Month: January 2020

Bolton Video Guts Democrat Witness Strategy

Posted on by LifeZette

By David Kamioner | January 30, 2020

Well, well.

One thing about DC is that everyone has said everything at one time or another for every reason.

So it is with former temporary Democrat savior and darling John Bolton. The Democrats wanted him on the witness stand in the senate impeachment trial of President Trump because, in an illegally leaked book passage to gin up book preorders, Bolton claimed that the president directly told him that Ukrainian military aid was completely tied to a political hit on Joe Biden by the Ukrainians.

Turns out, it was all a gimmick to sell books.

RELATED: Rand Paul and Justice John Roberts Battle Over Whistleblower

We know this because the president and the busy bees on his opposition research staff have unearthed a video in which former Trump National Security Advisor Bolton makes no mention of any quid pro quo in the Ukrainian matter. None.

They also found clips of Schiff personally trashing Bolton.

Given the Democrats obsessed on Bolton and his supposed damning indictment of the president during the entire Wednesday session of the trial they have some explaining to do when the Thursday session rolls around. No doubt Jay Sekulow and Alan Dershowitz can’t wait to hear it.

The first video is an August 2019 clip from Radio Free Europe. In the interview Bolton says the presidential relationship with Ukrainian president Zelensky was “warm and cordial.” He says not a word about misconduct on the part of President Trump. He even makes the GOP president’s case by saying fighting corruption in Ukraine was a “high priority” for Trump.

But now, with Bolton needing cash for a post White House career, he changes his tune. Well golly, what a surprise.

Seeing the clip the President Trump tweeted: “Game over.”

And what of the honesty and credibility of prospective Democrat star witness Bolton? Let Adam Schiff explain it to us, “This is someone who’s likely to exaggerate the dangerous impulses of the president toward belligerence, his proclivity to act without thinking, and his love of conspiracy theories,” Schiff said to MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow on March 22, 2018.

RELATED: Wednesday Senate Trial Got More Heated as it Got Later

And in 2005…
“And particularly given the history, where we’ve had the politicizing of intelligence over WMD [weapons of mass destruction], why we would pick someone who the very same issue has been raised repeatedly, and that is John Bolton’s politicization of the intelligence he got on Cuba and other issues, why we would want someone with that lack of credibility, I can’t understand,” Schiff said, emphasis mine.

The GOP legal team will most probably be ready with those clips at the trial on Thursday. Fun will ensue.

This piece originally appeared in LifeZette and is used by permission.

Read more at LifeZette:
Actress Evan Rachel Wood Gets Major Backlash For Calling Kobe Bryant A ‘Rapist’ After His Death
‘The View’ Goes Off The Rails As Impeachment Lawyer Alan Dershowitz ‘Triggers’ Hosts By Defending Trump
Senate Impeachment Trial Moves Coming Fast and Furious, Biden Livid

The post Bolton Video Guts Democrat Witness Strategy appeared first on The Political Insider.

Trump’s defense lawyers try to memory-hole Mick Mulvaney’s quid pro quo ‘Get over it’

Posted on by Laura Clawson

“Get over it,” acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney said in October about Donald Trump’s Ukraine quid pro quo. “There’s going to be political influence in foreign policy.” Hours later, under pressure, he walked it back in a statement attacking the media and denying that he said what he said.

Guess which of these accounts Trump’s impeachment team has decided to focus on? What Mulvaney said of his own accord, or the careful statement presumably written by the official White House ass-covering committee?

Yeah, obviously the second one. Two members of Trump’s defense team made that effort during Wednesday’s question-and-answer period. According to Patrick Philbin, “it’s been clear in the record since that press conference that what he was saying was garbled and or misunderstood” and “He immediately clarified, and said on that day, quote, The president never told me to withhold any money until the Ukrainians did anything related to the server. End quote.” Hearing that, you might think that Mulvaney immediately clarified in the same press conference, realizing as he spoke that he was coming across wrong and correcting himself on the fly. He did not. The line Philbin quotes as coming “immediately” was in the statement later the same day. 

But more importantly, Mulvaney was not “garbled.” He was crystal clear. “There’s going to be political influence in foreign policy” and there was “no question” that Trump had, in blocking the aid to Ukraine, mentioned his conspiracy theory about Ukraine and 2016.

Trump defense lawyer Mike Purpura also read out Mulvaney’s walk-back statement on Wednesday, in response to a softball question from Republican Sen. Richard Burr. Because Mulvaney’s brash honesty in his original press conference is really inconvenient for Republicans hoping their cover-up won’t look too obvious. So sad for them that the cover-up is right out in the open and everyone sees it.

