Interesting. Rukmini Callimachi is a correspondent for The New York Times covering ISIS & al-Qaeda and an analyst for NBC and MSNBC.
So, naturally…
Tag: Trump
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Might is not will
Trump in 2011:
Narcissists are big on projection.
The thing that annoys me most about that clip though is the last thing he says – Isn’t it pathetic.
What is “it”? The thing Trump predicts Obama will do. It’s a prediction, it’s about the future, so Trump can’t know it will happen. He couldn’t know that even if his reasons for thinking so (or pretending to think so) were good as opposed to contemptible. It’s now in the past so we know it didn’t happen, so his stupid prediction based on ludicrous and disgusting assumptions was a bad wrong prediction, but even if it had been a good one, you can’t exclaim “Isn’t it pathetic!” about an action you predict will happen. You need the conditional tense for that, not the future.
That’s not a merely grammatical or aesthetic point, it’s fundamental – it’s about being able to keep track of what you know and what you don’t, what you can know and what you can’t, of reality itself. What is really pathetic is Trump’s apparent conviction that his thoughts are so powerful that his mere venomous prediction about Obama can create a future fact that he then gets to call pathetic.
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Golfing while Palm Beach burns
Trump spends a very hefty percentage of his time on the golf course – hefty as in around 20%.
In one way that’s a good thing, because while he’s golfing he’s not shit-tweeting or Putin-kissing or world-destroying. In another way it’s contemptible, because he decided to take on this formidable job and he’s not even giving it his full attention. (An even heftier percentage of his time is taken up with watching Fox News.)
CNN has collected some figures.
According to CNN’s tally, he has spent at least 252 days at a Trump golf club and 333 days at a Trump property as President.
This year alone, he spent at least 86 days at a golf club, despite a late start due to the government shutdown. The golf excursions have included the Trump National Golf Club in Sterling, Virginia; his Bedminister, New Jersey, golf club; Trump National Doral outside Miami; and Trump International Doonbeg in Ireland.
All the ones at his own clubs mean more $$$ in his pocket, which violates a law.
During a Christmas Eve call with US service members, Trump was asked about his holiday plans. “I’m at a place called Mar-a-Lago, we call it the southern White House,” he said. “I really pretty much work. That’s what I like to do.”
We do not call it the southern White House.
He does not pretty much work. He plays golf and watches Fox and hangs with his cronies. When would he find time to work?
333 days out of 1075…yes I call that a hefty chunk.
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They fear new revelations
It’s always worse. Greg Sargent at the Post sums up the new evidence on how bad it is:
If Mitch McConnell is going to pull off his scheme to turn President Trump’s impeachment trial into a quick and painless sham with no witnesses, the Senate majority leader needs the story to be covered as a conventional Washington standoff — one that portrays both sides as maneuvering for advantage in an equivalently political manner.
But extraordinary new revelations in the New York Times about Trump’s corrupt freezing of military aid to Ukraine will — or should — make this much harder to get away with.
Not everything is left v right, Dems v Republicans, Big End v Little End. Much of what’s awful about Trump isn’t political in that sense. But McConnell needs to frame it that way to save Trump’s oozing hide.
If Republicans bear the brunt of media pressure to explain why they don’t want to hear from witnesses, that risks highlighting their true rationale: They adamantly fear new revelations precisely because they know Trump is guilty — and that this corrupt scheme is almost certainly much worse than we can currently surmise.
The Times report makes some of that clearer than it was.
The report demonstrates in striking detail that inside the administration, the consternation over the legality and propriety of the aid freeze — and confusion over Trump’s true motives — ran much deeper than previously known, implicating top Cabinet officials more deeply than we thought.
Mulvaney got to work on freezing the aid to Ukraine in June, and one of his top aides “worried it would fuel the narrative that Trump was tacitly aiding Russia.”
Internal opposition was fierce.
The Pentagon pushed for the money for months. Defense Secretary Mark Esper, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and then-national security adviser John Bolton privately urged Trump to understand that freezing the aid was not in our national interest.
Trump brushed them off, babbling about Ukraine’s “corruption.”
Lawyers at the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) worked to develop a far-fetched legal argument that Trump could exercise commander-in-chief authority to override Congress’ appropriation of the aid, to get around the law precluding Trump from freezing it.
That’s a striking one. White House lawyers tried to create their own special legal theory that would make it ok for Trump to ignore the law.
