Category: Corruption

Rand Paul Says President Trump Would Be ‘Going Against The Law If He Didn’t Investigate The Bidens’

Posted on by Guest Author

Republican Senator Rand Paul asserts that President Donald Trump had a legal obligation to investigate potential corruption committed by former Vice President Joe Biden and his son, Hunter.

Paul appeared on Fox News Thursday night program “The Story with Martha MacCallum” after making news earlier in the day by reading a question that had been censored by Chief Justice John Roberts on the Senate floor. Paul’s question cited the “original legislation” providing money to Ukraine as having included a provision to “investigate corruption.”

RELATED: Ted Cruz: Democrats Made ‘Very Serious Strategic Error,’ Hunter Biden Testimony Now Needed

Rand Paul: Trump NOT Asking Ukraine to Investigate Bidens Would Be Breaking the Law

“Did you think there was anything wrong with the phone call?” asked host MacCallum. “Did you see it as a request for a political favor in the coming election against somebody who is likely running against the president?”

“The original legislation that we gave money to Ukraine said that the president has to investigate corruption,” Paul responded. “And so I think there is a lot of evidence that the Bidens are corrupt and that there was corruption, so he would actually be going against the law if he didn’t investigate the Bidens. I think he did what was completely in compliance with the law and this is just partisanship thing gone amok, and ultimately the Democrats are going to regret they did this because they are making it very, very hard for the country to have anything that we can do together.”

Paul was likely referring to a 1998 treaty that former president Bill Clinton signed with Ukraine that called for “Mutual Legal Assistance” to investigate corruption. Fox News host Jesse Watters brought up this fact during a debate back in September with fellow “The Five” co-host Juan Williams, saying that Trump had a “firm legal underpinning” to pursue an investigation into the Bidens.

RELATED: Schiff: Calling Hunter Biden to Testify an ‘Abuse’ of Impeachment Process

Paul an Ally of Trump

Rand Paul has consistently opposed the Democrats impeachment scam, including questioning whether Donald Trump’s enemies have conspired against the President long before the Ukraine phone call was a twinkle in liberal eyes.

Not to mention, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that Joe and Hunter Biden are corrupt!

The post Rand Paul Says President Trump Would Be ‘Going Against The Law If He Didn’t Investigate The Bidens’ appeared first on The Political Insider.

We can all stop pretending Republicans want to preserve the republic. They don’t

Posted on by Kerry Eleveld

L'état, c'est moi. I am the state. That is where we are—a declaration of self as sovereign once made famous by France's Louis XIV, whose pre-revolutionary reign as king lasted 72 years until his death in 1715. This appears to be exactly what Senate Republicans are preparing to embrace on Friday when they will likely vote against hearing witness testimony so they can summarily move to acquit Donald Trump without engaging even the most basic due diligence of any fair fact-seeking trial.

At least we won't have to endure any more insulting bothsidesisms from the media like this New York Times classic from December asserting that "the lawmakers from the two parties could not even agree on a basic set of facts in front of them." Actually, House Republicans hadn't even pretended to deal in facts, they were too busy deploying the distraction of emotional hyperbole. 

The failure of House Republicans to lay a factual foundation for Trump’s defense is exactly why, over the course of the past week, the arguments of Trump's legal team have effectively devolved from "he didn't commit a crime" to "it doesn't matter if he did" to "it's perfectly legal and acceptable for a president to break the law in pursuit of his self interests because his interests are the state's interests." 

“If a president does something which he believes will help him get elected in the public interest, that cannot be the kind of quid pro quo that results in impeachment,” Alan Dershowitz told U.S. senators Wednesday, only to refute himself on Thursday.

“The idea that any information that happens to come from overseas is necessarily campaign interference is a mistake,” White House deputy counsel Patrick Philbin offered. “Information that is credible that potentially shows wrongdoing by someone who happens to be running for office, if it’s credible information, is relevant information for the voters to know about.”

Trump's so-called "information" seeking about Biden was never credible. But that's clearly immaterial to Philbin. He doesn't even think Trump seeking something of value from a foreign government to win reelection is criminal, when it actually is under 52 U.S.C. 30121. But who cares? C'est la vie. He's president. Get over it. 

