Actually, you’re missing a key but forgotten part of the story. You make it sound like Byrd was carrying water for a partisan cause. The facts do not bear this out.
While the impeachment was still winding its way through the process, the Clinton White House has a behind-the-scenes effort to convince 34 Democratic senators to sign a letter saying that they would not vote to convict Clinton, essentially an effort to short-circuit the whole process and make it into a effort that was obviously doomed from the start.
Byrd regarded the impeachment and trial as a historic and serious process, and strongly opposed Clinton’s effort to secure his not guilty verdict before the case was even made.
So Byrd made a speech that included these lines:
Byrd did offer the motion to dismiss some of the charges, but AFTER Clinton was impeached and the arguments were made before the Senate. The trial started on January 7, and Byrd made his motion on the 25th, after three days of arguments from the prosecution, three days of arguments from the defense, and two days of questions from Senators. Then another two days of closed door debate on Byrd’s motion and another on whether to call witnesses, and the vote happened and failed on the 27th. (That’s a longer trial than the police officer in Texas received for her murder charge.)
It’s pretty hard, even in the ways that some people want to paint Dems as bad people who act on orders from pollsters or political commissars or whatever, to spin Byrd’s role in the Clinton impeachment as being anything about politics or party. In fact, I’d go so far to say that it’s the same level of misunderstanding the facts as Trump and his associates typically exhibit.
McConnell has stated that there will be a trial if Trump is impeached, but hinted that it may be a brief trial. Who knows what will actually happen, but what McConnell is hinting at - that this effort isn’t something deserving a whole lot of respect - would seem to be a far cry from the institutionalist role that Byrd played in 1998.
So I suggest that before you play your “both sides do it” card, you should first understand what the first side actually did.
I’ve asked for people to point to specific things, NOT just links. When I post links, I point to what they say to support my argument. A perfect example of the opposite is #1319, where Elvis posted this link. Do you seriously think I’m gonna wade through all of that trying to ascertain what he wanted me to get out of it? It’s not my responsibility to do this for links. It’s the poster’s.
I said I was out of this discussion. If anyone would like to discuss specific things as to how Trump is or is not controlled by foreign entities, please start a new thread. I think this thread has had enough of it.
Joe Biden threatened to withhold aid from Ukraine unless they dropped their corrupt prosecutor Viktor Shokin. That is not disputed, to my knowledge, and it was a foreign policy act. I am not familiar with the legality of withholding appropriated aid then, nor am I now. In Trump-world, Mr. Shokin was clean and Joe Biden was the corrupt one protecting his son from international law enforcement. Therefore, the basis for Joe Biden’s actions is the basis for Mr. Trump’s actions: Ukraine must crack down on corruption before we send aid.
Obviously you and I don’t believe the Biden conspiracy for a second. But if Mr. Trump and his administration did, what are you going to do? Most crimes require criminal intent, but is it abuse of power if Mr. Trump legitimately believes his requests fall under foreign policy? If he pleads ignorance, or worse (and more likely), that he is right? If you argue that a reasonable person doesn’t believe the Biden conspiracy theory, realize that the “jury” is almost half populated by Republicans who may in actuality or for political reasons subscribe to the same theory.
We have a situation where there are multiple recorded conversations that neither the public nor the Congress are privy too. One similar conversation is seen by some to show an impeachable abuse of presidential authority. The executive branch has already classified the memorandums, presumably as Secret. The media reports that confidential government sources say the president did the same thing in the other conversations with foreigners.
I say, don’t release the records to the public until Congress reviews them and files a formal article of impeachment based on them. You seem to say, release them to the public before that happens.
If I had my way, the House of Representatives would be the one deciding whether or not the memorandums are valid foreign policy communications (not OK for public consumption) or evidence of impeachable conduct (for public consumption). If you had your way, just who decides whether the records are for public consumption or not?
Thanks for sharing this. I do hope it turns out to be good-interesting and not bad-interesting.
My personal initial reflexive reaction was like a whipped dog, who didn’t quite grasp that what was being offered was a nice juicy bone, not a club for a smack. Still don’t know which one.
The State Department is full of career servants. Plenty of them are not going to be at all pleased with Pompeo’s defiance of Congress. The Inspector General may provide a means for them to communicate important information to congress through appropriate channels.
There are certainly other possibilities, but this one seems likeliest.
Also: I would super love it if conversations about circumstantial evidence, Occam’s Razor, and whatever the hell else y’all are on about could be in a dedicated thread. The past two pages or so are full of bickering that’s not particularly interesting to anyone except the bickerers.
