You’re right, of course. I am surprised I even typed that. If it does come out Trump did this, they’ll just excuse it.
In an interview aired last night on Rachel Maddow, Parnas said that Trump tried to fire Yavanovitch several times before he successfully got rid of her.
Tried?
TRIED??!!
Trump is the President of the United States and Yavanovitch was his representative in Kiev. How could he NOT fire her if that is what he wanted? What kind of an administration does DJT have that he cannot make something as simple as recalling an ambassador happen? I absolutely loathe Trump, but I’ve get to wonder who is really in charge. How does this happen? For all his bloviating, is Trump really so ineffective at leading the very people who seem to have signed onto his bandwagon?
I’ll tell you one thing, though. If word got out that the black president couldn’t get an ambassador recalled, FoxNews and others would be screaming about what an ineffective leader Obama was and that he couldn’t even get his own people to do what he tells them.
The problem is that the evidence could never be 100% clear to Trumpers. If he issued the order in writing, in triplicate, signed and notarized, with video of him signing it and reiterating it vocally directly into the camera, but then later he said he didn’t do it, they’d be like “He says he didn’t do it, so who are we supposed to believe? Fake news. #MAGA”.
I originally wrote a 99% chance, but changed it to 100%. Fair enough, I’d go with the 99%. I don’t generally like to make absolute statements.
But anyway, you know how in The Godfather, the Don is never directly implicated in ordering a hit, because “the Corleone family had a lot a buffers?” The Godfather is not real life. There aren’t enough buffers in the world to keep something like this from getting out. Trump has bankrupted casinos and driven numerous Trump businesses into the ground. But he has still managed to amass a fortune that you or I couldn’t make in a thousand lifetimes. He is not an idiot. Okay, sometimes he* is* a big, fucking idiot. But does common sense not suggest that he would never be so stupid as to order a hit on the ambassador, given that he is the most watched and montiored man in the world?
ETA: And also, remember, we are talking about actual murder here. Where you get right up to their face and “bada-Bing!!! and the blood all over your nice Ivy League suit.” 
Trump may be a lot of things, but like most of us, he is not a murderer.
Given that this is a thread where we’re discussing the likelihood of Trump ordering a hit on an ambassador, I came across a line of reasoning which argues that Parnas was arrested to shut him up, given he was supposed to be testifying before the House the day after his arrest.
The arrest… October 9th… occurred a week after Trump, through John Dowd, waived a conflict of interest and actively started directing Parnas’s defense.
Then Rudy sends Parnas on a mysterious 1-way trip to Vienna. The DOJ pounces on Parnas, arresting him, got all this information… and then sat on it. For months.
Parnas isn’t stupid, he’s seeing himself being made into the fall guy. So he flips, but not to the government - the government run by the guy he worked for who just put him in jail - but to the public. And so here we are.
https://twitter.com/blakesmustache/status/1218173235902189569?s=20
Trump is a coward and it’s well documented that he is afraid to fire people directly.
This is the reality tv comfort food msm media view. Because it’s not civil to say anything beyond this. Just look at the outtakes of the tv show and don’t think any further down the line. But off camera he is quite capable of conspiracy to murder. No q about it. Just imagine the man you saw next to putin, in trouble, and looking for a solution. No stretch of imagination necessary.
He kept pushing the button but the trapdoor wouldn’t open.
Donald Trump would cheerfully let nerve gas kill ten thousand American children if he could make money off it, and I mean that absolutely literally. However, he wouldn’t do it himself. He is weak, and he’s chicken. He has a lot of bravado, but no bravery.
It is NOT in his character to actually plan a hit. That takes a degree of intestinal fortitude, however vile it might be.
It’s worse; it’s Third Generation Zillionaire Privilege. People who actually earned the family fortune understand the work that went into it. They know that you need to slap a few prostitutes around if you want to make a dollar. But two generations later, their grandchildren take being rich for granted. They’ve been rich since birth and they just assume their lifestyle is normal. They know that they’ll go to an Ivy League school regardless of whether they do any work in school; that they’ll always be a highly paid executive regardless of how many times they go bankrupt; that they’ll never be arrested much less go to prison regardless of how many times they break the law. They live a life in which there are no bad consequences, so they never develop any skills for avoiding trouble.
That’s why I said “conspiracy.” These people are very likely to be chicken, weak or whatever. That’s why conspiracy got a bad rep. It allows the chickens to make evil.
You are still imagining him alone in a room either planning or not. He is in a whirlwind of bad people and shifting fortunes at the endgame of his life.
You win!
Yup, the President of the United States… who could have just fired her at any time… was purposely told by Parnas stuff about Yovanavitch which would piss Trump off, to which Trump replied:
Do remember the last person Trump wanted “taken out” was killed in a Baghdad airport.
Question: Why would he be telling a bunch of hoodlums to take out the ambassador if he could just fire her?
I think these recent prop bets may actually come into play. It’s like betting before some random game 5 gets you 5,000 that Kobe will get 80 points… and he’s at 72 with 4 minutes left.
Let’s see how this works out. (Me? I’m on team Kobe. He’s gonna get his 80. Maybe nobody on the Lakers touches the ball ever again, but he’s getting his 80. But I don’t think the Repubs will convict. However, the House would be justified to bring up additional charges of impeachment if Parnas or the other person who is cooperating affirms they understood the President to mean ‘harm’.)
Lordy, there is video. Of what, who knows, but there’s video:
“NEW: Joseph Bondy, Lev Parnas’ attorney, tells me he turned over an hour long iPhone VIDEO recording to House Intel Committee of Pres Trump saying he wants to get rid of former Amb. Yovanovitch. Bondy says he hopes this will lead to a “tipping point” & Parnas will get to testify.”
Bondy is to appear on Maddow tonight.
I don’t wanna rain on your parade and go full-on Asahi here, but…that video won’t matter. Impeachment doesn’t matter. People don’t care. People aren’t even paying attention to the impeachment trial.
As I said, they’ll start paying attention when their economy collapses. But not until then.
MSNBC has the clip - I think the story is that once ABC released the story, Lev and his lawyer looked for and found his copy. Rachael Maddow was playing it and it was Trump saying exactly what they said he said . And Lev started it by talking smack about Yovanovitch, it was obvious he knew how to push Trump’s buttons.
But the interesting thing is that the tape is, I think they said, 1 hour and 24 minutes long. According to Lev’s lawyer, they were, in part, discussing that sleazy natural gas exporting deal they were working on.
And it’s kind of amusing how bad Trump is at firing people. I bet his aides are really in the habit of just ignoring him when he requests something stupid, at least the first few times.
Well, so much for the canard that Trump never knew this Parnas guy; just some rando he took a picture or two with.
- Sit at a dinner table with two businessmen, neither of whom has a position in the United States government.
- Order them to fire the ambassador to “the” Ukraine.
- Forget the matter, having now given orders and delegated.
- Repeat.
Think for a moment about not only what the US Senate, but also the millions of voters who actively support them and also those who just don’t care one way or another, are saying: It’s okay to use taxpayer funds allocated for diplomacy and national security interests as a political battering ram against a political rival. This country is saying, “That’s okay. No problem. None of our concern. I guess they all do it, right?”
Let it sink in.
To be fair, your average person is going to be like “Howdafu*k does giving Ukraine a load of money protect US national security?”
Schiff missed a few points there in his presentation. He should have pointed out that the power of the purse is with Congress and that it’s Congress who gets to decide where the money goes.