The Trump Impeachment

[Seabass]

[Tero]

Agent Giuliani reporting from Ukraine:

“He’s going to make a report, I think to the attorney general and to Congress,” Trump told reporters at the White House on Saturday as he departed for a fund-raising trip to Florida. “He says he has a lot of good information. I have not spoken to him about that information yet.”

Repeated Claims
Giuliani has repeatedly made unsubstantiated claims about interactions between the Obama White House and Ukrainian officials. Multiple administration officials testified during the impeachment proceedings that they were worried Giuliani was pursuing politically motivated conspiracy theories and conducting a shadow foreign policy on behalf of Trump and at the expense of U.S. interests.
Still, Giuliani traveled to Ukraine with the conservative One America News Network in what he described as an effort “to bring before the American people” information he said House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff “covered up.”

The 5.3 billion:
But the Accounting Chamber of Ukraine said that the $5.3 billion came from multiple countries, that the funds to non-governmental organizations represented only a small percentage of the aid, and that the issue was improper accounting rather than misuse of funds, according to CNN.

The president’s lawyer also tweeted without substantiation that the “Obama embassy,” led by then-ambassador Marie Yovanovitch, urged Ukrainian police not to investigate the matter.

Giuliani was accompanied in Kyiv by Andriy Telizhenko, a Ukrainian who worked at the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington in 2016 and is the source of unsubstantiated allegations that his country interfered with the 2016 U.S. election.

bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-12-07/trump-approval-ratings-are-bad-news-for-republicans-opinion

[Tero]

All going according to plan. Trump will not pull off a Clinton. His popularity will be a steady 40% now till election.

[L'Emmerdeur]

Agent Giuliani reporting from Ukraine:

Giuliani was accompanied in Kyiv by Andriy Telizhenko, a Ukrainian who worked at the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington in 2016 and is the source of unsubstantiated allegations that his country interfered with the 2016 U.S. election.

bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-12-07/trump-approval-ratings-are-bad-news-for-republicans-opinion

Telizhenko has his finger on the problem, and if only he can evade the fiendish minions of the Jewish globalist conspirator Soros, he'll break the whole horrible plot wide open.

'How a conspiracy theory about George Soros is fueling allegations of Ukraine collusion'

An associate traveling with Rudy Giuliani in Ukraine this week has voiced an unusual theory for why he may not be able to return to the United States: "Soros people," he says, are working to discredit him and may block his visa.

Andriy Telizhenko, a former Ukrainian diplomat who has alleged Ukraine's government conspired with Democrats in 2016, said he's been told that people associated with liberal megadonor George Soros, including former Ukrainian politicians, are working against him — possibly because he's helping Giuliani continue investigating President Donald Trump's political opponents and undermine the credibility of the House impeachment inquiry.

"Soros people are trying to discredit my reputation with lies and then will try to block me," he said in a text message to NBC News from Kyiv.

...

When Fiona Hill, then a National Security Council official, started hearing early in 2019 about a smear campaign against a colleague in Ukraine invoking Soros, she had a sinking feeling: She'd heard this before.

A similar conspiracy theory about Soros had been lobbed against Hill during her first year as Trump's top adviser on Russia and Europe. That's when Hill says a former Republican congressman from Florida tried to get the vice president's office to get rid of her — "to have me fired for being a Soros mole in the White House," she told Congress.

...

A successful campaign to oust Marie Yovanovitch as the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine by Trump's personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, and two now-indicted associates was galvanized by accusations that Yovanovitch protected Soros' efforts. Those accusations originated in an opinion article by John Solomon in the "The Hill," which, according to documents given to Congress, he coordinated with one of the indicted Giuliani associates and with two pro-Trump lawyers, Victoria Toensing and Joe diGenova.

Last month, as the impeachment probe unfolded, diGenova told Fox News that Soros "wants to run Ukraine" and "controls a very large part" of the U.S. diplomatic corps, along with FBI agents in Ukraine and elsewhere. Giuliani falsely told The Washington Post in September that Yovanovitch was "now working for Soros." In fact, she is still a U.S. government employee.

