Tag: Trump

You know how Zelenskiy has been saying he felt no pressure from Trump, no no, no pressure at all? Well, don’t you believe it.

U.S. State Department officials were informed that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy was feeling pressure from the Trump administration to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden even before the July phone call that has led to impeachment hearings in Washington, two people with knowledge of the matter told The Associated Press.

In early May, officials at the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv, including then-Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch, were told Zelenskiy was seeking advice on how to navigate the difficult position he was in, the two people told the AP. He was concerned President Donald Trump and associates were pressing him to take action that could affect the 2020 U.S. presidential race, the two individuals said. They spoke on condition of anonymity because of the diplomatic and political sensitivity of the issue.

State Department officials in Kyiv and Washington were briefed on Zelenskiy’s concerns at least three times, the two sources said. Notes summarizing his worries were circulated within the department, they said.

I wonder where those notes are now.

The briefings and the notes show that U.S. officials knew early that Zelenskiy was feeling pressure to investigate Biden, even though the Ukrainian leader later denied it in a joint news conference with Trump in September.

No pressure! Perfect phone call! Totally appropriate!

The Associated Press reported last month about Zelenskiy’s meeting on May 7 with two top aides, as well as Andriy Kobolyev, head of the state-owned natural gas company Naftogaz, and Amos Hochstein, an American who sits on the Ukrainian company’s supervisory board. Ahead of the meeting, Hochstein told Yovanovitch, the U.S. ambassador, why he was being called in.

Zelenskiy’s office has not replied to requests for comment about the May 7 meeting.

Notes circulated internally at the State Department indicated that Zelenskiy tried to mask the real purpose of his May 7 meeting __ which was to talk about political problems with the White House __ by saying it was about energy, the two people with knowledge of the matter said.

Sigh. Zelenskiy not only felt the need for a meeting, he also felt the need to mask its purpose. Don put the frighteners on him early and hard. It’s always even more disgusting than we already thought.

It turns out Trump has a tendency to attack people who annoy him.

Knowing Trump’s reflex is to lash out, aides have in the past warned him that character assassination is a bad idea. They told him to avoid savaging Special Counsel Robert Mueller, for example, advising that it would do him no good. Trump didn’t listen, treating Mueller as another in a long line of antagonists to be trampled.

“He’s a street fighter,” said a former senior White House official, who like others I talked with this week spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss Trump’s personality. “He’d rather be tearing the head off a rooster than putting caviar on a cracker.” A Republican senator told me the president “has two speeds: hostile, and hostile on steroids.”

In other words he’s a nasty vulgar malevolent man who never ever restrains his own bad temper.

Why exactly does Trump behave this way? Some mental-health professionals who have studied him—and a few politicians and aides who have worked with him—describe him as a narcissist whose self-image is mortally threatened by criticism of any sort. For Trump, criticism seems to amount to “an attack that is lethal to the public veneer,” Seth Norrholm, a neuroscientist who’s written about Trump’s mental state, told me. The invariable response is “not just [to] extinguish the threat, but to humiliate and destroy the threat.”

This is redescription rather than explanation. Why does Trump vomit rage and hatred all over people? Because he feels a lot of rage and hatred, and he likes to vomit it all over people.

“Some of this comes from immaturity—you can imagine a person who’s narcissistic, but has the intelligence and brains to back it up,” said Norrholm, who believes that Trump is unfit for office. “But there’s not a lot of firepower behind [Trump’s] narcissism, so you end up with grade-school nicknames and playground-level insults.”

Do intelligent narcissists also have enough (or the right kind of) intelligence to know that vulgar abuse doesn’t enhance their status and so restrain some of their hostile urges in favor of more veiled forms of revenge? I believe they do, yes.

Day one of the impeachment hearings.

I’ve just realized, partly because of something Schiff said in his opening statement and partly because/while reading in the Guardian’s live coverage

Echoing his closed-door testimony, Bill Taylor said in his opening statement that he was told “everything” Ukraine sought, including a White House visit and the frozen military aid, was tied to a public announcement of investigations into Joe Biden and the 2016 election.

