All Things Trump: Is it over yet?

[Tero]

Elsewhere:
Meanwhile,
If you're a member of the Trump administration, get a lawyer.

If you're a lawyer for the Trump administration, get a lawyer.

If you’re a lawyer for a Trump administration lawyer, get a lawyer.

Congressional subpoenas can only be delayed for so long before they become obstruction.
Witness Cohen and Manafort. They were lawyers, remember?

[Brian Peacock]

As the old saying goes: "The lawyer of your lawyer is your enemy."

[Animavore]

Transcript is out.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.thegua ... osi-latest

[Tero]

[Animavore]

Irish journalist Declan Walsh has said US President Donald Trump's criticism of the media is threatening journalism around the world.

Speaking to RTÉ News, he said there is an "unwritten assumption" that the US government will step-in in extreme "moments of peril for reporters who work for American papers".

The New York Times reporter said he believes that under the Trump administration, that assumption has been challenged.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.rte.ie/amp/1077960/

Trump administration willing to throw a NYT journalist and Irish citizen under the bus. Thankfully Irish government steps in.

[Animavore]

Senate votes to kill national emergency declaration along southern border

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/senate-vot ... rn-border/

[Seabass]

They're really doing it. The Republicans are actually defending Trump's mob style shakedown of a foreign leader in exchange for election rigging. There really is no bottom for the Republicans. American politics is longer left vs right, liberal vs conservative... it's good vs bad. This is fucked up.

[Brian Peacock]

It's the last roll of the dice for identity politics. Everyone has been assigned their side by now, and if you haven't you better choose quickly because some nutter with a plan is going to try and kick it all off soon.

[L'Emmerdeur]

Still blithering about a non-existent DNC server, repeating a long-debunked right-wing idiot conspiracy-theorist talking point. One of our absent members did the same despite being schooled on it repeatedly.

'Does Trump Actually Believe That "Server" Bullshit? Yes, Ukraine Call Notes Show'

The so-called “transcript” of a July 25 phone call between President Trump and his Ukrainian counterpart serves as a poignant reminder of how absurd conspiracy theories—even ones widely and thoroughly debunked for many years—have come to influence daily life in the Oval Office.

The White House released the “transcript”—which is, in reality, a series of compiled notes without independent verification—following the announcement of a House impeachment inquiry on Tuesday.

...

...Trump’s discussion with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky also contains a number of bizarre references to a computer server and cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, the company the Democratic National Committee (DNC) enlisted to investigate the attacks on its servers by Russian hacking groups Cozy Bear and Fancy Bear in 2016. At one point, Trump even appears to suggest that “the server” itself is being stored in Ukraine.

Since 2017, Trump has repeatedly claimed that there is a “missing” DNC server, as if to imply there’s some sort of cover-up underway. But not only is there no server missing, the attack did not involve just a single “server.” As the Daily Beast reported over a year ago:

The “server” Trump is obsessed with is actually 140 servers, most of them cloud-based, which the DNC was forced to decommission in June 2016 while trying to rid its network of the Russian GRU officers working to help Trump win the election, according to the figures in the DNC’s civil lawsuit against Russia and the Trump campaign.

Being notably inept when it comes to basically all forms of technology, Trump has for years tried to make hay of the fact the DNC didn’t turn over its servers to the FBI. But as any expert in computer forensics knows—and the president has 17 intelligence agencies he could call to ask about this—physical access to the hardware is entirely pointless. Instead, what forensic investigators do and have done basically forever is make exact copies of the hard drives called “images” to inspect. Unplugging a server to physically move it (again, entirely pointless) would only lead to potential data loss in the machine’s memory.

...

Despite, again, having over dozen intelligence agencies at his disposal (not to mention all of the public reporting on this subject over the past two years) Trump seems to truly believe there’s some missing server floating around in the world somewhere and that CrowdStrike—which is headquartered in California, by the way—is a company controlled by some Ukrainian oligarch whose name he can’t recall, despite having spent actual face-time with the man.

Whatever else these so-called transcripts show, they speak to at least one truth: The president is a big dumb gullible idiot.

[Tero]

[Seabass]

Zelensky adviser says Biden case was precondition to Trump phone call

"It was clear that Trump will only have communications if they will discuss the Biden case. This issue was raised many times. I know that Ukrainian officials understood."
— Serhiy Leshchenko

[Tero]

[Joe]

While the Constitution does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.

[Brian Peacock]

I see he's been busy with his thumbs this morning. Looks like 20 tweets saying the impeachment is a scam and that the transcript of his phone call to Ukraine totally exonerates him - so obviously he's not bothered by either.

https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump

[Joe]

Since our friend isn't here to point out how we should think about this transcript, here are some GOP talking points to help us out.



Apparently, in the interest of transparency, the White House emailed these to the Democrats.