Impeachment

[yovargas]

That's what I meant by they gave their opinion. In the courts opinion, this person cannot be compelled to testify by the courts.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

No. In this court's opinion, they should not be asked to decide whether or not to compel him to testify. It's not the same thing.

Sent from my LG G6 using Tapatalk

[Frelga]

If not by courts, then how? I'm puzzled.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Exactly.

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[Voronwë the Faithful]

He just can't help himself. Even now, with everything going on.

Trump firing inspector general who flagged Ukraine whistleblower complaint

[RoseMorninStar]

Reminds me a bit of President Xi (etc..). Get rid of the messenger.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

I doubt anything will come from this and it is probably nothing more than lip service, but it still nice to see a bi-partisan effort to hold Mr. Trump accountable in some way.

Republican, Democratic senators press Trump for more on IG firing

[RoseMorninStar]

Good. Trump is acting like was anointed King rather than a servant of the people. That he thinks everyone has to be a 'Big Trump Fan' to serve their country or do their job demonstrates his overblown narcissistic ego.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Meanwhile, John Bolton is forging ahead with his book, despite threats from the White House.

Bolton forges ahead with book on Trump 'transgressions'

This is a great line.

Bolton "argues that the House committed impeachment malpractice by keeping their prosecution focused narrowly on Ukraine when Trump's Ukraine-like transgressions existed across the full range of his foreign policy," the publisher said.

Of course, who was it who refused to cooperate with the House without a court order that never was going to be forthcoming?

[RoseMorninStar]

That should be an interesting read.. but damn him for not testifying. He faults Trump for doing everything based on re-election calculations, but just what are his calculations?

[River]

Gee, if only there were an ex-National Security Advisor who could have come before Congress to talk about all that. Wouldn't've paid as well as a book deal but it might have made a difference to the nation.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

The judge overseeing the lawsuit filed by Justice Department to try to stop the publication of Bolton's book has refused to stop it, but he also indicated that he believe that it was likely that there was still classified information in the book and that Bolton could potentially be subject to civil and possibly criminal penalties.

[N.E. Brigand]

Something that puzzles me about the argument that this impeachment is just an attempt to overturn the 2016 election: if Trump is removed, Pence takes over. Not Hillary. Pence. Who is not exactly a loved figure on the left. In fact, given how rabidly the right supports Trump, I'm not sure Pence is all that loved on the other side either. Nonetheless, he'll be President if Trump is unable to finish his term. That's the way it works. Everyone ought to know that...so why the b.s. about coups and overturning elections and such? Did a massive chunk of the country forget elementary school civics at some point in the past few months? Or is the gaslighting from the White House just that effective?

In fact, it turns out that some on the right were ready to hang him.

[N.E. Brigand]

Gawd damnit. I really hate that the House didn't stick with and follow through with the subpoenas. If there was ever any chance of this whole impeachment proceeding meaning anything at all - and there was never much of a chance of that - it was from pushing the courts to make these rulings. In the long run, they would have been far more important than getting a pointless House vote in quickly, but for apparent political expediancy they bailed on the most important part of the whole process.

How long do you think that would have taken? The answer is minimum of a year, and almost certainly not before the next election. So an impeachment that is all about soliciting interference with the 2020 election would not be resolved before the 2020 election. That is untenable. Moreover, how likely is it that the Trump-dominated SCOTUS would issue a truly objective decision about compelling witnesses to testify against Trump's direction, and compelling production of the documents (which are actually more important, because I now have concluded that the documentation is fully damning). In an ideal world, yes I agree that the best case scenario would be to have the courts decide. But we don't have an ideal world.

I don't understand this thinking at all. So it takes a year. So what? So what! You say it needed to be "resolved" before the next election. Why? What is the point of "resolving" it, in our current scenario? What do you think our current scenario is accomplishing that pushing this through the courts would not? Because the current scenario is accomplishing nothing at best (in my view it is accomplishing worse than nothing). The Senate is going to give Trump the pass and he will not be affected at all, so in what way is this more or less "tenable" than waiting for the courts? You say what are the odds of the SCOTUS being objective and I would say, the odds are FAR better than the odds of the Senate being objective, so why the rush to get it in front of the Senate?

I am just baffled by the idea that waiting to try to get all the info and all the testimony that can be gotten is not important enough. As far as I'm concerned, it's the only thing that's important here. I don't know what it is that you think their current goal should be, but I can't possibly agree that whatever that goal is is more important than the opportunity to hear the full truth of the matter.

Having looked back at some of the posts in the Trump-Russia thread, I decided to check out this one as well. I see there were a couple variations on this theme at the time. Even at this late date, I think it's a subject worth some further comments.

