I don't think it's nearly as ambiguous as you say, but whether it was opportunism or revenge, it was still an abuse of the powers of his office and wrong. If those are the two possibilities, the remedy is the same. Great post. Perry somehow has mostly dodged scrutiny. I think it'd be best for him if he continued to keep his mouth shut. I mostly agree. But there is a big educational attainment gap between rural and urban areas. That's not intelligence, but it is training in critical thinking and it is exposure to some mechanisms of power away from the operational experience people get in their work. It's really not that hard. 66 words: Trump tried to leverage official acts of his office to coerce a private benefit for himself. The private benefit was help in winning the 2020 election from an announcement by Ukraine of a phony investigation of his electoral opponent Joe Biden. The official acts were the release of aid approved by Congress, the sale of military equipment, and a White House meeting to show US support. What would take much longer to explain is the just-the-facts version of what Donald Trump was alternatively trying to accomplish by asking Ukraine for an investigation. Btw, I wish Joe and Hunter Biden were a lot more forceful in defending themselves. Here are two men being routinely castigated by many public officials for engaging in corruption, but there is no indictment, they haven't been named as suspects of any investigation. There doesn't even seem to be any investigation. Biden is a public figure (Hunter's case is more ambiguous) and limited in how he can legally fight slander, but he should at least be insisting on his rights in the PR sphere. We hear all the time about Trump's imaginary due process rights -- what about Biden's? Dmitri Alperovitch is not even Ukrainian. He's a Russian-born US citizen. He was born in Moscow. Trying to find out if maybe he's ethnically Ukrainian, but I don't see anything that says so. His last name is a Russian surname. The -vitch suffix is a patronymic suffix (like 'son' in Johnson) in Russian and is not how it's done in Ukrainian. They'd use -chuk or -chak or -ko. And Dmitri is a Russian given name as well. The usual Ukrainian version is Dmytro. So doubt he's ethnically Ukrainian either.
on this point only, sure, the remedy is the same, I agree with that as a technical matter. But the severity of the implication about Trump's motives changes--as Jack Marshall comments this morning: As Joe Biden appears more and more of a liability, doesn’t the claim that President Trump was only seeking an investigation of the ex-VP to eliminate a feared rival for his office look like more and more of a contrivance? Why wouldn’t Trump want to run against this boob? So the point again gets to how convincing this whole thing is to ANYONE other than the dyed-in-the-wool Trump haters and dyed-in-the-wool Trump defenders. Was Trump trying to gain an advantage over his eventual 2020 challenger (BAD), or trying to get to the bottom of an endless well of corruption surrounding the 2016 election (somewhat LESS BAD).
I don't feel that this view has intellectual merit. It: 1. attributes a sort of logic to Trump that he has simply never shown. 2. ignores weeks of evidence and testimony points to Trump wanting to get announcements (more than actual investigations) about Biden. 3. ignores that Trump's Ukraine behavior fits his pattern of believing conspiracy theories (hello, birtherism) and taking Russia's side of issues (hello, removing planks from Republican platform, taking putin at his word about 2016, and so on and so on). 4. ignores all the shots (sleepy, etc) Trump has taken at Biden over the last many months, moreso, I believe, than he's taken at other potential challengers. Reminder that Nixon (by evidence, a smarter dude) didn't need to break into the Watergate Hotel. He was going to handily win reelection. Trump may win, but he could have won handily if he didn't buy into weird conspiracy theories and court nutballs like Rudy (and well, also the many convicted and pled guilty criminals). Why, Jack Marshall, should anyone suddenly ascribe this kind of logic to Trump and take this one odd Ukrainian action, laser focused on a Burisma announcement, as an anti-corruption campaign that is otherwise missing in his other actions? It just looks like Marshall and others are taking on an advanced yoga pose, all to avoid Occam's Razor (and lots of testimony besides).