One of Trump’s people tried to get the Pentagon to say it was all their fault, which left one Pentagon official speechless.
Duffey froze the aid with highly unusual bureaucratic tactics, refused to tell Pentagon officials why Trump wanted it withheld and instructed them to keep this “closely held.” (Some of this had already been reported, but in narrative context it becomes far more damning.)
All this for the sake of trying to steal the upcoming election.
What makes all this new information really damning, however, is that many of these officials who were directly involved with Trump’s freezing of aid are the same ones Trump blocked from appearing before the House impeachment inquiry.
This should make it inescapable that McConnell wants a trial with no testimony from these people — Democrats want to hear from Mulvaney, Bolton, Duffey and Blair — precisely because he, too, wants to prevent us from ever gaining a full accounting.
In short McConnell wants to help a criminal get away with crimes in aid of stealing the next election.
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Obsessively focused on the self and nothing else
I thought a nice stocking present would be a sampling of the thoughts of several prominent “mental health experts” on Trump’s Letter to Pelosi, via Salon.
Dr. Bandy Lee:
This letter is a very obvious demonstration of Donald Trump’s severe mental compromise. His assertions should alarm not only those who believe that a president of the United States and a commander-in-chief of the world’s most powerful military should be mentally sound, but also those who are concerned about the potential implications of such a compromised individual bringing out pathological elements in his supporters and in society in general. I have been following and interpreting Donald Trump’s tweets as a public service, since merely reading them “gaslights” you and reforms your thoughts in unhealthy ways.
Dan P. McAdams:
Venomous and vitriolic, obsessively focused on the self and nothing else, this letter is what we have come to know as vintage Trump…
…[T] he letter is like the vitriolic, grievance-filled tweets he sends out every day, full of falsehoods, hyperbole and hate. As an extended expression of who Trump really is, the letter shows you how his mind works and what his raw experience is like.
For over 50 years, Donald Trump has lived this way. Trump has fought every day of his adult life as if he were being impeached by his enemies. And there have always been countless enemies, because his antagonism brings them out of the woodwork.
So he’s trapped in a spiral. He’s self-centered and hostile and mean, so he repels people, which makes him ever more hostile and mean. (He started out at max self-centered, so no increase is possible there). All the gold plating in the world can’t make that a happy life.
Dr. David Reiss:
Whoever actually wrote the letter, it accurately reflects Trump’s immaturity that has been obvious in public as long as he has been a public figure: insisting that his needs be met in a child-like manner; having very poor problem-solving ability; having an inability to take responsibility for anything and projecting his own negative attributes onto others; an inability to look at consequences of his statements or actions. Basically, acting as a frustrated or emotionally hurt toddler would react, looking for a parent to protect him and “make the bad people go away.”
Dr. Lance Dodes:
Mr. Trump’s letter shows his incapacity to recognize other people as separate from him or having worth.
As he always does, he accuses others of precisely what he has done, in precisely the same language. When confronted with violating the Constitution he says his accusers are violating the Constitution. When others point out that he undermines democracy, he says they undermine democracy. Through these very simpleminded projections he deletes others’ selfhood and replaces who they are with what is unacceptable in himself.
They’re all saying the same thing – he can’t see other people as real, he can perceive only his own self.
Dr. Justin Frank:
When I first read Donald Trump’s six-page letter to Speaker Pelosi, I marveled at the ease with which he shared what goes on in his mind openly, and without reservation. His letter is the quintessential example of how professional victims actually think. They turn the prosecutor into the persecutor.
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Trump is a con artist who succeeds by tricking his marks into not seeing the con. But the biggest mark — bigger than the GOP and his base — is himself. He believes the lies he tells, the delinquent traits he disavows. It’s what psychoanalysts call delusional projection.
We civilians call it projectile delusion.
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Peak environmentalism
“I’ve studied it better than anybody I know,” the president asserted in a bizarre segment from a weekend speech to young conservatives in West Palm Beach, Florida, close to his winter retreat at Mar-a-Lago where he is spending the holidays.
I particularly like “You know we have a world, right? So…the world is tynee.”
“They’re made in China and Germany mostly,” Trump said of wind turbines, of which there are more than 57,000 across the US, according to the American Wind Energy Association. “But they’re manufactured tremendous if you’re into this, tremendous fumes. Gases are spewing into the atmosphere. You know we have a world, right? So the world is tiny compared to the universe. So tremendous, tremendous amount of fumes and everything.