…that all this and more is going to come out and be nailed down and in the record, and if then nothing happens, we’ll be on the record as knowing all this and nailing it down and then saying no problem.

I know that’s obvious, we’ve all known that all along, but it became that bit clearer to me somehow. We’re going to document crime after crime after crime and be helpless to do anything, including even preventing new crimes. We’ll be nailing down the powerlessness to act along with the crimes. It has to be done, but…it’s sickening.

The acting US ambassador to Ukraine said of a conversation he had in early September, “Ambassador Sondland also told me that he now recognized that he had made a mistake by earlier telling Ukrainian officials that only a White House meeting with President Zelenskyy was dependent on a public announcement of investigations—in fact, Ambassador Sondland said, ‘everything’ was dependent on such an announcement, including security assistance.

“He said that President Trump wanted President Zelenskyy ‘in a public box’ by making a public statement about ordering such investigations.”

Could he sound any more like a hoodlum from a Warner Brothers movie from the 30s? Cagney and Robinson and Bogart all rolled into one?

New testimony is that a staffer overheard Trump on the phone asking about the “investigations” the day after the “perfect” phone call.

Here is Bill Taylor’s full account of his staffer overhearing Trump asking about “investigations” in Ukraine, which the longtime diplomat just shared with the House intelligence committee:

“Last Friday, a member of my staff told me of events that occurred on July 26. While Ambassador Volker and I visited the front, this member of my staff accompanied Ambassador Sondland. Ambassador Sondland met with [a senior adviser to the Ukrainian president, Mr. Yermak]. Following that meeting, in the presence of my staff at a restaurant, Ambassador Sondland called President Trump and told him of his meetings in Kyiv.

“The member of my staff could hear President Trump on the phone, asking Ambassador Sondland about ‘the investigations.’ Ambassador Sondland told President Trump that the Ukrainians were ready to move forward.

“Following the call with President Trump, the member of my staff asked Ambassador Sondland what President Trump thought about Ukraine. Ambassador Sondland responded that President Trump cares more about the investigations of Biden, which Giuliani was pressing for.”

I don’t know what the “front” is that Taylor and Volker were visiting, but the import of the phone call is clear enough.

I guess that’s one way to go – “Look, the president says stuff like that all the time, so because he says it all the time, it can’t be impeachable.”

Jesse Lee tweets:

Thornberry admits it was inappropriate for Trump to pressure a foreign country for political smears, but not impeachable because Trump does it all the time.

Thornberry’s argument:

There’s not really anything that the President said in that phone call that’s different from what he says in public all the time. So is there some sort of abuse of power that rises to that threshold that is different than the American people have been hearing for three years? I don’t hear that.

It’s not different from what he says in public, therefore it must be non-impeachable.

I don’t exactly follow the chain of reasoning, but no doubt that’s my ignorance.

A Seinfeld writer points out that Trump has never been a real New Yorker.

In his 70 years as a resident, his feet barely touched pavement. He probably still thinks the subway takes tokens. He probably never waited in line for a movie, got sick on street-fair Belgian waffles, or felt the thrill of beating everyone to a cab in the rain. He never had a vicious landlord or a predatory boss, and he sure as hell never had the ultimate New York experience of suffering in silence.

Peter Mehlman doesn’t say this, but I’m betting Trump also never got to know the city by walking around in it. That’s the only way to do it, as far as I’m concerned – because it’s the only way to see and absorb the details. If you’re just whisked around in a car all the time – even a car that’s mostly stuck in traffic – you get nothing but a car window view.

I grew up in Queens, just two miles and a few hundred income-tax brackets from Trump. As kids, both of us dreamed of living in Manhattan and being real New Yorkers. In the ’60s, one of us had parents who got us tickets for Leonard Bernstein’s Young People’s Concerts. In the ’70s, one of us took the Q17 bus and the F train to Madison Square Garden and paid off ushers to get into sold-out Knicks games. In the ’80s, one of us lived in a studio apartment, barely making rent while somehow going out to dinner every night, then hanging out at dive bars.

