Last Call For Orange Implosion

Morality and history aside, there are plenty of practical reasons to not impeach Trump: the main one being the near-guaranteed failure of a Senate trial to to garner 67 votes to convict him on any count, even if Mitch McConnell allows a Senate trial to even happen, which is no sure thing.

Does the Senate have an obligation to conduct a trial of the president if the House impeaches him? With the increased prospects for an impeachment inquiry now that the Democrats have taken control of the House of Representatives, most discussions of impeachment have assumed that, should the House vote to impeachment, the Senate will then hold a trial. This is the logical construction of the Constitution’s provisions setting out the impeachment process: If the House impeaches, then it would follow that the Senate tries the case. This is what the Senate did on the two occasions, in the cases of Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton, that the House voted articles of impeachment.

The current Senate rules would further support this view. They contemplate that when the House has voted an impeachment, the Senate will be notified, the House managers will present their case and trial proceedings, which the rules prescribe in some detail, will begin.

But it is also possible that, in this time of disregard and erosion of established institutional practices and norms, the current leadership of the Senate could choose to abrogate them once more. The same Mitch McConnell who blocked the Senate’s exercise of its authority to advise and consent to the Supreme Court nomination of Merrick Garland, could attempt to prevent the trial of a House impeachment of Donald Trump. And he would not have to look far to find the constitutional arguments and the flexibility to revise Senate rules and procedures to accomplish this purpose.

The Constitution does not by its express terms direct the Senate to try an impeachment. In fact, it confers on the Senate "the sole power to try,” which is a conferral of exclusive constitutional authority and not a procedural command. The Constitution couches the power to impeach in the same terms: it is the House’s “sole power.” The House may choose to impeach or not, and one can imagine an argument that the Senate is just as free, in the exercise of its own “sole power,” to decline to try any impeachment that the House elects to vote.

But the practical reason for moving forward with impeachment in order to force Trump out of office is that Donald Trump cannot keep his goddamn mouth shut and will certainly only make things worse for himself, in public, on a daily basis.

President Trump expressed disgust Thursday morning with the explosive whistleblower complaint, slamming the intelligence officer and the White House aides who helped him or her as “almost a spy” and suggested it was treason.
Speaking at a private breakfast in New York, Trump described reporters as “scum” and raged at the Democrats’ new impeachment proceedings, which were spurred by the whistleblower’s complaint alleging that Trump tried to strong-arm Ukraine’s leader to interfere in the 2020 election.

The still-unidentified whistleblower acknowledged that he did not listen to Trump’s July 25 phone call with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, but cited information from more than half a dozen U.S. officials over the past four months as part of “official interagency business.”

“Basically, that person never saw the report, never saw the call, he never saw the call — heard something and decided that he or she, or whoever the hell they saw — they’re almost a spy,” Trump said.

“I want to know who’s the person, who’s the person who gave the whistle-blower the information? Because that’s close to a spy,” he continued. “You know what we used to do in the old days when we were smart? Right? The spies and treason, we used to handle it a little differently than we do now.”

Trump openly calling for harm to come to the whistleblower as a "traitor" is basically not going to help his case.  And again, there's a very good chance Trump will just blurt out evidence of guilt in his rage.

Having said that, the NY Times couldn't help themselves either and published a story on the whisteblower, a CIA officer assigned to the White House.

The whistle-blower who revealed that President Trump sought foreign help for his re-election and that the White House sought to cover it up is a C.I.A. officer who was detailed to work at the White House at one point, according to three people familiar with his identity.

The man has since returned to the C.I.A., the people said. Little else is known about him. His complaint made public Thursday suggested he was an analyst by training and made clear he was steeped in details of American foreign policy toward Europe, demonstrating a sophisticated understanding of Ukrainian politics and at least some knowledge of the law.

The whistle-blower’s expertise will likely add to lawmakers’ confidence about the merits of his complaint, and tamp down allegations that he might have misunderstood what he learned about Mr. Trump. He did not listen directly to a July call between Mr. Trump and President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine that is at the center of the political firestorm over the president’s mixing of diplomacy with personal political gain.

Lawyers for the whistle-blower refused to confirm that he worked for the C.I.A. and said that publishing information about him was dangerous.

But we did it anyway!

Here Comes The Repo Man

Remember last week when the Fed had to step in with $53 billion in overnight lending to keep the money markets from imploding?  That problem is continuing, and the Fed has now poured in more than a quarter-trillion dollars last week to keep interest rates from going under and another $105 billion Tuesday.

The Federal Reserve added $105 billion to the nation's financial system on Tuesday in two transactions, seeking to calm money markets and keep interest rates in its intended range. 

The New York Fed continued its streak of market repurchase agreements, or repos, selling $75 billion of overnight repos and $30 billion of repos expiring in 14 days. Banks bid for $80.2 billion in overnight repos and $62 billion in 14-day repos, signaling strong demand in the government-backed investments. 

Last week marked the first time in a decade that the bank had taken such steps to relieve pressure on money markets. The bank offered a total of $278 billion in repos from Tuesday through Friday.

This is a massive economic system alarm bell, and it's happening while Trump is currently got his orange thumb up his ass over Ukraine.

Also last week, the Federal Open Market Committee cut its benchmark interest rate by a quarter of a percentage point, landing in a window of 1.75% to 2%. Fed Chairman Jerome Powell called the repo offerings a temporary action. 

"Funding pressures in money markets were elevated this week, and the effective federal funds rate rose above the top of its target range," he said. 