Alan Dershowitz Is Wrong

Posted on by Yahoo News - Latest News & Headlines

Alan Dershowitz Is WrongAlan Dershowitz has been widely taken to be saying that a president can do anything he feels necessary to aid his reelection and not be impeached for it; since the president will always feel that his reelection is in the public interest, it cannot be a corrupt motive. He has, however, protested at this characterization. He has a tiny point. As far I can tell, here is what he is actually saying: The president can be impeached for treason, bribery, crimes (criminal violations of statutes), and “crime-like” actions. “Abuse of power” is not impeachable unless it falls into one of those categories.So it’s not true, on Dershowitz’s view, that the president can do anything to aid his reelection without being subject to impeachment. He can’t commit a crime (or “crime-like” act) toward that end. The key point in his argument is that “abuse of power” is not a freestanding impeachable offense. The point he made about presidential motives is surplus to his argument.The trouble is that the key point is incorrect. There’s almost nothing in the Founding-era debates or the historical practice of impeachment that suggests that only violations of statutes count as high crimes and misdemeanors and thus as impeachable. Hence the need for the qualifier that “crime-like” activities count too. But this qualifier destroys the Dershowitz position. The supposed danger of allowing impeachment for abuse of power — a danger that can’t be acceptably diminished by the two-thirds-of-senators requirement for conviction, the ability of voters to reject those senators at the next election — is that it’s vague and malleable. It’s not as though “crime-like” is capable of precise definition.Dershowitz is right, of course, to posit that an action can have multiple motives. The president’s supporters correctly note that if any trace motive of political self-interest makes an action an abuse of power, then nearly anything any president has ever done would be impeachable. His opponents correctly note that if the president’s mere belief that he’s a good president counts as a proper motive for official action, then impeachment for abuse of power is nearly categorically impossible.The answer can’t be that anything over 50 percent self-interested is impeachable and anything less than that is fine. It has to be that it’s up to members of Congress to use their best judgment without some made-up legal standard that gives that judgment spurious precision. It’s up to voters to make their best judgment, too, in judging the senators’ decision.Madison’s example of the abuse of the pardon power is again clarifying. What if the president encouraged his allies to commit a crime to benefit himself and then pardoned them for that crime? That pardon would not necessarily have violated any statute, especially given the small federal government at the time of the Founding. The pardon power itself is nearly unreviewable, and maybe wholly unreviewable. Yet Madison believed that such a case would demand the president’s impeachment and removal. At no point did he raise the possibility that this course of conduct should not be impeachable because the president might have embarked on it to secure his power and consider that goal a public necessity — probably because it would have been a ridiculous thought.


Posted in Uncategorized

Rand Paul continues his efforts to get the Ukraine whistleblower killed

Posted on by Joan McCarter

Sen. Rand Paul has not been getting enough attention during this impeachment process, so he executed his predictable and promised stunt on the Senate floor Thursday afternoon, submitting a question to Chief Justice John Roberts during the Q&A session that presumably contained the name of the whistleblower. Roberts refused to read the question, so Paul left the floor to have an "impromptu" press conference (and probably hit the send button on a fundraising email).

CNN's Manu Raju reports, "At press conference, Paul says: 'I can tell you my question made no reference to any whistleblower.' Then Paul reads aloud his question which names a Schiff's staff member and names the individual who has been reported as possible whistleblower—and asks about their contacts." This was an apparent effort to get the press to publish the name, since he seems intent on getting the whistleblower killed.

It likely won't work. One reporter asked, "With all due respect, shouldn't you be at the impeachment hearing right now?" Of course he should have been, and the sergeant-at-arms should be putting him in the Senate jail right now. He should also be disqualified from sitting as a juror in this impeachment trial and have his vote taken away—if either Roberts or Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell wants to save this trial from being a total farce.

Senate impeachment Q&A continues. Republicans lay the groundwork for cover-up: Live coverage #1

Posted on by Laura Clawson

Thursday is the second day of questions from senators to the House impeachment managers and Donald Trump’s defense lawyers. Questions are submitted in writing to be read by Chief Justice John Roberts, with questions alternating between Republican and Democratic senators and answers generally limited to five minutes.

Thursday, Jan 30, 2020 · 7:33:37 PM +00:00 · Barbara Morrill

Ongoing coverage can be found here.

Thursday, Jan 30, 2020 · 7:33:59 PM +00:00 · Mark Sumner

Durbin responds to claims by Sekulow that Democratic senators tried to extract political favors from Ukraine. 

“The Senators’ letter was written in response to a New York Times report that the Ukrainian Prosecutor General was considering not cooperating with the Mueller Probe out of concern that President Trump would cut off aid as punishment. The Senators’ letter in no way calls for the conditioning of U.S. security assistance to Ukraine.”

Thursday, Jan 30, 2020 · 6:15:28 PM +00:00 · Mark Sumner

Senator Murray asks the House managers a question inviting further discussion of the Trump legal team’s claims that House subpoenas were “invalid.”

