The Commentariat -- December 7, 2019
Tal Axelrod of the Hill: "The House Judiciary Committee formally received the impeachment report from three other panels as the House continues to ramp up its investigation into President Trump. The House Intelligence, Foreign Affairs and Oversight committees officially sent the judiciary panel their impeachment report, along with the GOP 'minority views' as the House formally crafts articles of impeachment against the president."
Rebecca Shabad of NBC News: "The White House on Friday rejected an invitation to take part in impeachment hearings befjackore the House Judiciary Committee. In a brief letter to Committee Chairman Rep. Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., White House counsel Pat Cipollone sharply attacked the impeachment inquiry into ... Donald Trump as 'completely baseless' and said House Democrats had 'violated basic principles of due process and fundamental fairness.'... Nadler sent a letter to the president last Friday asking if his counsel would be participating in the panel's impeachment hearings, setting a 5 p.m. ET deadline Friday for a response."
Lisa Mascaro & Mary Jalonick of the AP: "House Democrats are bringing the impeachment focus back to Russia as they draft formal charges against ... Donald Trump. Speaker Nancy Pelosi is connecting the dots -- 'all roads lead to Putin,' she says -- and making the argument that Trump's pressure campaign on Ukraine was not an isolated incident but part of a troubling bond with the Russian president reaching back to special counsel Robert Mueller's findings on the 2016 election. 'This has been going on for 2 1/2 years,' Pelosi said Friday. 'This isn't about Ukraine,' she explained a day earlier. 'It’s about Russia. Who benefited by our withholding of that military assistance? Russia.'... 'Sometimes people say, "Well I don't know about Ukraine. I don't know that much about Ukraine,"' Pelosi said Thursday after announcing the decision to draft formal charges. 'Well, our adversary in this is Russia. All roads lead to Putin. Understand that.'... Democratic lawmakers and aides are working behind closed doors over the weekend as the articles are being drafted and Judiciary Committee members are preparing for hearings and votes expected next week.... Democrats expect there will be two to four articles of impeachment against the president. Merging the Mueller findings into the overall charges by making the direct link to Ukraine might be one way to reach all sides [of the House Democratic caucus]."
The fact that Giuliani is back in Ukraine is like a murder suspect returning to the crime scene to live-stream themselves moon dancing. It's brazen on a galactic level. -- Dan Eberhart, prominent Republican donor and Trump supporter ~~~
~~~ Paul Sonne, et al., of the Washington Post: "Rudolph W. Giuliani departed Kyiv after meeting with a range of Ukrainians who have been feeding him unproven allegations against former vice president Joe Biden and helping construct a counternarrative that is taking hold in the Republican Party. The purported purpose of the trip was to conduct interviews for a documentary on a right-wing media network. But Giuliani's travel also appeared designed to send a broader and more brazen signal of the disregard that he and Trump have for the unfolding impeachment process.... Giuliani used his Twitter account while on the trip to describe the impeachment hearings as a 'witch hunt,' attack the former U.S. ambassador whom he helped oust earlier this year, and assert that Trump's demands for politically beneficial investigations by Ukraine's government were appropriate.... Giuliani's trip also represented an affront to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, whose government was welcoming a high-level State Department diplomat at the same time and hoping to return relations with the United States to normal after more than two months at the center of an American political maelstrom. Zelensky, who didn't meet with Giuliani, is preparing for a high-stakes summit on Monday in Paris, where he is scheduled to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin alongside the leaders of Germany and France in a renewed attempt to bring an end to the war between Russia-backed proxies and Ukrainian forces in the nation's east." ~~~
~~~ Greg Sargent of the Washington Post: "Rudolph W. Giuliani just confessed to the crime in broad daylight -- or, more precisely, in broad cyber-daylight. Yet he did so defiantly, with a middle finger unfurled in our faces, without the slightest concern that it would harm him or ... President Trump.... 'The conversation about corruption in Ukraine was based on compelling evidence of criminal conduct by then VP Biden,' Giuliani tweeted, referring to Joe Biden, the intended target of 'investigations' Trump and Giuliani pressured Ukraine to announce. To empirically grounded observers, this will blow up a key Trump defense: that in conditioning official acts on getting Ukraine to announce investigations he wanted, he was correctly concerned with cleaning up corruption there.... The disinformation employed by Giuliani, Trump and his GOP defenders in many ways overlaps with Russian disinformation. They share tropes and narratives, and some common goals.... Trump may not care if we're more vulnerable to Russian disinformation, since he benefited from it so extensively last time, and is now heavily trafficking in its offshoots himself. As Giuliani's latest confession shows, their commitment to employing and benefiting from it is only escalating." ~~~