“You talk about the carbon footprint, fumes are spewing into the air, right? Spewing. Whether it’s in China, Germany, it’s going into the air. It’s our air, their air, everything, right?”
Since when does Trump give a damn about fumes spewing into the air?
Well he identifies as an environmentalist.
You can see his broken brain do that thing it does – it hears him say he’s an environmentalist and it goes PING! Cleanwaterandair. He interrupts himself when it goes PING: he changes his gesture from the shovel-shape to the thumb-finger circle shape, he stands up straighter, and he shouts: “I want THE CLEANEST WATER” and the rest of the stupid formula, including the phrase “crystal clean,” because the formula would not be complete without that. He returns to his One Big Idea which is that ranting about clean water and clean air is all there is to “being an environmentalist.”
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Riffing shmiffing
No. Absolutely not. No.
There’s my “absolutist belief” for you, if you want one.
No, Trump was not “just riffing.” They don’t get to brush off disgusting sadistic contemptuous cruelty that way, least of all coming from the president of the US.
White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham said Thursday on ABC’s Good Morning America that she did not know why Trump decided to suggest that Dingell was in hell. “You’d have to talk to the president about that,” she said.
But Grisham added that Trump is a “counter-puncher,” and suggested Trump was venting his frustration after being impeached by the House. “It was a very, very supportive and wild crowd and he was just riffing on some of the things that had been happening the past few days.”
No. You don’t get to shrug off Trump’s foul sadism with “just riffing.” You don’t get to excuse it because he was “venting his frustration.” Trump is not six, he’s a grown man, and he’s not a random guy shouting at clouds, he’s the president of the US. No.
This is Trump, it’s always been Trump. He’s a bully; he enjoys sticking the verbal knife in people. He enjoys hurting people. It’s one of his favorite activities. He’s a very bad man.
Debbie Dingell tweeted her response, telling Trump: “Mr President, let’s set politics aside. My husband earned all his accolades after a lifetime of service. I’m preparing for the first holiday season without the man I love. You brought me down in a way you can never imagine and your hurtful words just made my healing much harder.”
He’ll be pleased about that. It’s what he intended. It’s what he wanted. He likes hurting people; that’s what he is.
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Mock the widow
Trump’s latest befoulment.
The “maybe he’s looking up” is bad enough, but my disgust was already on Full from his sarcastic contemptuous mimicry of Debbie Dingell talking to him on the phone, in a breathy soft weak beseeching voice. It’s disgusting in its contempt for women, and it’s also disgusting in that what he was trying to convey and mock was her emotion over the, you know, death of her husband.
He says she called him but that’s a lie, he called her.Also he didn’t “give” John Dingell anything; it wasn’t his call. He doesn’t decide such things, Congress does.
The man is evil.
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Hard to reconcile
Interesting point.
Mitch McConnell is going to have to swear an oath to be impartial.
Now, broadly speaking, it’s bound to be difficult to impossible to make an airtight case that X is not impartial, because we can’t see inside each other’s heads. But if X comes right out and says – on national tv at that – “There will be no difference between the President’s position and our position as to how to handle this,” then that’s your airtight case.
Not that I think it will matter. The criminals have seized the engine room and they are never giving it back.
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Replace “Ukraine” with “Louisiana”
Well said.
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Happy pumpkins
Trump will save us all from the treacherous war on the word…”Thanksgiving”?
Conservative media and some Republicans have for years claimed that Christmas is under attack, turning some people’s decision to say “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas” during the month of December into a culture war touchstone to try to spark outrage on the right. Trump has embraced the “war on Christmas” narrative, and now he’s taking it a step further: he’s claiming liberals are out to get Thanksgiving, too.
At a rally in Florida on Tuesday, the president confoundingly reassured supporters that he wouldn’t let the “radical left” change Thanksgiving’s name. “As we gather for Thanksgiving, you know, some people want to change the name Thanksgiving. They don’t want to use the term Thanksgiving,” Trump said. He later continued: “People have different ideas why it shouldn’t be called Thanksgiving, but everybody in this room, I know, loves the name Thanksgiving. And we’re not changing.”
Personally, I think it should be named Pizzahut, but a much larger faction prefers Route 518.