Zoe Lofgren goes through the House rules, showing that the House had already adopted rules that included giving several committees the authority to issue subpoenas. The Trump legal team has been making claims that the rules don’t include the authority of impeachment, Lofgren shows that the rules authorize the House committee to issue subpoenas for “any” of it’s duties, details the way in which the rules have changed since the time of Nixon so that the House no longer requires a specific vote to authorize each committee, and generally slices, dices, and makes julienne fries of the Trump arguments.

Thursday, Jan 30, 2020 · 6:21:22 PM +00:00 · Mark Sumner

Baldwin sents a note to the House managers asking them to answer the question Trump’s team wouldn’t answer from Mitt Romney—that is, when was the hold put in place. A very nice question.

Note that it’s not that the Trump team can’t answer the question. It’s that they won’t answer it.

Jason Crow rises to explain that John Bolton is one of those who may have an answer. Crow lists several other incidents in which U.S. officials were contacted by Ukrainians concerned about the hold in advance of the date it became public.

Crow then takes time to smack around the argument that Trump’s team made that Trump intentionally kept the hold “private” out of some concern that didn’t apply to any other hold.

Thursday, Jan 30, 2020 · 6:24:44 PM +00:00 · Mark Sumner

A collection of Republican Senators make a pointless bow toward the “impeachment undoes elections” arguments and gives Jay Sekulow a chance to get up and rant about taking the vote away in  2020 (and I can say that before he does, because I know he will).

But even answering this question without spiraling out into WTF-land. is really too much to ask of Sekulow. 

Sekulow is so Michael Cohen 2.0 that Michael Cohen should collect royalties. And send this poor guy some plaid pants.

Thursday, Jan 30, 2020 · 6:28:47 PM +00:00 · Mark Sumner

Adam Schiff gets the chance to talk about the “descent into constitutional madness” by talking about the claims that Dershowitz made on Wednesday evening absolving a president of any limits at all on quid pro quo.

Schiff calls it the kind of argument a lawyer only makes when they’ve been caught “dead to rights.” Draws a straight line from Dershowitz’s claims right back to Nixon’s “if the president does it, it’s not illegal.”

Schiff: “We may be in a worse place, because this time that argument may succeed. … That means we’re not back to where we were. It means were are worse off than we were. That’s the normalization of lawlessness.”

Thursday, Jan 30, 2020 · 6:32:27 PM +00:00 · Mark Sumner

Cramer and Young give the Trump team a tonguebath … sorry, I mean they hand them a question that’s simply an invitation to dress Donald Trump up in a star-spangled suit and pretend that he’s the paragon of virtue, defending the justice system against those meanies in the House.

Early coffee break!

Thursday, Jan 30, 2020 · 6:35:22 PM +00:00 · Mark Sumner

Made it back with a fresh cup and a double-handful of animal crackers in time to hear Philbin talking about “fast and furious.” Because of course he was.

Thursday, Jan 30, 2020 · 6:37:45 PM +00:00 · Mark Sumner

House managers get a request for another round of explanations on the rules that allowed them to issue subpoenas before the general House vote. And they’re asked for a list of subpoenas that went out after 660.

Apparently the senator asking this question wasn’t listening literally ten minutes ago, when Zoe Lofgren went through these rules, including going line by line through the rules.

Thursday, Jan 30, 2020 · 6:41:43 PM +00:00 · Mark Sumner

Schiff is showing that each House committee had authority — and that the subpoenas issued were squarely in the oversight capacity of Congress even before the inquiry became official. 

Thursday, Jan 30, 2020 · 6:49:00 PM +00:00 · Mark Sumner

Oh, wonderful. We’re already up with a combined Cruz and Hawley and Graham. Stand by for smear …

Question accuses Demings of refusing to answer a question about Hunter Biden, that brings in half a conversation from USA Today.

Expect the Trump team to put on their mud suit and roll in this one. Oh, look. It’s Pam Bondi! Recovered from her arduous single answer on Wednesday to talk about fishing in Norway. And then Bondi lies about Shokin, about Biden. 

Seriously hoping that the House management team uses their opportunity to ask why Pam Bondi was on the board of a foreign company where she “didn’t know the language.” Please. Please. Please.

Demings steps up again, Starts off by talking about “if we’re serious about why we are here ...” somewhere off camera, Cruz has just moved on to the next person who will help him slip up another smear of the Bidens. 

Cruz is getting an early start today. Expect this same question to be asked, along with paragraph length excerpts from any article that he things sounds bad for Biden, at least a dozen times.

