Yeah, I’m dumb sometimes. The President would be a civilian commander of the military. :smack:
~Max
THis doesn’t answer my question. You argue as if there is no such thing as reality testing or that it shouldn’t be used in this instance.
You argue that John Roberts should entertain the notion that dt is “concerned about corruption” and “worked around” the constitution to do it and that is an “innocent” position. How does that work?
dt is the commander in chief of certain govt functions under the constitution. But he is not supposed to be meddling or involved day to day, independently of govt functions and heirarchies, and his own chain of command, (command: as in commander in chief) to act on specific matters.
If someone is a commander in chief he is subject to a heirarchy of command. If you want to go outside of that good luck. But it is not comand anymore.
You gotta break a few eggs to make an omelette? You gotta be cruel to be kind? You have to break the law to uphold the law? Nice guys finish last? Just spitballing here.
You are right to imply that “shocks the judicial conscience” refers to things like torture. But the defense theory is that the “favor” is not Biden/Burisma but investigations into Ukrainian interference in the 2016 election.
Regarding Biden/Burisma, the defense brief reads:
“The Vice President of the United States, while operating under an apparent conflict of interest, had possibly used a billion dollars in U.S. loan guarantees to force the dismissal of a prosecutor who may have been pursuing a legitimate corruption investigation. […] Even if the Vice President’s motives were pure, the possibility that a U.S. official used his position to derail a meritorious investigation made the Biden-Burisma affair a legitimate subject to raise. Indeed, any President would have wanted to make clear both that the United States was not placing any inquiry into the incident off limits and that, in the future, there would be no efforts by U.S. officials do something as “horrible” as strong-arming Ukraine into dropping corruption investigations while operating under an obvious conflict of interest.[SUP]764[/SUP][…]”
“Importantly, mentioning the whole Biden-Burisma affair would have been entirely justified as long as there was a reasonable basis to think that looking into the matter would advance the public interest.”
(Note 764 refers to Mr. Trump’s use of the word “horrible” in the 7/25/19 call memorandum)
~Max
The assertions in the brief were simply not credible that Trump had some sort of decision that corruption had been addressed on a substantive basis on or about September 11.
First, Portman reportedly said that it was the “prudent” thing to do to release the aid. According to Tim Morrison, Portman focused on the NEED for the aid, since Ukraine is at war with Russia.
Second, the White House learned at exactly that time that the whistleblower report had gone to Congress on September 9.
Third, throughout all the email dumps and testimony provided so far, there isn’t any real evidence that the Administration actually did anything with respect to corruption in Ukraine during the period of the hold, other than asking for investigaitons into Burisma and the DNC server. For example, the unredacted emails show DoD asking OMB repeatedly WHY the aid was being held up, and could not get an answer. Since DoD officials had certified that Ukraine was making progress in fighting corruption, if the hold was actually about reform to eliminate corruption, one would expect that OMB would have communicated to DoD that they disagreed with DoD’s assessment.
Instead, the real reasons for the hold were kept secret from other agencies. The only reasonable inference is that the true reasons for the hold were corrupt, as John Bolton has described them. Therefore, the hold could not have been either instituted or released due to satisfying some Administration policy on corruption.
Uhm, again, it’s established fact that this is a total lie.
Sorry, I just don’t understand the question. If you are asking why we should entertain Mr. Trump’s defense argument, it’s because I don’t think the defense is absurd on its face, and barring such an absurdity Mr. Trump is entitled to consideration of his defense argument.
I also disagree that the defense case admits the President “‘worked around’ the constitution”, but you are free to share whatever led you to that conclusion.
~Max
As regards the LEO thing, I’d say that the question of whether the President is or is not one was not strongly relevant to my point.
Let’s present two examples.
A woman, Melinda, is appointed to be General and commander of all troops deployed to the Middle East.
To date, she has been great at her job. She earned the title and role. But, she’s been doing this job for decades now, working her way up to the top, pushing papers, reviewing troops, writing policy reports, etc. But, fundamentally, she got into the military because she wanted to be a person who goes out there and kills bad guys. To be sure, nominally, she is still a soldier but nothing that she does is actual “soldiering” and, darn it, she’s been doing this long enough, she’s earned her stars, it’s her prerogative to decide how best to lead her troops!