This is a matter of convenience for Trump. Biden no matter what you believe of him, is one of the DNC front runners. Gullianni and Solomon finding a talking point to rush to Sean Hannity about Biden and his son in Ukraine is something Trump can easily push. He understands that he has significant leverage over Ukraine and conveniently, the accusation of the Bidens happens to be in Ukraine. For Trump it's that simple. You would only need to be a die hard Trump sycophant if you believe his look into the "crowd strike server" which is a crazy debunked conspiracy is out of a genuine concern to look into the 2016 elections than him just trying to find more ammo of consipracy theories to feed to his base to help him in his reelection bid. The abuse of power here is going against US interests AND extorting a foreign nation for personal political gain. No matter how you slice it, all these peddlings of conspiracy theories from Crowd Strike to Biden trying to push out a corrupt prosector to save his own son is for Trump's own personal gain. Just ask Trump to explain in nuance about corruption in Ukraine that doesn't involve Biden. If that is all he cares about when he refers to "corruption", it's quite clear to any rational individual that his desire to find corruption in Ukraine is purely political. It's obvious that it's for his own personal political gain from just following the sources of these conspiracies. If this was a serious investigation where Trump wasn't doing it out of his own personal benefit, he would be obtaining sources from intelligence briefings, DOJ reports, the FBI etc rather than a TV lawyer in Gulliani and right wing blogs on the internet. In fact, his own intelligence officials have repeatedly told Trump that all these conspiracies are debunked and he still persists with them. Which tells me that he isn't looking for accuracy here. He's looking for a narrative to push for a 2020 reelection bid.
While Joe Biden looks less strong now, you can't say that Trump knew back in April that he'd lose his lead in November. Besides, it may be exactly this phony Ukraine story that is keeping him from more aggressively going after the nomination. So not a contrivance at all -- back when Trump hatched this stupid plan, Biden looked like the biggest risk (he's still the best head-to-head performer). And besides all that, he may have other conspiracies ongoing against Warren, Sanders, or others that we haven't discovered yet. And finally you know that Trump's theory that Joe Biden engaged in corruption in Ukraine to get his son a gas company handout, force the prosecutor to drop an investigation against him, to engineer a black ledger conspiracy to get Paul Manafort convicted of corruption to smear Trump's campaign, and to get a Ukrainian company that isn't at all Ukrainian to blame a Ukrainian hack of DNC servers on Russia -- that that's all ridiculous bullshit. You do know and can admit that can't you? I know your point was about convincing others, but we need to start with the basics here: the dichotomy you set up is a false dichotomy because one of the two possibilities is actually just bullshit.
you just really can't help yourself, can you? that's okay. But I disagree that the "crazy debunked theory" is irrelevant to the question of impeachment. See e.g., Andrew McCarthy's piece in the NY Post yesterday . . . and I know, I know, THE POST IS NOT A CREDIBLE SOURCE. glad I got that off my chest. https://nypost.com/2019/11/21/fiona...-serious-evidence-of-ukrainian-2016-meddling/ Fiona Hill (and Dems) ignore the serious evidence of Ukrainian 2016 meddling By Andrew McCarthy November 21, 2019 | 1:21pm | Updated Fiona Hill REUTERS In her testimony before the House impeachment inquiry, Fiona Hill, formerly of the National Security Council, took great pride in telling lawmakers she was a nonpartisan intelligence professional. She then labored mightily in service of a Democratic political narrative. Specifically, Hill conflated two separate theories of Ukrainian collusion in the 2016 election. One of these is discredited, the other is quite viable. Hill helped the Democrats suggest that they have both been debunked. Hill is too smart not to have grasped the effect of her testimony. This is exactly the kind of cynicism that fuels concerns about the unaccountable “deep state.” To be sure, President Trump is largely to blame for propagating the discredited Ukraine theory. It holds that, somehow, it was Ukraine, rather than Russia, that interfered in the 2016 election by cyber-espionage against Democratic email accounts. This is such a loopy theory, it defies clear explanation. Suffice it to say that it