The Fed's schedule calls for another $75 billion of overnight repos to be sold every business day until October 10, with certain days also offering at least $30 billion worth of 14-day repos.

So the Fed will have added more than one trillion dollars to its asset sheets in four weeks.  The lender of last resort is currently doing just that, and it's the only thing keeping our economy from imploding into a mess right now.

This is on top of impeachment, US troops in Saudi Arabia and the UAE, the Brexit mess in the UK and Israel still unable to form a government.  September 2019 is the month where the wheels came off, guys. I don't know where we're headed from here, but it's not going to be a fun rest of the year, I guarantee it. It definitely feels like 2008 and 1974 had Rosemary's Baby.

I gotta baaaaaaaad feelin' about this...

Ukraine In The Membrane, Con't

And overnight everything just got much, much worse for Team Crimer.

The intelligence officer who filed a whistle-blower complaint about President Trump’s interactions with the leader of Ukraine raised alarms not only about what the two men said in a phone call, but also about how the White House handled records of the conversation, according to two people briefed on the complaint.

The whistle-blower, moreover, identified multiple White House officials as witnesses to potential presidential misconduct who could corroborate the complaint, the people said — adding that the inspector general for the intelligence community, Michael Atkinson, interviewed witnesses.

Mr. Atkinson eventually concluded that there was reason to believe that the president might have illegally solicited a foreign campaign contribution — and that his potential misconduct created a national security risk, according to a newly disclosed Justice Department memo.

An early portrait of the intelligence officer began to take shape on Wednesday as the White House released a rough log of a July 25 phone call between Mr. Trump and President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, the latest extraordinary revelation set off by the whistle-blower’s complaint.

This account is based on interviews with the two people and with lawmakers who were permitted to read the complaint late in the day, as well as on details revealed in a Justice Department memo explaining the Trump administration’s legal rationale for withholding the whistle-blower’s allegations from Congress before Mr. Trump relented this week. The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

In other words, it's not just Trump who will go down over this.  The report is expected to be declassified and released on Thursday because Team Crimer thinks it will actually save them.

Mr. Atkinson also found reason to believe that the whistle-blower might not support the re-election of Mr. Trump and made clear that the complainant was not in a position to directly listen to the call or see the memo that reconstructed it before it was made public, according to the Justice Department memo, which referred only to a single phone call between Mr. Trump and an unnamed foreign leader.

Instead, the officer heard about the call secondhand from unidentified White House officials who expressed concern that Mr. Trump had “abused his authority or acted unlawfully in connection with foreign diplomacy,” the memo said. Still, Mr. Atkinson concluded after an investigation that the information in the complaint was credible.
In their first public comments, lawyers for the whistle-blower said their client hoped to remain anonymous but wanted to continue to cooperate with lawmakers conducting oversight.

The "hearsay" and "biased" arguments will play on FOX News State TV all day, for sure.  But the reality is that the IG found Trump was a credible national security risk, and that the Justice Department agreed with him.

And like Watergate, it's the clumsy cover-up that's going to do these idiots in.

The complaint also alleges a pattern of obfuscation at the White House, in which officials moved the records of some of Trump’s communications with foreign officials onto a separate computer network from where they are normally stored, this person said. The whistleblower alleges that is what officials did with Trump’s July 25 call with Zelensky, an action that alarmed the intelligence community inspector general and prompted him to request that the White House retain records of the Zelensky call, the person who read the complaint said.

And that brings us to more big news from last night, that the whistleblower complaint and IG investigation also turned up a second phone call to Zelensky, from April, where Trump also asked him to work with Giuliani on attacking Joe Biden.  So why did Trump have such a hard-on for working with the Ukraine to fabricate something he could use against Joe Biden and the Democrats?

So he'd have cover to pardon Paul Manafort.

The effort by President Trump to pressure the government of Ukraine to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden and his son had its origins in an earlier endeavor to obtain information that might provide a pretext and political cover for the president to pardon his former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, according to previously undisclosed records.

These records indicate that attorneys representing Trump and Manafort respectively had at least nine conversations relating to this effort, beginning in the early days of the Trump administration, and lasting until as recently as May of this year. Through these deliberations carried on by his attorneys, Manafort exhorted the White House to press Ukrainian officials to investigate and discredit individuals, both in the US and in Ukraine, who he believed had published damning information about his political consulting work in the Ukraine. A person who participated in the joint defense agreement between President Trump and others under investigation by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, including Manafort, allowed me to review extensive handwritten notes that memorialized conversations relating to Manafort and Ukraine between Manafort’s and Trump’s legal teams, including Trump’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani.

These new disclosures emerge as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced on Tuesday that the House would open a formal impeachment inquiry into President Trump’s conduct. What prompted her actions were the new allegations that surfaced last week that Trump had pressured Ukraine’s newly elected president, Volodymyr Zelensky, to investigate Trump’s potential 2020 campaign rival, Biden, and his son Hunter, placing a freeze on a quarter of a billion dollars in military assistance to Ukraine as leverage. The impeachment inquiry will also examine whether President Trump obstructed justice by attempting to curtail investigations by the FBI and the special counsel into Russia’s covert interference in the 2016 presidential election in Trump’s favor.