That's basically the exact same argument Trump made to ABC journalist George Stephanopoulos last June. "It's not an interference, they have information—I think I'd take it," Trump said of dirt offered to him by a foreign government. Trump also told Stephanopoulos that FBI Director Christopher Wray was "wrong" when he advised Congress that politicians should report any approaches made by foreign entities to the FBI.

The next day, Trump was momentarily shamed into walking back his comments, saying "of course" he would report such an instance to the FBI. That whiplash 180 came after Republican lawmakers like South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham flatly rejected the idea of accepting foreign help in campaigns. “If a foreign government comes to you as a public official, and offers to help your campaign giving you anything of value, whether it be money or information on your opponent, the right answer is no,” Sen. Graham said on June 14, 2019.

Oh, those were the days, when Trump lackeys like Graham still gave at least some deference to the law.

Now the Wall Street Journal editorial board is endorsing the presidential exceptionalism that Trump’s lawyers advanced. "Every President equates his re-election self-interest with the public interest. It isn’t grounds for impeachment," read the subhead of the board's jaw-dropping editorial. The board cited Philbin asserting, “All elected officials, to some extent, have in mind how their conduct, how their decisions, their policy decisions, will affect the next election. ... It can’t be a basis for removing a President from office.”

In a rebuttal, House Intelligence Committee chair and floor manager Adam Schiff pointed out the disingenuousness of that argument. "We're calling that policy now. It's the policy of the president to demand foreign interference and withhold money from an ally at war unless they get it," Schiff said. "That's what they call policy. I'm sorry, that's what I call corruption."

But by Thursday morning, none other than the GOP chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee was echoing Philbin's folly. “I have no problem with what Philbin said,” Burr told reporters. “I think that the idea that any information that happens to come from overseas is necessarily campaign interference is a mistake. ... If it’s credible information, [it's] relevant information for the voters to know about.” 

In other words, Republicans are removing the origin of the information as the standard of criminality and replacing it with a subjective determination about whether the information is "credible." And according to Trump, the president, his corruption concerns were credible enough to bypass the U.S. Department of Justice on the way to demanding an investigation led by a government so corrupt, he wouldn’t release foreign aid to it. 

It doesn't pass the smell test, folks, but Schiff got it right on both counts. That's corruption, plain and simple. And that's also what Republicans call policy now.

Watch Schiff’s rebuttal.

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Trump defense in court: Impeachment, not courts, is proper remedy for a president ignoring subpoenas

Posted on by Hunter

There were gasps and laughter on the Senate floor when House impeachment manager Rep. Adam Schiff announced this: Even as Trump's lawyers insisted repeatedly, over and over, that a president cannot be impeached for refusing to comply with congressional subpoenas, his Bill Barr-led Department of Justice is in court, today, insisting that Congress absolutely can respond to a president refusing to abide by congressional subpoenas by ... impeaching that president.

CNN reports, "Justice Department lawyer James Burnham said without hesitation that the House can use its impeachment powers, among other options, like withholding appropriations." The courts have no role in enforcing subpoenas directed at the executive branch—that has been the repeated Trump court argument. In the Senate, in the meantime, Trump's team is simultaneously arguing that impeachment cannot be used in response to a president's team ignoring subpoenas, that it must be argued through the courts.

The Trump defense is inherently corrupt. The Republican defense, in the Senate, is inherently corrupt.

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Bribery. The crime is bribery. Say it

Posted on by Hunter

The Trump defense against impeachment is premised on layers upon layers of nonsense, but the notion that Donald Trump's act—suspension of military aid to a foreign nation until its government announced an investigation of his just-announced domestic political opponent—does not constitute a crime is among the most blatant.

Bribery. The crime is that Donald Trump demanded a personal bribe in exchange for an official act of his office. And soliciting a bribe is, unequivocally, a criminal act.