I suppose what the confused belligerent fool is “thinking” of is the fact that the holiday celebrates the moderate success of a group of people who set up camp without invitation on the coast of what is now called Massachusetts, and that some of us are rude enough to point out that there were already people there and they weren’t consulted.
The president has leaned into culture wars often throughout his tenure, aware that it’s a way to rally his base and sow division. Declaring out of the blue that there’s a movement on the left to change the name of Thanksgiving is another example of that. But the episode also highlights the president’s dismissiveness of issues with some real cultural and social weight. While Thanksgiving’s name isn’t particularly controversial, its history is.
But that’s the problem, you see – it’s political correctness run mad. Why shouldn’t people bounce into other people’s neighborhoods without an invitation? Unless of course they’re from Mexico or points south – then it’s a whole different ball game.
Pass the guacamole.
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Timing is everything
What did the Trump know and when did he know it? The Times says before he unfroze the aid to Ukraine. Oops.
President Trump had already been briefed on a whistle-blower’s complaint about his dealings with Ukraine when he unfroze military aid for the country in September, according to two people familiar with the matter.
Lawyers from the White House counsel’s office told Mr. Trump in late August about the complaint, explaining that they were trying to determine whether they were legally required to give it to Congress, the people said.
Here’s a detail I didn’t know:
The whistle-blower complaint, which would typically be submitted to lawmakers who have oversight of the intelligence agencies, first came to light as the subject of an administration tug of war. In late August, the inspector general for the intelligence community, Michael Atkinson, concluded that the administration needed to send it to Congress.
But the White House counsel, Pat A. Cipollone, and his deputy John A. Eisenberg disagreed. They decided that the administration could withhold from Congress the whistle-blower’s accusations because they were protected by executive privilege. The lawyers told Mr. Trump they planned to ask the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel to determine whether they had to disclose the complaint to lawmakers.
If the executive branch doesn’t have to turn whistleblower complaints over to Congress then what does the term even mean? What’s the point of making a complaint that will just be thrown in the garbage?
A week later, the Office of Legal Counsel concluded that the administration did not have to hand over the complaint.
No problem; just do whatever you want; there are no rules, no laws, no limits.
There’s a little vignette of life under Trump:
Only days after the president learned of the whistle-blower complaint, he spoke with Senator Ron Johnson, Republican of Wisconsin, about the aid holdup. Mr. Johnson sought permission to tell Mr. Zelensky at an upcoming meeting in Ukraine that Mr. Trump had decided to release the security assistance, according to Mr. Johnson.
Mr. Trump replied that he was not ready, Mr. Johnson said. He said he asked later on the call whether the aid was linked to some action that the president wanted the Ukrainians to take.
“Without hesitation, President Trump immediately denied such an arrangement existed,” Mr. Johnson wrote in a letter this month to House Republicans.
Mr. Trump erupted in anger and began cursing, he wrote.
“‘No way,’” Mr. Trump said, according to Mr. Johnson. “‘I would never do that. Who told you that?’”
Touchy, are we?
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Captain Bone Spurs strikes again
Another skull added to Trump’s belt:
Navy Secretary Richard Spencer was fired Sunday by Defense Secretary Mark Esper, who ordered that a Navy SEAL who was acquitted of murder be allowed to remain in the elite commando corps, the Defense Department said.
Esper asked for Spencer’s resignation after President Donald Trump tweeted on Thursday that Chief Petty Officer Eddie Gallagher would retain the gold Trident insignia signifying his status as a member of the Sea, Air, and Land Teams, or SEALs. Spencer told reporters on Friday that he believed the review process over Gallagher’s status should go forward.
In a letter to Trump, Spencer said he acknowledged his “termination,” saying the president deserved a Navy secretary “who is aligned with his vision.”
“Unfortunately, it has become apparent that in this respect, I no longer share the same understanding with the Commander in Chief who appointed me,” Spencer wrote.
Which is a polite way of saying “I think you’re a sick fuck with no morals and no sense of duty.”
Shortly thereafter, Trump tweeted that he was displeased not only by the way that “Gallagher’s trial was handled by the Navy” but also because “large cost overruns from [the] past administration’s contracting procedures were not addressed to my satisfaction.”
“Therefore, Secretary of the Navy Richard Spencer’s services have been terminated by Secretary of Defense Mark Esper,” he wrote.
In other words he used his office and Twitter to do harm to yet another public servant he threw overboard. It’s not appropriate for a president to get on Twitter to say “Here’s what I don’t like about this person I just shitcanned.”