Giuliani also told CNN that month that an anti-corruption nonprofit in Ukraine that took funding from a Soros philanthropy had fabricated evidence against former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort. He later told Fox News' Sean Hannity that the Ukrainians had "brought me substantial evidence of Ukrainian collusion with Hillary Clinton, the D.N.C., George Soros, George Soros' company."

"They put it in my lap," he said.

And last month, a photo that purportedly showed the whistleblower who outed Trump's call with the Ukrainian leader went viral, tweeted out by Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa. It turned out to be a photo of Soros' son.

...

Telizhenko, the former Ukrainian diplomat, has long alleged that AntAc [a Ukrainian anti-corruption nonprofit organisation] worked on Soros' behalf in trying to get rid of former Ukrainian Prosecutor General Victor Shokin, Telizhenko's former boss. Shokin is the prosecutor who Republicans allege that former Vice President Joe Biden got fired to protect his son Hunter Biden's natural gas company from scrutiny. Telizhenko in 2017 alleged that during the 2016 campaign, Ukrainian embassy officials in Washington coordinated with a Democratic National Committee operative to dig up information linking Trump's campaign to Russia.

There's more detail on Telizhenko's allegations in the story, but as to the man himself:

'Inside Rudy Giuliani’s Attempt To Get Dirt On Joe Biden'

[Telizhenko] described the pitch he made to Giuliani as “how to get lobbyism in Ukraine and tax corruption — you can’t fight corruption in Ukraine,” adding that efforts to do so have so far failed.

“Why not tax our politicians, have lobbying firms pay politicians, be the middle person on those fees,” he recalled. “I discussed those ideas with him, whether the U.S. would want to support and implement them. To improve our relationship with the United States.”

“I got positive feedback for those ideas,” he added.

Telizhenko first surfaced in the public sphere in January 2017. The former diplomat told Politico that Ukrainian officials tried to work with Democratic National Committee staffers to provide information about potential ties between the Trump campaign, Paul Manafort, and Russia.

Telizhenko’s claims have been denied by former members of the Ukrainian government, as the Washington Post reported.

Within a year of the Politico story, he set up a political consulting firm called Golden Lion Strategies, Inc., attempting to parlay supposed connections with Western and Ukrainian officials.

He appears to have had some luck in that role.

Ukrainian oligarch Pavel Fuks — a onetime potential Trump Tower Moscow partner who once brought Giuliani to Ukraine — hired Telizhenko as a consultant last year.

Telizhenko also spent the first six months of 2017 working with former Ukrainian parliamentarian Andrii Artemenko, who found himself stripped of his citizenship after delivering a supposedly Russian-backed “peace plan” to the desk of then-National Security Adviser Michael Flynn by way of Michael Cohen.

[Tero]

Play all the game pieces, but it is still Russia that has the most influence over there.

Meanwhile
https://www.npr.org/2019/12/07/78555433 ... e-to-swirl
Pompeo troubles.

[Scot Dutchy]

Russia as the most influence everywhere especially in the USA.

[L'Emmerdeur]

The 21st century's reds under the bed.

[rainbow]

*Get Impeachment Done*

You Yanks are as bad as the Poms with your dithering.

[Tero]

Grown men screaming, speaker gavel useless:
The whole thing -- even for someone like me who gets paid to watch this stuff -- was, well, unwatchable. A bunch of adults yelling at one another over matters that almost no one watching understood or cares about. It's hard to see how either side benefits from any of this display. And here's the thing folks: All of this ugliness happened within the first hour of the hearings. Buckle up.

https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2019/12/09/poli ... index.html

[Seabass]

[Tero]

Sondland, who bought his ambassadorship by donating to Trump, can't be described in that way
https://thehill.com/homenews/house/4737 ... e-very?amp

[L'Emmerdeur]

