Two years later, nothing has changed
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“though” being the operative word… yes.
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No one would ever talk like that. Might as well wait for Trump to say, “Hey, maybe we could do some crimes together!”
When you are withholding foreign aid that was passed by the legislature and then you ask for a favour, the other person will infer that they are being extorted. People who are extorting you to “look into” their enemies are not extorting you to be even handed and fair.
If Lindsey Graham (or anyone else) is comfortable with this should think about whether they would be comfortable if the next president called up President Xi and said, “I’d really like to end this trade war, and while we’re talking, would you look into financial misdeeds of Lindsey’s Graham’s family?”
I think characterizing this as seeking political dirt is crazy. This was Trump seeking to have a foreign government prosecute the family of a political rival. It’s only in Trump’s crazy head where other people don’t really exist and there is no difference between the two. The rest of us should know better.
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specifically disclaimed as “not a verbatim transcript”
Apparently it’s what they call a “memcon,” a memorandum of conversation memorializing the call. I.e. a memo. The actual call was three times longer.
And yet it’s still damning as hell.
Because, essentially, that’s what it is, since it’s a “memcon” not a “transcript.”
Trump had already contradicted himself as to what was discussed/his reason for withholding military aid, so…
And keep in mind - this is not actually the transcript. It’s a memo ostensibly capturing the essence of the conversation. It contains a fraction of the content of the actual call, and has been massaged into something more palatable. Yet even so, it still manages to be damning, so the transcript is going to be worse.
Trump thinks he’s Moriarty.
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<extremely yakkity sax on kazoo noises>
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Just what happened there, anyway? I could take a moment and look it up, but (pre-mayor) didn’t he used to be a prosecutor, perhaps even a widely-feared person in NYC? Love him or hate him, was he not good at what he did? Even accounting for nepotism, the Peter Principle, Dilbert Principle etc., I doubt that Giuliani got to be a prosecutor by shooting his mouth off, saying stupid things, and generally acting like a buffoon, yet that is mainly all that I’ve seen from him for the past decade (give or take).
What happened to him that he’d hitch his wagon to the likes of Donald Trump and (apparently) take the stupid pill? (ETA) He seems like someone who (at least a few years ago) would have known better.
But then, I guess one could ask the same thing about Our Fellow Americans.
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Kissinger was at least Secretary of State.
Giuliani is…Trump’s personal lawyer, employed by Trump?
Why is a personal lawyer and the USAG Barr doing foreign relations? Where the fuck is Pompeo in all this??
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Pompeo apparently has his hands full being a dick about Iran at the UN.
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with apologies to Nina Simone
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“It sounds horrible to me”
Well of course it does, you’ve only heard about it from Fox News hyping it as evidence of corruption. Biden bragged publicly about it because he knows it wasn’t corruption, the State Dept. and all the G7 countries wanted Viktor Shokin fired because he wasn’t doing his job.
" Shokin was appointed General Prosecutor of Ukraine on 10 February 2015.[4] He became deeply unpopular and was accused of blocking major cases against allies and influential figures and hindering the fight against corruption in Ukraine.[5]"
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And there’s a good portion of what he says would be insulting to writers of poorly written fan fiction…
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We need to hear from the whistleblower. There is more to this.
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There’s good indication that Rudy had something to with getting the US Ambassador to Ukraine, Marie L. Yovanovitch fired and you can bet Mr. Pompeo had his mits in that too.
I’d post the section where this is described but, the WaPo is telling me that I have exceeded my free content.
Read here:
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Trump seems to think otherwise:
Good because I heard you had a prosecutor who was very good and he was shut down and that’s really unfair. A lot of people are talkinga bout that, the way they shut your very good prosecutor down and you had some very bad people involved.
Well, didn’t take long to answer that one.
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The dude was so corrupt that Ukrainians were protesting in the streets for his dismissal. Biden just tied his firing as part of a much-needed aid package.
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The short version is that he started to get high on his own supply of PR after 9/11. When the city and then the nation didn’t suitably recognise their need to have him as benign despot for life, he got bitter. He found companionship in his egomania in his old orange pal from NYC.
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a streaming flow of shit vomit.
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Trump: I would never say that, but I totally could if I wanted to.
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He made his bones as a US Attorney in the SDNY supervising very, very good attorneys prosecuting organized crime cases and then taking credit for their work. He was generally well respected, but his abilities of self-promotion were substantially better than his actual abilities as a lawyer.
(and, let’s not forget, in a just world he also would have had to answer for his decisions to put the emergency response center in the WTC against advice and common sense, which literally cost people’s lives but ran counter to the America’s Mayor narrative that we wanted at the time)
I think the bitterness of old age combined with cognitive impairment explain a lot. Hitching his wagon to Trump has made him an Important Person again who gets to be on the teevee and have his ass kissed by a whole new crop of folks. And having something genuinely wrong with his noggin explains why he literally can’t keep his own talking points straight from one minute to the next when he’s riled up. At the risk of running afoul of house rules, I’d bet my mortgage payment that an examination by a medical profession would result in a diagnosis of something that would prevent him from holding any position of authority requiring insurance.
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