New information in this story suggests that these two, seemingly unrelated scandals, in which the House will judge whether the president’s conduct in each case constituted extra-legal and extra-constitutional abuses of presidential power, are in fact inextricably linked: the Ukrainian initiative appears to have begun in service of formulating a rationale by which the president could pardon Manafort, as part of an effort to undermine the special counsel’s investigation.
From 2004 to 2014, Manafort had advised President Viktor Yanukovych, who advocated that his country sever ties with the United States and other Western nations, and align itself more closely with Vladimir Putin’s Russia. After Yanukovych fled the country in disgrace in 2014, a ledger was recovered from the burned-out ruins of his Party of Regions. Its records showed that Yanukovych and his political allies had made some $12.7 million in secret cash payments to Manafort. The disclosure led directly to Manafort’s resignation in August 2016 as chairman of the Trump presidential campaign.

The records I have reviewed also indicate that on at least three occasions, Rudy Giuliani was in communication with Manafort’s legal team to discuss how the White House was pushing a narrative that the Democratic National Committee, Democratic donors, and Ukrainian government officials had “colluded” to defeat Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential bid. (This story has since been debunked as baseless, though that has not prevented Trump, Giuliani, and other surrogates in conservative media from repeatedly pushing the story.)

In particular, the records show that Manafort’s camp provided Giuliani with information designed to smear two people: one was a Ukrainian journalist and political activist named Serhiy Leshchenko, whom Manafort believed, correctly, of helping to uncover Manafort’s secret payments from Yanukovych; another was Alexandra Chalupa, a Ukrainian-American political consultant and US citizen, whom Manafort suspected, mistakenly in this case, was also behind the exposé. The records also show that Giuliani and attorneys for Manafort exchanged information about the then US ambassador to the Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, who Giuliani believed had attempted to undercut his covert Ukrainian diplomacy and fact-finding; the records are unclear as to whether it was Giuliani or Manafort’s attorney who first initiated their discussion about her.

After his arrest in 2017, Manafort continued to encourage President Trump and his lawyers to engage in this effort when they joined Manafort in a joint legal defense agreement. Attorneys are allowed to enter into such agreements in order share information and coordinate legal, public relations, and political strategies—in this case regarding the investigations of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, including that of the special counsel. Federal courts have long ruled that joint defense agreements are legal to protect the due process rights of those under investigation, as long as they are not used by potential defendants to coordinate providing cover stories or false information to prosecutors.

And there's the game.  Create the narrative on Biden, and use it to pardon Manafort and sink Mueller.

Enjoy, folks.  This is going to be fun.

StupidiNews!

• British lawmakers returned to session Wednesday after the country's Supreme Court ruled that PM Boris Johnson unlawfully suspended Parliament, Johnson's critics are calling for his resignation.
• A grand jury has indicted the entire Warren County, Virginia County Board of Supervisors -- all Republicans -- over an alleged $21 million embezzlement scheme.
• Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu will get the chance to form a government after talks with leading vote-getter and opposition leader Benny Gantz failed earlier this week.
• Eleven Senate Republicans joined Senate Democrats in voting a second time to block Donald Trump's "Emergency Border Wall" money, the White House says Trump will again veto the measure.
• Facebook now confirms its rules against hate speech and fact checking community standards will not apply to posts by "newsworthy" users like politicians, but will apply to political ads.

Last Call For Spies Like Us, Con't

I'm shocked, but apparently the reason why the Trump regime allowed Acting DNI Joseph Maguire to testify to Congress this week is because he threatened to resign if they stopped him.

The acting Director of National Intelligence threatened to resign over concerns that the White House might attempt to force him to stonewall Congress when he testifies Thursday about an explosive whistleblower complaint about the president, according to current and former U.S. officials familiar with the matter.
The revelation reflects the extraordinary tensions between the White House and the nation’s highest-ranking intelligence official over a matter that has triggered impeachment proceedings against President Trump.

The officials said Joseph Maguire, who was thrust into the top intelligence post last month, warned the White House that he was not willing to withhold information from Congress, where he is scheduled to testify in open and closed hearings on Thursday.

Maguire denied that he had done so. In a statement, he said that “at no time have I considered resigning my position since assuming this role on Aug. 16, 2019. I have never quit anything in my life, and I am not going to start now. I am committed to leading the Intelligence Community to address the diverse and complex threats facing our nation.”

The White House also disputed the account. “This is actually not true,” White House spokeswoman Stephanie Grisham said in a tweet.

After these statements were issued, Washington Post Executive Editor Martin Baron said, “We stand by the story.”

Somebody, maybe Maguire himself, wanted to make him look more sympathetic and honorable. We've had our fill of Trump regime employees who walked away from their train wrecks and refused to say anything about how Trump was hurting the country, previous DNI Dan Coats and previous Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis among them.

Meanwhile, Trump's new Ukrainian friends aren't exactly in a good place, and they can smell what's coming down the pike.

When Ukrainians voted to elect comedian Volodymyr Zelenskiy as their next president in the spring of 2019, the fledgling administration was eager to coordinate a phone call with Kyiv’s most important benefactor -- the United States, according to an adviser to Zelenskiy.

But after weeks of discussions with American officials, Ukrainian officials came to recognize a precondition to any executive correspondence, the adviser said.

"It was clear that [President Donald] Trump will only have communications if they will discuss the Biden case," said Serhiy Leshchenko, an anti-corruption advocate and former member of Ukraine's Parliament, who now acts as an adviser to Zelenskiy. "This issue was raised many times. I know that Ukrainian officials understood."

The Trump administration’s alleged insistence that the two leaders discuss a prospective investigation into Biden, one of the president’s political opponents, casts his July 25 conversation with Zelenskiy in a new light.

During the call, a rough summary of which was released by the White House Wednesday, Trump repeatedly encouraged Zelenskiy to work with Attorney General William Barr and his personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, to probe Biden’s role in the dismissal of the country’s prosecutor general, Viktor Shokin, in 2016.

