voted against it. Republicans also argue that what Trump did was wrong, but the voters should decide whether to remove him from office. But they don’t listen to voters on this one basic thing?
  9. This is the first Senate impeachment trial in history to not have witnesses.

More Trouble for Parnas, Fruman, and Giuliani:

  1. Chuck Schumer gives tickets to Lev Parnas to attend the Senate impeachment trial, but he can’t go because he has an ankle monitor.
  2. Lev Parnas sends a letter to Mitch McConnell discussing the evidence he wants to testify to and naming people like Mike Pence, Bill Barr, Lindsey Graham, Rick Perry, Devin Nunes, Derek Harvey, John Solomon, Rudy Giuliani, Joe diGenova, and Victoria Toensing as being complicit.

Fact-Checking Impeachment Claims:

There’s just too much misinformation out there about impeachment for me to tackle here, so here are a few fact checks. If you’re wondering why they seem so skewed against the defense instead of the House managers, even Republicans agree that Trump did what the House said he did—they just don’t think it rises to an impeachable level. It could also be because House managers presented the evidence they found, while it was up to the defense to cast doubt on that evidence.

Week 157 in Trump

Posted on January 31, 2020 in Politics, Trump

I don’t know which category this goes in, but it’s so symbolic of this administration, I’m opening with it. NPR’s Mary Louise Kelly interviews Mike Pompeo. When questions turn to Ukraine, Kelly asks Pompeo if he owes Marie Yovanovitch an apology. Pompeo says he didn’t come on the show to talk about Ukraine. Kelly says she confirmed with his staff that Ukraine was on the table. Pompeo gets super testy on air.

  • After the interview, a staff member brings Kelly to Pompeo’s sitting room so he can yell profanities at her. He says Americans don’t care about Ukraine and couldn’t find it on a map (he dropped a few f-bombs in there). He then has a staff member bring in a blank map and tells Kelly to point to Ukraine, which she does (it’s a big county—not that hard to find).
  • After the incident goes public, Pompeo puts out an official State Department statement blasting Kelly’s journalistic integrity and accusing her of lying. His statement also implies that she pointed to Bangladesh instead of Ukraine, which is laughable. I invite you to look at a map to see how far apart these countries are. Kelly’s been to Ukraine, graduated magna cum laude from Harvard, and has a master’s in European studies; so it’s doubtful she pointed to a country in Asia.
  • Kelly also the emails to back up her assertion that Pompeo’s staff was clear that Kelly was going to ask about Ukraine.
  • Pompeo refuses to say whether he owes Yovanovitch an apology even after text messages arise indicating she may have been under surveillance by associates of Lev Parnas, and it’s doubtful he’ll ever own up and apologize to Kelly either. Of course, Trump congratulates Pompeo, saying he “did a good job on her.”

Here’s what happened in politics for the week ending July 26…

Shootings This Week:

  1. There were SIX mass shootings in the U.S. this week (defined as killing and/or injuring 4 or more people). Shooters kill 12 people and injure 22 more.
    • A shooting in Seattle leaves 1 person dead and 7 people injured. There were multiple shooters involved when a fight broke out near Pike Place Market.
    • A man in Vanceboro, NC, shoots and kills his wife and 3 children before killing himself.
    • A shooter in Hartsville, SC, kills 3 people and injures 3 more at a nightclub.
    • A shooter in Salisbury, NC, injures 6 people at an after-hours party at a restaurant. One of the injured is currently paralyzed.
    • A shooter at an event hall in Cape Girardeau, MO, injures 5 people.
    • A shooter at a residence in Newburgh, NY, kills 3 people and injures a three-year-old.
  1. About 22,000 protestors show up for a gun-rights rally in Richmond, VA. Despite concerns of violence from hate groups and militia groups, the gun-toting crowd is peaceful.
    • While gun-rights activists were outside protesting, student activists from March For Our Lives were inside meeting with state legislators.
    • The Virginia Senate passes a red-flag gun law despite the protest. The law allows law enforcement officials to obtain court approval to remove weapons from someone deemed to be a danger to themselves or to others.

Russia:

  1. Despite findings from previous investigations into the Russia investigations that the FISA warrants for Carter Page were valid, the DOJ reports that two of those warrants were not. The two in question were renewals, both approved in 2017. Andrew McCabe and Rod Rosenstein approved one, and James Comey approved the other.
    • A previous IG investigation did find missteps, some egregious, by the people requesting the warrants, causing the FBI to conduct a review of their procedures.
    • The FBI has until the last week in January to respond.

Legal Fallout:

  1. The D.C. Attorney General sues Trump’s inaugural committee and business over the committee spending over $1 million for a Trump Hotel ballroom.
  2. In the ongoing saga of Michael Flynn, he requests that he be sentenced with probation instead of prison time if he can’t withdraw his guilty plea.

Impeachment:

Including all this info just makes this too long, so I moved it out into its own post. You can skip right over to it if that’s your focus.

Healthcare:

  1. Major cities in China cancel their New Year festivals to try to contain the Wuhan virus outbreak. The government restricts travel, especially around Wuhan. Travelers to the U.S. from China are being routed to five airports for screening upon entry into the U.S. WHO says it’s too early to declare a state of emergency.
  2. Teachers at the elementary school on which a Delta flight dumped fuel file a lawsuit against Delta.
  3. The Trump administration threatens to cut healthcare funding to California over the state’s requirement that insurance policies cover abortion. They timed the announcement with Trump’s appearance at the March For Life.
    • California’s law requires insurance providers to cover both medically necessary and elective abortions.
    • The administration indicates that they’ll target other states with similar coverage requirements.
  1. Trump is the first president to speak in person at the March For Life. He singled out pro-life enemy number one, Ralph Northam, for his support of a late-term abortion bill. Northam’s words have been widely misinterpreted to back claims that doctors and parents are killing infants after they’re born. Northam was actually talking about what happens when what should be start-of-life decisions tragically turn to end-of-life decisions because the infant is born with a terminal disease.
    • The march organizers expected around 100,000 attendees, but some people say they were more people in attendance.
  1. According to the U.S. Department of labor, women incur healthcare costs 80% higher than men, even though doctors treat women’s medical issues less aggressively and less quickly. Women wait longer in waiting rooms, and they’re still told that their pain is due to emotional stress.
  2. Executives at pharmaceutical company Insys are finally heading to jail for their role in the opioid epidemic and their irresponsible marketing activities.
  3. The Supreme Court refuses to expedite a lawsuit that could end the ACA, so now it won’t be decided until after the presidential election.

International:

  1. Trump invites Benny Gantz, a political opponent of Netanyahu’s, to Washington (at the same time, Trump invites Netanyahu to the White House). Gantz considers declining, but in the end, agrees to come. Gantz is worried it’s a political trap set by Netanyahu. They’ll meet about the U.S. Israeli-Palestinian peace plan. Pence says both are invited to the White House.
  2. The UN International Court of Justice rules that Myanmar must take emergency steps to protect Rohingya Muslims from violence. The country must also preserve any evidence of potential genocide. Myanmar has committed atrocities against its Rohingya Muslim citizens for decades. There are around 700,000 Rohingya Muslim refugees in camps in Bangladesh.
  3. Greece appoints its first female president.
  4. The Director of National Intelligence fails to send a report on Jamal Khashoggi’s killing to Congress, as required by the National Defense Authorization Act signed into law in December. The report identifies those responsible for Khashoggi’s murder.
  5. The protests in Iraq, which started in October, escalate this week. Demonstrators block highways and force government offices to close. They want a new prime minister. Iraqi forces launch a major crackdown at Tahrir Square. At least one protestor is killed and dozens more are wounded.
  6. Protests start up again in Bogota, Colombia, against the right-wing government.
  7. Protests continue in Lebanon, India, and Hong Kong.
  8. Chilean students protest their version of the SAT.
  9. Recent protests in the U.S. include the Women’s March, the March For Life, and the pro-gun rally in Virginia.