A few weeks later, Adam Schiff said this in his great "Midnight in Washington" speech, the closing argument from the House impeachment managers: "Can you be confident that Americans, and not foreign powers, will get to decide, and that the president will shun any further foreign interference in our democratic affairs? The short, plain, sad, incontestable answer is no, you can't. You can't trust this president to do the right thing, not for one minute, not for one election, not for the sake of our country. You just can't. He will not change, and you know it. ... He has made that clear himself, without self-awareness or hesitation. A man without character or ethical compass will never find his way. ... And when the president tries to coerce a foreign ally to help him cheat in our elections and then covers it up, we must say, 'Enough.' Enough. He has betrayed our national security and he will do so again. He has compromised our elections, and he will do so again. You will not change him. You cannot constrain him. He is who he is. Truth matters little to him. What's right matters even less. And decency matters not at all."

Donald Trump was a danger to his country (and to the world). The best thing for the security of the United States and its people would have been for Trump not to be president. A point that I saw made repeatedly by political observers in 2017, 2018, and 2019 was that he (and we) had been very lucky that he was not confronted by a major crisis during his first three years -- depending on how major you consider the devastation of Hurricane Maria, the response to which managed as badly by Trump as George W. Bush had mismanaged the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, with a similar loss of life -- because it was evident that should there be a large catastrophe to which he needed to respond, it would be disastrous for the nation. More than any damage that Trump would deliberately inflict as he spent his time in the White House grifting and playing to the white nationalists in his base, what caused the sense of doom that so many of us felt in the pit of our stomachs was the fear of him blundering us into an abyss when faced with a serious challenge. I think I repeat myself on this point: Saturday Night Live is much derided these days, but they captured something in this December 2016 sketch:



And then the disaster happened. Because Donald Trump was in charge when the Covid-19 pandemic began, hundreds of thousands of Americans died who should have lived.

So Democrats from January 2017 through January 2021 were faced with this question: how can we protect the country from Donald Trump?

As I see it, there were four paths that they could follow.

The first path, and probably the best for the country, which needn't require Democrats to do anything except repeat the truth as often as possible (and in Trump's first two years, that was all they *could* hope to see achieved), would have been for Trump to resign, and the sooner the better. We would all be better off if Mike Pence had taken over at any point in those long four years. There were times in Trump's first months when the scandals were piling up so quickly, and Trump's popularity was falling so far (his worst numbers came in the summer of 2017, when his administration was musing about cutting Social Security), and he was unable to fill staff positions or hold onto those who he had hired, that I thought this could happen. But it has since been made clear that by becoming president, Trump had unwittingly exposed his life to a scrutiny that he was not prepared for -- thus his refusal, as the first president since Nixon, to release his tax returns -- and that his finances and even his liberty could be at risk if he didn't have the office of the presidency to protect him, so at latest, by the time the Mueller investigation launched in May 2017, resignation just wasn't in the cards.

The second path was for Democrats to use their power to constrain Trump from damaging the country. Apart from a smattering of victories in court, that was all but impossible for his first two years in office, when Democrats had no power nationally, and only somewhat possible once Democrats controlled the House. Republicans in 2017-2019 had no interest in limiting Trump's powers (their two goals were to pass an enormous tax break for corporations and the wealthy, and to put as many Republicans onto the federal judiciary as possible, and in exchange for that, they would let him do as he wished), and the oversight efforts of House Democrats in 2019-2021 were blocked by the White House to a degree not seen since the Nixon adminisration. Democrats also tried to temper some of his excesses with carrots rather than sticks, as by trying to strike a deal with him on immigration, or by expressing support for a grand bargain on infrastructure, but those moves also failed (in the case of immigration, top Congressional Democrats met with him at the White House and forged an agreement, only to learn hours later that he was backing out).

The third path was to impeach Trump and remove him from office, if he engaged in conduct that deserved that response. Boy, did he ever. Trump committed multiple acts that were so outrageous they would have resulted in the removal of past presidents, but the country has grown ever more polarized over the past 30 years, and with Republicans in control of the Senate, the scandal would have to be degrees of magnitude larger to convince them to act. For example, merely buying the silence of a porn star with campaign funds, as Trump did, a crime which resulted in a prison sentence for his personal attorney acting at Trump's direction, and which all by itself easily eclipses the deeds for which Bill Clinton was impeached, would not be enough in this degraded age.