Why yes, the Ukrainians knew full goddamn well that before Trump would even talk to Zelensky that they had to agree to come up with something on Joe Biden's son.

That's it, guys.  That's the crime.

How It's Playing In Hillsboro

Just a reminder that nobody cares about Trump scandals in Trump country and they never will, so don't expect impeachment to move the needle, much less matter out here in red states one goddamn bit.

This time of year in bellwether rural Ohio, we go from the diner full of MAGA hats that always has FOX News playing on the TV to the county fair full of MAGA hats with FOX News on the radio.  Thirty miles east of Cincinnati in Highland County, Donald Trump will be their man forever.

The fair is not a political rally, and Republicans, Democrats and unaffiliated voters commingled and fellowshipped throughout the week. But in a county Trump won with 76 percent of the vote, signs of continued support for the president were common. There were bumper stickers in the parking lots — “Trump 2020” and “Keep America Great” were new additions. Numerous MAGA hats and Trump T-shirts could be spotted. One teenage boy casually strolled across the midway with friends, a huge “TRUMP” flag draped around his shoulders. 

Even more prolific, but almost synonymous with Trump’s name on a banner, were sartorial declarations of Second Amendment adherence, such as “I’m a bitter gun owner clinging to my religion” and “Criminals Love Gun Control, It Gives Them A Safe Work Environment.” 

As fairgoers sat on bleachers inside the many barns to bid on champion livestock, or relaxed on benches dotting the fairgrounds enjoying a pulled pork or fish sandwich, conversations mostly centered on the fair exhibits and this year’s near-perfect weather. But also overheard were inevitable complaints about the constant attacks on Trump. 

“Russian collusion” failed, several noted, but critics moved seamlessly to “obstruction.” During the week of the fair came “Sharpiegate,” Trump’s alleged weather-map manipulation. In the media, it brought hyperbolic accusations of illegality, but as fair visitors waited in line at the ticket gate ($10 admission, rides included), a few were heard chuckling over how little it takes for Trump to drive the media nuts. And so it went among residents of this alternate reality far removed from the cascade of negative images and narratives about Trump beamed daily onto their TV and smartphone screens. 

The Highland County Fair has endured, rain or shine, for more than 70 years, despite occasions of drought, crop failure, trade wars and grain embargoes. “Like a tree that’s planted by the waters,” the old hymn declares, “I shall not be moved.”

Next year’s fair will be held just two months before the 2020 election. No matter the hardships that might befall farm families, livestock will be exhibited and blue ribbons will be awarded. Regardless of how hot or cold it might be or how much rain might fall, the tractor pulls will be held into the wee hours of the morning. And despite the outrages and scandals that will be relayed from that galaxy far, far away called Washington, for most fairgoers Trump will still be their man. They shall not be moved.

It's all one cosmic joke to them, the stupid liberals out in New York and California who don't get it and never will, that the Obama era was a mistake that will never be allowed to be repeated because of how ungrateful those people were, and the fairgoers knowingly laugh and smile and everything's great again and it's back to The Way Things Should Be™ and impeachment won't matter either.

I mean they'll be pissed off, but what are they gonna do other than Trump winning the county by 45 points like he did last time?  The one thing impeachment means is that Dems have finally stopped chasing rural red state white voters, because they're lost for good now.

They were lost for good before though.

Ukraine In The Membrane, Con't

I do believe the Trump regime has found their Michael Cohen for this particular act of "Who's going to jail for this one?"

President Trump’s attempt to pressure the leader of Ukraine followed a months-long fight inside the administration that sidelined national security officials and empowered political loyalists — including the president’s personal lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani — to exploit the U.S. relationship with Kiev, current and former U.S. officials said.

The sequence, which began early this year, involved the abrupt removal of the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, the circumvention of senior officials on the National Security Council, and the suspension of hundreds of millions of dollars of aid administered by the Defense and State departments — all as key officials from these agencies struggled to piece together Giuliani’s activities from news reports.

Several officials described tense meetings on Ukraine among national security officials at the White House leading up to the president’s phone call on July 25, sessions that led some participants to fear that Trump and those close to him appeared prepared to use U.S. leverage with the new leader of Ukraine for Trump’s political gain.

As those worries intensified, some senior officials worked behind the scenes to hold off a Trump meeting or call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky out of concern that Trump would use the conversation to press Kiev for damaging information on Trump’s potential rival in the 2020 race, former vice president Joe Biden, and Biden’s son, Hunter.

“An awful lot of people were trying to keep a meeting from happening for the reason that it would not be focused on Ukraine-U.S. relations,” one former official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive matter.

White House officials disputed these accounts, saying that no such concerns were raised in National Security Council meetings and that Trump’s focus was on urging Ukraine to root out corruption. A White House spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.

But Trump admitted this week that he had done some of what his own advisers feared, using the call to raise the issue of Biden with Zelensky. And the wave of consternation triggered by that call led someone in the U.S. intelligence community to submit an extraordinary whistleblower complaint, setting in motion a sequence of events that now includes the start of an impeachment inquiry in the House of Representatives.

Though the whistleblower report focuses on the Trump-Zelensky call, officials familiar with its contents said that it includes references to other developments tied to the president, including efforts by Giuliani to insert himself into U.S.-Ukrainian relations.

Today is going to be A Day in DC, I can tell you that.

Rudy, call your lawyer.  There are a whole hell of a lot of people in the Trump regime who are going to crucify you in order to escape this, up to and including Trump himself.