~~~ Rudy on the Road to Russia. David Stern & Robyn Dixon of the Washington Post (Dec. 5): "... Rudolph W. Giuliani met Thursday in Ukraine with one of the key figures working to build a corruption case against Hunter Biden, the Ukraine lawmaker said, after posting Facebook photographs of himself with the former York mayor. Andriy Derkach said he pressed Giuliani on the need to set up a joint U.S.-Ukraine investigation into corruption in Ukraine at the meeting in Kyiv.... Derkach, an independent lawmaker who was formerly a member of a pro-Russian party in parliament, went to the Dzerzhinsky Higher School of the KGB in Moscow. He is the son of a KGB officer who later served as head of Ukrainian intelligence.... Ukrainian anti-corruption campaigner Daria Kaleniuk, director of the nonprofit Anti-Corruption Action Center, described Derkach on Twitter as having associations with Ukrainian security services and an allegedly corrupt pharmaceutical firm." ~~~
~~~ Aaron Blake of the Washington Post (Dec. 5): "Derkach's name is a big one in Ukraine. A story about him might have even helped spark that country's 2004 Orange Revolution. That story involved a murder plot that implicated his father. The story is from 2000, and it suggested the younger Derkach could the 'Ukrainian Putin.' At the time, that label -- a reference to Russian President Boris Yeltsin'0 handpicked successor, Vladimir Putin...." In recorded conversations, Leonid Derkach, then-head of Ukraine's security services, & former Ukraine president Leonid Kuchma discussed disposing with online journalist Georgiy Gongadze. "Gongadze would soon claim he was being followed, and by September he was killed, his headless body discovered in a forest near Kyiv.... Soon after, the ... recordings ... were released. They sparked protests calling for Kuchma's ouster. Kuchma would survive it, but his governing coalition collapsed, and he was forced to fire Leonid Derkach.... In 2005, a Ukrainian parliamentary commission labeled Kuchma, Leonid Derkach and two other senior officials as being the masterminds of the plot." ~~~
~~~ Rudy "in a Den of Kremlin Agents ... at Midnight." digby republishes much of Sargent's post linked above. She also, via a tweet by Jack Laurenson of the Kyiv Post, places Giuliani in the thick of it: "Here are @AndriyUkraineTe [Andrii Telizhenko] and RudyGiuliani here in Kyiv, #Ukraine. At midnight, they are in lounge bar of the Premier Palace Hotel, owned by close Putin ally, Russian oligarch Alexander Babakov. Hotel known as den for Kremlin agents & Babakov is alleged Russian intel himself." Mrs. McC: Yeah, & I'll bet Rudy was calling Donald on his cellphone at the bar with all the KGB agents listening in. Was it a Skype call? Were KGB agents standing behind Rudy & waving to Trump? ~~~
~~~ Rudy Will Have to Visit This Source in Jail. Betsy Swan & Adam Rawnsley of the Daily Beast: "A former Ukrainian member of parliament who has claimed to have dirt on a company linked to the Bidens was arrested earlier this week in Germany.... As the impeachment proceedings against President Trump took hold in October, Oleksandr Onyshchenko, who worked closely with Ukraine's previous president before fleeing the country after being accused of embezzlement, has been living in Europe for several years.... Onyshchenko claimed to have inside information about Hunter Biden and his work for Burisma. He told Reuters that his friend Mykola Zlochevsky, who founded Burisma, had placed the vice president's son on Burisma' board as insurance against criminal investigations. The claim echoes those made by Rudy Giuliani and former Ukrainian Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko.... Onyshchenko made other fantastic claims, including that Burisma had paid $10 million to Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign through 'big bags of cash' sent instead of wire transfers."
The Gaslight Defense. Mrs. McCrabbie: So it looks as if Trump's impeachment "defense" will be to counter facts with fictions promulgated by shady Ukrainians with Russian ties. This would be a lot funnier if Republican lawmakers laughed it off, too. But it looks as if the majority are buying into it. ~~~
~~~ Update. Apparently So. Katie Glueck & Maggie Haberman of the New York Times: "President Trump's re-election campaign has run menacing and misleading ads this fall accusing Joseph R. Biden Jr. of corrupt dealings with Ukraine. Republicans in Congress are scrutinizing Mr. Biden's son, pressing the State and Treasury Departments for information about his work for a Ukrainian energy company. The president himself has unleashed a stream of unfounded accusations against the Bidens and pushed for them to appear at a potential impeachment trial in the Senate. As Mr. Trump faces impeachment for allegedly pressuring Ukraine to investigate Mr. Biden, he and his allies are now turning those same claims about Mr. Biden and his son into a key element of their defense. And they plan to continue to hammer at the Bidens' Ukraine dealings as impeachment proceedings move into the new year."