Iran:

  1. After Iran retaliated with airstrikes for the U.S. killing of General Soleimani, Trump initially said there were no injuries. Then we learned there were about a dozen troops with concussive injuries. Now the total of troops diagnosed with traumatic brain injuries is at 34.
    • Some have already been cleared for active duty.
    • Trump said they just had some headaches, but the effects of brain injuries are wide-ranging.
  1. Trump says Obama designated General Soleimani as a terrorist but didn’t do anything about it. This is mostly true, though the designation restricted Soleimani’s ability to travel and complete financial transactions. The designation wasn’t intended to be used as an excuse to kill a general of a foreign government.
  2. A bipartisan effort in the Senate to follow the House’s lead and limit Trump’s war powers with Iran stalls during the impeachment trial.
  3. Seemingly as a result of tensions with Iran, CBP is illegally deporting Iranian students who have legal permission to be here.
  4. Following Trump’s attack on Soleimani, our European allies start talking about cutting some ties. Britain considers cutting back its defense ties with us. Germany says the U.S. alliance with the EU isn’t that important anymore.
  5. Three rockets hit the U.S. Embassy compound in Baghdad, injuring one person.

Travel Ban/Immigration/Discrimination:

  1. U.S. Customs and Border Patrol is ruffling some feathers in a small town on a Canadian island on the border with Maine. The community has enjoyed an easy back-and-forth relationship with the U.S., but now CBP is intercepting and opening their mail and refusing to give a reason.
  2. In case you were thinking the Muslim Ban and Trump’s actions against Iran don’t affect real, everyday people, at least 16 students with permission and all the necessary approved paperwork to attend college in the U.S. have been deported with no reason given.
    • One was removed despite a court order commanding he be allowed to stay, and he was removed to France before his lawyers could stop it. The judge says he can’t do much about it since the student is now outside of the U.S.
    • This leaves colleges and universities holding the bag trying to figure out how to continue their students’ education while also getting them back to the U.S.
    • The process students go through to get their paperwork in order can take a year or longer.
    • The ACLU is seeing an uptick of Iranian students getting stopped at Logan Airport in Boston.
  1. And now Trump wants to expand the Muslim ban to include these countries: Belarus, Myanmar, Eritrea, Kyrgyzstan, Nigeria, Sudan, and Tanzania. Remember when they said it would be a temporary 90-day ban while they worked out a better vetting process? It’s been a year and a half since the Supreme Court upheld the travel ban.
  2. Texas still officially recognizes Confederate Heroes Day the Friday before Martin Luther King Day. Wow.
  3. Utah bans LGBTQ conversion therapy, the 19th state to do so. The practice is widely discredited.
  4. New Jersey becomes just the ninth state to ban gay and transgender “panic” defenses, which the Governor says are rooted in homophobia.
  5. Britain’s House of Commons votes against legislation that would ensure refugee children can reunite with their families in Britain. The House of Lords previously passed protections for refugee children in their Brexit legislation.
    • The House of Commons also stripped rules protecting the rights of EU citizens in Britain.
    • The House of Commons can override the House of Lords, so it looks like hyper-nationalism and racism will win out in this battle.
  1. Trump names Rodney Scott to Border Patrol Chief. The previous chief admitted to being a member of a private Facebook group for CBP agents that turned out to be racist, anti-immigrant, and misogynistic (and the previous chief was a woman!). Scott is reported to be a member of the same group.
  2. The Trump administration gives visa officers more leeway to stop pregnant women from visiting the U.S. because they might be having anchor babies. Add pregnant women to the growing list of unwelcome immigrants. We already limit Muslims, the poor, refugees, asylum seekers, Middle Easterners, Central Americans, and Africans.

Climate:

  1. Trump has been complaining at his rallies about low-flow showerheads and toilets, as well as energy-efficient dishwashers. And voila. The Energy Department announces changes that will limit the government’s ability to place new efficiency standards on appliances.
    • Increasingly efficient standards are currently saving U.S. households around $500 per year. The new rules make it harder to keep increasing those savings.
  1. The UN rules that countries cannot send climate refugees back to life-threatening conditions created by climate change.
  2. The Trump administration finalizes a rule that removes environmental protections from streams, wetlands, and groundwater. Landowners can now dump pesticides into wetlands and build over them, among other things.
    1. The protections being removed were implemented based on 1,200 scientific studies.
    2. The new rule is already being challenged.
    3. This is just the latest in Trump’s efforts to repeal nearly 100 environmental protections.
  3. The Interior Department approves a right-of way for Keystone XL development in Montana.
  4. At Davos, Steve Mnuchin says youth climate activist Greta Thunberg should go take some economics classes so she can explain calls for investors to pull their money out of fossil fuels. He also sarcastically pretends not to know who she is.
    • How does the head of our Treasury not know that money managers are already doing just that? From BlackRock’s CEO: “The evidence on climate risk is compelling investors to reassess core assumptions about modern finance.”
    • There are two reasons to divest:
      1. The theory of Economics of Welfare looks at the difference between private costs and societal costs. For example, we know that unchecked emissions of greenhouse gases that are going to cost us in the form of having the rebuild and replace infrastructure.
      2. With alternate and better sources of electricity becoming more available, fossil fuels will naturally fall out of favor.
    • Mnuchin’s wife tweets her support for Greta Thunberg.
  1. China plans to ban plastic bags in major cities by the end of this year.

Budget/Economy:

  1. Yet again, Trump threatens European countries with tariffs, this time at the World Economic Forum in Davos. This time it’s over European countries’ plans to tax major tech companies like Google and Facebook.
  2. In a shift from his 2016 promise to protect Medicare and Social Security, Trump says he’s willing to consider cuts to the programs. His last budget proposed nearly $2 trillion in cuts for programs like Medicare and Medicaid.
  3. Fair Isaac is changing the way it calculates your FICO score due, in part, to the record level of consumer debt. Those with high credit scores are likely to see it go higher. Those who are struggling with debt already are likely to receive lower scores.
  4. The European Union reportedly does not plan to offer Britain a trade deal on par with their other trading partners, like Canada and Japan. The EU fears that Britain will try to get the best of both worlds by maintaining access to the EU single market while not following the same rules around trade that EU countries must follow.
  5. Wells Fargo’s ex-CIO is banned from banking for life and must pay a $17.5 million fine over the bank opening fake accounts and unnecessary lines of credit for vulnerable clients.
  6. The Fed’s injections into the repo market, which have been bolstering the stock market for four months, have caused the largest decline yet in the Fed’s balance sheet. And even with that influx of cash, Trump blames the Fed for the U.S. not having 4% GDP growth.
  7. One side effect of Trump’s tariffs is a large increase in the price of aluminum to U.S. consumers and businesses. The sanctions against Russia-owned Rusal also increased prices. Nonetheless, Trump expands the tariffs by adding aluminum products like nails, staples, wires, vehicle parts, and so on.

Elections:

  1. A 2019 voter roll purge in Ohio in 2019 removed thousands of active voters in error. Ohio’s Secretary of State calls for a reform of the process for cleaning out the voter rolls.
  2. Presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard sues Hillary Clinton for defamation for Hillary’s comments about a candidate being a Russian asset. Clinton did not mention Tulsi by name in her comments.
  3. The impeachment trial pulls four presidential candidates —Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Amy Klobuchar, and Michael Bennet—off the campaign trail at a crucial time for the Iowa caucuses.
  4. At this point in the Democratic presidential race, 16 candidates have dropped out and these 12 remain in the race: Senator Michael Bennet, former Vice President Joe Biden, former New York City Mayor and billionaire Michael Bloomberg, South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg, former Representative John Delaney, Representative Tulsi Gabbard, Senator Amy Klobuchar, former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick, Senator Bernie Sanders, billionaire Tom Steyer, Senator Elizabeth Warren, and entrepreneur Andrew Yang.
  5. There are three candidates on the Republican side: Donald Trump, former Representative Joe Walsh, and former Massachusetts Governor William Weld.

Miscellaneous:

  1. An explosion at a Houston manufacturing plant kills two people and pushes nearby homes off their foundations. The explosion damages 214 homes and destroys 50. By the end of the week, the number of structures damaged increases to 450.