The defense theory that Trump was allowed to target a specific political opponent for an "investigation" as a supposed foreign policy is inherently corrupt. There is no other word for it. Criminal defender Alan Dershowitz went further still, claiming that if Trump believed that his winning reelection was genuinely in the public's best interest, then any action he took to sabotage his opponents would be legal and allowable. In every other public context, this is recognized unequivocally as an act of corruption.

Ex-House Republican Chris Collins was indicted for insider trading—using private information to make stock trades meant to benefit himself. Ex-Rep. Duncan Hunter was indicted for stealing, outright, campaign funds for his own personal gain. The then-governor of Illinois, Democrat Rod Blagojevich, was impeached, removed, and imprisoned for seeking to trade political appointments, an official act of his office, for personal bribes.

It is Blagojevich's case that is a close analogue to what Trump himself did. Trump unilaterally delayed military aid allocated by the House and Senate to a foreign ally. Trump distanced his White House from that government, refusing a meeting the newly elected Ukrainian leader considered of utmost importance in signaling to Russia that his nation had the support of the United States. He withheld both acts, indisputably now, to procure an announcement from the Ukrainian government that his potential election opponent was now being investigated for corruption.

That is soliciting a bribe. Trump could have requested that his Department of Justice "investigate" his election opponent itself; it would still likely be a crime. Trump could have made the request without using the tools of his office to pressure the desperate Ukrainian government into compliance; doing so in his official capacity as president would still likely be a crime. Trump did the most corrupt of all versions, however.

Trump demanded that Ukraine announce two specific investigations, one of Biden and one promoting an anti-Democratic Party conspiracy theory boosted by the same Russian government known to have targeted Trump’s election opponents in the past. The only investigations Trump demanded were focused on his domestic political opponents.

Trump coordinated the effort not through the United States' robust law enforcement and foreign policy agencies, but through his personal lawyer, working with now-indicted Ukrainian criminals, coordinating "evidence"-gathering with a known-to-be-corrupt Ukrainian official seeking to trade that evidence to Trump's team in exchange for getting his own criminal indictment squashed by Trump's Department of Justice. This gaggle of criminals was elevated above the official United States foreign policy apparatus, and quickly succeeded in getting a member of that foreign policy apparatus, the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, removed from her position by convincing Trump she was a political, not a policy, opponent.

Trump ordered multiple members of his Cabinet to take official actions, actions determined at the time to be baseless and soon afterwards judged to be illegal, intended to put maximum pressure on Ukraine to comply in providing the “favor’ he’d asked for. He ordered his subordinates to perform official acts meant to extort Ukraine into compliance—literally at gunpoint.

Trump provided no public explanation for his acts, Trump's subordinates provided their own government subordinates no private explanations for those acts; an after-the-fact effort was launched to investigate any possible rationale that could be offered for his acts; White House officials swiftly moved to conceal his acts as numerous White House and government officials alerted White House lawyers of the potentially criminal nature of those acts; and when Congress eventually learned of his acts, Trump offered no explanation, but instead ordered all agencies to refuse document requests, subpoenas for testimony, and other basic tools of oversight.

Donald Trump sought a bribe from Ukraine. Donald Trump demanded that the government of Ukraine grant him two very specific personal favors, both targeting his election enemies, and withheld official acts of his government to procure them. Trump ordered his administration to take official acts to obstruct congressional investigation of those acts.

Seeking something of personal value in exchange for performing an act as a public official is seeking a bribe. It is not hard to understand. It does not matter if it is called a new "foreign policy" in which personal bribes are, now, supposedly both official policy and good for the country.

It's bribery. Just say it. And every Republican senator either knows full well that Trump was soliciting a bribe or, by denying it, has indicated that they too are sufficiently corrupt to consider demanding precisely the same thing in exchange for doing their own official duties.

That is likely the case. It is evident, at this point, that nearly every Republican senator both stipulates that Trump did exactly what John Bolton claims to be an eyewitness to and is taking the official position that members of their party are indeed allowed to solicit such "favors" without repercussion or recourse. But it is unambiguously bribery, and each of them is now conspiring in that act.