involves suspicions that a hacked DNC server is hidden in Ukraine. Perhaps, the speculation runs, it was Ukrainian operatives, not Russian ones, who were the culprits. It is a fringe theory. No one who has closely followed the collusion caper puts any stock in it. Regrettably, the president is a hospitable audience for frivolous theories that cast doubt on Russia’s culpability, which he wrongly fears casts doubt on his legitimacy. In his July 25 conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Trump appears to have pressed this theory about the server. He wanted Kiev to look into it, even though it is the consensus of American intelligence agencies that Moscow was behind the cyber hijinks. In her testimony, Hill observed that Russia, which she rightly regards as our strategic rival, is delighted by the promotion of this debunked server theory. Anything that could undermine ties between Washington and Kiev promotes Moscow’s interest — putting in doubt our support for a former Soviet captive state that revanchist Russia has under siege. Fair enough, but Hill generally framed this debunked idea as the “theory of Ukraine’s interference in the 2016 election” — as if it were the only theory of Ukrainian collusion. A Democratic questioner stressed, and Hill emphatically agreed, that “there is no basis for these allegations.” The problem, of course, is that there is a second theory of Ukrainian collusion in the 2016 election. The second theory has nothing to do with Russia. It is supported by significant evidence. It includes public professions of support for Clinton and opposition to Trump by Ukrainian officials. It includes acknowledgments by Ukrainian investigators that their Obama administration counterparts encouraged them to investigate Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort. Bolstering this theory is the fact that Ukrainian officials leaked information damaging to Manafort (a ledger of payments, possibly fabricated) that forced Manafort’s ouster from the Trump campaign, triggering waves of negative publicity for the campaign. A Ukrainian court, in late 2018, concluded that two Ukrainian officials meddled in the election. And in 2018 House testimony, Nellie Ohr — who worked for Fusion GPS, the Clinton campaign opposition research firm that produced the lurid and discredited Steele dossier — conceded that a pro-Clinton Ukrainian legislator was a Fusion informant. When Republicans and most Trump supporters refer to evidence of Ukrainian collusion in the 2016 election, it is this collusion theory that they are speaking about. This theory is in no way mutually exclusive with the finding that Russia hacked the DNC accounts — it has nothing to do with the hacking. There is nothing illogical in believing both that Russia hacked the Democrats and that Ukraine supported the Democrats. Hill’s testimony aimed at obfuscating this viable theory of Ukrainian collusion, implying that it had been debunked and that to consider it is to lend aid and comfort to Russia, notwithstanding that many people who credit the Ukrainian collusion theory are more reliably hawkish on Russia than Democrats have been over the last 30 years — I included. Hill even suggested that talk of Ukrainian collusion is the cause of the bitter divisiveness in American politics. Nonsense. The divisiveness is mostly attributable to an obsessively pursued but never credible and now-debunked theory that Trump conspired with the Kremlin to steal the 2016 election. Critics of the Trump-Russia “collusion” theory don’t believe, and have never contended, that Ukraine hacked the Democrats. But that hardly means Ukrainian officials didn’t try to put their thumbs on the scale for Clinton. Andrew C. McCarthy, a former chief assistant US attorney, is a contributing editor of National Review. Twitter: @AndrewCMcCarthy
that is a fine point and exactly true. On the other hand, we have no evidence that Trump has EVER believed that Joe Biden would be a strong opponent. So the mind-reading can go both ways.
Or we can just look at the actions taken instead of trying to get into Trump’s mindset.... Instead of a transparent investigation, he sent Rudy Giuliani to Ukraine. What do those actions tell you?
This Yavanovich thing is crazy. In response to his bit on Fox and Friends, multiple people who have run embassies under Trump have come out to say that it took 15 months to receive the official portrait from the white house and that received administration instructions NOT to print their own to hang. He's mad at her for not hanging his picture when she didn't hang it because his admin was struggling to get him photoshopped just right for too long.