Polls:

  1. A Pew Research poll finds that Democrats trust more news sources than Republicans. All U.S. adults overall trust more than Republicans as well. Looking at news sources that are trusted by 33% or more, all U.S. adults trust nine news source, Democrats trust thirteen, and Republicans trust two. Even though media consensus isn’t really a measure of news accuracy, I think the more sources you get your news from, the more accurate your view of the news is.

 

Week 157 in Trump – Impeachment News

Posted on January 31, 2020 in Impeachment, Trump

So much has happened since we first learned about Trump pressuring Ukraine for political gain, I’ve forgotten all the ways Trump and his administration have twisted the truth along the way trying to justify what went down. Here’s a pretty good, though incomplete, list of the ways we’ve been lied to. And if you’re one of those folks who thinks CNN isn’t a reliable source, they have the receipts. You can follow the links to their source material.

Here’s what happened on the impeachment front for the week ending January 26…

General Happenings:

  1. As Trump’s impeachment trial gets underway, there is pretty much no one who really thinks Trump will be removed from office.
  2. The Senate rules ban C-SPAN cameras from the Senate chambers. No audio recordings or still photography will be allowed except from the cameras controlled by the Senate Recording Studio.
    • They will only show the presenters and not any of the Senators.
    • Numerous media outlets send letters requesting C-SPAN cameras be allowed.
  1. The following House Republicans join Trump’s legal team: Doug Collins, Mike Johnson, Jim Jordan, Debbie Lesko, Mark Meadows, John Ratcliffe, Elise Stefanik, and Lee Zeldin. They are only there to give guidance, not to present to the Senate.
  2. Alan Dershowitz makes a point of saying that he didn’t sign on to the White House’s seven-page rebuttal to the House’s impeachment brief last week.
  3. Adam Schiff says that the CIA and NSA are both withholding evidence relevant to the impeachment trial.
  4. McConnell and the White House aren’t 100% certain they have all the votes they need to block witnesses, so they have a Plan B. Plan B is to move Bolton’s testimony to a classified setting. It’s an easy argument that since he was the national security adviser, he would have lots of classified info.
  5. Republicans keep saying they’re trying to use the same format as the Clinton impeachment trial; but in that trial, the Democratic and Republican leaders in the Senate worked closely together to design the trial.
  6. Talking to reporters at Davos about impeachment, Trump says, “But honestly, we have all the material. They don’t have the material. House manager Val Demings says this means he just admitted to the obstruction of Congress he’s being accused of by withholding witnesses and material.
  7. Trump also says he’d like to see Mulvaney and Bolton testify, though, so maybe they should. But then he backpedals on that, so maybe not.
  8. A Trump confidant tells CBS News that GOP Senators were warned that if they vote against Trump in the impeachment trial, “Their heads will be on a pike.” That doesn’t play well when Adam Schiff repeats it on the Senate floor, and Senator Susan Collins breaks with decorum by saying loudly “That’s not true.” Schiff listens and responds, “I hope it’s not true.” But he was clear the entire time he was quoting a news story.
  9. Trump defender and Republican Representative Matt Gaetz praises the House managers’ presentation and says Trump’s legal team’s presentation looked like an “eighth-grade book report.”
  10. Senator John Kennedy (R-LA) says that the evidence presented by the House managers was news to most Senators. How is that even possible? Everybody in the Senate should’ve read the testimony by now.
  11. House manager Jason Crow (D-CO) says that how the Senate votes on witnesses will reflect how seriously they’re taking this trial. He adds that all of the information will eventually come out, whether in books, FOIA requests, or a future administration.
  12. Trump tweets and retweets 142 times on the first day of House managers’ arguments. And woke up the next day and did it all over again.
  13. Trump says that Obama withheld aid to countries like Ukraine, Philippines, Egypt, and others. Representative Ruben Gallego (D-AZ) counters by saying that Obama did it “openly, not using a shifty lawyer and two Ukrainians with a business called ‘Fraud Guaranteed.” Gallego also says Obama didn’t do it for self-interest, but the interest of the country.
  14. Each side accuses the other of trying to undermine the 2020 election. Republicans say Democrats are just trying to remove Trump from the ballot. Democrats say that Trump’s interference in the elections means we won’t have free and fair elections with him in office.
  15. Senators from both parties view a classified document in a secure facility. The document is provided by Jennifer Williams. Some Democratic Senators say they don’t understand why it was classified. We don’t know what the document is, but we can surmise it’s about the phone conversation Mike Pence had with Zelensky that Pence ordered classified.
  16. Republican attorneys general from 21 states call on the Senate to reject both articles of impeachment.
  17. A Republican Senator breaks the “no bringing phones into the Senate chambers” rule and their phone goes off in the middle of a presentation.
  18. The rest of the world thinks our Senators are playing games and taking naps during the impeachment. They’re acting like bored schoolchildren.
  19. Documents indicate that Adam Schiff mischaracterized a text message between Parnas and Giuliani when he implied that “Mr. Z” referred to Zelensky. It actually referred to a Mykola Zlochevsky, the founder of Burisma.
  20. Mike Pompeo defends his treatment of diplomats, including Marie Yovanovitch. He says he’s proud of the administration’s work in Ukraine.

Trump’s Defense Files A Brief:

  1. Trump’s legal team submits their 171-page brief, which claims that the two articles of impeachment aren’t impeachable offenses.
  2. The brief includes opinions from the DOJ Office of Legal Counsel to support their position that the White House didn’t illegals defy Congress in holding back witnesses and evidence form the impeachment committees.
  3. The brief argues the following:
    • The impeachment hearings weren’t about finding the truth.
    • Even if Trump did abuse his power by holding up the aid to Ukraine, it’s not impeachable because there’s no crime. The brief calls the House Democrats theory of abuse of power “novel” and “made up.”
    • There’s no dispute that Trump did what he’s accused of—withhold aid, withhold a White House meeting, and request investigations into the Bidens. But just because Trump did that, it doesn’t mean he withheld one for another. The brief uses the same evolving reasons the White House gave in the weeks after the story first broke.
    • The aid was released and the meeting happened, all without an announcement of the investigations.
    • Trump did this all to root out corruption and to get other countries to help out more.
    • This is a political process, not a criminal one.
    • The impeachment process was rigged, and Democrats shut Trump out of secret hearings in their basement bunker.
    • The transcript of Trump’s call with Zelensky shows that Trump brought up corruption.
  1. The brief includes a DOJ Office of Legal Counsel opinion supporting Trump’s right to block evidence and witnesses requested by the House committees investigating the administration’s activities around Ukraine.

A few rebuttals here:

  1. The Pentagon had certified that Ukraine was in compliance with our anti-corruption conditions, and there’s no record of Trump approaching other national leaders to get them to beef up their contributions. So those don’t seem to have been at the top of his mind in regard to Ukraine.
  2. The Constitution was written before our criminal code, so when they defined impeachment, there wasn’t anything in the criminal code to tie it too. It has always been a political process, as it was designed to be. As such, even if a president were to be removed from office, there would be no criminal charges coming from Congress.
  3. The “basement bunker” is actually a SCIF, a commonly used room where classified information might come out. People were deposed there. Depositions are typically not public. And after the depositions, the House held public hearings, where they invited Trump and his legal team to take part. They refused.
  4. Also, even if the impeachment process were rigged, the Constitution gives the House complete control in how to run impeachment hearings. At the same time, McConnell isn’t breaking any rules by working with Trump’s legal team to design a trial that benefits Trump.
  5. The White House meeting never happened—Zelensky was looking for a state visit, not a chance encounter at an international summit.
  6. The aid was released only after the issue was publicized.
  7. Zelensky was reportedly two days away from announcing the investigations on Fareed Zakaria’s CNN show when the military aid was released.
  8. There’s no mention of corruption in the transcript; only the investigations into the Bidens and Crowdstrike.