If I had my way, they should be subject to FOIA like trillions of other government records, which are also subject to withholding or redaction due to real, not feigned, security reasons.
What did that have to do with upcoming American elections, or specifically Biden’s forthcoming electoral fortunes? That’s a pretty important difference don’t you think? Do you think it is acceptable for Presidents to pressure foreign countries using US taxpayer dollars to dig up dirt on political opponents? Ask yourself this, would you be ok if Obama did this to Romney in 2012?
Not only that, he was acting in accordance with the agreed-upon best interests of the country in doing so, along with many other allies and the IMF. There is no comparison. Acting out of our best national interests is supposed to be the job – not furthering your own selfish political interests. Is the difference so difficult to discern?
And on a similar note, this Politico article brings up the important point of Pompeo’s’ hypocritical claim to be protecting state department officials in light of what he did to the Ukrainian ambassador.
The memorandum itself gives the original classification “SECRET//ORCON/NOFORN”. EO 13526 Section 6.1 (l) says '“Damage to the national security” means harm to the national defense or foreign relations of the United States from the unauthorized disclosure of information, taking into consideration such aspects of the information as the sensitivity, value, utility, and provenance of that information." Section 1.2 (a)(2) reads, ‘“Secret” shall be applied to information, the unauthorized disclosure of which reasonably could be expected to cause serious damage to the national security that the original classification authority is able to identify or describe.’
In my opinion, if Russia or any other hostile actor knew that American military aid to Ukraine is conditioned on Ukrainian cooperation on specific investigations, they have an incentive to sabotage those investigations and thus our military cooperation with Ukraine. No military cooperation means Ukraine has less missiles to fire at the Russians, which means Ukraine’s national security is weaker than it would have been. We have created a potential risk to the national security… of Ukraine. And generally speaking, weakening the national security of an ally could reasonably result in serious damage to the foreign relations of the United States.
So going by my opinion and interpretation of the executive order and the memorandum, I would say Secret-level classification is warranted.
Regarding the alleged move to a top-secret archive from the usual archive, I have a suspicion that such a move was made without specific instructions from the president because that is the kind of environment he runs. It would fall on the Director of National Intelligence to ensure the maximum number of people with Secret-level clearance can access the memorandums; EO 13526 Sec. 4.2 (a). The president may have repeatedly demanded that the director crack down on leaks after the leaked conversation between Mr. Trump and EPN, sequestering future memorandums might not have been a specific instruction from the president, but a general policy instituted at that point. So I see someone else taking the blame for that one.
So, if the world found out our President was extorting another world leader for political help, it would be damaging to foreign relations? You don’t say. So how damaging is the act itself then? Isn’t any malfeasance super secret classifiable under the same rationale? Do you see where the road of this logic leads us?
Yep. If you want to get an understanding of the totality of the case against Trump you are going to have to do some reading.
Its like Climate Change. Its a common tactic from Climate Change deniers to “demand proof.” I could point you to here but then you would be demanding that I pull sentences from that report that prove climate change is happening. So I do that: but then the Climate Denier would probably reply with “that’s not evidence.”
Because ultimately context is important. And if you don’t understand the underlying context of the story then any pull-quotes aren’t going to prove anything to you.
This is an extraordinarily deep and complex story. I’ve had a cursory look at the Moscow Project and the authors seem uncontroversial, the information looks accurate, and it seems to be about as good a primer as any for getting an understanding of Trump’s ties to foreign powers.
Nobody will be able to summarise decades of activity in a messageboard-friendly pull-quote. If that was your expectation then I’m sorry but nobody will be able to meet them.
I didn’t drag you back into the discussion. If you wanted out: then just stop posting.
My post was entirely on the subject of what is and what isn’t evidence. I’ll take this as a concession that “evidence has been posted” in this thread.
There is also a small difference of threatening to implement a policy change (which one presumes would go by way of Congress as part of the administration leading international consensus on overall corruption in Ukraine) and just going ahead and doing it (even for a bit), with no attention to corruption overall but to the imagined dirt that he dreams might be found that he could use for his election campaign.
EVEN in a fantasy alternate reality in which Biden was a Snidley Whiplash corrupt hack there would no similarity.
There would still be no national interest in a specific investigation of one possible crime by one person. Oh I get it in Trumpvision - the national interest is having Trump re-elected. Anything that serves that is patriotic and anything that goes against that is treason.
That was the wrong answer to a rhetorical question. The President and his executive branch would be the only ones that could make that determination, which they did make, when the document was originally classified as Secret.