Thursday, Jan 30, 2020 · 6:55:27 PM +00:00 · Mark Sumner

Rosen to House managers asks about the precedent set by Trump’s actions. Jason Crow takes the answer (sorry, did you know he’s a veteran?) Anyway, Crow moves on to talking about alliances … (did you know he’s a veteran?) … back to talking about the importance of alliances.

Sorry, I’m a bit fritzed out by Crow’s repeated mention of his military service. Doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate it. It’s just that inserting a personal story into any of these five minute windows is almost certain to weaken the response and certainly takes up time that can be used on the the topic at hand.

Then Crow runs a series of clips showing all the times Trump has directly appealed for foreign interference in the election. Which is a sequence we should have available … will look for it.

Thursday, Jan 30, 2020 · 6:58:35 PM +00:00 · Mark Sumner

A heap’o Republicans give Trump’s team a chance to repeat the blandest aspects of the abuse of power case and quote the statements from Republican witness Jonathan Turley that they like. 

This is another of those questions from Republicans who wanted to show that they were present, but not risk asking anything that had the slightest chance of generating new information.

Dear Team Trump, Isn’t he great? Isn’t his toilet the goldest? Please talk for the next five minutes and don’t say anything anyone will ever quote. Thank you.

Thursday, Jan 30, 2020 · 7:00:45 PM +00:00 · Mark Sumner

Ahh. Here you go.

x

Thursday, Jan 30, 2020 · 7:06:35 PM +00:00 · Mark Sumner

The House managers get a question from Wyden giving them a chance to comment on how Team Trump absolutely refused to say that soliciting information from a foreign government for political advantage is a bad thing.

Hakeem Jeffries talks about the message that Trump, and Trump’s team, are putting out to autocrats, and governments of all kinds, about seeking information from foreign governments for political purposes. Jeffries is describing the idea of investigating opponents as wrong, in a room where more than half of those present are not just actively supporting such an investigation, but helping to smear a candidate on the Senate floor.

That’s a tough job.

Thursday, Jan 30, 2020 · 7:10:58 PM +00:00 · Mark Sumner

Hawley back again already, this time with Mike Lee. And this is actually an interesting one, because what Hawley asks the Trump team is flat out a defense of bribery, by offering Trump’s team a chance to talk about how it’s just dandy to “exchange official acts.”

Trump’s team doesn’t lean into it at first, but continues to pretend that Trump didn’t do anything wrong … Only, hypothetically, says Philbin, of course Trump could condition aid on something “legitimate to look into” like “these specific areas of corruption.”

Truthfully, the response was less interesting than the question, because the question from Hawley and Lee showed just how much they have bought into the idea that Trump can use the power of his office for his benefit without facing scrutiny.

Thursday, Jan 30, 2020 · 7:15:00 PM +00:00 · Mark Sumner

Val Demings gets a chance to talk about the scale of the “loop” and just how many people were aware of the Ukraine scheme. Rather than concentrating on Bolton, she focuses on a series of — and this term should be familiar to Republicans — missing emails; in particular the emails that State Department officials mentioned in texts and testimony, but which the White House refused to produce.

Thursday, Jan 30, 2020 · 7:20:20 PM +00:00 · Mark Sumner

Thune, Crap, et. al. give Trump’s team another chance to hit Nancy Pelosi on the “bipartisan impeachment” front. And Sekulow stands up to claim “that should end it.” Everyone go home.

Sekulow is already back at “removing Trump from the ballot” and the horrible, terrible results of removing Trump. Which “the American people wouldn’t tolerate it.” Now Sekulow is against Trump-splaining how the House gets to do impeachments. And now “all of the ballots need to be torn up” and blergh.

Let me say … please, people. Can you be so out of questions that we’ve already had this Sekulow rant twice in the first hour?

Thursday, Jan 30, 2020 · 7:26:06 PM +00:00 · Mark Sumner

A split question from Reed “can you explain who has paid for Rudy Giuliani’s legal fees, international travel, and expenses in his capacity as Mr. Trump’s attorney?” Popcorn time!

Schiff: “The short answer is, I don’t know.” Schiff suggests that if “other clients” are paying, it raises profound questions. Schiff extends Dershowitz’s quid pro quo argument to China, declares again that he doesn’t know who is paying Rudy’s tab.

Sekulow gets up and begins … ranting about Joe Biden. Is he going to be giving any answer on Rudy? Oh, no he is not. Now he’s ranting about a letter supporting the Mueller investigation. 

Sekulow believes that if he talks loud enough, people will forget the question.

Thursday, Jan 30, 2020 · 7:29:15 PM +00:00 · Mark Sumner

A bunch of dates, other dates, and some dates. All under the pretense that everything was just the same this year even though Trump placed a hold on military assistance.

Again, Republicans have zero interest in learning anything. This was a question that might as well have been “Can you confirm that money spent in September was also spent in September?”