Debating the Rules:

  1. The Senate debates for more than 12 hours over the procedural rules of the trial, delaying opening arguments.
  2. Mitch McConnell proposes a condensed impeachment trial schedule, with two days of opening arguments per side, not to exceed 24 hours, followed by four hours of debate.
  3. Maybe after that, they’ll call witnesses.
  4. This could mean 12 hours of opening arguments per day, starting after a full morning of regular Senate work (so 16-hour days for the Senators and for Chief Justice Roberts).
  5. Both Democratic and Republican Senators pressure McConnell to extend it to three days each, giving them the option of three eight-hour days.
  6. Both Democrat and Republican Senators also pressure McConnell to allow the House managers to present the evidence they gathered at the beginning of the trial.
  7. McConnell is working on a rule that would let Trump’s legal team move to dismiss as soon as the arguments are complete. Kind of like a kill switch in case the trial goes on too long.
  8. Republicans vote over and over again to defeat Democratic amendments to subpoena new witnesses and evidence,
  9. The Senate rules include the option of refusing to hear new evidence or testimony. They also have provisions to prevent certain people, like Bolton, from testifying in public.
  10. According to McConnell’s rules, if any witnesses are called, they would have to first be deposed by both sides.
  11. Despite the rules that Senators must remain seated and quiet during the proceedings, they’re already walking around when they’re supposed to be seated, and they’re talking when they’re supposed to be quiet. This despite the punishment being imprisonment.
  12. During the rules debate, Pat Cipollone was given an hour to make a case in his opening statement—he spoke for three minutes, saying Trump has done nothing wrong.
  13. Adam Schiff took 50 minutes of his hour to lay out their entire case, accusing Trump of trying to manipulate the 2020 elections by pressuring Ukraine to announce investigations into Biden.
  14. Members of Trump’s legal team repeated some of the misinformation included in their brief, including that Republicans weren’t allowed in the House SCIF during depositions and that Schiff didn’t tell us he was making a parody of Trump’s phone call with Zelensky during his now-infamous paraphrasing of the call.
  15. Jay Sekulow claims that Trump was cleared of obstruction of justice in the Mueller report. In actuality, Mueller outlined around a dozen cases of possible obstruction of justice, and he said it’s up to Congress to decide whether to pursue impeachment on them. Legal analysts agree that most of these meet the criteria for obstruction.
  16. Sekulow also says that Trump was denied the right to cross-examine witnesses. In fact, Trump and his team declined to participate. How many times must this be debunked?
  17. For some reason, Trump’s legal team keeps exaggerating the number of days the House waited to send the articles of impeachment to the Senate. It was 28 days, but the team says it was 33. That’s just a useless and weird lie.
  18. Trump’s team says the aid to Ukraine got out on time anyway. In reality, because of the delay, $35 million didn’t get out in time and Congress had to extend the deadline.
  19. Sekulow gets worked up over a House manager talking about “lawyer lawsuits” and delivers an indignant rebuke to Val Demings. No one knows what he was talking about. Demings had talked about FOIA lawsuits, and she actually introduced the term as “Freedom of Information Act, a.k.a. FOIA lawsuits.” The White House backs up Sekulow and says the transcript has Demings saying lawyer lawsuits. The Federal Document Clearing House transcript includes no mention of “lawyer lawsuits” except Sekulow’s. Why is this a big deal? It shows a continued pattern of lying and not correcting the record even when provided with hard evidence. Also, we can all watch the video of Demings’ presentation.
  20. The rules debate goes on past midnight, and Jerrold Nadler at one point raises his voice and accuses Republicans of “treacherous” behavior if they don’t allow witnesses. One of Trump’s lawyers responds angrily. The whole thing leads Chief Justice Roberts to remind both sides to be polite and remember where they are.
  21. There’s debate about a trade for witnesses. Republicans could call people like the Bidens if Democrats could call John Bolton. The deal is dropped. Joe Biden says he refuses to part of an impeachment deal.
  22. It’s pretty notable that 3/4 of Americans want new witnesses and evidence.
  23. Senator John Cornyn (R-TX) quotes a Wall Street Journal editorial claiming that what Trump did was legal. This despite the GAO finding the opposite and despite the fact that Cornyn just took an oath to be impartial.

House Managers Arguments:

  1. Adam Schiff opens up the House managers presentation by outlining their arguments. He says Democrats aren’t overstepping by impeaching; it’s part of Congress’s Constitutional mandate. Here’s the gist of their argument:
    • Trump solicited foreign interference to cheat in an election.
    • He did so by abusing the powers of his office to pressure a foreign country to get involved in our elections.
    • When Trump was caught, he continued to use the powers of his office to obstruct the investigation.
  1. Schiff urges Republicans to “protect our democracy” by joining Democrats in voting to remove Trump from office.
  2. Schiff presents the facts of the case:
    • Trump mentioned the Bidens and Burisma but not corruption when he talked to Zelensky (you can check it out for yourself).
    • According to Gordon Sondland’s testimony, Trump followed up on whether the investigations he wanted were going to happen.
    • Kurt Volker texted Andriy Yermak, less than 30 minutes before that call to say that if the investigations were announced, they could set up a White House meeting.
    • Trump told reporters that he wanted both Ukraine and China to investigate Biden, which appears like he’s just looking for foreign countries to smear Biden.
    • Sondland and Giuliani rewrote a Ukraine statement announcing investigations into corruption investigations. They specifically added investigations into Burisma and the 2016 elections.
    • When U.S. officials asked Ukraine not to investigate their political opponents, Yermak threw back, “You mean like asking us to investigate Clinton and Biden?”
    • Ukraine faced the possibility of being cut off from vital aid in the middle of a war.
    • The aid was only released after Trump was caught.
  1. And then Schiff addresses whether abuse of power is impeachable:
    • Bill Barr and Jonathan Turley have both argued that abuse of power is impeachable.
    • The framers of the Constitution made it clear that they were trying to prevent political crimes.
    • If abuse of power isn’t impeachable, then we don’t have a president, we have a king.
  1. Trump’s re-election campaign and the White House both tweet running commentaries during the presentation refuting House managers’ arguments.
    • They say that Trump didn’t withhold a White House meeting with Zelensky; he invited the Ukraine president three times. The UN was their first opportunity to meet.
    • Zelensky himself has said that the UN meeting didn’t fulfill Trump’s promise of a White House meeting, and Trump never offered Zelensky a date.
  1. House managers spend the first day of arguments describing Trump’s scheme to pressure Ukraine to open, or at least announce, investigations into the Bidens while withholding aid and a White House meeting to increase pressure.
  2. Schiff walks the Senate through a timeline of the early events in the pressure campaign, and says Mike Pence canceling his trip to Ukraine in May was a pivotal moment.
  3. Schiff includes new allegations from Lev Parnas in his presentation.
  4. Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) criticizes the House managers for being repetitive. I agree that they’re quite repetitive, but I think it’s to get the information to stick. Senator Mazie Hirono (D-HI) responds by saying, “It is hard to listen to things you don’t want to hear.”
  5. An anti-abortion, pro-Trump protestor disrupts proceedings on the first day, shouting “Schumer is the devil!” and “They support abortion!” You could hear him screaming all the way down the hall as police removed him.
  6. On the second day, they focus on the allegations of abuse of power, and Schiff explains it will be a little repetitive again today while they show how the facts they presented the previous day fit together.
  7. Nadler speculates that Trump’s legal team won’t refute the facts of the testimony or evidence. (Spoiler for next week: they don’t.)
  8. Nadler also says a crime isn’t necessary to impeach a president. Constitutional scholars largely agree. Nadler plays a video of Alan Dershowitz saying the same thing about the Clinton investigation. Dershowitz has done an about-face and will argue the opposite.
  9. House manager Sylvia Garcia (D-TX) argues that the allegations against Joe and Hunter Biden are groundless. She goes into detail about how Biden’s efforts in Ukraine were done in the open to forward U.S. policy and were supported by our European allies.
  10. Garcia also says there’s no factual basis for the conspiracy theory that Ukraine interfered in our 2016 elections. She says that theory only benefits Putin and Trump. Schiff goes on to show that the origin of the conspiracy theory was the Kremlin.
  11. Here’s an incredible moment. Garcia brings up a letter signed by Senators Ron Johnson (R-WI), Rob Portman (R-OH), Dick Durbin (D-IL), Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH), and other members of the Senate Ukraine Committee in 2016. The letter urged Ukraine to fight corruption, including in the General Prosecutor’s office (the prosecutor at the time was Shokin, whom Biden helped oust).
    • Johnson, who has said he doesn’t remember the letter, gets upset, speaks to Portman, and leaves the Senate floor. He’s still agitated when he returned.
    • He later releases a statement saying that Garcia misrepresented the letter and it was about corruption in general. He must’ve missed the bit about the General Prosecutor.
  1. Reporters spot Senator Marcia Blackburn (R-TN) reading a book during the presentation. The book is “Resistance (At All Costs): How Trump Haters Are Breaking America.”
    • The same day, Blackburn repeats an unfounded smear against decorated war veteran Alexander Vindman, and then doubles down with a second tweet calling him vindictive. Let’s remember he has a purple heart.
    • And then, Blackburn breaks the trial rules by giving a live TV interview to Laura Ingraham while proceedings were ongoing and her colleagues were seated in the Senate chamber.
    • Blackburn does not appear to take her job seriously. Maybe all ya’ll could vote her out?
  1. Schiff reminds the Senate that Trump has said he can do what he wants under Article II. He argues that since Trump didn’t pay a price for Russian interference in 2016, he’s unrepentant and undeterred, and he’ll keep doing it.
  2. Demings says that Senators know better than to think this is about one election. She says it’s bigger than any one election and bigger than any one president.
  3. Hakeem Jeffries reminds Senators that, as Sondland testified, everyone was in the loop on the Ukraine operation and Trump directed the whole thing.
  4. Sekulow says that the House managers opened the door for Trump’s legal team to go after Biden because House managers defended Biden as sort of a prebuttal to what the defense might say.
  5. Jeffries reminds us that the administration did try to bury the transcript on the super-secure server, and that they ran a failed effort to cover the whole thing up.
  6. Demings tells us that the State and Defense Departments, the Vice President, and the Office of Management and Budget have still not produced a single document in response to their 71 requests, five of which are subpoenas. So the argument of waiting for the courts to straighten this out is ridiculous on its face.
  7. Schiff closes by saying that what Trump did is what our founders feared most—inviting foreign interference in our elections. He accuses Trump of putting his personal benefit over national security.
  8. Schiff warns that if Trump isn’t removed, “the balance of power that our founders set out will never be the same.”
  9. If you haven’t heard them, Schiff’s closing caused even Republicans to commend him. They’re worth a listen.
    • One of his most quoted lines is, “Why would anyone in their right mind believe Rudy Giuliani over [FBI Director] Christopher Wray?”