It’s as if Trump’s city isn’t New York but Richburg, a gold-plated emptiness that might as well be on the Moon.

And it won’t be any different in Florida.

Trump will hole up at Mar-a-Lago—what are the odds he can translate the words Mar-a-Lago into English? Ten to one against?—where he’ll be sequestered from almost all things Floridian. The Category 5 hurricanes and rising ocean floods on perfectly sunny days won’t touch him. He won’t sit by the pool chatting about his grandkids; he won’t reconnect with people he knew in high school 60 years ago; and he won’t rush to make the early bird at the best burger joint in town only to see an elderly diner hike down his pants and give himself an injection before the appetizers arrive.

His only true Floridian experience will be golf with a small ring of devoted right-wing entertainers/athletes/televangelists only too happy to look away as Secret Service agents dutifully kick the president’s ball on the green.

If he happens to venture out in public, he’ll realize that he’s almost as despised in southern Florida as in New York, because hordes of his neighbors will be ex–New Yorkers. Even worse, they’ll be old ex–New Yorkers well beyond the point of keeping their opinions to themselves.

It will be all Frank Costanza all day long.

Aw, nice, Volodya invited Trump to attend Russia’s next military parade and Don is all excited about it.

The whistleblower’s lawyer sent the White House counsel a cease and desist letter. That may seem a futile gesture but at least it gets it on the record.

“I am writing out of deep concern that your client, the President of the United States, is engaging in rhetoric and activity that places my client, the Intelligence Community Whistleblower, and their family in physical danger,” Andrew Bakaj wrote to White House counsel Pat Cipollone in a Thursday letter obtained by CNN’s Anderson Cooper.

“I am writing to respectfully request that you counsel your client on the legal and ethical peril in which he is placing himself should anyone be physically harmed as a result of his, or his surrogates’, behavior,” he said.

…

In his letter, Bakaj cites Trump’s recent comments to reporters that they’d “be doing the public a service” if they reported the name of the whistleblower as well as his comments in September that whoever provided the whistleblower with information about his call with the Ukrainian President is “close to a spy,” adding that in the old days spies were dealt with differently.

“These are not words of an individual with a firm grasp of the significance of the office which he occupies, nor a fundamental understanding of the significance of each word he articulates by virtue of occupying that office,” Bakaj wrote.

I like that. I like the lawyerly caution and precision coupled with the damning nature of the substance. Trump indeed lacks a firm grasp of the significance of the office which he occupies…and he indeed thinks his words are significant because they are his, not because of the office he so wretchedly occupies.

House Democrats have argued that the whistleblower’s identity is irrelevant at this stage in the proceedings due to testimony from several witnesses corroborating and expanding on allegations contained in the initial complaint.

Pff, who cares about that, the point is revenge.

Ah now this is a good look for a current president. Yes indeed, this really reflects well on us and our institutions and choices.

A New York judge on Thursday ordered President Donald Trump to pay $2 million to an array of charities to resolve a lawsuit alleging he misused his own charitable foundation to further his political and business interests.

Judge Saliann Scarpulla said Trump breached his fiduciary duty to the Trump Foundation by allowing his campaign staff to plan a fundraiser for veterans’ charities in the run-up to the 2016 Iowa caucuses.

The event, which passed money through Trump’s non-profit, was designed “to further Mr. Trump’s political campaign,” Scarpulla said.

The judge also signed off on agreements reached last month between Trump’s lawyers and the New York attorney general’s office to close the Trump Foundation and distribute about $1.7 million in remaining funds to other nonprofits.

In the agreements, Trump admitted to personally misusing Trump Foundation funds and agreed to pay back $11,525 in the organization’s funds he spent on sports memorabilia and champagne at a charity gala. He also agreed to restrictions on his involvement in other charitable organizations.