The dispute flared into the open last week after NBC News and other organizations reported that the Navy was convening a review board to consider whether Gallagher should remain in the SEALs after he was convicted of posing with the ISIS fighter’s corpse but acquitted of having killed the young man.
Trump tweeted on Thursday that “the Navy will NOT be taking away Warfighter and Navy Seal Eddie Gallagher’s Trident Pin,” saying the case was “handled very badly from the beginning.” Earlier, the president had overturned the Navy’s decision to demote Gallagher, which would have severely affected his retirement pay.
Of course he did. He made sure Gallagher got his higher retirement pay, while he made sure Andrew McCabe lost his. Tells you where his priorities lie.
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Where Trump feels most productive
President Donald Trump is increasingly morphing the White House residence into a second Oval. It’s become the place where Trump feels most productive, where he avoids meddling by his staff and where he speed-dials his network of confidantes, GOP lawmakers and TV pundits.
Heh, “productive,” that’s a good one. Also “meddling” – because he thinks he’s the god-emperor with infinite powers, geddit?
Maintaining a sanctuary to work and think has taken on greater importance for the president as he increasingly feels under siege by the Democratic impeachment inquiry.
Hahahahaha to work and think, oh that’s hilarious, I’m out of breath from laughing.
“The Oval presents itself as historic and it gives off a sense of power, but the residence has a sense of exclusivity,” said a former senior administration official, describing Trump’s affinity for conducting business there. “He works more in the residence because he is not constrained there by staffers knocking on the door.”
Hmm I’m not sure I get this joke. The Oval presents itself? What, the Oval Office has a mind? And obviously “the residence has a sense of exclusivity” because that’s how residences work: they’re for the people wot reside in them. There would be even more of a sense of exclusivity if Trump locked himself in a bathroom.
But the joke about working more is still funny.
But most days and nights, if Trump is not on the campaign trail or a foreign trip, he happily stays inside his White House bubble and the residence — working late into the night and very early in the morning.
Not quite as funny the third time, but still raises a smile, or grimace.
Now he tends to go to the Oval Office and adjacent private dining room for five to six hours a day for formal meetings, lunches and ceremonial events, current and former administration officials say. But the bulk of his work in the mornings, late afternoons, evenings and weekends happens in his private quarters where Trump can call staff and advisers as early as 6 a.m. and up to midnight. Sometimes he or one of his aides will summon a senior staffer to the residence for an informal discussion or quick meeting to review a speech.
He also uses it during working hours as a place to watch TV freely, tweet and serve as own his one-man communications director and political strategist.
Calling Trump yammering at people on the phone while watching tv “work” – still funny. Or do I mean sad? One of those.
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There’s a reason for that
Oh, it turns out that the day Trump told Sondland “I WANT NOTHiNG I WANT NOTHiNG” was September 9, the day – here, Matt Lewis explains:
It’s important to note the timing of Trump’s “I want nothing..I want no quid pro quo” statement to Sondland: It occurred on September 9, the exact same day the House Intel Committee received the whistleblower’s complaint….
Most of the exculpatory evidence Republicans cite consists of things that happened AFTER Trump and Republicans realized the whistleblower had reported Trump’s activities.
No wonder he was in a bad mood.
Which is why the President would use that specific phrase — he knew he was being accused of precisely that. The White House had seen the complaint, which discusses said quid-pro-quo.
Exactly. Trump would never randomly invoke the term “quid pro quo” just out of the blue.
Indeed not. Trump has to consult his notes before he can shout “I WANT NOTHiNG” twice. His vocabulary is not large, generous, capacious, ample, hefty…you get the idea.
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WHAT DO YOU WANT
There is also the first page of Trump’s notes, the one where Sondland sets up the context of Trump’s I WANT NOTHiNG.
Wtf is going on over there? Was he sitting in bed transcribing the testimony himself, by hand?
He read all that to the reporters on the lawn. He read it twice, shifting into a more scratchy shouty voice for his own part of the dialogue. When he read the “HE WAS NOT iN A GOOD MOOD” part he said as an aside that [shouting] “I’M ALWAYS IN A GOOD MOOD, I DON’T KNOW WHAT THAT IS.”
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HE WANT NOTHiNG
Trump did a quick cameo in the White House backyard. He took notes with him, in giant letters, so that he wouldn’t forget what he was supposed to say.