Last Call For The Reach To Impeach, Con't

We got significantly closer to full impeachment hearings today as the dam broke, flooding DC and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.  Today, she called for a formal impeachment inquiry and says six House committees will move forward with investigations in order to arrive at possible articles of impeachment.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Tuesday announced a formal impeachment inquiry into President Trump, a dramatic turnaround by the Democratic leader that sets up a constitutional and political clash pitting the Congress against the nation’s chief executive. 

“The actions of the Trump presidency have revealed the dishonorable fact of the president’s betrayal of his oath of office, betrayal of our national security and betrayal of the integrity of our elections,” Pelosi said in brief remarks. “Therefore, today, I am announcing the House of Representatives is moving forward with an official impeachment inquiry.”
Impeachment is a rare and extraordinary first step that could lead to overturning the decision of U.S. voters in 2016 to elect Trump. Pelosi’s decision foreshadows an intensely partisan fall, triggering pushback from Trump allies with repercussions for the 2020 campaign. 

The president immediately lashed out on Twitter. 

“Such an important day at the United Nations, so much work and so much success, and the Democrats purposely had to ruin and demean it with more breaking news Witch Hunt garbage. So bad for our Country!” he wrote.

Pelosi’s change of heart comes after days of consulting allies and follows reports that Trump may have pressured a foreign leader to investigate former vice president and potential 2020 campaign rival Joe Biden and his family. 

Those reports over a seven-day period created a groundswell of support among Democrats for impeachment, with moderates from swing districts joining liberals in calling for an inquiry.

Meanwhile the Senate called unanimously for the White House to turn over the full whistleblower complaint to the House and Senate Intelligence Committees as Republican Sen. Richard Burr says there will be a bipartisan investigation into the report.

Even as the House is ramping up its investigation into the Trump administration’s dealings with Ukraine, the Senate Intelligence Committee is conducting its own inquiry and is seeking an interview with the whistleblower who filed the initial complaint with the intelligence community’s inspector general, according to a letter obtained by Yahoo News. 

A letter seeking to question the still-anonymous whistleblower was sent Tuesday to Andrew Bakaj, the lawyer who represents the official. It was signed by committee chair Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C., and Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va. — signifying that the panel is pursuing the politically explosive issue on a bipartisan basis. 

“In order to ascertain the appropriate path forward for your client while protecting your client’s privacy, we are writing to request that you make your client available for a closed bipartisan interview with Committee counsel no later than Friday, September 27, 2019, in a mutually agreeable secure location,” the letter reads. 

It was not immediately clear whether the White House will agree to let the official be questioned. A committee spokeswoman declined comment. “Since you showed me the letter, I can confirm its authenticity,” wrote Bakaj’s law partner Mark Zaid in an email to Yahoo News. “But I cannot comment on the substance at this time. The letter speaks for itself.” 

After the letter was sent, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff said the whistleblower’s lawyer informed him the official “would like to speak to our committee and has requested guidance” from the acting Director of National Intelligence on his appearance, which could come “as soon as this week.”

So, the game begins in earnest.  Questions I have:

1) Who's the whistleblower?  We didn't find out Deep Throat was FBI associate director Mark Felt for more than 30 years.

2) Does Pelosi have the votes for articles of impeachment?  As of today, the answer is no.  As of today, Pelosi doesn't the votes for a formal impeachment inquiry, either.  The committee votes are there on the House Judiciary and Intelligence Committees to investigate, and that was preceding beforehand without Pelosi's announcement today.

3) What's in the whistleblower report?  We may never know.  We could find out tomorrow.  Who knows?

All kinds of things could happen from here.

Boris Bad Enough Versus The Law

As I said two weeks ago, UK PM Boris Johnson is in perilous legal trouble, facing a smackdown from Scotland's Supreme Court.  Now Britain's Supreme Court has laid down a similar unanimous ruling that Johnson's move to suspend Parliament in order to keep his political opponents from taking any action to oust him before next month's Brexit deadline was unlawful.

Britain’s highest court dealt a serious blow Tuesday to Prime Minister Boris Johnson, ruling that his controversial decision to suspend Parliament was unlawful, in a landmark judgment that will have immediate implications for Britain’s departure from the European Union.

In one of the most high-profile cases to come before Britain’s Supreme Court, the 11 judges ruled unanimously that Johnson had attempted to stymie Parliament at a crucial moment in British history.

The court ruled that Johnson’s decision to ask Queen Elizabeth II to suspend Parliament frustrated the ability of lawmakers to do the business of democracy, including debating Johnson’s plans for leaving the E.U. The new prime minister has vowed that the departure, known as Brexit, will occur — “do or die” — by the end of October.

The court’s judgment was a brutal one for the embattled prime minister. The justices asserted that his move to suspend Parliament was a political maneuver and strongly suggested that he might have misled the queen.

Johnson said he will not resign.

Brenda Hale, president of the Supreme Court, eviscerated the government’s case.

Sitting in the high court, avoiding legal language and speaking clearly to the country, Hale said that Johnson’s decision to suspend Parliament “was unlawful because it had the effect of frustrating or preventing the ability of Parliament to carry out its constitutional functions without reasonable justification.”

The court unanimously found that Johnson’s suspension was “void and of no effect,” meaning, essentially, that Parliament has not been suspended.

John Bercow, the flamboyant speaker of the House of Commons, called the high court’s decision “unambiguous” and “unqualified” and said Parliament would resume its duties Wednesday morning.