Moscow Mitch’s 2020 campaign fund helped out by Trump’s impeachment defense team

Posted on by Joan McCarter

You can't make this degree of corruption up. Moscow Mitch McConnell, the guy who has promised again and again that he is working with Donald Trump's impeachment lawyers to make sure that Trump will not be convicted and removed from office, has gotten campaign donations from those lawyers. This year. For his 2020 reelection campaign.

The Louisville Courier Journal reviewed campaign finance data for McConnell, finding that Ken Starr gave the maximum allowed, $2,800, on July 31, 2019. He's been a donor to every one of McConnell's campaigns since 2020. McConnell's gotten two separate donations from Robert Ray for a total of $5,600. Those were on Sept. 30, 2019, 12 days after The Washington Post reported on the whistleblower report that Trump was withholding aid to Ukraine until the country agreed to announce an investigation into Joe and Hunter Biden.

McConnell's campaign blew off the glaring appearance of corruption in the transaction, taking a swipe at House Democrats. "The absence of any adequate arguments by House impeachment managers seems to be playing a pretty meaningful role however," McConnell's campaign manager Kevin Golden said. Clearly the money isn't a bribe for McConnell to ensure Trump's acquittal, because that's been a foregone conclusion from the get-go. Moscow Mitch promised it. So it must be a reward.

It's time to end McConnell's destructive stranglehold on the republic. Please give $1 to our nominee fund to help Democrats and end McConnell's career as Senate majority leader.

Who’s paying for Trump’s impeachment defense? Republican donors, yet again

Posted on by Hunter

Almost everything about Donald Trump's finances remains murky, because Donald Trump has refused to do the customary tax disclosure of what he owns and who owns him, while his cabinet blocks outright any congressional attempts to review that material. But we do know, in a bit of an ironic twist, who is paying for Trump's lie-filled legal defense during his Senate impeachment trial. You will not be surprised to learn it ain't Donald Trump.

The Trump defense is in large part being paid, reports The Washington Post, by the Republican National Committee. Yes, it is the Republican Party itself, through the donations of America's greatest suckers, that is paying to argue that a Republican-and-only-a-Republican president can demand that a foreign government assist his reelection efforts, and can use the tools of his public office to extort it into doing so. Impeachment word-sayers Jay Sekulow and Jane Raskin had received $225,000 as of November, says the Post, but we can expect that amount to balloon significantly.

The RNC's costs to defend Trump are expected to be in the millions, all of it coming from Trump-supporting Republican donors (presuming, of course, there's no Lev Parnas or other foreign-agent cash mixed in, which is not a bet anyone should take). This is less money that Trump's supporters have to donate toward actual Republican campaigns, so this is good news. That doesn't mean that the rest of America isn't on the hook for some of Trump's defense, however: Taxpayers of course pay for the Justice Department and White House-based government lawyers who have done their damnedest to obstruct the House's impeachment investigation and continue to argue vigorously that the Senate has no right to or need for evidence either.

But the rest of the details, like Trump's own finances, remain murky. Defender Alan Dershowitz claims he is not receiving a penny for his work defending Trump, which checks out, because Alan Dershowitz would consider national television time to be the best pay anybody could possibly give him, and will probably be using his own recordings ... privately ... for the next 10 years. Ken Starr isn't talking at all, because Ken Starr has gotten very reluctant to talk about much of anything since his most recent scandal—or maybe he decided he needs all the fact-hiding practice he can get, just to keep himself limber.

Trump’s latest anti-corruption move: PR event alongside world leader charged with corruption

Posted on by Laura Clawson

Donald Trump really cares about fighting corruption, his impeachment defense lawyers keep telling us. He cares so much that he held up nearly $400 in military aid to Ukraine to ensure that it would crack down on corruption (in a way that would just so happen to benefit him personally). And now Trump has showed how strongly opposed he is to corruption by … unveiling a major (deeply problematic) Middle East plan alongside a world leader who was indicted just today for corruption.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been charged with bribery, fraud, and breach of trust. In one of the three cases, he steered hundreds of millions of dollars in regulatory benefits to a media company owned by a friend, and in exchange got favorable news coverage. Netanyahu tried to argue he was immune to prosecution and has called the prosecution an “attempted coup.” So actually, he’s the perfect person for Trump to be standing with on the last day of the defense’s opening arguments in Trump’s impeachment trial.