Now “I WANT NOTHING” is trending on Twitter.
He wrote that weird note himself. He always writes in all caps, like a true illiterate. All caps but he still dots the i.
THiS iS THE FiNAL WORD FROM THE PRES OF THE US, he wrote. Oh yes? So he’s resigning?
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To call it a bombshell is to underestimate
The Guardian pauses to take a breath and sum up:
With each line of his testimony, Sondland has blown another hole in Donald Trump’s defenses. To describe the testimony as a bombshell is perhaps to underestimate its potential for damage to Trump. To attempt to describe the shock that it is Sondland delivering this message is to come up short for words.
Since the impeachment inquiry began, Trump has ranted that there was no quid pro quo with Ukraine, no conditions placed on a White House meeting, no strings on US military aid, only a desire to fight corruption in Ukraine and to pursue the truth about 2016. It is all a witch hunt, a hoax, Trump has said.
But every bit of it is true, and most every word from Trump’s mouth and his Twitter about it has been a lie, Sondland is testifying. There was a clear quid pro quo, repeatedly stated, and explicitly ordered by Trump through his designated agent, Rudy Giuliani.
Sondland is saying: he did it.
Sondland is also saying: we did it. He is quoting emails demonstrating that the plot, which secretary of state Mike Pompeo once pretended ignorance to, was well known inside the state department, National Security Council and budget office – and by vice president Mike Pence. “It was no secret,” Sondland said.
Now he begins a cross-examination period sure to generate moments that will go down in US political history.
What did the Mike Ps know and when did they know it.
Schiff is driving down on what the Mike Ps – Pompeo and Pence – knew and when they knew it.
Did Pompeo ever deny the connection between investigations and the White House meeting?
“Not that I recall.”
In a meeting with the vice-president in Warsaw, Sondland said he told Pence that he thought the military aid would not flow without the announcement of investigations.
Pence remained sphynxlike, in Sondland’s telling:
The vice president nodded like he heard what I said and that was pretty much it.
Sphynxlike? I think the correct word for that is “stupid.” Pence nodded because his head is empty.
Now Sondland is talking about a phone conversation in which Trump told him there was no quid pro quo. Earlier Sondland had said he took the president at his word. Now Sondland is saying he and everyone else knew there was a clear quid pro quo.
Sondland said after “frantic emails to me and to others about the security assistance” from ambassador Bill Taylor, Sondland called Trump and asked, “what do you want from Ukraine… what do you want?”
It was a very short abrupt conversation, he was not in a good mood. He said I want nothing, I want nothing, there’s no quid pro quo. Tell Zelenskiy to do the right thing.
That’s Trump all right. “There’s no quid pro quo, tell Zelenskiy to do the right thing, get it?”
But the Republicans want us to take the lies at face value.
Castor, the Republican lawyer, asks Sondland if Trump ever told him personally that aid or a meeting were conditioned on an announcement of investigations.
Sondland: “Personally, no.”
Castor: So how did you know Giuliani spoke for Trump?
Sondland: “Well when the president says talk to my personal attorney and then Mr Giuliani says ‘as the president’s attorney,’ we assume it’s coming from the president.
Then Castor splits hairs between Trump saying “Go talk to Rudy” and “Talk to Rudy”. It wasn’t an order, correct? Castor says.
We understood we had to talk to Rudy to get anything done on Ukraine, Sondland said.
Oh but no no no this was all a rogue operation by Rudy Giuliani, entirely on his own, nothing to do with Trump, Trump had no idea it was going on, he is shocked, SHOCKED to hear of it.
Is Giuliani going under the bus?
You’ll recall:
Rudy Giuliani, Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, has said he is confident the president will remain loyal to him as an impeachment inquiry unfolds in which the former New York mayor has become a central figure.
But Giuliani joked that he had good “insurance” in case Trump did turn on him, amid speculation Republicans will seek to frame him as a rogue actor.
In a telephone interview with the Guardian, in response to a question about whether he was nervous that Trump might “throw him under a bus” in the impeachment crisis, Giuliani said, with a slight laugh: “I’m not, but I do have very, very good insurance, so if he does, all my hospital bills will be paid.”
Giuliani’s lawyer, Robert Costello, who was also on the call, then interjected: “He’s joking.”
Nah, he’s not. They’re both crooks and they know each other well.
