High crimes and misdemeanors can make for strange bedfellows… .
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And snarky… .
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T reveals that he’s very aware Russia helped him…and it has not gone unnoticed…even from the Right and the media.
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Made duplicate…!!!
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William Cohen, former Secretary of Defense and R Senator tries to encourage other R’s to take on the Impeachment process.
Impeachment is an extraordinary political remedy under the Constitution. The democratic process by which we elect a president is defined by passion and partisanship, but any effort to remove that leader is likely to be unsuccessful if it is similarly motivated. As an English lord chancellor once wrote, “The power of impeachment ought to be, like Goliath’s sword, kept in the temple, and not used but on great occasions.”
All who are elected or appointed to high office are fiduciaries of the public trust. Supreme Court Justice Benjamin Cardozo once described the standard of a fiduciary’s conduct to be “something stricter than the morals of the marketplace. Not honesty alone, but the punctilio of an honor the most sensitive.”With the exception thus far of Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.), Republicans have taken the position that Mueller’s redacted report has resolved all issues of alleged presidential collusion with the Russians and obstruction of justice. Case closed.
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"
There is no Republican Party. There’s a Trump party. The Republican Party is kind of taking a nap somewhere," Boehner, a Republican himself, said.
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Citing this piece from Benjamin Wittes of Lawfare which was linked on The Bulwark…asking Dems not to violate norms by wanting to indict the sitting President or prosecute him. It is an interesting point since many of us want to throw the book at him…but how to do that.
Kamala Harris and Nancy Pelosi have suggested he needs to be in jail and prosecuted…(which I agree with…)
But which is the best way to get him out…
Get him impeached - but only achieving that halfway, since the Senate will never vote for it.
Get the Impeachment investigation going so Dems have more muscle to get docs that they need and can subpoena with more ease and can expose more wrong doing?
Or just plain make look like such a fool - embarrass him, expose his weaknesses and hopefully make it impossible for him to win another term.
She refrained from chanting, “Lock Him Up!”—for which I suppose we should be grateful.
Harris is not the only prominent Democrat to have dipped her toes in these dangerous waters. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi reportedly said recently that she didn’t want to see Trump impeached, she wanted to see him jailed. We can expect others to weigh in over the coming weeks as well.
Paul Rosenzweig is fond of saying that you don’t protect norms by violating norms. And with the president so flagrantly and consistently abusing basic expectations regarding the non-politicization of law enforcement, it is tempting to be tolerant when Democrats—or Republicans, for that matter—return the favor in some small measure. But declaring someone guilty of crimes, as Pelosi reportedly did, and saying that as president you would supervise that person’s prosecution, as Harris did, is poisonous stuff in a democracy that cares about apolitical law enforcement. It’s poisonous to a society that believes in a presumption of innocence. It’s poisonous to a society that believes in limiting the relationship between political actors—including the president—and the deployment of the coercive powers of the state against individuals. A presidential candidate’s promising a law enforcement outcome against an individual should be unacceptable—even to those who fervently wish to see Trump in the defendant’s chair in federal court.
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Conservative radio host Michael Savage of “Savage Nation” radio show was once a favorite of T’s but now he is an outlier. Savage is interviewed about the way T has been handling his job and how he hasn’t fulfilled his campaign promises - ie wall, immigrants etc.
Some interesting comments from those Conservative Media people who have broken with T - Ann Coulter who unto herself is a large bag of ugly words, but the fall out from some circles is happening…
Note: Brett Baier was condemned this am…by T T condemns Fox and Baier re: Polls 6.18.19
In January 2011, four and a half years before Donald Trump glided down the escalator at Trump Tower and began a campaign for the White House that few conservatives were taking seriously, Michael Savage invited him on the radio and declared that he had found a president. It was their first interview.
Mr. Savage isn’t as well known or as widely listened to as heavyweight conservative talk show hosts like Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh. But his early backing of Mr. Trump helped the candidate build a bridge to the millions of people in his “Savage Nation” audience who identify with the host’s nationalist beliefs, a worldview he sums up in his unofficial motto: “Borders, language, culture.”
Now Mr. Savage is an outlier once again, dismayed more each day as the budget deficit continues to swell, thousands of new migrants are apprehended at the border, and the wall Mr. Trump promised to erect and make Mexico pay for remains unbuilt.
“Read my lips: no new immigrants,” Mr. Savage said one recent day, taking a swipe at what he says is just one of the president’s major unfulfilled promises.