Speaking of the Justice Department, and Trump’s efforts to exert complete control of a branch that is supposed to be largely independent, and how that plays out for Attorneys General – Jeff Sessions is running for the Senate again.

Mr. Sessions has remained largely out of the public eye, and has been effectively exiled from Republican politics, since he was forced out of the Trump administration last November. He had repeatedly clashed with the president over his decision to recuse himself from the Justice Department’s investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election.

Mr. Trump relentlessly attacked Mr. Sessions both in public and in private, calling him “scared stiff” and his leadership “a total joke,” among other insults, ultimately forcing him to resign. By choosing to run for office now, Mr. Sessions risks reigniting attacks from his former boss, who could undermine his standing among the Republican voters he needs to win next year’s crowded primary election on March 3.

Let’s hope so. It’s not as if we want Jeff Sessions back in the Senate.

Mr. Trump, for his part, continues to blame Mr. Sessions for the two-year Russia probe, and last weekend he repeatedly denounced Mr. Sessions, saying he was a “jerk” and making it clear Mr. Sessions would not have his support, according to a person briefed on the discussions.

Publicly, however, Mr. Trump has remained silent, although some of his allies have begun expressing their disapproval. Minutes after the news of Mr. Sessions’s decision broke on Wednesday evening, Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida declared on Twitter, “Jeff Sessions returning to the Senate is a terrible idea.”

Which is true, but not for the reasons the odious Gaetz thinks.

News of Mr. Sessions’s decision to run startled and dismayed national Republicans, who had hoped that he would step aside to avoid the possibility of being vilified by Mr. Trump…

I can’t help laughing. Republicans hoped Republican Sessions would stay out so that he wouldn’t prompt more public bullying and defamation from the Republican president. Nice buncha people they got there!

Mr. Sessions had been chewing on the idea of returning to the Senate for several months, making clear to allies and advisers that he was pained at the possibility that his final act in public life could be his contentious 21-month tenure at the Justice Department. He had talked to aides and consultants, had polling conducted and asked friends whether they thought Mr. Trump might warm to him.

But over the last week, Mr. Trump sent word to Mr. Sessions through allies that he would publicly attack him if he ran. And Mr. McConnell recently approached Mr. Trump, asking him whether his feelings about Mr. Sessions might have improved. The president said he was very much still opposed to Mr. Sessions and would make that clear if he had to, according to a person briefed on the discussions.

If he “had to” – he doesn’t “have to.” There is no reasonable interpretation of this scenario that makes Trump’s bullying and defamation some kind of imperative. Trump wants to because he’s an evil bullying shit; end of story.

Trump wanted Barr to hold a press conference to say Trump didn do nuthin.

President Donald Trump asked Attorney General William Barr to hold a news conference clearing him of legal wrongdoing with regard to his phone call pressuring the Ukrainian President to investigate Democrats, a person familiar with the matter tells CNN.

Trump has raised the idea in conversations surrounding the ongoing impeachment inquiry over recent weeks, and has said he thought the idea could help project the message that he hadn’t done anything wrong, the person familiar with the matter said.

Right, because that’s how that works – big honcho guy gets up and says Nobody did nuthin, and that’s the end of it.

In Trump’s dreamworld at least. We’re not quite there yet. The Washington Post says Barr refused.

Trump has brought up Barr’s refusal to aides over the past few weeks and how he wishes the attorney general had held the news conference, Trump advisers told the Post.

Sound familiar?

Even without a news conference from the attorney general, the Justice Department gave the President nearly everything he wanted. In an orchestrated rollout alongside the release of a transcript of Trump’s Ukraine call, the department publicly announced that criminal division prosecutors had found no wrongdoing by the President, at least as it relates to campaign finance law.

The department also released a legal memo on why the intelligence community’s inspector general was not required to turn over a whistleblower complaint to Congress.