Lawmakers in the House of Commons will be allowed to ask “urgent questions” of Johnson’s ministers and take part in “emergency debates” Wednesday, Bercow said, foreshadowing a freewheeling session for the chamber to press the government on all fronts.

Some lawmakers were already discussing a no-confidence measure against Johnson in Parliament, where the prime minister already has lost his majority.

“This is an absolutely momentous decision,” said Joanna Cherry, a Scottish politician who helped to launch the case in the Scottish courts.

This could very well be the week where lawmakers in both the UK and the US decide it's time for their respective country's leaders to go.

Stay tuned.

Ukraine In The Membrane

At this point, the Trump/Ukraine extortion story is getting comically stupid, as we're on shoe number five or six to drop.

President Trump told his acting chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, to hold back almost $400 million in military aid for Ukraine at least a week before a phone call in which Trump is said to have pressured the Ukrainian president to investigate the son of former vice president Joe Biden, according to three senior administration officials. 

Officials at the Office of Management and Budget relayed Trump’s order to the State Department and the Pentagon during an interagency meeting in mid-July, according to officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. They explained that the president had “concerns” and wanted to analyze whether the money needed to be spent. 

Administration officials were instructed to tell lawmakers that the delays were part of an “interagency process” but to give them no additional information — a pattern that continued for nearly two months, until the White House released the funds on the night of Sept. 11. 

Trump’s order to withhold aid to Ukraine a week before his July 25 call with Volodymyr Zelensky is likely to raise questions about the motivation for his decision and fuel suspicions on Capitol Hill that Trump sought to leverage congressionally approved aid to damage a political rival. The revelation comes as lawmakers clash with the White House over a related whistleblower complaint made by an intelligence official alarmed by Trump’s actions.

So yes, the extortion happened first when the military aid already approved by Congress was blocked on Donald Trump's orders, then the phone call to Zelensky happened where Trump made it clear why he was holding up the money. He expected a foreign leader to come up with something on Hunter Biden in order to help Trump beat Joe Biden in 2020.  Told Mulvaney to lie to Congress about it to boot.

That's it, that's the crime.  Bag em, tag em, fire up the grill.

Dude did it.   And remember Pence was in on it too.

Pelosi now finally moving forward with the big I.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi has been quietly sounding out top allies and lawmakers about whether the time has come to impeach President Trump, a major development as several moderate House Democrats resistant to impeachment suddenly endorsed the extraordinary step of trying to oust the president. 

Pelosi, according to multiple senior House Democrats and congressional aides, has been gauging the mood of her caucus members about whether they believe that allegations that Trump pressured a Ukrainian leader to investigate a political foe are a tipping point. She was making calls as late as Monday night, and many leadership aides who once thought Trump’s impeachment was unlikely now say they think it’s almost inevitable. 

The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak frankly. 

Pelosi’s conversations — and reconsideration of her long-held position that impeachment is too divisive — come amid a growing clamor for impeachment that extends beyond the party’s liberal base and many Democratic presidential candidates to moderate lawmakers in competitive House seats. 

Seven freshman Democrats with previous service in the military, defense and U.S. intelligence said in a Monday night Washington Post op-ed that if the allegations against Trump are true, “we believe these actions represent an impeachable offense.”

Things are starting to move towards a critical mass.  Finally.

StupidiNews!

• Police and protesters in Hong Kong clashed again as demonstrations entered their 16th week, Amnesty International says police may be violating human rights of protesters.
• Donald Trump says as many as 4,500 US troops in Europe could be relocated to new bases being built in Poland as part of the EU's planned NATO military expansion.
• European Union countries are backing the US and Saudi Arabia on Iran being responsible for the recent attack on Saudi Arabia's oilfields but are urging diplomatic measures to resolve issues.
• The Trump Organization has turned over more than 3,300 pages of documents in the ongoing investigation into Trump's charity non-profit finances. 
• Russian researchers investigating arctic wildlife were safely rescued after an angry mother walrus attacked and sank an inflatable craft used by the science team.

Last Call For Spies Like Us, Con't

As TPM's Josh Marshall points out using the White House's own public transcripts from their September 1 meeting in Warsaw, Poland for the 80th anniversary of the start of WW II, Vice President Mike Pence was clearly involved in the efforts to pressure Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky into coming up with something damaging on Joe Biden, and Pence suggested US military aid to Ukraine was at stake if Zelensky didn't deliver.

Here’s the text of the question and answer from the official White House transcript, with my emphasis added.

Q: Thank you very much, Mr. Vice President. I wanted to ask you about your meeting yesterday with the Ukrainian President and for an update on Ukrainian security aid money.  

Specifically, number one, did you discuss Joe Biden at all during that meeting yesterday with the Ukrainian President? And number two, can you assure Ukraine that the hold-up of that money has absolutely nothing to do with efforts, including by Rudy Giuliani, to try to dig up dirt on the Biden family?  

VICE PRESIDENT PENCE: Well, on the first question, the answer is no. But we — with President Zelensky yesterday, we discussed — we discussed America’s support for Ukraine and the upcoming decision the President will make on the latest tranche of financial support in great detail.  

The President asked me to meet with President Zelensky and to talk about the progress that he’s making on a broad range of areas. And we did that.  

We, as I said yesterday, especially since Russian aggression — the illegal occupation of Crimea and Russian aggression in Eastern Ukraine — the United States has stood strong with Ukraine and we will continue to stand strong with Ukraine for its sovereignty and territorial integrity.  