…
Still, in the world of conservative media, where questioning the president’s greatness can be an apostasy that tanks ratings and ends careers, Mr. Savage is taking a major risk. His views aren’t widely shared among conservatives, though they do represent a small crack in the foundation of Trump loyalists who are not buying the president’s “Promises made, promises kept” motto.
…
Mr. Savage, 77, was surprised there wasn’t more second-guessing that day. “I don’t think they care very much about issues,” he said of his listeners, with a hint of disappointment. “They’ll vote for him no matter what because he’s not ‘them.’ I think it’s come down to ‘them’ or ‘us.’”
…
Mr. Trump once said his political base was so rock solid that he could “stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and wouldn’t lose any voters.” He may have had a point. While public polling has consistently shown that the majority of Americans disapprove of how he handles his job, the percentage of Americans who think he is doing a good job has been relatively stable — though still a minority.
Mr. Savage, a former member at Mr. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club in Florida, embodies the contradictions of much of the president’s base. He insists “I’m no Benedict Arnold,” and will still vote for Mr. Trump in 2020 despite his misgivings because there is no Democratic candidate he could imagine supporting.
But he has no plans to pull his punches when it comes to the president. Mr. Savage believes his words have already cost him access to Mr. Trump, whom he has not spoken to since the White House Hanukkah party in December.
“They keep pushing me away because they don’t like what in their mind is not 100 percent sycophantic behavior,” he said.
His bridges to the Trump White House are not as scorched as those of Ann Coulter, who has accused the president of lying about his pursuit of funding for the border wall and attacked him as “a shallow, narcissistic con man.” But Ms. Coulter said she believed there were far more people like her and Mr. Savage who are dismayed. They are just less willing to speak up.
“A lot of wingers are desperately hanging on to Trump as flotsam in a tsunami,” Ms. Coulter said in an interview. “So loads of Trumpsters are beside themselves — but almost none of them will say so publicly. I think the issue is: How many voters, who voted for Obama, or didn’t vote, and then came out to vote for Trump, are done with him?”
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From tonight’s rally in Florida…“The T faithful”
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Here’s an ‘opinion’ piece out today in The Hill by Conservative writer John Solomon, formerly of The Washington Times (Wiki info J Solomon background)
with the notion that the FBI came up with shoddy evidence to start the Russia Investigation - see Steele Dossier and the black cash ledger from Ukraine (stating large amounts sent to Manafort for his Ukrainian work) that was never verified by outside sources.
It is an attempt to muddy the waters, and place doubt on the FBI’s efforts and clearly debunk any of the Russian Investigation
When the final chapter of the Russia collusion caper is written, it is likely two seminal documents the FBI used to justify investigating Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign will turn out to be bunk.
And the behavior of FBI agents and federal prosecutors who promoted that faulty evidence may disturb us more than we now know.
The first, the Christopher Steele dossier, has received enormous attention. And the more scrutiny it receives, the more its truthfulness wanes. Its credibility has declined so much that many now openly question how the FBI used it to support a surveillance warrant against the Trump campaign in October 2016.
At its best, the Steele dossier is an “unverified and salacious” political research memo funded by Trump’s Democratic rivals. At worst, it may be Russian disinformation worthy of the “garbage” label given it by esteemed reporter Bob Woodward.
The second document, known as the “black cash ledger,” remarkably has escaped the same scrutiny, even though its emergence in Ukraine in the summer of 2016 forced Paul Manafort to resign as Trump campaign chairman and eventually face U.S. indictment.
In search warrant affidavits, the FBI portrayed the ledger as one reason it resurrected a criminal case against Manafort that was dropped in 2014 and needed search warrants in 2017 for bank records to prove he worked for the Russian-backed Party of Regions in Ukraine.
There’s just one problem: The FBI’s public reliance on the ledger came months after the feds were warned repeatedly that the document couldn’t be trusted and likely was a fake, according to documents and more than a dozen interviews with knowledgeable sources.
For example, Ukraine’s top anti-corruption prosecutor, Nazar Kholodnytskyy, told me he warned the U.S. State Department’s law enforcement liaison and multiple FBI agents in late summer 2016 that Ukrainian authorities who recovered the ledger believed it likely was a fraud.
“It was not to be considered a document of Manafort. It was not authenticated. And at that time it should not be used in any way to bring accusations against anybody,” Kholodnytskyy said, recalling what he told FBI agents.
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Solomon is an imbecile. Talk about shoddy…
First, the idea that the Steele “Dossier” was the prime mover in
“the oranges” of the investigation is Trump dogma, but it is simply false. Second, if Solomon has a problem with the black ledger payments, he should talk to Trump, who fired him over it. (Fired him, but interestingly, didn’t banish him from the campaign–in the transition phase, Manafort was merrily working to sell access to Trump.)
