Month: January 2020

To GOP’s delight, Trump’s attorneys turn impeachment trial into a Biden disinformation campaign

Posted on by Kerry Eleveld

When Trump's personal attorney Jay Sekulow opened the floor arguments Monday in defense of his client, he had a simple message: Just the House facts, man. "We deal with transcript evidence, we deal with publicly available information," Sekulow said. "We do not deal with speculation—allegations that are not based on evidenciary standards at all." Trump's legal team wouldn't be dabbling with anything outside of the case that was transmitted to the senate by the house. In other words, the John Bolton bombshell directly implicating Trump in an extortion scheme was entirely off the table. 

What Sekulow forgot to mention was that, when it came to conspiracy theories about Joe and Hunter Biden, Team Trump would let their imaginations run wild. In fact, Trump attorney and former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi quoted a 2014 Washington Post article citing Hunter Biden's position on the Burisma board as “nepotistic at best, nefarious at worst.” Bondi claimed that the House managers referenced Biden or Burisma "over 400 times" as they made their case for impeachment, as if that alone was somehow an incriminating fact. In other words, Bondi quoted House Democrats who were quoting the disinformation injected into the ether by Trump and his personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, and then she charged that the sheer quantity of those mentions was somehow dispositive. In reality, what she latched on to was nothing but a feedback loop created by Trump and his henchmen.

Bondi also implicitly put Biden on trial, making the ridiculous claim that Democrats must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Trump's accusations about the Bidens were baseless. She added that Democrats, by noting all those accusations had been debunked, were just creating "a distraction."

Actually, no. Bondi was creating the distraction—dangling her keys as it were before the American public in order to direct its gaze on Biden rather than Trump, who's the person actually on trial. 

But Senate Republicans were just thrilled by all that key dangling. Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst could barely contain herself as she was musing later about the effect all that disinformation might have on Biden's chances of winning Iowa.

"Iowa caucuses are this next Monday evening. And I'm really interested to see how this discussion today informs and influences the Iowa caucus voters, those Democratic caucus goers," Ernst said late Monday, beaming with the enthusiasm of a high school cheerleader. "Will they be supporting Vice President Biden at this point? Not sure about that."

Wow. Senate Republicans, supposedly weighing whether the nation's commander in chief tried to corrupt the 2020 elections with bogus investigations, are gleefully finishing the job Trump started. 

Wanna put the Senate back in the hands of people who actually put the country before their personal interests? Give $2 now to the effort to flip the Senate to Democratic control. 

Watch Ernst gush.

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Trump signs bill to improve religious groups’ security

Posted on by Ryan Lovelace

President Trump has signed little-noticed legislation to fund greater protection of religious institutions against terror attacks.

Mr. Trump signed the bipartisan legislation Friday amid the impeachment trial in the Senate, after several attacks on religious institutions in recent weeks.

The measure authorizes an annual appropriation of $75 million through fiscal ...

Posted in Uncategorized

Impeachment trial resumes with more of Trump’s lie-and-attack defense: Live coverage #6

Posted on by Laura Clawson

White House counsel Pat Cipollone, Trump personal lawyer Jay Sekulow, and their whole crew are back to continue the opening arguments in the impeachment defense of Donald Trump. They gave a brief preview on Saturday, which was exactly what you’d expect: lies and attacks. They resume in the wake of reports that former national security adviser John Bolton’s book recounts a conversation with Donald Trump in which Trump explicitly tied military aid to Ukraine investigating his political opponents—exactly what Trump was impeached for—but it’s unlikely that will change the basic lie-and-attack strategy.

Tuesday, Jan 28, 2020 · 1:48:47 AM +00:00 · Hunter

If you’re just joining us, Alan Dershowitz is giving a long lecture on how the founders would not want a president impeached for mere abuse of power, despite Alan Dershowitz previously arguing the opposite. He’s trying to put a legal spin on Ken Starr’s argument that there are Too Many Impeachments These Days.

Tuesday, Jan 28, 2020 · 1:52:45 AM +00:00 · Hunter

Dershowitz now arguing at length that merely being a “dishonest” leader is not impeachable, which is probably not going to go down well with an already-fuming Trump.

Tuesday, Jan 28, 2020 · 1:54:44 AM +00:00 · Hunter

Dershowitz has spent quite a bit of time defending his own complete reversal of opinion on the issues he’s arguing tonight, which does not help Trump but does help Dershowitz as he claws at credibility in the highest-profile television show he’ll ever be on.

Tuesday, Jan 28, 2020 · 1:58:58 AM +00:00 · Hunter

Next up: Trump’s legal team will communicate via magic crystal with the Founding Fathers, who will say they agree with Donald Trump in every way. Wait, the crystal broke—so we’ll go with Cipollone, one of the Trump defenders implicated in the very acts that landed Trump here to begin with. He says he’s closing up for the night and promises it won’t take long.

Tuesday, Jan 28, 2020 · 2:02:21 AM +00:00 · Hunter

Cipollone lied about this not taking very long. And again, he is ignoring the facts of the case at hand and arguing procedure and Too Many Impeachments These Days. “Imagine if all that energy was being used to solve the problems of the American people.”

Tuesday, Jan 28, 2020 · 2:04:02 AM +00:00 · Hunter

“This choice belongs to the American people. They will get to make it months from now.” So the “Constitution” prevents you from removing the traitorous idiot and crook from office. And we’re done.

Editorial Roundup: Ohio

Posted on by The Associated Press

Recent editorials of statewide and national interest from Ohio newspapers:

Sen. Portman must vote for more impeachment witnesses

Akron Beacon Journal

Jan. 27

This is a big week for Rob Portman, Ohio’s Republican U.S. senator.

With the impeachment trial of President Trump continuing in the Senate, at least two major ...

Posted in Uncategorized

‘Get your facts straight!’ Chris Wallace gets testy with Fox News pundit’s spin on Bolton

Posted on by Walter Einenkel

Fox News’ Chris Wallace slammed conservative pundit Katie Pavlich on air, telling her to “Get your facts straight” after she tried to claim all kinds of made-up facts in her defense of Donald Trump. In question was Pavlich’s revisionist retelling of how the Democratic House’s impeachment inquiry was hampered by obstruction. In Pavlich’s imagineering, the Democratic Party is breaking with impeachment tradition by pushing an incomplete case, “and every impeachment beforehand, the witnesses that were called had been called in the House before being brought to the Senate. So there are questions here about the process.”

That’s not true. It’s not even a little bit true, and Wallace cut Pavlich off to tell her as much: “They hadn’t all been called in the House, and in the Clinton impeachment, they’d been called by the general independent counsel. They had not been called by the House.” 

Right-wing pundit Katie Pavlich is just the kind of dumb that Trump’s Republican Party loves: willing to toe any line of misinformation, no matter how many obvious facts and contradictions there are. Appearing on Fox News with conservative luminaries such as Brett Baier, Pavlich was promoting the old conservative trope that the difference between Clinton’s impeachment trial and Trump’s is that the Democratic Party keeps trying to add new things to it, because it’s going so terribly. The basis of this bit of bullshit is that Donald Trump’s White House has refused to allow anyone to testify, while his Department of Justice has done more work trying to cover up his criminal behavior than any of the actual work it’s supposed to do as a department. 

Wallace has been as critical of President Trump as anyone can be on the Fox News network, even admitting to the public that Trump has damaged our freedom of the press. But it’s hard to tell whether Wallace is angry at the lies being spread, or how stupid the spin is. The segment opened with Wallace saying proof that the John Bolton news that broke over the weekend was “big” was how intensely people like Pavlich were trying to spin it. 

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