But as President Trump had me make clear, we have great concerns about issues of corruption. And, fortunately, President Zelensky was elected decisively on an anti-corruption message. And he and I discussed yesterday that as he’s assembled his cabinet, and as his parliament has convened, that even in the early days, he informed me that there have been more than 250 bills filed for — that address the issue of public corruption and really restoring integrity to the public process.  

I mean, to invest additional taxpayer in Ukraine, the President wants to be assured that those resources are truly making their way to the kind of investments that will contribute to security and stability in Ukraine. And that’s an expectation the American people have and the President has expressed very clearly.  

We also talked in some detail about what other European nations are doing for Ukraine. The simple fact is that the United States has carried the load on most of the security investments in Ukraine. And we have been proud to do that, but we believe it’s time for our European partners to step forward and make additional investments to stand with the people of Ukraine as they assert their territorial integrity and sovereignty.  

President Zelensky and I talked in great detail about ongoing discussions about resolving the ongoing violence and occupation of Ukraine. And those were the issues that we covered.  

But I assured him that the people of the United States stand with Ukraine for their sovereignty and territorial integrity. But I called on him to work with us to engage our European partners to participate at a greater level in Ukraine, and also told him that I would carry back to President Trump the progress that he and his administration in Ukraine are making on dealing with corruption in their country.

Corruption is a longstanding issue in Ukraine. Rooting out that corruption has been a central focus of US policy in the country for decades. That is why the United States and the European Union were so focused on removing that prosecutor back in 2015. But in the context of what we know was happening and especially the call we know took place a month earlier, these repeated references to progress on corruption and holding up military aid until Zelensky acted could scarcely be more clear.

Yep.  If it's impeachable for Trump, and Pence was in on it, well...

The Rapidly Receding Red Rout

Washington Post reporter Rachael Bade notes that out of the 241 House Republicans who took office along with Donald Trump in January 2017, more than a third of them are gone or will be gone by the end of next year.  Michigan's Paul Mitchell is the most recent departure this month, announcing his retirement a few weeks ago.

Mitchell is among a growing list of House Republicans — 18 to date — who have announced plans to resign, retire or run for another office, part of a snowballing exodus that many Republicans fear is imperiling their chances of regaining control of the House in the 2020 elections.

And the problem for the GOP is bigger than retirements. Since Trump’s inauguration, a Washington Post analysis shows, nearly 40 percent of the 241 Republicans who were in office in January 2017 are gone or leaving because of election losses, retirements including former House speaker Paul D. Ryan (Wis.), and some, such as Mitchell, who are simply quitting in disgust.

The vast turnover is a reminder of just how much Trump has remade the GOP — and of the purge of those who dare to oppose him. Former congressman Mark Sanford (R-S.C.) lost his June 2018 primary after challenging Trump; he’s now a Republican presidential candidate. Rep. Justin Amash (I-Mich.), the only Republican to accuse Trump of impeachable acts, quit the GOP in July citing the “partisan death spiral.” His political future is uncertain.

Mitchell, who hails from a Republican-leaning district that Trump won easily in 2016, simply decided he had enough. He has a 9-year-old son with a learning disability, and remaining in a highly polarized Washington just wasn’t worth the trade-off, he said.

“Did any member of this conference expect that their job would start out every morning trying to go through the list of what’s happening in tweets of the day?” Mitchell asked, referring to Trump’s Twitter habits. “We’re not moving forward right now. We are simply thrashing around.”

The retirement numbers are particularly staggering. All told, 41 House Republicans have left national politics or announced they won’t seek reelection in the nearly three years since Trump took office. That dwarfs the 25 Democrats who retired in the first four years of former president Barack Obama’s tenure — and Republicans privately predict this is only the beginning.
Most of the departing Republicans publicly cite family as the reason for leaving. But behind the scenes, Republicans say the trend highlights a greater pessimism about the direction of the party under Trump — and their ability to win back the House next year. 

The president has doubled down on an all-base strategy for his reelection campaign, making some Republicans ask whether Trump has put his own political future ahead of the long-term viability of the party of Abraham Lincoln.

“If the party doesn’t start looking like America, there will not be a party in America,” said Rep. Will Hurd (R-Tex.), the only black House Republican, who announced his retirement in August.

That's staggering.  We're talking more than 90 of those same 241 Republicans retired in the last 32 months, lost in 2018, or are retiring before 2021.

More retirements are coming, I guarantee that.  They're not getting the House back anytime soon.  The Senate remains a much different story, but I expect after 2020 redistricting in favor of Democrats at the state level, you're going to see a very solid House Democratic majority for some time.

Well, unless the Dems find a way to blow it.

Doing "Something" About Trump

Washington Post columnist Karen Tumulty suggests that while the impeachment debate rages on, the Trump/Ukraine perfidy is worth an unprecedented and historic House censure resolution by Democrats.

This argument will continue, with new fuel being added by the administration’s refusal to turn over a whistleblower’s complaint regarding the Trump-Zelensky conversation. It is hard to see how it could possibly be resolved before we are well into the 2020 campaign season. But there is something the House could do right now, an idea that I have raised before: censure the president. 

The procedure for doing so is pretty straightforward, as spelled out in a recent report by the Congressional Research Service: 

Should a House committee report a non-Member censure resolution, the full House may consider it by unanimous consent, under the Suspension of the Rules procedure, or under the terms of a special rule reported by the Committee on Rules and adopted by the House. 17 If widespread support exists for the censure resolution, unanimous consent or the Suspension of the Rules procedure may be used. Otherwise, the resolution could be brought to the floor under a special rule reported by the Committee on Rules. All three of these parliamentary mechanisms require, at a minimum, the support of the majority party leadership in order to be entertained. 