And there’s the “unverified and salacious” hobby horse again. Believe me, if it turned out that none of it was true EXCEPT the salacious parts, I would be (almost) ready to kiss and make up with the POTUS.
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Read Marcy Wheeler’s rebuttal all of John Solomon’s remarks in this above Opinion piece. It is layered with details, sources and says straight up…"The key claim behind Solomon’s breathless propaganda is bullshit."
Marcy Wheeler has been a great analyzer of the layers of arguments and sources it to the actual proven facts. She is a great derailer of what’s absolutely false. She has appeared many times on MSNBC and like Benjamin Wittes of Lawfare, she knows her facts. She also testifed in front of Mueller about some evidence she knew about in the Russian Investigation.
It’s nice to see that she can slice and dice through the above BS.
Konstantin Kilimnik Shared Stolen Data Laundered Through Bannon’s Propaganda with State Department
June 20, 2019/7 Comments/in 2016 Presidential Election, Mueller Probe /by emptywheel
John Solomon is feeding the frothy right with faux scandals based off dubious propaganda again.
What John Solomon’s document really shows
“Konstantin Kilimnik Shared Stolen Data Laundered Through Bannon’s Propaganda with State Department.”
That’s what the title of an article based off a document propagandist John Solomon turned into the latest frothy right shiny object. After all, the fragment of the email exchange between Kilimnik and a guy at State named Eric Schultz that Solomon includes ends with Kilimnik attributing the narrative that Trump is dangerously close to Russia to Hillary solely because Ken Vogel, who wrote an article critical of Manafort, once shared an article critical of Hillary with her team before publishing it. He cites a Breitbart story that, the same day the DNC emails stolen by Russia were released, focused on Vogel.
more summation
…
So this fits the John Solomon propaganda laundry pattern:
- Sources that may have access to Manafort’s discovery dump documents to Solomon
- Solomon writes a logically ridiculous story, in this case hiding part of a document that might show more of how Kilimnik himself was laundering documents stolen by Russia and magnified by Steve Bannon into the State Department
- According to an update to Solomon’s story, Mark Meadows, “is asking the Justice Department inspector general to investigate the FBI and prosecutors’ handling of the Manafort warrants, including any media leaks and evidence that the government knew the black ledger was potentially unreliable or suspect evidence”
- The frothy right goes nuts (and Don Jr. goes even more nuts) (Update: Matt Gaetz just entered this into the record)
Solomon’s illogical misreading
Now that we’ve established that this is yet another instance of Trump supporters using Solomon as a tool to launder illogical propaganda to fire up the frothy right, let’s look at how he misreads the evidence.
…
The FBI did not claim that the ledger served as an important reason behind the “resurrection” of the investigation into Manafort
Logically, all the documents Solomon have been leaked only matter if it is true that the ledger was a key reason why the investigation into Manafort remained ongoing in 2017.
But neither of the warrants show that.
…
Manafort has pled guilty to the two key details included in this passage in the affidavit: that he was lobbying for the Party of Regions as early as 2006, and that he was trying to hide that relationship (see ¶¶4, 6, and 7 for those admissions). So the assertion in question — that Manafort was lobbying for Akhmetov in 2006 and got paid for it in 2007 — was not faulty. Moreover, the AP story in question specifically said that it hard confirmed those two payments, which would seem to raise questions about 2016 claims that the ledger was totally unreliable.
So to sum up:
- The May 2017 warrant Solomon doesn’t mention but which was incorporated by reference and attachment into the July one describes the FBI still investigating the ledger
- The July 2017 warrant doesn’t rely on either the ledger or the story about it as proof; rather, the story about it (but not the ledger) is described as background that explains why Manafort continued to lie about his ties to Ukraine
- What the FBI used the ledger for in October 2017 not only had been corroborated after the 2016 evidence claiming the ledger was totally bunk, but Manafort has since pled guilty to the substance it addresses
The key claim behind Solomon’s breathless propaganda is bullshit.
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“So at a time when Kilimnik had recently been trading Ukraine for Michigan… .”
Hahaha.
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If you lack a soul, you can’t have a spiritual advisor–those are the rules. Cheer-leaders are under some circumstances permissible.
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This review of the differences in the party outlooks has to do with the very tribal nature of ‘other,’ or ‘not us.’ When’s R’s talk about 'pearl clutching, or ‘Limousine Liberal’ it is a posture that they , R’s can not stand…and D’s do the same…so it can be seen as a tit-for-tat dilemma.