Despite efforts to publicly declare the matter as case closed, it is clear that the Ukraine interactions and the role of Rudy Giuliani, the President’s personal lawyer, are still at the heart of an investigation led by federal prosecutors in New York.

Because we don’t yet have a complete autocracy.

Trump breaking the law yesterday by promoting his son’s new “book” on Twitter:

My son, @DonaldJTrumpJr is coming out with a new book, “Triggered: How the Left Thrives on Hate and Wants to Silence Us” – available tomorrow, November 5th! A great new book that I highly recommend for ALL to read. Go order it today!

A reply:

Another:

The director of public policy at the Project on Government Oversight sums it up well … “Frankly he’s using his Twitter account to try to financially benefit his son .. That’s not only distasteful, but it’s a misuse of public office.”

One more:

2635.702 Use of public office for private gain. “An employee shall not use his public office for his own private gain, for the endorsement of any product, service or enterprise, or for the private gain of relatives.”

He breaks the law and laughs in our faces.

It all points to Trump’s desire to be a dictator.

A common thread is emerging from the impeachment bombshells, court fights and multiple scandals all coming to head this week inside the one-year mark to the next general election. It’s a picture of a President and his men who subscribe to a staggeringly broad interpretation of executive power and have no reservations about using it[,] often for domestic political ends.

The trend, which threatens to recast the conception of the presidency shared by America’s founders, shone through the first witness testimony released from the impeachment inquiry Monday.

One former ambassador, Marie Yovanovitch, who apparently had been in the way of Trump’s plans to get dirt from Ukraine on former Vice President Joe Biden, was shocked when the President told his counterpart in Kiev on a phone call that the official US diplomatic representative to his country was “bad news.”

“I was very concerned, I still am,” Yovanovitch said in her October 11 appearance before investigators, saying she felt “threatened” by the harassing words of her own President.

Head of state 1 isn’t supposed to tell head of state 2 that 1’s ambassador is “bad news.” That’s not how the system is supposed to work.

Another top State Department official, Michael McKinley, testified that he had resigned partly because of the use of the State Department to dig up dirt on Trump’s political opponents.

“In 37 years in the Foreign Service and in different parts of the globe and working on many controversial issues, working 10 years back in Washington, I had never seen that,” McKinley said, according to a transcript also released on Monday.

McKinley also said under oath that he had asked his boss, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, for a statement of support for the beleaguered Yovanovitch.

Pompeo told ABC News last month that McKinley had never raised the issue. And the top US diplomat emerges from the testimony as more loyal to Trump’s political goals than his own department’s mission.

We’re not even relevant in all this, we the people – we’re just the serfs, the proles, the cannon fodder. Trump’s only mission is to expand and secure ever more power and money for himself.

More on Trump N Twitter:

Aides said they often compiled positive feedback for Mr. Trump. He revels in the stream of praise from his most loyal followers, on paper or as he scrolls through his phone early in the morning and late at night.

That’s so pathetic. No, I don’t feel sorry for him, I just find it pathetic. Contemptible, and pathetic. Random fools on Twitter think he’s awwwwwwsome, and that gives him the cuddly feelz.

The Times presents a graph showing that tweets that get lots of love on Twitter are repellent to the sane adult public. It’s kind of as if Trump spent all his time courting gamers or zombie fans.

The president is keenly aware of his number of followers and reluctant to acknowledge that any of them are not real. Mr. Trump has accused Twitter of political bias for its periodic purges of bot accounts across the platform, which have cost him — and other prominent users — hundreds of thousands of followers. When he met with the company’s chief executive, Jack Dorsey, in April, Mr. Trump reportedly pressed him at length about the lost followers.

It’s so cruel to take his loyal bots away.

According to data from YouGov, which polls about most of the president’s tweets, some of the topics on which Mr. Trump got the most likes and retweets — jabs at the N.F.L., posts about the special counsel’s investigation, unfounded allegations of widespread voter fraud — poll poorly with the general public.

