My guesses, in rough order of likelihood, would be MBS, Netanyahu, or Putin.
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Trump has recognised Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, so perhaps Putin asked him when he was going to get off his arse and recognise Russian sovereignty over Crimea.
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… and Georgia… and Poland… and well, lets just put up that good old Iron Curtain,eh?
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Schiff’s letter to DNI from the 13th [edited] says:
“You have also refused to rule out to me that the urgent concern, and underlying conduct, relates to an area of active investigation by the Committee.”
If whistleblower matter is already under active investigation by HPSCI that would push the main suspect for the other end of the conversation to be Putin.
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Let the whistle blower be a fucking US patriot and go public with his or her information.
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Yeah, his promises suck.
However it would be nice if he kept his oath of duty to USA and the office of president. That would a start.
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Barr: I checked it out, and there’s nothing to see here.
Congress: But you’re legally obligated to show us.
Barr: I’ll have the DoJ check out who blocked it from being shown to you.
Congress: You did.
Barr: I can’t comment on an ongoing investigation.
Congress: But you can rectify it somewhat by showing us now.
Barr: No.
Congress: Okay, then we’re going to subpoena Maguire.
Maguire: Okay, but give me a week to make sure we all have our stories straight, and I can figure out what I withhold from you and get away with it.
Congress: Okay.
Trump: (thanks all)
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But only after he wins the next election…
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Not yet. As easy as it is to call on someone to martyr themselves for expediency, there are procedures a whistle blower can still follow and keep their life (relatively) intact. Filing the report was step one. Next is having some evidence that it was ignored or covered up. That there was no other regular avenue to getting the problem resolved. That opens other avenues.
The IG conclusion is a bit of figleaf, but not for public disclosure.
Oddly, congress learning about the report slows things down. With congress and the WH battling over release, a whistle blower can’t in good faith say the report won’t get to those who can resolve the problem. And it makes public disclosure by this person almost impossible. The next step, even if congress didn’t know, would have been to disclose what happened to someone with clearance oversight of this part of government. Often someone higher up, but in this case it’s congress.
As things stand now, they need some vote in congress and/or a court ruling that congress should get the report. Then this person can disclose to the chairperson of the right committee and live to tell the tale.
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I saw some negative statements Trump has made about spies. This is exactly why corrupt business people shouldn’t be running a country - it’s a totally different strategy / game. He sees all spies as rats and narcs who might expose his dirty deeds. It’s a mafia / don’t snitch mentality. That even foreign assets are somehow inherently undesirable because it means that we have compromised citizens as well. Despite the fact that having good human intelligence is one of our country’s most important defense assets for preventing terrorism, wars and aiding diplomacy.
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He still talks about how Obama spied on him, and about how the Deep State is after him. Whether or not the pee tape thing is true, I’m sure he still wants to take revenge for it. He doesn’t read intelligence reports, as he goes by his own judgement, so he doesn’t think he needs an intelligence apparatus. I think this may be it.
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Even better if the live feed was on Fox News, as then it would be one of those picture of a picture of a picture infinite regression things.
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Well now I am super curious what that promise was.
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Good to know Nancy Pelosi’s being careful, cautious and accommodating about all this while the country gets ruined.
Again, every current Democrat in Congress can and should be primaries, from the left, for the simple reason that they’re committing dereliction of duty.
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There’s so much amazing about this story. Not just the accusation itself, but everything around it is pretty wild(ly awful). E.g. apparently Trump had already restricted information about what he said to foreign leaders after White House staff became alarmed when he revealed secret information to the Russians a number of times. And that this complaint was required to go before congress, but it was illegally withheld (and all the shenanigans around that). That’s pretty damning all by itself.
Though the list of leaders he had spoken to in the five weeks before the complaint included Putin, Kim Jong Un and some completely unlikely ones (e.g. the PM of Luxembourg). So the (most likely) options are rather narrowed down…
One of my uncles thinks that Trump being revealed as the traitor that he is will cause his supporters to drop their support of him. I rather think that absolutely nothing he does (that doesn’t hugely negatively impact them) will bother them - they’ll just see it as betraying the nation to own the libs, so they’ll be fine with it.
To be fair, one some days it’s every fucking hour.
Unfortunately at this point, killing whistleblowers does seem like a believable progression.
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That we know of.
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Agreed.
They will be fine with it.
They are pridefully unreachable.
Full stop.
And fwiw I really doubleplusUNLIKE posting this image, but here they are, and they seem pretty ok with treason in this picture:
There’s a solid chunk of Neal Stephenson’s latest (Fall or, Dodge in Hell)…
… where Stephenson writes about a post-truth “Ameristan” that I see as an extremely plausible “[the nation formerly known as the USA] in a few years [if that]” …
The way Stephenson tells it, there was a 300-year period in human history when folk by-and-large found themselves able “to agree on matters of fact not immediately visible to them”. This collective consensus peaked during what he calls “the Cronkite era”, but then “dropped to zero incredibly quickly when the internet came along”. Post-truth turns out to be a grim sort of place to live…
The portrayal of Ameristan, a geographical section of the U.S. that I fled, is so very close to the logical scatterplot extrapolation of future U.S. generations of those two old “gentlemen” in the picture above. (Maybe a bit OT: I absolutely refuse to post the completely fucked up picture of those Nazi shits in Charlottesville with their tiki torches, chanting and snarling, but Stephenson’s Ameristanis are basically those dudes and their kkkulture, may each and every one of them be an incel forever, should each choose to stay on that Nazi path.
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Then we had better get busy!
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It turns out the complaint involves a “series of actions” so far all we know, there was something problematic with all the world leaders Trump had talked to…
(Though I’m not sure Trump is smart enough to have secret communications with foreign leaders, anyways. Ivanka and Jared can manage it, but I just don’t see Trump doing it. He commits treason in public view after all.)
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