The Trump-Russia scandal appeared to represent the nation's best hope to remove the cancer in the White House (to adapt a phrase from Watergate). Trump had won the presidency -- with a minority of the vote, mind you -- thanks in part to help from Russia, help that he solicited and welcomed, and there remains the serious likelihood that his collusion with Russia was criminal. Alas, he successly obstructed the investigation into his activity, and within two months of the House coming into Democratic hands, the Trump-Russia investigation had been brought to a close and was successfully spun by Trump's attorney general to the American public as being inconclusive at best. Seeing little public support for impeachment, thanks in part to the media repeating Bill Barr's talking points, and fearing a backlash that would improve Donald Trump's chances of reelection, Democrats instead were left trying instead to limit Trump's damage to the country by regular oversight and by looking toward the fourth path.

I am not certain, as it happens, that Democrats were correct in not impeaching Trump for obstructing the Russia investigation. Because Repblicans controlled Congress, there had been almost no public testimony about that scandal during Trump's first two years. Michael Cohen's testimony, just weeks before Mueller's report was submitted to Barr and not long before Cohen reported to prison, was seen by a lot of people who hadn't paid attention to reports on Mueller's investigation, and it was damning and suggested further avenues of investigation (Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in particular did a nice job of asking useful questions). A full-bore impeachment investigation changed public opinion during Watergate; it might again have done so in this case. It's possible that the public, upon seeing, e.g., Donald Trump Jr. take the Fifth Amendment when asked about his 2016 meeting with someone he knew to be a representative of the Russian government offering dirt on his father's opponent, would begin to understand the gravity of what had occured. On the other hand, Robert Mueller's testimony in July 2019, because he was limited to repeating points in his report (though even some of those points exposed how few people had read Mueller's report), showed the risks that Democrats faced. Also we've seen that an intransigent White House can block Congress's access to witnesses and evidence for years, and Congress has no way to enforce subpoenas on its own.

That brings us to the fourth path to save the country from Donald Trump: the 2020 election. If there was no way to avoid four years of Trump doing awful things to the country with the looming fear of him being in charge when a real crisis struck, then at least he must not be in the role for eight years. And while incumbent presidents historically are likelier than not to win reelection, Trump's approval rating had consistently stayed in the low 40s, so there was a reasonable chance that the American public would turn him out in November 2020.

But then within two months of Mueller's final testimony to Congress, it became apparent that Trump was trying to use the powers of his office to cheat in the 2020 election. Trump was repeating the actions that Mueller appears to have believed Trump had taken in 2016: offering to assist a foreign nation as president in exchange for that nation helping him win election. But this time, Trump was already president and actually could provide that assistance, or he could withhold assistance Congress had designated. Specifically, he had blocked promised aid to Ukraine until that country would make public statements denigrating the 2020 opponent that Trump most feared, Joe Biden. And if Trump was allowed to get away with it in this instance, he would just keep doing it. He would literally steal the election.

Thus Democrats were forced to impeach Donald Trump in December 2019, even though there was almost no hope that the Republican-controlled Senate would remove him from office. They had to do it to try to save the country. If he were to cheat his way to victory, that would be the end of American democracy.

By the way, this is not just me speaking with hindsight 21 months later. At the time that this debate was going on, I sent emails to a couple dozen political journalists and psephologists, after I had read their articles and essays alternately wondering why Democrats had moved to impeach so quickly and also why Nancy Pelosi held onto the articles of impeachment for a couple weeks before sending them to the Senate. All of these commentators were evaluting the questions in simple political terms. None of them were asking what was the right thing to do. None seemed to recognize the danger facing the country. And the few who responded to me seemed incapable of understanding the issue that way. But here's what I said. First I explained more briefly what I wrote above: (a) every day that Donald Trump is president is a threat to the United States, (b) he had engaged in impeachable conduct but the Senate was unlikely to convict him, (c) his losing the 2020 election was therefore the best path to removing the danger, (d) Trump himself realized that, (e) this is why he's trying to rig the election, and (f) he must not be allowed to do that.

Given those circumstances, I said, the best thing Democrats could do was to expose Trump's crimes, as quickly and as thoroughly as possible, and an impeachment trial was the best way to put Trump's crimes in front of American voters. Pelosi's two-week delay was a last-ditch effort to allow further evidence to come out that might convince the Senate either to convict Trump or at least to allow witness testimony. (I see there was a lot of discussion about whether this was the first Senate impeachment trial not to feature witnesses: does anyone know if there were witnesses in the Thomas Porteous trial in 2010 -- in which, by the way, Adam Schiff was the lead House Manager and Jonathan Turley was lead defense attorney?). When it was clear that move had failed, Democrats returned to their original fast track. It had to happen quickly because merely exposing what Trump had done already was putting the false stories about Joe Biden and Ukraine in the public eye. (It's like the problem with arresting a blackmailer, except in this case the allegations against Biden weren't even true.) Those lies needed to be quashed, and hopefully forgotten, before people were thinking about the election. Democrats were well aware of how four years of Benghazi lies and a year of endless repetition of the word "emails" had damaged Hillary Clinton. They could not let Republicans use the same smear tactics all over again on Biden. Even so, I feared that enough damage had been done that if Biden were the nominee, he wouldn't win. And Republicans did try to return to the Burisma conspiracy theories very late in the campaign, with the stories about Hunter Biden's laptop. Imagine if they'd been pushing it for ten straight months.