Trump’s Defense Arguments:

  1. Trump’s legal team starts their arguments with only two hours on Saturday, so there’s more to come in next week’s recap.
  2. They begin by working to cast doubt on the House managers’ case that Trump pressured Ukraine to investigate the Bidens and Ukraine interference in the 2016 elections in return for things of value—withholding aid and a White House meeting.
  3. They refer frequently to the transcript (which is actually a summary, not a direct rendering of the call).
  4. Here’s the gist of their argument:
    • There was nothing wrong with the call, and no meetings or withholding money were discussed. (The articles of impeachment don’t actually center on the call, though, they center on activities before and after.)
    • Democrats are trying to rig the election against Trump. They’ve always been trying to get rid of him.
    • Trump had valid reasons for withholding the aid. They don’t address that the DOD did certify Ukraine as compliant on fighting corruption.
    • House managers overlooked facts and didn’t speak to people with direct contact with Trump on the matter.
    • House managers haven’t met the burden of proof.
    • Zelensky himself said he didn’t feel any pressure.
    • Democrats want to overturn the election. They don’t mention that Pence, who was elected alongside Trump, would be president if Trump is removed.
    • It was Ukraine, not Russia, that interfered in our elections.
    • Biden tried to get the prosecutor who was investigating Burisma fired. (Except that prosecutor wasn’t investigating Burisma.)
  1. The defense brings up Schiff’s paraphrasing of the call in a hearing. They leave out the part where Schiff says he’s paraphrasing.
  2. The defense kind of made a case for allowing new witnesses and evidence.

More Documents Released:

  1. The Office of Management and Budget releases another bunch of documents about the Ukraine aid, as required by a FOIA request.
    • The documents include email threads from late June, after an article about military aid to Ukraine appeared in the Washington Times.
    • Some are between the OMB’s Michael Duffey and Mark Sandy (Sandy testified in the House hearings).
    • They were figuring out the details of the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative, a defense program for allocating money to Ukraine.
    • Remember Sandy testified that he learned in a July 12 email that Trump was directing the hold on aid, but he didn’t get a reason until September.
  1. Emails with Pentagon officials who were questioning the legality of the freeze are heavily redacted.

More Trouble for Parnas, Fruman, and Giuliani:

  1. Oh lordy, there are tapes. Among Lev Parnas’s evidence released to the House is an hour-plus audio recording of Trump dining with a group of political donors, Parnas, Fruman, and others. The dinner took place on April 30, 2018.
    • We can hear Parnas say that Marie Yovanovitch was saying that Trump would be impeached so we needed to get her out of there. Trump responds with, “Get rid of her! Get her out tomorrow. I don’t care. Get her out tomorrow. Take her out. OK? Do it.”
    • Parnas says Yovanovitch was left over from the Clinton administration, but she’s actually served since Reagan.
    • The recording highlights how inane dinner conversation can be.
    • One of the donors is a Canadian steel magnate who funneled money through his U.S. subsidies to donate to Trump. Which is perfectly legal.
    • This shows that the effort by Parnas and Giuliani to oust Yovanovitch went on for at least a year.
  1. Trump continues to tell us he doesn’t know Parnas.
  2. Giuliani promises he’ll release evidence to take down the Bidens this week. He goes on Fox & Friends to promote it.
    • It turns out it’s just a ploy to get ears on his new podcast.
    • He gives no evidence on his podcast, but on F&F he accuses Biden of taking multiple bribes totaling $8 million, and he accuses Democrats of collusion and profiteering. He says the crimes are shocking, including a poisoning.
    • Giuliani says that starting at noon on Friday, he would be rolling out his case. By the end of the week, it doesn’t sound like he’s got anything.
  1. Parnas requests that Bill Barr recuse himself from the investigation of Parnas’s possible violations of election finance laws. He says Barr knew everything Parnas was working on with regard to Ukraine and they were basically on the same team.

Polls:

  1. 75% of Americans want new evidence and testimony to be allowed in the impeachment trial.
  2. A Pew Research poll finds that 63% of Americans think Trump has acted illegally. 51% think he should be removed from office.

Week 156 in Trump

Posted on January 27, 2020 in Politics, Trump

Here’s one more catch-up blog, and this week I’ll finally be up to date. There’s so much going on and so much misinformation, it’s easy to throw up your hands and say we’ll never know the truth. We’ll never be able to understand it all. But we’re at a pivotal time in history, and what’s going on in Washington right now is incredibly important. The fallout from this administration is going to last decades. So it’s critical that the voting public pay attention.

