What's new
By:

The official "let's impeach Trump" thread

colton said:
Click to expand...


Arg! Beat me to it!

What’s a non-corrupt quid pro quo?

For impeachment it shouldn’t matter. You don’t solicit personal quid pro quos (what’s the plural form?). But I’ve never heard of a non-corrupt quid pro quo and this feels again like this admin is gaslighting us.
 
JazzyFresh said:
Look no further than the Steele dossier paid for by Hillary. Funny nobody gives a **** Hillary paid Steele, a foreign agent,, for dirt on Trump.
Click to expand...

I don't know why this fallacy, that Steele was a "foreign agent" is still being stated as fact, when he was a private citizen. Foreign agents are in the employ of the intelligence services of their respective nation. Steele was not a foreign agent for Great Britain when he was hired.

From the link at the bottom of this comment:

"Here are the facts. First of all, the Clinton campaign did not hire Steele. He was hired originally by the Washington Free Beacon, a right-wing website that was anti-Trump at the time, which paid him through Fusion GPS. Later, during the general election, the Beacon was no longer interested in dirt on Trump, and Fusion GPS went to the Clinton campaign and the DNC and asked them to pay for Steele’s work. It is true that he was paid ultimately by the Clinton campaign, through the law firm Perkins Coie. Those payments were reported as required by law.

Two important points here. First of all, if the work was paid for, it is obviously not an in-kind contribution, which would indeed be illegal. But second—and know this, because it’s crucial—what the Clinton campaign and Steele did was entirely legal.

Campaigns can contract with foreign individuals and firms to do work. The allegation that this is wrong is completely baseless. And what makes this allegation surreal is: Guess who hired a foreign firm to do important data analysis in 2016? Donald Trump! Cambridge Analytica was British. If Clinton using Steele was a scandal, then so was Trump using Cambridge. The fact that Steele was doing oppo research, which admittedly can be made to sound seamy on propaganda television, is neither here nor there legally. Work for a campaign is work for a campaign.

And again, that work was legal. You know who said so? House Republicans! Yes—the House intel committee issued a report in March 2018, when the House was under GOP control, that included these words: “Under current federal election law, foreigners are prohibited from making contributions or donations in connection with any campaign in the United States. However, it is not illegal to contract with a foreign person or foreign entity for services, including conducting opposition research on a U.S. campaign, so long as the service was paid for at the market rate.” It is impossible that Cornyn, Graham, and everyone else who tries to make the Steele connection sound shady don’t know this.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/what-hillary-clinton-did-was-politics-what-trumps-doing-is-treason
 
colton said:
I'm sure the Post is not the only place that has posted a direct comparison of the two. But here's the start of the article for you:

[WHISTLEBLOWER] COMPLAINT: "Multiple White House officials with direct knowledge of the call informed me that, after an initial exchange of pleasantries, the President used the remainder of the call to advance his personal interests.”

TRANSCRIPT: Trump speaks in nine discrete segments.

  1. He congratulates Zelensky on winning the presidency.
  2. He says Ukraine is happy Zelensky won.
  3. He mentions how much aid the United States provides to Ukraine.
  4. He asks a favor: Investigate (baseless) rumors about Ukrainian involvement in an assessment of Russia’s hacking of the Democratic National Committee in 2016.
  5. He encourages working with his attorney Rudolph W. Giuliani and pushes for an investigation of former vice president Joe Biden and his son.
  6. He says he’ll have Giuliani and Attorney General William P. Barr call about the investigation.
  7. He invites Zelensky to the White House.
  8. He says he’ll see Zelensky at the White House or at an event in Poland (that he ended up not attending).
  9. He again offers his congratulations.
Except for the invitation to the White House — though even that is questionable — the whistleblower’s allegation is accurate.

COMPLAINT: “According to the White House officials who had direct knowledge of the call, the President pressured Mr. Zelenskyy to … initiate or continue an investigation into the activities of former Vice President Joseph Biden and his son, Hunter Biden. …" (A different transliteration of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s surname is used throughout the document.)

TRANSCRIPT: Trump says, "[T]here’s a lot of talk about Biden’s son, that Biden stopped the prosecution and a lot of people want to find out about that so whatever you can do with the Attorney General would be great. Biden went around bragging that he stopped the prosecution so if you can look into it … It sounds horrible to me.”

COMPLAINT: “ … assist in purportedly uncovering that allegations of Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election originated in Ukraine, with a specific request that the Ukrainian leader locate and turn over servers used by the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and examined by the U.S. cyber security firm Crowdstrike, which initially reported that Russian hackers had penetrated the DNC’s networks in 2016 …"

TRANSCRIPT: Trump says, “I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine, they say Crowdstrike … I guess you have one of your wealthy people … The server, they say Ukraine has it. There are a lot of things that went on, the whole situation.” (Ellipses in the original.)
Click to expand...