Yes, it is the NY Post and yes, they cannot be trusted as a objective source as they are a Rupert Murdoch tabloid. This article is rife full of bad faith. Let me explain. First I suggest reading this treaty or at least the summary of treaty: https://www.congress.gov/treaty-document/106th-congress/16/document-text So now we have established that there is a legal proper channel is having the US cooperate with Ukraine on criminal investigations. Let me quote my earlier post to make my other point: Notice how Trump wasn't briefed by official channels about an ongoing investigation into Biden or the Crowd Strike server. This was all from his own personal propaganda machine where these desires for investigations did not stem from career prosecutors and investigators. With Manafort, the FBI was already doing an ongoing investigation on him. At no point did Obama direct the FBI into investigating these matters and the FBI naturally asked for cooperation with Ukraine which is completely legal given the treaty I linked. There aren't a dozen Obama appointees testifying under oath that Obama personally directed the FBI to investigate the matters of Paul Manafort and Carter Page. This was the FBI doing their work in a natural legal process. Obama wasn't finding left wing blogs and Bill Maher for their sources on Manafort. He was being briefed by the FBI. In fact, Obama when he was briefed that certain members of Trump's campaign were being investigated by the FBI, he purposefully did not go public with it because he understood that it could be perceived as a political investigation rather than an investigation that came out of its own natural fruition from career no partisan investigators.
Won't this lead to the other subpoena boys being asked the same thing? What say you: Giuliani, Bolton, Pompeo and Mulvaney wrt the inquiry implicating you in knowing about Burisma and 2016? Is anyone in media applying pressure to them to clear that up?
They all are stating they will go to court and drag this out if they are subpoenaed to testify in Congress.
You guys don't realize the posts by @Os Trigonum - now in full on disinformation mode are for him, not for you, to forge his internal identity as a member of Trump Tribe. It's also why and how Lindsay Grahamw wentfrom "quid pro quo would be wrong! Betraying Kurds is disastrous!" to "quid pro quo is fine, Erdogan can I wipe your ass?" In the span of a month. Remember mr." keep hope alive " went absolutely AWOL and vacated these hallowed fora for weeks in September when news of the Ukraine scandal went live and those few vestiges of a conscience left for Trump cult members cowed them into silence, as their dipshit emperor thought it was a great idea to release the transcript of his "perfect call". And it was indeed perfect - in terms of making indictment a virtual certainty. But over time the cult members repeat these things to themselves and a month later, they're in full on Internet Research Agency approved mode. And then it's a boomer feeding frenzy of disingenuous dipshittery. It's a feedback loop for the cult to suspend disbelief and forge an ever more dangerous and mutually reinforcing consensus. Treat them like they are.
How is this a viable theory? Gates pleaded guilty. Manafort was convicted on the merits in one court and pleaded guilty in another. Our standard is proof beyond a reasonable doubt. Both suspects had good legal representation. Are we saying our US courts got it wrong 3 times? The investigation of Manafort began in 2014, long before Trump and therefore Manafort were political entities to be countered. This theory makes no sense to me. We have metrics for these things. Tons of polling. We can assume a reasonable person in Trump's place would consider Biden a prominent threat. Trump might not be a reasonable person, but the reasonable person standard is a very commonplace tool we use to adjudicate such things. Asserting what an unreasonable person likely thought is mind-reading. Asserting what a person should have reasonably thought in his place is not mind-reading. And more convincing.
you may be right. but the theory is out there, and it affects voters' perceptions none-the-less. Look how long the Russian collusion theory lasted. fair points as usual.
I think he’s just a bored contrarian. I do the same thing in the GARM and Dish. When bored I’ll look for opportunities to take a contrarian position, whether it’s an identifying BBall position for me or not. It’s a bad addiction of mine that provides a sense of fun and self-importance when bored. Like I’m doing now. Ah, to eliminate useless addictions — life’s a work in progress.