The plan Trump and Netanyahu are unveiling “is overwhelmingly expected to be skewed in Israel's favor and is largely viewed as dead on arrival in the region,” CNN reports. Former Israeli Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman charged that Netanyahu is using the event and the plan to boost his own political strength, saying that “Netanyahu is taking a political plan and turning it into a survival plan for him personally.”

With Israel set for an unprecedented third election in early March after the last two resulted in deadlocks, Lieberman explained, “Everyone understands that, 34 days before an election, it is impossible to start a deep, meaningful, fundamental discussion.” Cynically using sham policy for personal political benefit? Another way the Trump-Netanyahu partnership on this plan, on this day is a perfect meeting of minds.

But an hour after Trump was side by side with Netanyahu, his impeachment defense team will be back to argue that he really, really cares about corruption. Tell us another one, guys.

Mike Pompeo lied about NPR interview with Mary Louise Kelly—and there’s proof

Posted on by Hunter

It's hard to keep track of every detail of Republican corruption, but Trump-appointed Secretary of State Mike Pompeo got himself into a new scandal when he cut an NPR interview short after journalist Mary Louise Kelly asked him about ousted ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch, screamed at Kelly afterward, and dared her to find Ukraine on a "blank" map he keeps in his office, for some reason (which she did, as Kelly has a master's degree in European studies). He capped off this tour de force by sending out a crass official State Department statement claiming she was lying about all of it.

Among his claims: Kelly had agreed to limit questions only to Iran and was not supposed to ask about anything Ukraine-related. It turns out, because we've heard this song before, that Mike Pompeo was lying through his teeth on that one and The Washington Post was quickly given proof. Once again, Pompeo has used his State Department to lie to the American people.

The Washington Post obtained the email exchanges between NPR and Mike Pompeo's staff. They show that Kelly specifically did not agree to Pompeo's conditions, and specifically said she would also be asking questions about "Ukraine." "I never agree to take anything off the table," Kelly wrote in one email.

Pompeo's office pushed back, asking at least that Iran be the topic for "a healthy portion of the interview," once again signaling Pompeo's months-long aversion to answering any questions whatsoever about the impeachment-causing scandal he is buried in up to his ex-House Republican eyebrows. But Kelly gave only the assurance that her "plan" was to spend a "healthy portion" on Iran, with no promise that other subjects wouldn't come up.

So the secretary of state lied to the American people in an official State Department statement, which is many times worse than the Benghazi scandal House Republican Pompeo attempted to manufacture out of thin air. This is not surprising: He is crooked. He has repeatedly lied. He has been identified as a key figure in Trump's scheme to withhold military aid to Ukraine until a "Biden" investigation was announced.

Former national security adviser John Bolton's unreleased book manuscript alleges that Pompeo personally knew of the smear effort against Ambassador Yovanovitch, and knew that Rudolph Giuliani's claims about her were false, The book says Pompeo expressed a supposition that Giuliani was working to undermine Yovanovitch on behalf of other, unspecified clients. Pompeo is corrupt. He must be removed from office.

On the Sunday shows, Trump’s Senate bootlickers show how low they can go

Posted on by Hunter

Before this evening’s blockbuster John Bolton news, we’d already seen that the level to which Republicans will sink to defend Donald Trump on anything and, literally, everything has no bottom. There seems no cutoff point beyond which now thoroughly-corrupted lawmakers will abandon him; he could sacrifice Mitch McConnell's family to Satan on the steps of the Capitol and senators like Lankford and Cotton would applaud madly at his boldness and explain that this is indeed What Middle America Wanted.

Sen. Tom Cotton went pretty damn low on Face The Nation this morning when asked about Trump’s dismissal of soldiers being flown back to the United States for medical treatment after suffering TBIs, or traumatic brain injuries, in the Iranian strikes responding to Trump’s targeted assassination of a top Iranian military leader. Trump said “they had headaches,” and “but it is not very serious.”