In other words, a censure resolution could be brought to the House floor with support from Democrats alone, and it would not require any action on the part of the Senate. 

This would not sate the appetite of the pro-impeachment forces, or end the debate over whether that step is warranted. But it could be done quickly, with the evidence at hand, and would have the benefit of forcing Republican members to go on record stating whether they do or do not find this behavior on the part of the president acceptable. While many would argue that censure is a symbolic gesture, it is a disgrace that Trump would share with only one other president in American history — his purported idol, Andrew Jackson. Jackson was censured by the Senate in 1834 as the result of a little-remembered dispute over the Second Bank of the United States; it was expunged a few years later when his pro-Jackson Democrats gained a majority in the chamber, which showed that they regarded a censure as more than a slap on the wrist. 

None of this would end the argument over impeachment, but it would prove to the American people that at least part of their government sets a higher standard of behavior than our current president does. It also, finally, would force Republicans to answer a question that they have been dodging: Is there anything this president does that you will not tolerate?

 Censure of Trump and five bucks will get you a pumpkin spice latte at Starbucks.

Look, at this point Pelosi doesn't have the votes for censure, let alone impeachment. Tumulty admits it won't accomplish anything even if it did happen.  And Trump will simply say -- correctly for once because no Republican would risk getting Amashed over voting for it -- that there's a purely political Democratic "witch hunt" going on against him.

Not even Paul Ryan and John Boehner censured Barack Obama.  Censure resolutions were introduced against Nixon but he resigned, and the censure resolution against Bill Clinton over Monica Lewinsky failed because Newt Gingrich didn't have the votes for it.

House Democrats did vote to condemn Trump over his racist remarks against Reps. Omar, Tlaib, Ocasio-Cortez, and Pressley earlier this year, but it fell short of official censure.

And like the condemnation vote, censure is not going to fix a damn thing, and Tumulty should know better.  If censure was a real option, it would have been used already for precisely the reasons Tumulty laid out.

But that of course leaves us in the same position we've been in since January: Democrats control the House, and Nancy Pelosi controls House Democrats, but so far the votes aren't anywhere close to being there in order to be able to impeach Trump.

The Ukraine situation may change all that in the near future, however.

With Pelosi unwilling to impeach Trump, Democratic rank-and-file members are frantically looking for something to fortify their investigations. On Friday, Judiciary members pressed Nadler to invoke Congress’s long-dormant inherent contempt authority that would allow Congress to jail or fine people for defying subpoenas.
The power hasn’t been used in more than 100 years. Pelosi, leadership and other House lawyers were dismissive of the idea when investigators first floated it last spring. But Judiciary members are once again trying to force the issue.

“Our side says it's ‘legally questionable,’ ‘it hasn't been used in forever,’ and ‘blah, blah, blah,’ ” said Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.), a member of the panel, who argues Trump’s legal team frequently has used last-ditch efforts and bogus explanations to block testimony — and the House should do the same. 

“I say do it,” he continued. “Let them argue in court that they take the position that it's legally questionable. We back off of everything! We’ve been very weak.” 

The frustration with the Democratic approach extends to members of Pelosi’s leadership team. 

“We need to develop other tools because our tools are not working,” said Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.), a Judiciary panel member who is co-chair of the Democratic Policy and Communications Committee. “We cannot allow the administration to simply continuously stonewall Congress with no consequences.” 

Lieu is pushing for the use of inherent contempt. 

Even Schiff, who came to Congress in part by defeating a Republican who voted for President Bill Clinton’s impeachment, said on Sunday that relying on the courts may not work for Trump, Ukraine and the undisclosed whistleblower complaint.

“We cannot afford to play rope-a-dope in the court for weeks or months on end,” Schiff said. “We need an answer if there’s a fire burning it needs to be put out, and that's why we're going to have to look at every remedy . . . we're going to have to consider impeachment, as well, as a remedy here.”

Ostensibly the next step in this drama is Thursday, when Acting DNI Joseph Maguire goes before the House Intelligence Committee. This whole mess started because Maguire refused to turn over the transcript of Trump's call and the whistleblower complaint as required by law. Committee chair Rep. Adam Schiff then issued a subpoena for Maguire to do so, and that showdown comes later this week.

If Maguire doesn't comply, Pelosi has hinted that the resulting "grave new chapter of lawlessness" would lead to a "whole new stage of investigation" into the Trump regime.  That gives me some small measure of hope at least, but there's not a reason to believe that Trump won't try to call that bluff between now and Thursday.

And if it is a bluff by Pelosi, well, like I've been saying, if Democrats keep walking down the middle of the road on impeachment, they're going to get hit by the bus in the 2020 elections and it won't be a question any longer, because Trump will be re-elected.

StupidiNews!

• Pittsburgh police say a total of seven people overdosed in an apartment, three were pronounced dead and the other four have been hospitalized.
• Israeli President Reuven Rivlin will hold talks among multiple political parties Monday as the country tries to form a government after no party was able to claim a majority in last week's elections.
• France says the EU stands ready to defuse US-Iran tensions at this week's UN General Assembly meeting as Iran is warning that US military forces being sent to Saudi Arabia could lead to war.
• Multiple 2020 Democratic hopefuls joined striking GM auto workers picketing plants over the weekend as both labor and management say they're a long way from settling the ongoing strike.
• Facebook has finally suspended thousands of apps on the platform for violating its privacy rules and improperly sharing user data, but critics say the damage has already been done to tens of millions.