And so, Melinda flies to the Middle East meets her number two and, in essence gives him the keys to the kingdom, with carte blanche to lead as he wants. The only thing is that there must be a special operations team, handling the biggest problems, manned by the best troops, and Melinda is going to lead that herself - on the ground, gun in hand. The second in command cannot give them orders. He cannot deny any request they make. He just has to let Melinda and her little force run free, while stiffed with the job that Melinda is meant to be doing.
Example 2
Willard is a lighthouse keeper. He is also a semi-pro rower, trying to go pro and win a major competition.
He took on the job of lighthouse keeper thinking that he’d be on the water; lots of free time and access to practice his rowing. But, as it turns out, he’s really pretty locked down to staying in the lighthouse, babysitting the light every day. He’s not allowed to leave and get in his boat, and practice out in the water. “What a stupid rule. I could be back to the lighthouse in 10 seconds flat! I’m an almost pro rower!”
And so he decides that he will not stay in the lighthouse. He will go out, onto the water, and practice his sport.
The defense case is…what does one even say. What they admit to, what they don’t…You want to get inside that swamp?
It’s hard to imagine a spoken conversation where it could be claimed that dts defense is not absurd so here we are in writing. It’s not more believable.
It is absurd for one thing to say he was acting as a govt agent fighting corruption, when he was trying to operate rogue outside of our govt, and keep this from his chain of command, rather than operate within the constitution. Commander in chief implies a chain of command.
I am in awe of Adam Schiff. His presentations have been masterful.
I don’t think this is a contradiction, both words came from the same mouth. The only criticism I can see here is that the section of Mr. Morrison’s testimony describing the meeting is hearsay. (Mr. Morrison named his sources as coming from the VP’s office, and also alleged that the President, Vice President, Chief of Staff, and Senator Portman were in the room.)
See p 242-243 of Mr. Morrison’s deposition: https://intelligence.house.gov/uploadedfiles/morrison_final_version.pdf
“[p.243][…]
Q Okay. Do you know what was discussed at the meeting?
A I believe Senator Portman was relating, and I believe the Vice President as well, related their view of the importance of the assistance. The Vice President was obviously armed with his conversation with President Zelensky, and they were – they convinced the President that the aid should be disbursed immediately.
[p.244][…]
Q Okay. Do you know why the President made the decision to lift the freeze at that time?
A I do not. Based on what I had been told, and it’s not first person, obviously, it’s second and third person, it was – the case was made to the President that it was the appropriate and prudent thing to do.”
I will acknowledge that this works against the defense theory, which reduces the timing to coincidence.
I think you have it backwards, it was the Zelenskyy administration who was supposed to do something about corruption in Ukraine, not the U.S. administration. The defense brief lays out a theory that the aid was withheld because by late May circumstances had changed in Ukraine. The defense argues that Ukraine didn’t have their act together until September and I’m comfortable buying into that.
Zelenskyy campaigned as a reformer and was sworn in on May 20. The Ukrainian Rada initially rejected his reforms, and the leading coalition dissolved the day Zelenskyy was sworn in - Zelensky called for snap elections. As you know from the July 25 call, Zelensky had only just then named his prosecutor general. The old Rada wasn’t kicked out until August 29, and the new one started passing anti-corruption reforms like removing parliamentary immunity in early September.
The DoD certified Ukraine sometime in May - I can buy the argument that circumstances had changed since then. I would need to see information about the DoD’s certification process, of course, but on it’s face the defense argument seems credible here.
~Max
Are you trying to say Mr. Trump’s actions amount to such micro-managing as to be a criminal dereliction of duty?
I mean, I get what you’re saying in the examples, but it’s not carrying over by way of analogy. It’s not like the President is himself going over to Ukraine to play detective, he’s still here stateside doing other president stuff.
