It may be worth noting that Nixon was not under indictment when Ford pardoned him.
People have proposed Amendments in this thread, and here’s my proposal.
Whenever a president is subjected to a valid impeachment inquiry (validity to be determined by SCOTUS), his (or her, it could — eventually — be a her) pardoning prerogative is suspended for the duration (that is, until the inquiry is ended without Articles of impeachment being returned, or a verdict has been reached by the Senate).
Unintended ramifications might include the president announcing pardons under consideration during the period of suspension (which could be addressed by including a gag order in the wording of the amendment), and such an amendment incentivizing getting as many appointees on the Court as possible, as quickly as possible.
P.S. The amendment should also expressly prohibit self-pardoning.
There are a lot of people posting, and it becomes impractical to directly address each person in my posts. I had your comment, and others, in mind when I wrote the snippet below. I included a quote from another poster though, because I read many posters saying they exclude certain sources from their consideration entirely, and the poster I cited even expressed being only willing to read written sources, which I considered an extreme case of having such “blinders” on. It seems to me that the people on the side of “Trump needs to be impeached because of what we are hearing in the testimony” are of the “blinders on” type, while those saying “this doesn’t add up to anything remotely impeachable” are more open to perusing a variety of sources.
To directly address what you wrote: I thought you meant I was confused about what Yovanovitch was trying to say. But since the first clip in the video above was from a prepared opening statement, it is “less likely to be an innocent mistake”, and thus, compared to the admission in the second clip, as I wrote above: “to me it suggests that wherever she thinks she can get away with it, she will bend the truth, or perhaps lie, to paint Trump in a bad light”.
I don’t want to see any of these witnesses brought up on perjury charges. They have been goaded into these hearings by Democrats just out for their own political gain, and are not being given the proper cautions about testifying under oath. Google “why you should ask for a lawyer” and you will get many results explaining (among other things) that to varying degrees everyone tells white lies, rewrites events subconsciously to fit what they are thinking now, make mistakes, etc. But it appears they are just being rushed into this and promoted from the secret to the open hearings if what they say looks bad for Trump, but with no regard for making sure they aren’t mistaken, or telling the sort of lies they tend to in casual conversation but don’t even notice, in their testimony. Luckily for them, I don’t think the Republicans are going to prosecute them for it. This is having an effect I don’t think the Democrats foresaw though. Recall that in the Mueller probe a number of Trump associates were convicted of lying, and the sources it seems many people posting here refuse to look at have voiced the “people are not robots” defense in regards to some of the counts of lying: Roger Stone is an example recently in the news. And things like this from
So now it has become a Republican rallying point to call out the draconian treatment of Trump’s associates for lies or “misstatements” compared to the apparent letting such things slide for the Democrat’s impeachment witnesses. This will have the effect of having his supporters chomping at the bit to go vote for him in 2020.
Of course you don’t, because it would be embarrassing to have yet another MAGA legal matter laughed out of court. The playbook for the Trump defense is slander and innuendo, and staying away from facts as possible.
You have failed to address what I wrote, and I’m not sure you even understand why.
Do you know how confirmation hearings work? Applicants sit in front of the senate and get asked questions about their past experience. For some applicants, this involves getting softball questions from their own side, and getting grilled by the other side. In order to prepare applicants for this grilling, especially non-lawyer applicants who probably don’t otherwise have any experience with this sort of high pressure “gotcha” type of questioning, staffers will prepare “mock” questions and pretend to be opposing-side senators. It’s like the PSAT for confirmation hearings.
It appears that during Amb. Yavonovitch’s preparations, Obama staffers “mock” grilled her about Biden/Burisma, in anticipation of Republicans doing the same during her confirmation hearing.
The fact that they prepared her for this attack is in no way the same thing as Obama discussing Biden/Burisma with her during the course of her actual duties.
That’s the simple, non-sinister explanation for this contradiction you think you’ve found. Do you dispute any of what I described?
Jim Peebles, do you honestly think that Trump’s fixation on Hunter Biden is totally and completely unrelated to the fact that his father is his major political opponent at this point in time?
And, as to the rest of this stuff, I suspect the Republicans will not be prosecuting Yovanovitch for the same reason they’re not prosecuting me for eating breakfast. Because they know there’s absolutely no fucking reason.
And I expect that soon the investigation will expand beyond the phone call. Way beyond. Cause if the State Department had a policy of actively trying to put Westerners on the board of Ukrainian corporations, and the President and his henchmen were trying to subvert that process by getting Russian friendly interests on the board of those companies, there’s a word for that. And it’s not bribery.