Here’s what happened in politics for the week ending January 19…

Shootings This Week:

  1. There were SIX mass shootings in the U.S. this week (defined as killing and/or injuring 4 or more people). Shooters kill 11 people and injure 32 more.
    • A gunman opens fire in a barbershop in Chicago, IL, injuring 5 people (including one 11-year-old and one 12-year-old).
    • A shooter at a home in Grantsville, UT, kills 4 people (a mother and her children) and injures 1 more (the father). The shooter is believed to be a relative.
    • A shooter in South Houston, TX, kills 2 people and injures 2 more.
    • A gunman opens fire at a queue for a nightclub in Kansas City, MO, killing 1 person and injuring 15 more. A security guard shot and killed the gunman. Previous weapons charges against the gunman were dropped due to a loosening of gun laws in Missouri.
    • A shooter in Memphis, TN, kills 1 person and injures 4 more outside a nightclub.
    • A 19-year-old man opens fire in a bar on San Antonio’s River Walk, killing 2 people and injuring 5 more.
  1. Ahead of a planned gun-rights rally on Martin Luther King Day in Richmond, VA, Governor Ralph Northam bans weapons on the state capital grounds for the day. He also declares a state of emergency due to threats from armed militias that they’ll storm the capital.
    • Officials are a bit edgy, given the comparisons to the Charlottesville rally. This week’s rally is to protest gun reform legislation going through Virginia’s legislature turns out to be peaceful.
    • Days before the rally, the FBI arrested three white supremacists—members of The Base—who were planning to usurp the rally to start a race war. One of the men is from Canada and is here illegally. The other two men harbored and armed him.
    • Three other members of The Base are arrested for a plot to kill Antifa members.
    • Trump adds fuel to the fire by tweeting, “They will take your guns away.” (None of the laws in progress will take anyone’s gun away unless they’re illegally owned under current laws.)
  1. Several of the gun reform protestors come from out of state, fearing that changes to gun rules in VA will spread to other states. Here are the changes:
    • Universal background checks
    • Red flag laws (which allow law enforcement to protect people from themselves if they are deemed a threat)
    • Limiting handgun purchases to just one a month
    • A ban on assault-style rifles (but they won’t confiscate weapons that are currently legally owned)
  1. Cities across the state vote to become sanctuary cities that don’t have to follow the state’s gun laws. In reality, localities can only do that for federal laws, not state ones. That’s why sanctuary cities for undocumented immigrants are constitutional, but sanctuary cities to fight state gun laws are not.

Russia:

  1. Not to be left out of impeachment issues, Russian military intelligence hackers target Ukrainian gas company Burisma, likely to find information on Hunter Biden. If they were successful, they can dump documents at any time to try to upend Joe Biden’s campaign.
  2. Two weeks before sentencing, Michael Flynn wants to change his plea from guilty to not guilty. He pleaded guilty more than two years ago. How has he not done any jail time? Anyway, a judge needs to approve the change in plea.
  3. The entire Russian government resigns after Putin proposes constitutional amendments designed to extend his time in power. One of the changes takes power away from the president and gives it to the prime minister, giving him the option of being prime minister with more powers once his presidential term ends in four years. You might remember he did the reverse when he became president.
  4. Rod Rosenstein says he was the one who decided to release the text message between Lisa Page and Peter Strzok with the press. He says he did it to protect them from unfair criticism. Well, that kinda backfired.
    • Both Strzok and Page filed separate lawsuits against the Justice Department for the leak, saying it violated the Privacy Act.

Legal Fallout:

  1. George Nader, a political donor and lobbyist, pleads guilty to sex crimes involving children. Nader was mixed up in Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation, and he’s currently indicted for a campaign finance fraud scheme with several other large donors who hid foreign donations to Democrats and Republicans.
  2. Federal prosecutors in Washington are investigating James Comey again, this time over whether he leaked classified information to the press in 2017. Law enforcement officials express concern that their investigations are becoming politicized and worry that their own old cases could be opened up for political reasons.
  3. Former GOP Representative Chris Collins receives a 26-month sentence after pleading guilty to insider trading.

Impeachment:

Including all this info just makes this too long, so I moved it out into its own post. You can skip right over to it if that’s your focus.

Courts/Justice:

  1. The Trump administration asks the Supreme Court for the 23rd time in three years to let a new policy go into effect while cases against it work their way through the court. That’s nearly three times as many such requests as the previous TWO administrations made over 16 years.

Healthcare:

  1. A Delta jet dumps fuel over a populated area in Los Angeles before making an emergency landing at LAX. They say they had to lighten their load for the landing. But they dumped the fuel over a playground full of children. Air Quality management inspects the air quality and issues a notice of violation to Delta due to complaints of health issues, like burning eyes and difficulty breathing.
  2. Despite warnings that abortion can cause depression and regret, a new study finds that most women do not regret their decision to have the procedure and tend to feel relief instead of depression, even longterm.
  3. Tennessee Governor Bill Lee says he’ll sign a bill that funds faith-based foster care and adoption agencies even if they discriminate against same-sex parents (or anyone else who violates their closely held beliefs).
    • The following states allow similar discrimination: Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, Alabama, South Dakota, North Dakota, Virginia, and Mississippi. Michigan had a similar law, but a lawsuit forced them to reverse it.
  1. Consumer safety groups sue the USDA over Trump’s new rules for federal pork inspection practices, which reduce federal oversight and let the industry police itself.
  2. The Supreme Court agrees to hear a case over whether employers with religious or moral objections can limit access to free contraception under the ACA.
  3. Trump tells Alex Azar, Secretary of Health and Housing, that he regrets taking action on that “fucking vaping thing.”

International:

  1. Larry Kudlow, economic advisor to Trump, says that the administration plans to change global anti-bribery rules. Currently, American companies can’t pay bribes to secure overseas contracts. The rules are part of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA), which Trump has complained about and threatened to repeal. Experts say the act helps reduce corruption around the world.
  2. A former member of the national security council says that if Britain doesn’t pull out of the JCPOA (Iran deal), a free-trade deal with the U.S. will be at risk.
  3. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson supports Trump coming up with a new agreement to replace the JCPOA.
  4. Johnson refuses Scotland’s demand for another referendum on Scottish independence. These guys honestly don’t believe in second chances. Voters wanted a second referendum on Brexit and didn’t get that either.
  5. The British parliament has so far refused to give EU citizens physical proof of their right to remain in Britain after Brexit happens, leaving them up in the air once Brexit does occur.
  6. Police arrest nearly 60 protestors in Paris during continued “yellow vest” demonstrations.
  7. In Hong Kong, a rally is cut short when protestors and police clash. The Hong Kong protests have been losing a little momentum, and protestors worry they’re losing global attention.
  8. Protests continue in India over their new anti-Muslim citizenship rules.
  9. Clashes between police and protestors in Lebanon result in at least 70 people being injured. This week has been the most violent since the protests started there several months ago.
  10. The State Department says that Russian trolls played a part in the political unrest in South America, including in Chile, Bolivia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, and Colombia. That could be part of why there’s so much global unrest right now.
  11. U.S. intelligence agencies are trying to get Congress to stop holding the public portion of their annual Worldwide Threats briefing, where they discuss the biggest threats to our security. Trump blew up after last year’s open session, and officials don’t want to be seen as disagreeing with Trump in public. Because God forbid U.S. citizens should get the truth.
  12. 350,000 Syrians flee a Russian-led assault in Syria’s Idlib province.

Iran:

  1. France, Germany, and Britain trigger the resolution dispute clause of the JCPOA, which means that Iran has 60 days to come back into full compliance with the defined limits on nuclear development. If Iran doesn’t comply, the UN must reimpose sanctions.
    • Since Trump withdrew the U.S. from the JCPOA, European countries let Iran push the limits of the deal, hoping to save it.
    • The major objective of the three countries is to save the JCPOA because it was successful in preventing Iran from becoming a nuclear power.
    • Russia calls this an “ill-considered decision” that could lead to escalation.
    • Trump had threatened tariffs up to 25% on European automobiles if they didn’t trigger the dispute.
    • Some European officials call this extortion. I say it goes to show that Trump will not stop abusing the power of his office.
    • Iranian President Rouhani had threatened danger for European troops in the Middle East if they did trigger the dispute.
  1. Remember what a big deal it was that General Soleimani posed an imminent threat and that’s why the U.S. killed him? Now Trump says it doesn’t really matter whether there was an imminent threat or not.
  2. Trump said Soleimani was going to blow up the Iraq embassy. Then Trump said that he was going to blow up other U.S. embassies as well. Now Trump says four embassies were targeted but doesn’t say which ones.
  3. Mike Pompeo also changes his tune on the reasons for the strike, saying that the attack was part of a larger strategy to combat global threats. He previously said an attack from Soleimani was imminent.
  4. Pompeo declines an invitation to attend a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing about Soleimani.
  5. Both Trump and the Pentagon said last week that Iran’s strikes in retaliation for Soleimani’s killings resulted in no injuries. But 11 troops were injured, displaying symptoms of concussion and possible brain injuries. Trump later says that some service members had headaches. At least eight of the troops were medevaced to other countries better equipped to treat brain injuries.
  6. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau blames both Iran and the U.S. for the downing of a passenger jet carrying 57 Canadians.
  7. Protests continue against the Iranian government for shooting down a passenger jet and then seeming to lie about it. Their chants went from “Death to America!” last week to “Death to the dictator!” this week.
    • People report that riot police are using tear gas and live ammunition.
    • Iran says they arrested dozens of people over the downing of the passenger plane, but some have been released.
    • Iran says that the root cause of the tragedy is the U.S. attack on Soleimani.
    • Last week, they said one person was responsible; but this week, President Rouhani says there were likely more people involved in the decision.
    • Russia says that Iran was spooked by rumors of the U.S. sending stealth fighters to Iran, and that’s why they shot down the plane.
  1. Democratic Senator Tim Kaine says he has the necessary 51 votes to pass a resolution requiring Trump to get Congressional approval before making any more military moves against Iran. The House already passed such a measure.
  2. Iran’s foreign minister cancels his appearance at the World Economic Forum in Davos.
  3. Pompeo says that Iraqi leaders have told him they support keeping U.S. troops in the country, despite their public declarations of the opposite.
  4. Trump gave the authorization to kill Soleimani seven months ago, but also had to approve this specific operation.
  5. Drone and missile strikes by Iran-backed Houthis rebels in Yemen kill at least 80 Yemeni soldiers while they were in prayer at a mosque.

Travel Ban/Immigration/Discrimination:

  1. A federal judge blocks Trump’s executive order allowing states and localities to refuse to settle any refugees. This means Texas and that county in northern Minnesota will have to let any refugee settlements go forward.
  2. Virginia finally passes the Equal Rights Amendment, 44 years after Congress passed it. 97 years after it was first proposed. This makes Virginia the 38th state to pass it, the milestone needed to start the ratification process. There are still hurdles:
    • The deadline has passed to ratify the amendment, but it’s debatable whether that deadline is binding.
    • Other states have rescinded their ratifications, but there’s no provision for that in the constitution.
    • My great-grandma marched for women’s rights nearly 100 years ago. I wonder what she’d think if she knew we’re still marching for this shit?
  1. Even though the annual march is getting smaller, hundreds of thousands of demonstrators show up to march in the fourth annual Women’s March in more than 200 cities around the world.
  2. GOP legislators in Georgia, Kentucky, and Texas propose laws to ban minors from receiving gender transition care and to criminalize treatments that help with gender dysphoria.
    • People who support these bills argue that minors are too young to know and that this treatment is life-altering.
    • People who oppose these bills say that the children know and that starting early makes the transition easier.
    • Transgender health experts recommend just using puberty blockers and waiting until they’re older to explore hormones and surgery.
  1. A GOP state representative in Missouri introduces a bill to establish parental review boards to decide on whether to allow drag queen story hour at libraries in the state. Librarians who don’t comply would face criminal charges.
  2. Despite the low unemployment rate for Black Americans, 90% disapprove of Trump’s overall job performance and over 80% think he’s a racist and has made racism a bigger problem.

Climate:

  1. Ocean temperatures hit a new high in 2019 and had the largest temperature increase in a single year over the past decade. Higher ocean temperatures mean more severe storms, harm to sea life, and disruptions to the water cycle that lead to flooding, drought, and wildfires.
  2. Scientists at the EPA say that political appointees cut them out of the decision-making process when the EPA decided to reverse parts of the Clean Waters Act.
  3. Even some of Trump’s appointed advisors disagree with the changes, say they go against scientific knowledge.
  4. Despite the Trump administration’s opposition to managing climate change, investment in renewable energies increased by 28% in 2019.

Budget/Economy:

  1. The U.S. and China sign their phase one trade deal. But we won’t cut any tariffs until after the election. What’s that about, I wonder?
    • As part of the agreement, the U.S. delists China as a currency manipulator.
    • New data continues to show that American consumers bore the brunt of the costs of the tariffs, not China.
  1. The New York Fed announces it’ll decrease the amount of money it’s injecting into the repo market.
  2. The Dow Jones closes above 29,000 for the first time, buoyed by the signing of the USMCA and phase one of the China trade deal, as well as by better than expected earnings and good reports in the retail sector.
  3. The House votes to overturn a Trump rule that makes student loan forgiveness harder to obtain.

Elections:

  1. Trump holds an election rally in Milwaukee, WI, on the same night as the Democratic presidential debate. He repeats his slew of lies—Obama gave Iran $1.8 billion (it was less, it wasn’t all held by the U.S., and it was their money), wages are growing for the first time in a long time (it started in 2014), the ISIS caliphate is 100% defeated (closer to 85%), late-term abortion means ripping babies out of the mother’s womb (that’s infanticide), Democrats started “catch and release” policies for undocumented immigrants (it started in 2001). And that’s just to name a few.
  2. A Wisconsin judge orders state election commissioners to move ahead with purging more than 200,000 people from the voter rolls.
    • Republicans say these are voters who have moved or are deceased, while Democrats accuse them of trying to purge registered voters.
    • I say there’s a little truth to both. There’s no harm in keeping old voter records on the rolls, and these purges do largely hit people who have moved. But there are also mistakes, and people get removed who shouldn’t be. And then it’s up to volunteers to call those voters to make sure they know. And there’s no way to reach everyone.
  1. But then a state appeals court puts the order on hold again, at least until the case goes through the courts.
  2. The Florida Supreme Court upholds a ruling that convicted felons must pay off their fines and fees associated with their sentence before they can have their voting rights restored. Opponents say this amounts to an unconstitutional poll tax.
  1. South Carolina election officials agree to change a rule that requires people to provide their full SSN to register to vote. Most states require just the last four digits.

Miscellaneous:

  1. The National Archives receives harsh criticism after blurring images critical of Trump or referencing women’s anatomy. Whitewashing, as it were.
  2. A new study finds that mayors face higher levels of physical and psychological abuse than people in the general workforce. This applies to both men and women, but women are much more likely to experience abuse, including abuse of a sexualized nature. Social media is the most common expression of that abuse.
  3. Air Force General John Raymond is sworn in as chief of Space Operations, the top position in our new United States Space Force.
  4. American history textbooks are customized by state, even though they come from the same publishers. Differences include gun rights discussions, racial histories, and immigration. Publishers feel caught in the middle of politics. I guess I’m not clear why they don’t present the truth at best, and at worst present pros and cons so students can learn how to talk about our differences.
  5. A 17-year-old intern with NASA discovers a planet nearly seven times larger than the earth, and on just his third day there.

Week 156 in Trump – Impeachment News

Posted on January 27, 2020 in Impeachment, Trump

The impeachment trial is finally underway in the Senate, with everyone taking oaths and opening briefs filed. And oh lordy, there are tapes. New evidence keeps coming out—the GAO finds that the Trump administration broke the law by withholding aid to Ukraine, the DOJ starts handing over a boatload of documentary evidence from Lev Parnas (which, oh my!)—and the Senate won’t commit to allowing new witnesses or evidence.