~Max
Agreed. Each time he stood up, he ripped new holes in the various asses of the defense lawyers. And then at the end, after hours of doing so, he delivered a crushing blow to the hack that Jay Sekulow obviously is, picking up immediately on Sekulow’s insistance that this was indeed not an appellate court, that there are as of yet no details from a lower court to review, and thus it follows directly that witnesses are essential in the trial phase.
To this I applauded, and laughed even louder than I did when Jerry Nadler sneered in his ever-present Brookly accent how embarrassed the Republicans should feel the idea of the absolute immunity of the president.
Even now, I can hear his “it’s embarrassing!” ringing in my ears. Fuck senate decorum. This needed to be said.
Too bad he’s such a lying fool. Schiff lied about having evidence of collusion. Schiff lied about Nunes memo which he knew was accurate because both him and Nunes had access to the same information. When the IG report dropped supporting what was in the Nunes memo and debunking what was in Schiff’s counter memo, Schiff acted like the information revealed by the IG was new to him, that was a lie.
As far as I can tell, the only part of that sentence which might be a lie would be that the Ukrainian investigation was legitimate. I don’t think that has been established to be a lie: going by the prosecution’s statement of fact #12, then-prosecutor-general Shokin was known to be corrupt and inneffectual at prosecuting corruption, and his removal made a legitimate investigation more likely, but it does not follow that Shokin’s investigation was illegitimate. Please correct me, but I think it was a nuanced statement.
The problem I have with the defense theory here is that the President went beyond mentioning Biden/Burisma or assuring Zelensky that the U.S. would be above board moving forward. The President actually asked Zelensky to look into it, and so I expect the defense theory to, in their own words, explain how looking into the matter would advance the public interest.
Here it seems there is a deep disagreement as to whether it has been proved that Joe Biden did no wrong. The prosecutor’s brief, again statement of fact #12, says witnesses unanimously testified that there was no credible evidence to support the allegation that Joe Biden corruptly pressured Ukraine to remove Shokin for investigating Burisma. They cite official U.S. policy, bipartisan support, and Shokin’s corruption. The defense brief responds by claiming that the circumstances show a conflict of interest on Biden’s part; that prosecutors have no evidence to debunk the theory that Bidens’ did wrong, and that the burden is on prosecutors in this matter.
I’m not terribly familiar with how this would work in other courtroom settings, so I’m doing research on legal burdens and proving negatives, etc.
~Max
There was no investigation of Burisma, legitimate or not, by the corrupt prosecutor general. Literally the whole world wanted him out, and that lie by Trump’s lawyers makes it look like Biden pushed him out to benefit his son. It’s a lie from beginning to end.
But the totality of US actions on corruption lay out like this: Trump demands a Biden investigation on July 25. All U.S. agencies involved are kept in the dark on the demand, except for the Three Amigos. Barr doesn’t find out about the phone call until September. Pence mentions corruption among many other issues in an early September convo. It’s not plausible on its face that a week later, anything substantive has happened to address corruption, because nothing had happened except the whistleblower and Pence/Portman telling Trump that he had to move on.
I wouldn’t classify it as micromanagement. Melinda isn’t managing at all, let alone micromanaging.
This is where we get back to the discussion of LEO versus not.
Is it micromanaging for the President to perform investigations on his own? Or is it better described as a hobby?
If it’s a hobby then, even if we’re discussing a minimal time allotment, there’s the matter that he’s using the powers of his office in order to conduct his hobby. And where that becomes a dereliction of duty is that he is replacing the national interests with the desires of his hobby.
Maybe Willard actually can row back in time. But if his reason for going out rowing was purely motivated by selfishness, and he would have done it regardless of whether it raised the risk that ships would crash and people would get hurt, then it doesn’t matter that the time he spent rowing was minimal and wouldn’t affect the situation. That’s just luck. He was still putting his personal interests over the duties he is charged with.
Additionally, what other countries did we withhold aid from due to corruption? Saudia Arabia? Sudan? Venezuela? Brazil? Nope. We only apparently held up Ukraine’s aid. That dog just doesn’t hunt.