But people close to Mr. Trump said there was no dissuading him that the “likes” a tweet got were evidence that a decision or policy proposal was well received.

Last December, after Mr. Trump announced plans to withdraw some troops from Syria, lawmakers came to the White House to argue against it. According to Politico, Mr. Trump responded by calling in Mr. Scavino.

“Tell them how popular my policy is,” Mr. Trump asked Mr. Scavino, who described for the lawmakers social media postings that had praised Mr. Trump’s decision. Aides said that for Mr. Trump, his Twitter “likes” were proof that he had made the right call.

Ok, I take back the “nothing we didn’t know” claim. I didn’t know that. Dear god – he makes his policy on Syria according to what’s popular on Twitter.

He and his flunkies are hoping Twitter will win him a second term.

While some campaign aides say Mr. Trump’s tweets can be a distraction, they also view Twitter as an essential tool to present him as someone strong, willing to stand up to so-called political elites and what the president recently called the “unholy alliance of corrupt Democrat politicians, deep-state bureaucrats and the fake-news media.”

The aides seek to cultivate the image of a man who understands “regular people.” Mr. Trump’s team believes that his unvarnished writing, poor punctuation and increasing profanity on Twitter signal authenticity — a contrast to the polished, vetted, often anodyne social media style of most candidates.

Absolutely. Who needs health insurance and affordable housing and decent wages when there’s an ignorant sexist racist loudmouth being “authentic” on Twitter?

The Times has a huge multi-author piece on Trump N Twitter. It’s nothing we don’t already know, I think, but it does provide some details that are interesting.

Mr. Trump’s Twitter habit is most intense in the morning, when he is in the White House residence, watching Fox News, scrolling through his Twitter mentions and turning the social media platform into what one aide called the “ultimate weapon of mass dissemination.”

Of the attack tweets identified in the Times analysis, nearly half were sent between 6 a.m. and 10 a.m., hours that Mr. Trump spends mostly without advisers present.

After waking early, Mr. Trump typically watches news shows recorded the previous night on his “Super TiVo,” several DVRs connected to a single remote. (The devices are set to record “Lou Dobbs Tonight” on Fox Business Network; “Hannity,” “Tucker Carlson Tonight” and “The Story With Martha MacCallum” on Fox News; and “Anderson Cooper 360” on CNN.)

He takes in those shows, and the “Fox & Friends” morning program, then flings out comments on his iPhone. Then he watches as his tweets reverberate on cable channels and news sites.

We mostly knew that, but it’s still astounding – that he can find four hours to watch tv and gossip about it on Twitter. In practical terms, the less work he does the better, but it’s still insulting and infuriating that he’s mostly just hanging out and watching teeeeeeveeeeeee.

The symbiotic relationship between Mr. Trump and Fox News is apparent through the president’s tweets. In fact, he praised the network in his first tweet on the first morning he woke up in the White House.

He has since praised and promoted the network, individual shows and conservative news media personalities more than 750 times.

Over all, at least 15 percent of the content in Mr. Trump’s tweets seemed to come directly from Fox News and other conservative media outlets.

Two transcripts from the impeachment inquiry have been made public, I guess with more to follow. One stomach-turning item:

Marie Yovanovitch, the ousted U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, told House impeachment investigators last month that U.S. Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland told her she should tweet out support or praise for President Donald Trump if she wanted to save her job, according to a transcript of her testimony made public Monday.

On one level, the higher level, that’s serious bad governance, bad policy, bad dealing with civil servants, all that. On the lower level, it’s the usual absolutely sickening contemptible infantile egotism of this ravenously greedy-for-praise monster. The higher level is vastly more consequential but it’s the lower one that always throws me into rages of disgust. I cannot stand the way he’s always hanging his conceit and need for slavish flattery out there for all to see. I can’t stand his total lack of seriousness. Can.not.stand.it.

Yovanovitch departed Ukraine in May, months ahead of her scheduled departure, after coming under attack from right-wing media, which alleged she was hostile to the president. Her departure set off alarm bells among Democrats in Congress but the State Department said at the time her exit was planned.