And Gym Jordan will be reduced to taking off his pants and screaming at the witnesses in pig Latin, then disparaging them by showing video of the confusion on their faces.
No Philly guy could ever support the idiot where I come from. I grew up 55 miles from AC in NJ in the '80s, '90s. (Go, EAGLES!) There’s still unresolved class action suits over the Taj Mahal bankruptcy. We knew he couldn’t run a hot dog stand then and it still surprises me how ANYONE outside the Trump family could ever consider him a candidate for anything. We knew then he never saw a business plan through to the end.
Yes I do. In fact, I think Trump would prefer to run against Biden over all the other Democrat contenders. Biden appears to be going senile, and Trump would crush him in debates. And if you type “creepy Uncle Joe” into youtube, you will find numerous videos which can be turned into campaign commercials to broadcast in October 2020. On top of that Biden is an old white male, which is used to disparage Republican candidates all the time.
Trump is an idiot. There is zero question on that matter.
I wrote out a post giving about 1/3rd of the variety of evidence to support that statement and the gophers ate it. I don’t feel like retyping it at the moment.
So I’ll say this:
Michael Jackson was horrible with money and stopped developing at about age 12. For as much as he earned, he was never able to bring in more than he lost. He was both an idiot and a genius. He was a bad investment, if your intentions were benign, and a great investment if your goal is for Michael to simply serve as a host for your parasitic feeding.
Payday loans are not unique to the poor. Many people have a large amount of cash flow while being, basically, idiots with a very specific talent for which they are greatly rewarded.
See “tom barrack michael jackson”. See also “tom barrack donald trump otaiba” or “colony capital trump wall”.
If you read The Big Con, the definitive book on con artists, it’s famously said that all con artists are broke because they have a gambling addiction. They live for the rush and that always ends up screwing them over, but they can’t help it.
Overall, I can prove both from evidence, math, experience, and basic logic that Trump is an idiot who, yes, has a Michael Jackson sort of genius. If any of those categories in particular appeal to you, I can lay out for you the subsection in that line which proves the point.
If Biden is going senile, then at least Trump will have company. Trump sounds like someone emptied his skull with an ice cream scoop and replaced it with cottage cheese.
That debate would be the the ultimate “get off my lawn” event. Add Bernie Sanders, and you have "Grumpy Old Men III "
Trump has no way to crush Biden in a debate. Anything he can go after Biden about, he’s done already, and ten times worse. Trump isn’t running against just Biden (or any other Dem nominee). He’s running against the 2016 Trump, too, and all the scandals, broken promises and “anyone but Hillary” voters that he has to try to keep.
I’d love to see a Trump debate vs Mayor Pete. Talk about the ultimate in differing styles. Mayor Pete may be one of the most prepared candidates I’ve ever seen. And, as an openly gay man, he’s familiar with the concept of not taking the bait with any barbs that Trump may throw his way.
That would be someone getting crushed in a debate.
To the degree Trump has a talent it is his capacity to demean others. His interest is in demeaning every possible competitor and to the degree he is able to catalyze some inside the D tent ugliness, bonus. It, and claiming how best and most unfairly treated ever he is, is really all he knows how to do.
There is no serious debate about the simple facts. Trump is a pathological liar who believes that the tools of the United States government are his to use for his personal benefit and anything that could potentially inhibit that should be destroyed (our intelligence community, our diplomatic corp, the scientific community, so on). He attempted to bully a U.S. dependent nation with threats that were against American interests into doing something beneficial for him personally, and created an “irregular” channel to facilitate the pursuit of his personal gains over identified American interests.
Those are facts. You can believe in Santa Claus or that Godzilla just destroyed New York, facts are still facts.
I think at this point we can say that very few people are going to change their opinion on Trump. If that Biden-Trump debate happened, people would come away with two very different conclusions based on their beliefs prior to the debate. Some would see a liar and an idiot, some would see a masterful businessman who tells it like it is.
We can sum it up with this meme that has been around since before the 2016 election;
“Trump is the poor man’s idea of a rich person, the stupid man’s idea of a smart person, and the weak man’s idea of a strong person.”
For someone to believe that Trump, who has always been a liar and a cheat, has the best interests of the country at heart, and that thousands of people who have demonstrated personal integrity throughout their whole careers are out to get him, is nonsensical. They are not going to change their minds.
Trump’s success is not from intelligent, problem solving/negotiating abilities. His success is mostly due to him being threatening and his willingness to fight dirty and take people down.