Everyone isn’t like you. Don’t use that misconception to justify your own lack of principles. “They did it too!” is not something a parent would accept from a child to excuse bad behavior. It doesn’t work for adults either, and that path leads to a very dark place where there are no norms, no ethics, no right or wrong, just might makes right. Is that really what you think America should be? Seriously you may want to take a step back and think about how you really feel about our country and our obligations to those that come after us. But that’s up to you of course.
Don’t get too attached to that talking point. There’s been ONE day of hearings. I’ve read some of the testimonies of the upcoming witnesses. There are first hand accounts coming up.
Anyway, I’ve got out my popcorn. I recognize that there currently is no chance that Senate will vote for removal — but the R’s have a problem. Because I think Trump honestly believes that it is absolutely fine to tie US foreign policy to support for his campaign. And he’ll keep doing it and he will offer you absolutely nothing to hang a defense on.
And Russia will keep pulling his strings, like they did by getting that disinformation packet into Rudy Guiliani greasy hands. And Parnas and Fruman are loose cannons.
Then why doesn’t Ukraine have the $35 million they were promised?
Are you playing some sort of stupid game here? Just spit it out.
But your theory of the crime, inspector, is that —
Obama decided not to provide lethal aid;
Everyone and their mother knew that he would not provide it;
But Obama tried to cover it up by not providing a certification that is not generally made public;
McCain, Durbin, Portman, Shaheen, Graham, and all the other anti-Russian and massively pro-Ukrainian lawmakers engaged in a conspiracy to criticize Obama for not providing the aid but all keep totally mum on his violation of the notification law.
Does that tie up your theory in a clean package, detective?
The Senate holds a trial. The House hearing is the equivalent to the prosecutor sitting in his office, looking at the information that the police have brought him, and deciding which crimes he has enough evidence for that he can issue an indictment.
The only reasons to be having these hearings, that I can think of, are:
Because the Senate won’t allow the prosecution to make a case.
To raise money for the DNC for 2020.
To ensure that all of the accusations are stale and have a lot of time to accrue misleading defences against them that leave the public uncertain about the what matters any more, before it goes to the Senate.
Given that Schiff isn’t trying to make a full case, e.g. by demonstrating a historical pattern of behavior of corruption, historical evidence that Trump is not trustworthy, etc. as he would, if he was going for #1, I lean towards option #2.
We’ve all heard the conspiracy theory that Christine Blasey Ford was actually Brett Kavanaugh in drag. Here’s one for this hearing: William Taylor is actually Tom Brokaw in disguise (same exact voice).
Framing it as bribery is something I said they should do weeks ago. The Ukrainian call is clearly asking for a bribe and bribery is part of the impeachment description. Really don’t know why they argued quid pro quo for as long as they did.
Though, strangely, she reverses the direction of the bribe (or I’ve been thinking of it in reverse).
I suspect that they’ve decided that “soliciting a bribe” is too hard for the average person to equate to being the same thing as “bribing”, so they’ve made it so Trump was bribing Zelensky.
Hey, I don’t mean to interrupt the Hurricane Ditka show, who firmly controls the narrative at this point–but…I have a fact based question regarding the impeachment.
One of the major defenses the GOP has for all of this is that eventually, and without reciprocity, the money was released.
Does anyone know why? Was the money released because of an approaching deadline that would be a clear violation of congressional law? Was it released because the whistle blower had at that point outed the whole thing?
I’m a little worried the court of public opinion will be swayed by the fact that “sure, we demanded this be done in order to get the money, but they didn’t even do it and we released the money.” ***Why ***did they release the money?
The funds were released within 48 hours of the whistleblower’s information coming to public light. Behind the scenes, OMB officials were already advising Trump that withholding the aid was illegal. We are left to draw our own conclusions.
Try to remember, however, that a foiled extortion attempt is just as illegal as an accomplished one. This should be the main point you make to anyone pretending that because the funds were released, no crime occurred. Many people are convicted of attempted rape, attempted burglary, attempted conspiracy, attempted murder… you get the idea. Accomplishment of the crime is not necessary for the attempt to still be a crime.
In terms of a factual answer, all we can say is that nobody in the state department knew why the money was on hold in the first place. Ukrainian officials were asking them why the money wasn’t flowing, and they didn’t have an answer – they asked up the chain and were told nothing.
Then the whistleblower report leaked out, and the money was magically released.
Trump’s attack dogs are now claiming that Trump put a hold on the money because didn’t have enough warm fuzzies about Zeleskyy’s reform efforts until he’d met with Pence etc, and once those warm fuzzies came through he released the money.
The problem with this, of course, is that it’s all post-hoc rationalization since there’s no pre-whistleblower documentation or contemporaneous testimony backing up this reasoning for the hold. If Trump put a hold on the money pending warm fuzzies, and then got those warm fuzzies, he sure never clued anyone in as to what he was doing.
Of course, there’s this other explanation for the hold, that there IS contemporaneous testimony to support…
The thing is that I don’t actually think proving the Quid pro Quo portion of the interaction is actually required, and focusing energy on proving that is to some extent letting the Republicans control the narrative. As I posted in another thread:
Although the holding back of the aid has national security implications that make the matter particularly bad; in terms of corruption and abuse of power, it would have been it still would have been a significant abuse of power if the president made the request he made even without holding the aid in the balance. The good will of the president of the United States in and of itself is a thing of value. If you are a small country who is in the US sphere of influence, and the president says jump, he doesn’t need to tell you what will happen if you don’t jump, you’ll still answer “how high?”.