Here’s what happened on the impeachment front for the week ending January 19…

General Happenings:

  1. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) finds that Trump and the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) violated the law by withholding military aid to Ukraine. They violated the Impoundment Control Act because it was a policy delay, not a programmatic delay.
    • The GAO also says the OMB and State Department have refused to cooperate and provide their office with the information needed to complete their investigation.
    • The OMB disagrees with the findings, despite the fact that OMB officials struggled for weeks to find a legal justification for the hold.
  1. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) says that it was right to withhold the aid even though it broke the law.
  2. U.S. diplomats express disappointment with Mike Pompeo for remaining silent on the issue of potential surveillance of one of their own and for not defending former Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch.
  3. Possibly as a result of all the information revealed in Lev Parnas’s documents, Ukrainian officials announce an investigation into potentially illegal surveillance of former Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch. Pompeo says the U.S. will also investigate whether she was under threat.
  4. Trump adds Alan Dershowitz and Kenneth Starr to his legal team, which already includes Pat Cipollone, Michael Purpura, and Jay Sekulow.
  5. Ukraine asks the FBI for help in their investigation of a cyberattack by the Russian military against Burisma, the company on whose board Hunter Biden served. 

  6. The House votes to send the articles of impeachment to the Senate.
  7. Speaker Pelosi names these Representatives to be impeachment managers: Adam Schiff, Jerrold Nadler, Zoe Lofgren, Hakeem Jeffries, Val Demings, Jason Crow, and Sylvia Garcia.
  8. Pelosi and the House managers all sign the articles of impeachment in an “engrossment ceremony,” after which Pelosi gives the House managers commemorative pens. She gets flack for it, but they did it for Clinton’s impeachment, too. The far-right says the pens cost over $2,000 apiece, and also that they’re gold plated. The pens actually cost $15.
  9. The House managers deliver the articles of impeachment to the Senate, and Adam Schiff reads aloud the articles of impeachment in the Senate well.
  10. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts is sworn in to preside over the trial. He administers the oath to each member of the Senate:
    “Do you solemnly swear that in all things appertaining to the trial of the impeachment of Donald John Trump, president of the United States, now pending, you will do impartial justice according to the Constitution and laws, so help you god?”
  11. Democrats continue to argue for hearing from witnesses and including any new evidence, while Republicans are mostly fighting it (there are a few exceptions).
  12. After much debate on several amendments, the Senate votes on the rules of the trial. Here are a few (rules in italics have already been broken):
    • Senators can’t check their phones during trial proceedings.
    • Senators can’t talk with each other during trial proceedings.
    • Senators should remain in their seats at all times.
    • Senate staff access is restricted.
    • Access to journalists is restricted.
    • The Senate will vote on whether or not to allow witnesses and new evidence after both sides have presented their cases.
  1. In the middle of the impeachment trial for pressuring a foreign government, Trump pressures European countries to officially accuse Iran of breaking the JCPOA and threatens them with 25% tariffs on their automobiles if they don’t.

More Trouble for Parnas, Fruman, and Giuliani:

  1. The House releases documents and voice mail messages they received from Lev Parnas that link Trump to the pressure campaign to get Ukraine to announce investigations into the Bidens.
    • This comes in the form of text messages, emails, letters, handwritten notes, voicemails, and audio recordings.
    • The documents outline work Giuliani and Parnas did on behalf of Trump.
    • They include exchanges between Parnas and former Ukrainian prosecutor Yuriy Lutsenko.
      • Texts show that Lutsenko helped Giuliani smear former Ambassador Yovanovitch and fed Giuliani dirt on the Bidens.
      • Lutsenko wanted Yovanovitch out, and agreed to help Giuliani in his mission if Giuliani would help Lutsenko get rid of Yovanovitch.
      • We also know that Lutsenko later recanted much of what he told Giuliani, but much of what he told Giuliani had already been reported by The Hill columnist John Solomon (who was also involved with Parnas and Giuliani). This is how most of the Ukraine conspiracy theories gained traction.
      • Parnas says that Trump and Giuliani let Lutsenko manipulate them when it came to Yovanovitch.
    • The documents include a May 10, 2019, letter from Giuliani requesting a meeting with President Zelensky. It also says that Trump had “knowledge and consent” of what Giuliani was doing. Remember that on May 7, Zelensky met with key advisors to try to figure out how to navigate Trump’s and Giuliani’s insistence that Ukraine open an investigation into the Bidens.
    • There’s a text from Fox News lawyer Victoria Toensing asking if there’s an absolute commitment for her Yovanovitch to be gone. What’s her interest in Yovanovitch?
    • On April 23, Giuliani texted Parnas to say Trump fired Yovanovitch again. For a guy who made a living off of saying “you’re fired,” he sure had a hard time actually getting it done.
    • There are handwritten notes on hotel stationery memorializing conversation about getting Zelensky to announce the investigations.
  1. After the document dump, Parnas goes on the Rachel Maddow show to get his story out. He weaves some stories that are hard to believe, but he’s been backing it up with receipts. His documentary and text evidence backs him up in many cases.
  2. Parnas tells the New York Times that he feels bad for trusting Giuliani and Trump. He also tells Maddow that he was wrong about Yovanovitch.
  3. Parnas says Trump knew exactly what was going on in Ukraine with Giuliani and Parnas, and that Trump was directly involved in the pressure campaign to get Ukraine to investigate the Bidens. Trump and others have argued that Trump didn’t know everything Parnas and Giuliani were up to.
  4. Parnas also implicates Mike Pence and Attorney GeneralWilliam Barr. He says Pence was in charge of the Ukraine project (including getting Zelensky to announce investigations).
  5. A second dump of the evidence from Parnas’s devices includes messages between Parnas and Derek Harvey, an aide to Representative Devin Nunes (R-CA). Harvey was arranging interviews with Ukraine officials who claimed the Bidens were guilty of wrongdoing.
    • Harvey also met with Parnas, Giuliani, and journalist John Solomon at the Trump Hotel.
    • Solomon worked with Parnas on articles about these Ukraine conspiracy theories.
    • Their texts also talked about Mykola Zlochevsky, the owner of Burisma.
    • Harvey gave Parnas contact information for Nunes, and phone records indicate that Nunes and Parnas did speak.
    • Harvey asked Parnas to look into “rumors” about any coordination between Clinton’s campaign and the Ukrainian government to find dirt on Paul Manafort.
    • Nunes has denied knowing Parnas, but was forced to acknowledge that the two had spoken.
    • The documents include text messages exchanged between Robert Hyde and Parnas indicating that Hyde had Yovanovitch under surveillance, including details of her activities.
      • The FBI has already been to Robert Hyde’s home and office.
      • Hyde says he was just joking with Parnas.
      • Oh yeah, and Hyde is running for Congress.
    • The documents show that Giuliani and Parnas were trying to secure a visa for Viktor Shokin, the prosecutor Joe Biden (and other allied countries) worked to oust.
  1. Supporters of Trump argue that we can’t trust Parnas because he’s a thug, but Parnas is backing up his story with receipts.
  2. The newly released evidence puts a little pressure on the Senate to include new evidence in the impeachment trial.

Opening Briefs:

  1. The House managers file a 111-page brief laying out their case against Trump for the Senate impeachment trial.
    • The brief explains the allegations against Trump—that he withheld both military aid approved by Congress and a White House meeting with the Ukrainian president in order to pressure Ukraine to announce and open investigations into the Bidens and Ukraine conspiracy theories.
    • It argues that Trump compounded the problems by obstructing the House investigation, and by doing so, disrupted our system of checks and balances.
    • The brief outlines the material facts gathered from the weeks of testimony and available evidence, including the GAO’s recent report and documents newly obtained by a FOIA request.
    • It emphasizes that trying to bring in a foreign country to interfere in a U.S. election is something our Founders would consider an attempt to corrupt our democratic processes.
    • The brief argues that Trump must be removed because he “will continue to endanger our national security, jeopardize the integrity of our elections, and undermine our core constitutional principles.”
  1. Trump’s legal team responds a seven-page rebuttal, and will file their brief next week.
    • The response doesn’t address the charges directly but instead says that Trump didn’t do anything wrong and that the impeachment is unconstitutional.
    • They argue that there was no crime. (Constitutional scholars say that isn’t necessary.)
    • They also argue that the American people should decide, not Congress. (That’s not how the constitution defines impeachment.)
    • Since Zelensky said the call was OK, they argue it must’ve been.
    • They say two witnesses exonerated Trump because Trump told them he wasn’t doing a quid pro quo.