Grown men screaming, speaker gavel useless:
The whole thing -- even for someone like me who gets paid to watch this stuff -- was, well, unwatchable. A bunch of adults yelling at one another over matters that almost no one watching understood or cares about. It's hard to see how either side benefits from any of this display. And here's the thing folks: All of this ugliness happened within the first hour of the hearings. Buckle up.

https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2019/12/09/poli ... index.html

It's not complicated. The Republicans' performance was in furtherance of creating a narrative: 'The out of control radical leftist Democrat mob is running roughshod over everything good and decent. Just look at our desperate efforts to rein them in, and their relentless stomping on our every attempt to bring order and fairness to the process. The evidence is right before your eyes.' The Fox News outrage machine will run with the narrative and the MAGA™ constituency will eat it up with relish and raised blood pressure.

[Scot Dutchy]

Steele had 'personal' relationship with Ivanka Trump, DoJ report reveals

Former MI6 officer gifted her ‘family tartan from Scotland’
Steele was ‘favorably disposed’ to Trump family, report said

The former MI6 officer Christopher Steele had a “personal” relationship with Ivanka Trump and gifted her a “family tartan from Scotland” as a present, the long-awaited report by US Department of Justice inspector general, Michael Horowitz, revealed on Monday.

Horowitz’s review of the FBI’s 2016 investigation into Donald Trump’s 2016 election campaign and its links with Russia includes fresh details of Steele’s interactions with the FBI, and startling claims about his relationship with the Trumps dating back to the period before he wrote a controversial dossier on Trump.

The report did not mention Ivanka Trump by name but her identity was revealed by ABC News.

The report said that contrary to what Donald Trump has claimed on Twitter Steele was actually “favorably disposed” to the Trump family. It was “ridiculous” to suggest he was biased against the then Republican candidate or that his memos on collusion, written at the behest of the Washington-based research firm Fusion GPS, were in any way biased, Steele told federal investigators.

Surprised? Anything in that monkey cage is possible.

[Tero]

The President did it, who are wexto question Trump? In fact his fans wanted just that: a strong boss.
CNN
Barr's return to the spotlight sheds insight into a more subtle tactic that the President is using to stave of impeachment -- his concept that there are few limits to his permissible actions.

The attorney general is an enthusiast of a concept of an all-powerful presidency. He effectively auditioned for the job by in an unsolicited memo to the White House that assailed Mueller's theory on obstruction of justice.

On Tuesday, Barr dismissed the second article of impeachment drawn up by Democrats, arguing that Trump was within his power to reject multiple witnesses and document requests based on a claim of "absolute immunity."

"I don't believe it's the case where somebody, including a branch of government, is asserting a legal privilege
In many cases, Trump and his defenders do not present a detailed counter to the facts of the impeachment case. They simply argue that everything Trump did was within his rights.

White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham, for instance, said Tuesday: "The President will address these false charges in the Senate and expects to be fully exonerated, because he did nothing wrong."

It should be noted that this version of a hyper-powerful executive smashing Washington's establishment power structures was what helped win Trump the White House and retains a strong appeal to his supporters.

https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2019/12/11/poli ... index.html

[Tero]

Trump obsessed with Russia and FBI. Ukraine distraction?
VOX
“You have great people in the FBI, but not in leadership.”
Trump’s comments about Strzok and Page were part of his broader attack on the FBI. Hours after Trump lashed out at FBI Director Christopher Wray for telling the truth about an Inspector General report that concluded the origins of the bureau’s Russia investigation weren’t tainted by political bias, Trump took aim at his hand-picked director once again.
Later, while lamenting how the FBI “destroyed the lives of people” who were associated with his campaign — a comment alluding apparently to people like Paul Manafort and Roger Stone — Trump referred to FBI agents as “scum.”

“Their lives have been destroyed by scum, ok? By scum,” Trump said, before hyping a forthcoming report by US Attorney John Durham that apparently will be harsher on the FBI than the just-released IG report.
https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/2019/1 ... ania-rally