I think it's disingenuous to say we should not be surprised that the Washington Post "claims" a close match because they are biased, when the Post is comparing exact, verbatim passages from both documents. To me "claims" implies a subjective judgement, that others might interpret otherwise. But the passages they compared showed a close match, which the reader should be able to clearly see.

These have both been posted in separate comments earlier in this thread, but one can do one's own comparison:

The readout of the phone call:

https://www.politico.com/story/2019/09/25/trump-ukraine-phone-call-transcript-text-pdf-1510770

The whistleblower report:

https://d3i6fh83elv35t.cloudfront.net/static/2019/09/20190812_-_whistleblower_complaint_unclass.pdf
 
colton said:
OK, one more thing for @Joe Bagadonuts because you probably didn't see this post https://jazzfanz.com/threads/the-official-lets-impeach-trump-thread.113221/page-189#post-1828295 if you truly think Trump's behavior is not impeachable. It's from an op-ed by Dana Milbank published in the Washington Post.

Trump began staking his title to absolute power in his first weeks in office. “The whole world will soon see, as we begin to take further actions, that the powers of the president to protect our country are very substantial and will not be questioned,” White House adviser Stephen Miller announced. He wasn’t kidding.

Trump soon stated that “I have the absolute right” to fire FBI Director James Comey. He subsequently proclaimed the “absolute right” to provide Russia with an ally’s highly classified intelligence; the “absolute right” to pardon himself; the “absolute right” to shut down the southern border; the “absolute right” to fire special counsel Robert Mueller; the “absolute right” to sign an executive order removing the Constitution’s birthright-citizenship provision; the “absolute right” to contrive a national emergency to deny Congress the power of the purse; the “absolute right” to order U.S. businesses out of China; the “absolute right” to release apparent spy-satellite imagery of Iran; and, most recently, the “absolute right” to ask other countries to furnish evidence that Joe Biden is corrupt.

Kellyanne Conway asserted Trump’s “absolute right” to give his son-in-law a security clearance over security professionals’ objections. White House counsel Pat Cipollone said current and former White House officials are “absolutely immune” from testifying before Congress. As others have noted, Trump has repeatedly said the Constitution’s Article II empowers him “to do whatever I want” and bestows on him “all of these rights at a level nobody has ever seen before.”

At a level nobody has ever seen. Now we see the corrupting effect of this claim of own absolute power:

Without troubling himself to engage in the usual consultations with lawmakers, allies and military leaders, he ordered a pullout of U.S. troops from northern Syria, setting off a Turkish invasion as well as fears of a massacre of our Kurdish allies and religious minorities (including some 50,000 Christians) and of a revival of Islamic State. He did it at the request of the repressive leader of Turkey, where Trump has boasted of his extensive business interests.

Trump declared “perfect” his phone call with the Ukrainian president, at a time when Trump was withholding military aid to that country, requesting a “favor” and asking for damaging information about Biden — a stark violation of campaign-finance law. He then publicly asked China for the same on the eve of trade talks.

He responded to the resulting impeachment inquiry in the House with a bizarre letter from Cipollone asserting, essentially, that Trump is exempt from all congressional oversight and won’t participate in this “unconstitutional inquiry” — even though the Constitution expressly gives the House “the sole Power of Impeachment.”
...
Maybe [Trump supporters] will finally realize that by supporting Trump as he claims absolute power, they are clearing the way for a successor who ignores Congress and inconvenient laws to, say, expand abortion rights, gay rights, gun control and restrictions on Christian schools. Maybe they will grasp that the democratic safeguards they are now letting Trump overrun won’t be there when a future leader claims an “absolute right” to assault what they hold dear.​


If you find this to be acceptable behavior for Trump, then it logically must also be acceptable behavior for ANY FUTURE PRESIDENT. Do you really feel that way?

If you do not find this to be acceptable behavior, then it logically must be IMPEACHABLE behavior, because that is literally the only way to stop someone who seizes these "rights" for himself.
Click to expand...

Several times, I've heard Trump supporters/apologists tell us not to take comments like this too seriously. Trump himself has sometimes stated following controversial statements that he was only joking. But he's hard at work fighting the Constitutionally granted right of oversight of the Executive branch by the Legislative branch. It's clear he regards the Constitution as something that does not apply to him. Ultimately, the Judicial branch will need to educate him that he is not above the law, and that Congress is a co-equal branch of our federal government:



 
Red said:
Several times, I've heard Trump supporters/apologists tell us not to take comments like this too seriously. Trump himself has sometimes stated following controversial statements that he was only joking. But he's hard at work fighting the Constitutionally granted right of oversight of the Executive branch by the Legislative branch. It's clear he regards the Constitution as something that does not apply to him. Ultimately, the Judicial branch will need to educate him that he is not above the law, and that Congress is a co-equal branch of our federal government:



Click to expand...


That’s what I’m afraid of. Gorsuch and Kav owe Trump big time. I can see the SC ruling in the executive’s favor. Kav even warned us about it:

“You sowed the wind and the country will reap the whirlwind.”
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Share this page
Back
Top