That seemingly glib dismissal of brain injuries as “headaches” caused anger among numerous veteran’s groups, who have demanded Trump apologize. To Sen. Cotton, though, Trump is still-and-always in the right. “He’s not dismissing their injuries, he’s describing their injuries,” he told Face the Nation.

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The Veterans of Foreign Wars, for example, disagrees. “TBI is known to cause depression, memory loss, severe headaches, dizziness & fatigue—all injuries that come w/ both short- and long-term effects” said VFW National Commander William Schmitz in a statement.

Cotton had thoughts about impeachment as well. Asked about the release of a new recording in which Rudy Giuliani, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman got a Trump instruction to “take her out” after the trio falsely claimed that anti-corruption U.S. Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch was “badmouthing” him,  Cotton’s only take away from the extended recording was that “badmouthing” sounded like “a pretty sound reason to move an ambassador.” That Trump was getting that advice from Rudy Giuliani and two now-indicted foreign agents, he claimed, was not a problem. See the bar getting lower? Do you think a similar tape coming out featuring, say, any Democrat that Tom Cotton could name would be similarly uninteresting to Tom Cotton?

So there you go. That’s the kind of person the Republican base puts in the Senate these days.

As for Sen. James ‘Young Lindsey’ Lankford, he has been throwing himself in front of whatever cameras he can find to defend Trump, during the trial. He made forays onto multiple networks to hail Our Dear Glorious Tweeting Leader; it’s not clear what administration job he’s angling for, as Trump already has more shoe-shiners than the Trump family has shoes. On MSNBC he got slapped around for lying repeatedly to the viewing audience. On CNN he pivoted to defending Dear Leader’s tweet-grouse complaining that impeachment manager Rep. Adam Schiff “has not paid the price, yet,” for challenging Dear Leader. 

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If you need a measure of just how intensively the Lankfords of Republicanism are willing to grovel, this might be a good one: Well I don’t personally interpret Dear Leader’s latest remarks as an actual “death threat” against a sitting congressman, so everything remains fine. All Hail Twitterburp.

The standards of the presidency have fallen very far, in the last three years, and Sen. Lankford would like you to buckle in because, at least according to him, the new lower bound is openly calling for the death of his opponents. Is he there yet? No? Then all praise Dear Leader, who will be vindicated after we vote to conceal all remaining evidence. And if Dear Leader does cross that last line, Sen. James Lankford will defend him still.

John Bolton: Trump explicitly said Ukraine aid freeze was tied to investigations into Democrats

Posted on by Hunter

Former national security adviser John Bolton has refused House demands that he testify on the events surrounding the freezing of military aid to Ukraine and the efforts by Donald Trump’s allies and administration officials to pressure the Ukrainian government into announcing an investigation into potential Trump election opponent Joe Biden. Bolton is instead writing a book on his tenure.

In the now-circulating manuscript for that unreleased book, reports The New York Times, Bolton writes that Donald Trump personally told him he would continue to freeze the nearly $400 million in aid until Ukrainian officials aided his desired investigations into “Democrats” and “the Bidens.”

Bolton’s manuscript alleges direct involvement in the scheme to falsely smear and remove U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, reports The Times, and Pompeo both knew the claims to be false and suspected Giuliani was “acting on behalf of other clients.” Bolton also says he personally spoke with Trump Attorney General William Barr to inform Barr that Trump had identified him as part of Rudy Giuliani’s efforts on his now-infamous call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky: Barr’s office had previously denied that he knew about that call until much later.

Importantly, The Times reports that the Trump White House was sent the manuscript for a standard pre-publication administration review in “recent weeks”—meaning Trump, his legal team, and others implicated have known what Bolton would testify to during this period in which they have loudly and angrily insisted that the Senate call no witnesses. If the White House has intentionally delayed or frozen the book’s publication in an attempt to block it until after the conclusion of the Senate impeachment trial, it could constitute yet another act meant to obstruct justice.