Nope. Not at all. I read the whole thing over lunch and was awestruck at how plainly it broke down illegal action after illegal action (and don’t even get me started on the footnotes). I can only wonder what was in that small redacted section given how shocking the rest of it was.
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I nearly forgot to mention the best line from the hearing:
“President Trump is not of the Intelligence Community.”
You can say that again…
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Yeah, they’ve made the Republican party into the Trump party - they’ve tied their fortunes with his. I wonder how nervous they are right now. Maybe not too much, as long as they’ve got Fox News.
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Whistleblower takes aim.
So Trump found an info stash more secure than David Pecker’s safe at the National Enquirer - on an NSC ultra-secret server, included with the covert action files (as per Adam Schiff on Maddow). That’s so much more sinister than what Nixon did.
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There’s a chance it might happen. McConnell might have a hard time condoning this behavior as the standard for all future presidents. Rather than be the one to hold his nose or sink the Prrrecious of the Republican base, I think he might pressure Trump into accepting resignation in exchange for legal protection against the myriad of investigations against him.
I’m not sure Trump will accept that, but I do believe it will be offered.
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I’m pretty certain the House will vote to impeach. The question is, will the Senate convict once the Articles of Impeachment are delivered?
Up until today, I was pretty sure the Senate would not. Today I am much less sure, given what I’ve read.
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Yup.
The NYT is doxxing the whistleblower as best they can.
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Big point I think everyone is missing
A) fool me once (election interference in the form of Clintons hacked email) shame on you (treasonous Trump)
B) Fool with me twice (Quid pro quo over Joe) and we will get the flamethrower.
At this point the Democrats know that if they do not come out nuking they will be eliminated by a whole host of treasonous tactics. There is impeachable crimes, and there is evidence of existential threats, and this extortion attempt by trump is an existential threat to our election system
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I love those green uniforms of the 95th Rifles…
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Ah, I think this is what I read, before I went back to try and find it again and wound up finding it in the complaint. The quote below is independent corroboration
Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn) said that, in a meeting with Zelenskyy, the latter had “directly” expressed concerns “the aid that was being cut off to Ukraine by the president was a consequence of his unwillingness to launch an investigation into the Bidens.”
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Here is my jaded, life-experience rebuttal to your strong take:
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This is really the key. They can argue the president didn’t say, “You do this for me if you want aid” but if Zelensky understood it that way then the only argument against corruption is that Trump is just too confusing to be understood by foreign leaders, which is impeachable on its own for national security reasons.
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Well it’s nice to know how old most of these people are. Barr and Giuliani were practically plucked from retirement cuz they couldn’t find younger toadies. Kavanaugh seems way too young for comfort unfortunately.
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I think they would, given the very real possibilities of a negative backlash over impeachment - much less chance of political backlash over a resignation. And congress wouldn’t be the problem there, it would most certainly be Trump himself. He’s too full of himself to ever consider it at this point.
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Speaking of Nixon, has anyone else watched Country Music on PBS? They mentioned how Nixon – just months from the end of his presidency – showed up in Nashville at the opening of the Grand Ole Opry (when it had moved to Opryland).
For context, they showed a radio station billboard showing its support for Mr. Nixon:
“Fans of our music,” a CNA offical said, “elect the President, run the factories, grow the food, transport our goods” [etc.]
Of course this is Ken Burns’ take on it, but I thought it was an interesting parallel to current events, Fox News etc.
Video is here, but may work differently depending on your location etc. Relevant portion is within the first 20 minutes or so.
(Actually the couple of episodes I’ve seen thus far were quite good. I’m not (that) much of a country fan, and neither are my parents, nor were their parents – although all of us were born in or around Nashville; my mom’s family lived a mile or so from Opryland. But I was surprised at how much I already knew, I guess just from Nashvillian osmosis.)
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I have to disagree; when it happened, there was a vast amount of resentment on the part of the American people that Nixon was allowed to resign and, essentially, stride away from any repercussions of his actions. There was a collective “you can f’n resign from the presidency?” that was poorly resolved when Gerald Ford gave him the pardon a few months later.
You’d better believe that in this internet age, that particular move will now be heralded waaaaaay in advance, and Congress won’t be able to just grab the resignation and go, as they did the first time.
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That entirely true, but I’m speaking more to the congress? I think they are connecting this to what happened to the GOP after the Clinton impeachment, and I’d argue although the type of crimes we’re talking about the Trump is more like Nixon’s, the politicized landscape is more like during Clinton. It’s also true that by the time Nixon resigned, he had lost whatever popular support he might have had, from most of the public AND from his allies in congress. Nixon was absolutely smart enough to see the writing on the wall, and he actually did care enough about the office to not want to go through the process.
None of this is true with Trump though. First, he would be the one who would not resign the office, because he legitimately does not care about it, except as it relates to empowering/enriching himself. Second, given how cautious Pelosi has been (due to the backlash the GOP got after Clinton), she’d be happy to have an out and I think those of us who DO support impeachment would be happy to see him go, especially if him being a private citizen again meant prosecution. Now, if who ever the president was when he resigned pardoned Trump if he resigned, plenty of people would be pissed off and there would be political repercussions. Last, I don’t know if anything will shake his hardcore of supporters, both in congress and in the public in general. There seem to be far more people in the mainstream of the party who are willing to hang on to this president and might even go down with him.
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Just a bit of perspective - Ford felt that Nixon, by accepting the pardon, accepted as a “confession of guilt” with it.
" After Ford left the White House in 1977, he privately justified his pardon of Nixon by carrying in his wallet a portion of the text of Burdick v. United States , a 1915 U.S. Supreme Court decision that suggests that a pardon carries an imputation of guilt and that acceptance carries a confession of guilt.[[4]"
I know I was angry that “Nixon got away with it”, but he really didn’t. He became the symbol of a lying, corrupt, dirt-bag and has been the butt of jokes ever since. I hope our current position holder meets the same end, at the very least.
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