According to the Democratic caricature, most Republicans stridently oppose immigration, hold deeply prejudiced views about religious minorities, and are blind to the existence of racism or sexism. Asked to guess what share of Republicans believe that immigration can strengthen America so long as it is “properly controlled,” for example, Democrats estimated about half; actually, nearly nine in 10 agreed with this sentiment.
Democrats also estimated that four in 10 Republicans believe that “many Muslims are good Americans,” and that only half recognize that “racism still exists in America.” In reality, those figures were two-thirds and four in five.
Unsurprisingly, Republicans are also prone to caricature Democrats. For example, Republicans approximated that only about half of Democrats are “proud to be American” despite the country’s problems. Actually, more than four in five Democrats said they are. Similarly, Republicans guessed that fewer than four in 10 Democrats reject the idea of open borders. Actually, seven in 10 said they do.
If the reasons for mutual hatred are rooted as much in mutual misunderstanding as in genuine differences of values, that suggests Americans’ divisions should in principle be easy to remedy. It’s all just a matter of education.
Unfortunately, the “Perception Gap” study suggests that neither the media nor the universities are likely to remedy Americans’ inability to hear one another: It found that the best educated and most politically interested Americans are more likely to vilify their political adversaries than their less educated, less tuned-in peers.
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Honestly…language is important. Idiot-proofing your communications seems to be important too. Jason Miller calls Rep Nadler a “Fat F*&k…”
Jason Miller, a former top campaign aide and close adviser to Donald Trump, has left his job as a managing director at Teneo, a prominent consulting firm, days after launching a profanity-laced tirade directed at a top House Democrat.
“I have parted ways with Teneo by mutual consent and look forward to formally announcing my next move in the coming weeks,” Miller said in a statement to The Daily Beast. “Teneo is an incredible firm and without a doubt the premier CEO consultancy on the planet. They have always been great to me and I’m proud to have called them teammates for the past two and a half years.”
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Fascinating conversation with Dr. Danna Young on the structure and aesthetic differences between the right and left media landscape. Great topic. 
The debate over polarized media can make the two ecosystems sound equivalent. One is left, the other right, but otherwise they’re the same. That couldn’t be more wrong. They’re structured differently, they work differently, they value different things, they’re built atop different aesthetics. And behind all these differences is something we don’t talk about enough: their audiences, and what those audiences demand.
Danna Young is an associate professor of communications at the University of Delaware and author of the forthcoming Irony and Outrage, a fascinating study of the differing aesthetics of the left and right media universes, and how those differences are rooted in the psychological composition of their audiences. This is tricky stuff to talk about, but it’s necessary for understanding why political media looks the way it does today.
Oh and here’s her book, I’ve added it to my ever growing list of books I have yet to read.
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Big switcheroo from former Fox Newser Carl Cameron who just left Fox News about a month ago, and will be working on a progressive website (Think liberal Drudge Report)
called…FrontPageLive
@matt - there’s always room for more progressive news…and Current Status is my FIRST CHOICE for political news with factual and reputable sources. 
And a little snippet on Carl Cameron - He’s left ‘partisan news because he believes in facts…’
Who is Carl Cameron from FrontPageLive
When folks leave Fox News, they quite often pursue projects that align with the worldview of their former employer. They might launch a conservative talk show airing on Sinclair stations, assist with President Trump’s reelection campaign or throw their time into a Trump-sycophancy website.
Carl Cameron, who covered politics for Fox News over two decades, is veering from that path. “I have a little bit of unfinished business,” says Cameron. He is teaming up with Joseph Romm, an author and reporter on climate science and climate policy at ThinkProgress, an “editorially independent” arm of the Center for American Progress Action Fund.
Their collaboration is FrontPageLive.com, a news site where progressives can find stories that feed their sensibilities. A news release calls the site “the go-to liberal antidote” to the Drudge Report, the aggregator that for more than two decades has been amplifying news reports with a conservative spin. Romm sees FrontPageLive.com as a “viralizing engine” for the other side. It will populate frequently with audience-tested headlines, while pairing stories with links to action campaigns working on the issue at hand.
The concept stems from Romm’s love of Internet metrics. Over 13 years of blogging at ThinkProgress, Romm has tracked the Web prints for his thousands of postings, with a particular focus on traffic sources. Over the years, he has watched as referral engines for his stuff have gone poof. Years ago, the Huffington Post drove good numbers; the modern, rebranded HuffPost doesn’t. Years ago, Yahoo provided helpful aggregation; no more, he says. And when Facebook changed its algorithm in 2018, says Romm, ThinkProgress traffic took a “big hit.”
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