WTF Community

Day 977

General Discussion
#1

1/ Trump admitted that he discussed getting dirt on Joe Biden with with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and that he is withholding the whistleblower complaint from Congress. Trump pressed Zelensky to dig up potentially damaging information against Biden during a July 25th phone call, baselessly accusing the former vice president of corruption related to his son Hunter's business dealings in Ukraine and whether they affected his diplomatic efforts. Trump said that "it doesn't matter" what he discussed with Zelensky and that while the he would "love" to release a transcript of the call, "you have to be a little bit shy about doing it." Trump's phone call with Zelensky occurred while Ukraine was awaiting $250 million in security aid, raising the possibility Trump was attempting a quid pro quo arrangement. The phone call led to the whistleblower complaint from within the intelligence community due to a "promise" that Trump made to Ukraine. Trump eventually agreed to release the money after coming under bipartisan pressure from Congress and immediately before the existence of the whistleblower complaint was revealed. (New York Times / Washington Post / Axios / Bloomberg / CNN)

This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://whatthefuckjusthappenedtoday.com/2019/09/23/day-977/
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The Impeachment of President Donald J. Trump
#2

:scream: Dept. of Must Reads

1. If This Isn’t Impeachable, Nothing Is

2. Donald Trump vs. the United States of America. Just the facts, in 40 sentences.

3. Trump Didn’t Bribe Ukraine. It’s Actually Worse Than That.

4. Trump’s Firing Away on Fifth Avenue, and We Are Fucked

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#3

BOOM :boom::boom::boom::boom:

President Trump told his acting chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, to hold back almost $400 million in military aid for Ukraine at least a week before a phone call in which Trump is said to have pressured the Ukrainian president to investigate the son of former vice president Joe Biden, according to three senior administration officials.

Officials at the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) relayed Trump’s order to the State Department and the Pentagon during an interagency meeting in mid-July, according to officials who spoke on the condition on anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. They explained that the president had “concerns” and wanted to analyze whether the money needed to be spent.

Administration officials were instructed to tell lawmakers that the delays were part of an “interagency process” but to give them no additional information — a pattern that continued for nearly two months, until the White House released the funds on the night of Sept. 11.

Trump’s order to withhold aid to Ukraine a week before his July 25 call with Volodymyr Zelensky is likely to raise questions about the motivation for his decision and fuel suspicions on Capitol Hill that Trump sought to leverage congressionally approved aid to damage a political rival. The revelation comes as lawmakers clash with the White House over a related whistleblower complaint made by an intelligence official alarmed by Trump’s actions

.

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The Impeachment of President Donald J. Trump
#4

Our friend at Lawfare is sounding the alarm!!!

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#5

What fucking Monday huh?

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#7

More confirmation for this story…from NYT

President Trump directed the acting White House chief of staff to freeze more than $391 million in aid to Ukraine in the days before Mr. Trump was scheduled to speak by phone with the new Ukrainian president, two senior administration officials said Monday.

Mr. Trump’s directive was communicated to the Pentagon and the State Department, which were told only that the administration was looking at whether the spending was necessary, the officials said.

The revelation that Mr. Trump ordered the aid package blocked, which was first reported by The Washington Post, adds a vital new element to the raging debate over pressure being put on Ukraine by Mr. Trump to investigate unsubstantiated allegations that former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and his son Hunter Biden had engaged in corrupt activities in dealing with Ukraine.

It came on a day when leading congressional Democrats demanded that the Trump administration turn over documentation about the allegations against the president, and a flood of their colleagues said his actions could warrant impeachment.

Mr. Trump has acknowledged that he mentioned the Bidens in a call on July 25 with the new Ukrainian leader, Volodymyr Zelensky, and people familiar with the call have said Mr. Trump repeatedly urged Mr. Zelensky to speak with one of his personal lawyers, Rudolph W. Giuliani. Mr. Giuliani has been pushing Ukraine aggressively to look into the Bidens and the origins of material that implicated Paul Manafort, Mr. Trump’s former campaign chairman, in 2016.

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#8

I guess we’ll find out what will happen next tomorrow after the House Democrats meeting. With so much opened to the public now, it’s really up to them what the consequence for the President’s actions will be, they’re setting precedent right now.

I feel anxious when I run down all the plays in my head. There isn’t a perfect path to follow, all of them have risks in 2020. I understand protecting the moderates to keep the majority but Democrats have to take a stand on this, it’s outrageous. To quote Nancy Pelosi, he’s self-impeaching.

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#9

Meanwhile, back at the ranch…

Manhattan D.A., Cyrus Vance Jr. is moving ahead relentlessly in pursuit of Trump’s taxes and other financial records as he investigates Trump’s role in the hush money payments made to Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal.

Manhattan’s district attorney urged a judge Monday to reject the “sweeping immunity” sought by President Donald Trump to protect him from divulging his tax returns in a criminal probe.

District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr. filed papers in federal court after Trump’s attorneys sued last week to stop Vance from forcing the president’s accounting firm to release eight years of his state and federal returns in a criminal probe.

Vance urged a judge to reject Trump’s request for a temporary order blocking Vance’s subpoena for the records in a probe of payments made to two women who claimed to have had affairs with Trump.

He also asked U.S. District Judge Victor Marrero to dismiss the lawsuit, saying it belongs in state court, if anywhere. Marrero has scheduled oral arguments for Wednesday.

Vance said Trump was asserting the “remarkable proposition” that a sitting president not only enjoys blanket immunity from criminal prosecution, but also isn’t required to submit to a routine grand jury request for information about what he, his businesses or employees did before he took office.

“The law provides no such sweeping immunity,” the court papers said.

“Here, the question is not whether a state prosecutor can indict a sitting President,” the papers said. “Instead, the issue is whether a third party, having been duly served with a state grand jury subpoena seeking the books and records of a number of individuals and corporate entities, including those of the President, must comply with the subpoena.”

In case you missed it, last week Trump’s lawyers made the extraordinary claim that Trump cannot be investigated while in office. This is a patently absurd argument with no basis in law. I suppose there’s a slim chance the judge could rule in Trump’s favor on this filing, but that ruling would immediately be challenged. The far more likely outcome is that Trump will suffer a humiliating defeat on this front in the next few weeks. He still may not give up his taxes, but it will be a stinging rebuke for Trump to absorb if the judge rules that a President can indeed be investigated while in office. That will be one less trick card Trump can play in all the other law suits he’s facing.

Here’s Vanity Fair’s take on Trump’s I’m-too-high-and-mighty-to-be-investigated defense.

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#10

Trump calls on nations to reject globalism, embrace nationalism

Not fond of posting from Donnie, but this feels like a trap.


Meanwhile:

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#11

Looks like this is going to the Senate…



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#12

TRANSCRIPT:

TRUMP: “The United States has been very, very good to Ukraine…”

TRUMP: “I would like to ask you a favor…”

With the $400 million being held in suspense by Trump, how is that NOT a corrupt quid pro quo?

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#13

AND Trump asks Zelensky about Crowdstrike, one of two security companies that originally pinned the DNC hack on Russia (Fancy Bear).

By so doing, he persists in defending Putin AND puts some energy into the “why didn’t the FBI seize the DNC server” hobby horse.

(as we know, it was the software contents of the server that mattered; the FBI took a snap-shot of the software. )

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#14

Okay, I am confused; why is Donnie bringing China into this now?

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#15

Maybe China because the lad Hunter Biden was on the board of a Chinese corporation at one point.

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#16

That seems to be it. He brought it up purely because of that.

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#17

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#6

LOL…WTF…LOL…WTF…

Could we be any closer to getting somewhere in getting this rat out of there…??

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