Jennifer Rubin of the Washington Post points out that Trump's use of a private cellphone is not just some careless but convenient violation of security protocols & the federal records act: Rubin cites a WashPo report, linked here yesterday: "When Trump realized that this enabled [chief of staff John] Kelly to compile daily logs of his calls, and the identities of those he was speaking to, Trump became annoyed and reverted to using his cellphone, officials said. 'He was totally paranoid that everyone knew who he was talking to,' a former senior administration official said." That is, Trump purposely uses his private cell so no one will know whom he talks to & there will be no official record of his clandestine calls. Rubin finds this practice "about the best evidence of consciousness of guilt you are ever going to find," and says it should be worked into articles of impeachment & possibly subjected to further congressional investigation. Mrs. McC: After all the trouble created by his July 25 call to Zelensky, it wouldn't surprise me if Trump has started using his cell for calls to foreign leaders like Putin, Erdogan & the Saudi royals. With any luck, the FBI is listening in (legally) along with hackers from around the world.
Andrew Desiderio & Kyle Cheney of Politico: "A national security aide to Vice President Mike Pence submitted additional classified evidence to House impeachment investigators about a [September 18] phone call between Pence and Ukraine's president, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff revealed Friday. In a letter to Pence, Schiff (D-Calif.) asked the vice president to declassify supplemental testimony from the aide, Jennifer Williams, about Pence's Sept. 18 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, arguing that there is no 'legitimate basis' to keep it secret." ~~~
~~~ Cody Fenwick of AlterNet, in the Raw Story: "Schiff reminded Pence's office that an executive order requires that in 'no case shall information be classified, continue to be maintained as classified, or fail to be declassified' for reasons of embarrassment or illegality.... Schiff also pointed out that Pence has previously said publicly that he would have no problem with the Sept. 18 call transcript being released. The office's decision to now claim the call is partially classified is 'contradictory of your public avowals in favor of transparency,' Schiff wrote."
There is overwhelming evidence that President Trump betrayed his oath of office by seeking to use presidential power to pressure a foreign government to help him distort an American election, for his personal and political benefit.. His conduct is precisely the type of threat to our democracy that the Founders feared when they included the remedy of impeachment in the Constitution. -- 500+ Legal Scholars ~~~
~~~ Matt Zapotosky of the Washington Post: "More than 500 legal scholars have signed on to an open letter [to Congress] asserting that President Trump committed 'impeachable conduct' and that lawmakers would be acting well within their rights if they ultimately voted to remove him from office. The signers are law professors and other academics from universities across the country.... The group noted in particular that Trump's conduct seemed to be directed at affecting the results of the 2020 election, and thus it was not a matter that could be left to voters at the polls." A Law & Crime story is here. ~~~
~~~ The full letter, including a list of signers is here, via Medium.
Mrs. Bea McCrabbie: In yesterday's comments, I suggested, not quite seriously, that the House could pass articles of impeachment but not forward them to the Senate, leaving impeachment hanging over Trump's head during high campaign season. Last night I heard that a number of pundits, including John Dean, thought that was a good idea.
Neil Vigdor of the New York Times: "Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on Friday put a one-week hold on a lower court's order for President Trump's bank records to be turned over to Congress. The stay issued by Justice Ginsburg came just three days after the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in New York said that Deutsche Bank and Capital One must cooperate with subpoenas of two Democratic-controlled committees in the House of Representatives.... Mr. Trump's lawyers made an emergency request for the stay while their appeal is considered by the Supreme Court, which has also been thrust into similar legal battle over access to Mr. Trump's accounting records." The Hill's story is here.
Timothy Gardner & Makini Brice of Reuters: "... Donald Trump said on Friday he has directed his environmental regulators to find answers to what he said is a big problem - water-conserving showers, faucets and toilets. 'We have a situation where we're looking very strongly at sinks and showers and other elements of bathrooms,' Trump told a meeting of small business leaders at the White House. 'You turn the faucet on in areas where there's tremendous amounts of water ... and you don't get any water,' he added.... The fixtures 'end up using more water,' Trump told the roundtable where U.S. officials also reviewed his agenda of slashing regulations such as those on efficient light bulbs. 'People are flushing toilets 10 times, 15 times, as opposed to once,' he said." Scatological comments acceptable.
All the Best People, Ctd. Em Steck, et al., of CNN: "A senior adviser at the State Department once said he thought then-President Barack Obama was a Kenyan and called House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi a Nazi whose Botox had worn off. Frank Wuco, a former conservative speaker and radio host who is now a senior adviser at the State Department's Bureau of Arms Control, Verification and Compliance, also said it would be tough for a 'solid, practicing' Muslim to be a good American and made unfounded claims that some Muslims in America were practicing Sharia law to create 'Muslim land.'... Wuco has a history of peddling conspiracy theories, pushing for extreme American action in warfare and spreading anti-Muslim rhetoric.... Wuco was previously a White House adviser at the Department of Homeland Security." Mrs. McC: Hey, what kinda name is "Wuco" anyway? It sounds "foreign" to me, or totally made-up. Maybe this Wuco guy is really a Mooslum or a commie.