Yovanovitch testified to House investigators Oct. 11 that Trump had personally pressured the State Department to remove her, even though a top department official assured her that she had “done nothing wrong.”

If only she had tweeted what an awesome perfect great stable genius and sex god he is.

Speaking of Only in Trump’s White House…what other president, even the shittiest of them, ever decided the best thing to do when a state was suffering a disaster would be to shout abuse at its governor, in public? I don’t know of any. But for Trump it’s just another Sunday.

The Governor of California, @GavinNewsom, has done a terrible job of forest management. I told him from the first day we met that he must “clean” his forest floors regardless of what his bosses, the environmentalists, DEMAND of him. Must also do burns and cut fire stoppers…….Every year, as the fire’s rage & California burns, it is the same thing-and then he comes to the Federal Government for $$$ help. No more. Get your act together Governor. You don’t see close to the level of burn in other states…But our teams are working well together in………putting these massive, and many, fires out. Great firefighters! Also, open up the ridiculously closed water lanes coming down from the North. Don’t pour it out into the Pacific Ocean. Should be done immediately. California desperately needs water, and you can have it now!

It’s ok to commit high crimes and misdemeanors as long as you keep it secret.

The senior White House lawyer who placed a record of President Donald Trump’s July 25 call with Ukraine’s president in a top-secret system also instructed at least one official who heard the call not to tell anyone about it, according to testimony heard by House impeachment investigators this week.

Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, a decorated Army officer who served as the National Security Council’s director for Ukraine, told lawmakers that he went to the lawyer, John Eisenberg, to register his concerns about the call, in which Trump asked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate the Bidens, according to a person in the room for Vindman’s deposition on Tuesday.

Eisenberg recorded Vindman’s complaints in notes on a yellow legal pad, then conferred with his deputy Michael Ellis about how to handle the conversation because it was clearly “sensitive,” Vindman testified. The lawyers then decided to move the record of the call into the NSC’s top-secret codeword system—a server normally used to store highly classified material that only a small group of officials can access.

That’s the senior White House lawyer right there – deciding that the thing to do with a record of the president strong-arming a vulnerable ally to find dirt on a political rival is to hide it. The thing to do about the crime is to join in it by covering it up.

Vindman did not consider the move itself as evidence of a cover-up, according to a person familiar with his testimony. But he said he became disturbed when, a few days later, Eisenberg instructed him not to tell anyone about the call—especially because it was Vindman’s job to coordinate the interagency process with regard to Ukraine policy.

Eisenberg’s decision to move the call record to the codeword system following his conversation with Vindman was first reported by The Washington Post. But Eisenberg’s subsequent request that Vindman not disclose the content of the call to anyone has not been previously reported.

The NSC and Eisenberg ignored Politico’s requests for comment.

Eisenberg’s purported request that Vindman keep the call a secret raises questions about whether the lawyers’ intent was to bury the conversation altogether. It also undermines Trump’s insistence that the call was “perfect.”

Just a tad.

Oh lord. Apparently Trump and The Sharpie Gang photoshopped a photo so that it looked as if Trump were putting a medal on the Hero Dog?

Or maybe Daily Wire did and he retweeted it?

AMERICAN HERO!

I did a comment retweet of it at the time saying “Trump hates dogs.” I also wondered why the dog was always photographed with her tongue lolling in exactly the same way…but I didn’t think of photoshop. Stupid of me.

Jim Acosta:

A WH official said “the dog is not at the WH.”

The NY Times:

The photo President Trump shared seemed to be an altered version of a 2017 photo of James McCloughan receiving a Medal of Honor. McCloughan told The New York Times that he felt President Trump was recognizing the dog’s heroism: “They are very courageous.”

President Trump was retweeting a fake photo without saying it was fake. That’s what President Trump was doing. Next time let’s put Homer Simpson in the White House.