Beyond that, (1) Trump needed to be warned that Democrats were wise to his schemes and would punish him for such behavior, which might make him a little less eager to try again; (2) the public needed to be alerted to how Trump was attempting to undermine the election, so that they would be better prepared to recognize such ploys and reject them; and (3) the public had to be made aware that what Trump had done was wrong, so that they would be likelier to vote against him in November 2020.

Again, I said all of this (many times over) in the last days of December 2019. Unfortunately, my warnings were already too late, and the Democrats were too late also. They did succeed, barely, in stopping Trump from stealing the election. But that was always the fourth best way to remove him from office and save the country, and the catastrophe that in the end would kill close to a million Americans, enabled in large part by Donald Trump's incompetence, was already coming.

Edited to fix typo.

[N.E. Brigand]

Meanwhile, in the weird-news-that-has-become-our-new-normal, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman are rather interesting characters. Evidently Trump doesn't pay Rudi Giuliani, Lev has paid him $500,000 (from his company 'Fraud Guarantee'?) and now Lev is claiming executive privilege. In order to claim executive privilege I believe they would have to say they are working for the government/Trump and that they had sensitive information. Parnas has had ties to the Trump organization for decades.

Now they are just saying stuff to just say stuff. There isn't even a bad argument that executive privilege would apply to Parnas (or Fruman, though I think it is specifically Parnas that the argument is being made, or at least brought up about). One "amusing" aspect of that article is where the lawyer for Parnas says that his client doesn't work form Mr. Trump, he works for Mr. Giuliani. Yet in reality it is Parnas that has paid Giuliani $500,000, not the other way around. So how is that Parnas works for Giuliani when he is paying Giuliani?

The mind doesn't boggle. It spins round and round like Linda Blair in the Exorcist.

Meanwhile, the latest word is that the Democrats on the Impeachment Committee hope to begin public hearings as soon as mid-November, though my guess is that it will probably be at least a month later than that, as everything always takes longer than expected.

ETA: Cross-posted with elengil. In this case, apparently so!

It was announced a couple weeks ago that Fruman is pleading guilty. Today it turns out that while that's true, it's not a cooperation agreement. He's not flipping.

[N.E. Brigand]

Meanwhile, in the weird-news-that-has-become-our-new-normal, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman are rather interesting characters. Evidently Trump doesn't pay Rudi Giuliani, Lev has paid him $500,000 (from his company 'Fraud Guarantee'?) and now Lev is claiming executive privilege. In order to claim executive privilege I believe they would have to say they are working for the government/Trump and that they had sensitive information. Parnas has had ties to the Trump organization for decades.

Now they are just saying stuff to just say stuff. There isn't even a bad argument that executive privilege would apply to Parnas (or Fruman, though I think it is specifically Parnas that the argument is being made, or at least brought up about). One "amusing" aspect of that article is where the lawyer for Parnas says that his client doesn't work form Mr. Trump, he works for Mr. Giuliani. Yet in reality it is Parnas that has paid Giuliani $500,000, not the other way around. So how is that Parnas works for Giuliani when he is paying Giuliani?

The mind doesn't boggle. It spins round and round like Linda Blair in the Exorcist.

Meanwhile, the latest word is that the Democrats on the Impeachment Committee hope to begin public hearings as soon as mid-November, though my guess is that it will probably be at least a month later than that, as everything always takes longer than expected.

ETA: Cross-posted with elengil. In this case, apparently so!

It was announced a couple weeks ago that Fruman is pleading guilty. Today it turns out that while that's true, it's not a cooperation agreement. He's not flipping.

Fruman today was sentenced to twelve months and one day in prison. (He had asked for no time; prosecutors wanted three to four years.) It was apparently not just one year because only sentences longer than a year are eligible to get time off (54 days) for good behavior.

I feel like there's a lot about Fruman's and Parnas's schemes that never came to light.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Well, the Giuliani investigation is still active.

[N.E. Brigand]

Lev Parnas was sentenced to 20 months in prison today.