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Everyone was in the loop
Apparently Sondland’s testimony is being very damning.
He read an opening statement saying he would be confirming the quid pro quo.
He said he and Volker didn’t want to work with Giuliani but they followed the president’s orders.
They tried to talk him out of it, but no.
In response to our persistent efforts to change his views, President Trump directed us to “talk with Rudy.” We understood that “talk with Rudy” meant talk with Mr. Rudy Giuliani, the President’s personal lawyer.
Let me say again: We weren’t happy with the President’s directive to talk with Rudy. We did not want to involve Mr. Giuliani. I believed then, as I do now, that the men and women of the State Department, not the President’s personal lawyer, should take responsibility for Ukraine matters.
Nonetheless, based on the President’s direction, we were faced with a choice: We could abandon the efforts to schedule the White House phone call and White House visit between Presidents Trump and Zelensky, which was unquestionably in our foreign policy interest — or we could do as President Trump had directed and “talk with Rudy.” We chose the latter course, not because we liked it, but because it was the only constructive path open to us.
Not exactly. He could have blown the whistle, or he and Volker together could have. But that’s not the issue, the issue is what Trump was doing, and the way Sondland is nailing it to the wall.
Sondland’s testimony continues to break in wave after wave of stunning statements contradicting previous testimony by Morrison and others that he was somehow acting alone:
We kept the leadership of the State Department and the NSC informed of our activities. That included communications with Secretary of State Pompeo, his Counselor Ulrich Brechbuehl, and Executive Secretary Lisa Kenna within the State Department; and communications with Ambassador John Bolton, Dr. Fiona Hill, Mr. Timothy Morrison, and their staff at the NSC. They knew what we were doing and why.
Now Sondland quotes from an email that the state department has refused to release.
Significant are the names CC’d – the secretary of state, secretary of energy, the acting chief of staff… all of whom have refused congressional subpoenas to testify or provide documents:
Within my State Department emails, there is a July 19 email that I sent to Secretary Pompeo, Secretary Perry, Brian McCormack (Perry’s Chief of Staff), Ms. Kenna, Acting Chief of Staff and OMB Director Mick Mulvaney (White House), and Mr. Mulvaney’s Senior Advisor Robert Blair. A lot of senior officials.
Here is my exact quote from that email: “I Talked to Zelensky just now… He is prepared to receive Potus’ call. Will assure him that he intends to run a fully transparent investigation and will ‘turn over every stone’. He would greatly appreciate a call prior to Sunday so that he can put out some media about a ‘friendly and productive call’ (no details) prior to Ukraine election on Sunday.” Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney responded: “I asked NSC to set it up for tomorrow.”
Everyone was in the loop. It was no secret. Everyone was informed via email on July 19, days before the Presidential call. As I communicated to the team, I told President Zelensky in advance that assurances to “run a fully transparent investigation” and “turn over every stone” were necessary in his call with President Trump.
All of which meant not clean up corruption in Ukraine but find or manufacture dirt on Biden.
TBC
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The latest burst of hail
Charles Pierce at Esquire says things are speeding up on Trump’s train to the cliff edge.
The latest burst of hail comes from a federal appeals court in Washington. From the Washington Post:
The request followed closely on the heels of Friday’s conviction of longtime Trump friend Roger Stone. Testimony and evidence at his trial appeared to cast doubt on written replies from Trump to Mueller about the president’s knowledge about attempts by his 2016 campaign to learn more about the release of hacked Democratic emails by the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks. “Did the president lie? Was the president not truthful in his responses to the Mueller investigation,” General Counsel Douglas N. Letter said. “The House is trying to determine whether the current president should remain in office. This is unbelievably serious and it’s happening right now, very fast.”
If the president* lied to Mueller’s people, that’s the entire ballgame.
Is it though? If Barr and the Senate won’t admit it’s the entire ballgame then it isn’t, right?
And that’s not even to get into the possibility that he—or nature itself—may be crafting a medical bailout for him even as we speak. (Reports are that he received the Fed chair in the residence today, and not in the Oval Office. Edith Wilson, white courtesy phone, please.) The rivets are all popping and the gears are springing loose. And now there’s a whistleblower from the IRS charging that a political appointee at Treasury may have monkey-wrenched an audit of either the president* or of Vice President Mike Pence. The hailstorm’s getting stronger, and the jackasses are running out of room.
Interesting.