The Party of White Supremacists. Republicans Don't Even Pretend They Want to Protect Minorities' Right to Vote. Sheryl Stolberg & Emily Cochrane of the New York Times: "The House voted on Friday to reinstate federal oversight of state election law, moving to bolster protections against racial discrimination enshrined in the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the landmark civil rights statute whose central provision was struck down by the Supreme Court. Representative John Lewis, Democrat of Georgia, who was beaten in 1965 while demonstrating for voting rights in Alabama, banged the gavel to herald approval of the measure, to applause from his colleagues on the House floor. It passed by a vote of 228 to 187 nearly along party lines, with all but one Republican opposed. The bill has little chance of becoming law given opposition in the Republican-controlled Senate and by President Trump, whose aides issued a veto threat against it this week. The measure is a direct response to the 2013 Supreme Court decision in the case of Shelby County v. Holder, in which the justices invalidated a key portion of the law."
Presidential Race 2020
Matt Stevens of the New York Times: "Michael R. Bloomberg on Friday brushed back critiques about his wealth and bristled at the suggestion that he was using it to buy success in the 2020 presidential race, arguing that other Democrats who have complained about his entry into their party's primary could have taken it upon themselves to earn their own personal fortunes, as he had done.... In his interview, Mr. Bloomberg said he did not come from money and noted that his 'father made $6,000 the best year of his life.' 'Nobody gave me a head start,' he said.... Discussing his reasons for entering the race, he said he worried that if other Democrats took on President Trump in a general election, Mr. Trump would 'eat 'em up.'" ~~~
~~~ Bloomberg Finds Another Black Guy Who Has Mastered Standard English. Kate Sullivan of CNN: "New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker said Friday he was 'taken aback' by former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg calling him 'well-spoken,' and said Bloomberg played into a tired trope about African Americans.... In an interview that aired Friday morning, Bloomberg told CBS This Morning, 'Cory Booker endorsed me a number of times. And I endorsed Cory Booker a number of times. He's very well-spoken. He's got some good ideas. It would be better the more diverse any group is.'"
Elena Schneider & Alex Thompson of Politico: "Long-simmering tensions between Pete Buttigieg and Elizabeth Warren, the two ascendant Democratic presidential candidates in Iowa, burst into the open this week. Warren and Buttigieg's campaigns each called the other out in a flurry of back-and-forths on the candidates' tax returns, past corporate clients, campaign bundlers and opening fundraisers to the news media." They accused each other of being corporate shills.
Elise Viebeck of the Washington Post: "Rep. Duncan D. Hunter (R-Calif.), who pleaded guilty in federal court this week to misusing campaign funds, announced Friday that he will resign from Congress 'shortly after the holidays.'" A San Diego Union-Tribune report is here. Maybe he's not resigning now because he expects a Christmas bonus. ~~~
~~~ Charles Clark of the San Diego Union-Tribune: "On the day Rep. Duncan Hunter pleaded guilty to misuse of campaign funds in federal court..., former Rep. Darrell Issa, a Republican insider who once chaired the powerful House oversight committee, talked seriously about presidential clemency should Hunter be sentenced to prison on March 17.... '... I would certainly say the commuting of sentencing ... has a certain ability to balance the public good. Are we better off spending $60,000 a year to put him behind bars or are we better off with him doing community service and going on with his life with the likelihood of him committing a crime in the future being pretty low?'"
AOC Gets the Last Laugh (and a $3BB Bonus for NYC Taxpayers). Bob Brigham of the Raw Story: "Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) was one of the progressive leaders in New York City credited with blocking $3 billion in public subsidies for Amazon to open an additional headquarters. But Amazon is moving into NYC despite the lack of subsidies.'The giant online retailer said it has signed a new lease for 335,000 square feet on the city's west side in the new Hudson Yards neighborhood, where it will have more than 1,500 employees,' The Wall Street Journal reported. 'Amazon is taking the space without any of the special tax credits and other inducements the company had been offered to build a new headquarters in the Queens neighborhood of Long Island City, the company said.' 'The new lease represents Amazon's largest expansion in New York since it stunned the city by abandoning those earlier plans. Amazon pulled back after facing a backlash from some politicians and activists over the roughly $3 billion in financial incentives the city and state had extended to woo the company and the 25,000 new jobs it had pledged to create,' The Journal explained.... 'Won't you look at that: Amazon is coming to NYC anyway -- *without* requiring the public to finance shady deals, helipad handouts for Jeff Bezos, and corporate giveaways,' [Ocasio-Cortez] tweeted."p>