StupidiNews!

• Consumer products giant Johnson & Johnson has reached a $20.4 million settlement with two Ohio counties ahead of a major trial scheduled for later this month.
• Colombian coastguard officials say they picked up three cocaine smugglers whose boat had capsized, the shipwrecked smugglers survived by clinging to floating bales of cocaine worth millions.
• A federal judge has rejected claims that Harvard University's admissions program amounted to discrimination against Asian-Americans, the Trump regime had written a brief supporting the case.
• Embattled UK PM Boris Johnson says Parliament must accept his final Brexit terms or face a "no-deal" Brexit that could collapse the country's economy.
• Hospitals in both Alabama and Australia have been crippled by ransomware attacks, meaning hospitals are turning away all but the most critical patients.

Last Call For The Reach To Impeach, Con't

As expected, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo says the State Department will not cooperate with House impeachment inquiry depositions this week.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo fired a broadside at House Democrats on Tuesday, saying State Department officials scheduled to appear this week before committees conducting the impeachment inquiry would not be made available until “we obtain further clarity on these matters.”

The refusal, in a letter to House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Eliot L. Engel (D-N.Y.), described the demand for depositions by five officials who played a role in U.S. relations with Ukraine as “an attempt to intimidate, bully, and treat improperly, the distinguished professionals of the Department of State.”

A spokesman for the committee had no immediate comment.

The statements came as Pompeo’s role in the Ukraine investigation broadened with reports that he was a participant in the July 25 call by President Trump to Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky, which led to the impeachment investigation.

Before that report, first published by The Wall Street Journal, Pompeo had brushed off questions about the incident, saying last week that he had not yet read the transcript of the telephone call released by the White House, or the whistleblower complaint that it sparked.

The committee, along with the House Intelligence and Oversight panels, had requested the five officials to appear for depositions this week and next, to begin Wednesday with Marie Yovanovitch, who was recalled by Pompeo as ambassador to Ukraine in May, prior to the end of her tour.

Other State Department officials scheduled for depositions include Kurt Volker, the administration’s special envoy to Ukraine, who resigned last week; Deputy Assistant Secretary George Kent; U.S. ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland; and State Department Counselor T. Ulrich Brechbuhl.

Well, ball's in your court, House Democrats. The response sure as hell better involve the words "inherent contempt".  And yes, it warrants that response because this is obstruction of justice, pure and simple.

It seems to me that Pompeo wants to have a long-drawn out court fight over this to buy the Trump regime some time, but again, the response needs to be painful enough to motivate Pompeo to comply sooner rather than later.

We'll see what happens.

We Gotta Face The Face(book) Con't

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is not silently sitting by this 2020 campaign season despite all the candidates giving his company quite a bit of money for internet advertising.  The Verge got their hands on audio and transcripts of Zuckerberg's latest employee Q&A session, and they are a doozy.  The Zuck has declared war on one candidate in particular, and given the power that Facebook commands, that alone is an argument the candidate, Liz Warren, is correct: the company should be broken up.

Question: With the recent FCC fine, investigation, and with the rise of politicians like Sen. Warren, I was wondering how personally worried you are about regulators coming in and breaking up Facebook?

Mark Zuckerberg: Well, I think you want to separate out a couple of things. I’m certainly more worried that someone is going to try to break up our company. Now, there’s a separate question about, at the end of the day, there is the rule of law — which, for all of the concern about the direction the country is going in, as someone running a company that operates in a lot of different countries, I have to say one of the things that I love and appreciate about our country the most is that we have a really solid rule of law, which is very different from a lot of other places around the world.

So there might be a political movement where people are angry at the tech companies or are worried about concentration or worried about different issues and worried that they’re not being handled well. That doesn’t mean that, even if there’s anger and that you have someone like Elizabeth Warren who thinks that the right answer is to break up the companies ... I mean, if she gets elected president, then I would bet that we will have a legal challenge, and I would bet that we will win the legal challenge. And does that still suck for us? Yeah. I mean, I don’t want to have a major lawsuit against our own government. I mean, that’s not the position that you want to be in when you’re, you know, I mean … it’s like, we care about our country and want to work with our government and do good things. But look, at the end of the day, if someone’s going to try to threaten something that existential, you go to the mat and you fight.

And I just think the case is not particularly strong on this … It’s just that breaking up these companies, whether it’s Facebook or Google or Amazon, is not actually going to solve the issues. And, you know, it doesn’t make election interference less likely. It makes it more likely because now the companies can’t coordinate and work together. It doesn’t make any of the hate speech or issues like that less likely. It makes it more likely because now ... all the processes that we’re putting in place and investing in, now we’re more fragmented.

It’s why Twitter can’t do as good of a job as we can. I mean, they face, qualitatively, the same types of issues. But they can’t put in the investment. Our investment on safety is bigger than the whole revenue of their company. [laughter] And yeah, we’re operating on a bigger scale, but it’s not like they face qualitatively different questions. They have all the same types of issues that we do.

So yes, I think that the direction of the discussion is concerning. I at least believe, I think, there are real issues. I don’t think that the antitrust remedies are going to solve them. But I understand that if we don’t help address those issues and help put in place a regulatory framework where people feel like there’s real accountability, and the government can govern our sector, then yeah, people are just going to keep on getting angrier and angrier. And they’re going to demand more extreme measures, and, eventually, people just say, “Screw it, take a hammer to the whole thing.” And that’s when the rule of law comes in, and I’m very grateful that we have it.

Zuck's position is that if there's not a framework in place to keep America from getting pissed off at tech companies, he'll be forced to fight legal battles that he's sure he'll win, but the expense means it'll be bad for the company's bottom line.  My immediate next question here is summed up by Matt Yglesias:

As Zuckerberg said, Warren winning would cost him a lot in legal fees.

Trump, by contrast, boosts profits with corporate tax cuts.

Does he have an obligation to shareholders to help spread fake news that helps him beat her?

— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) October 1, 2019

And there we have it.  Zuckerberg is either unaware of the power his company has in shaping the 2020 election, or he does, and doesn't care.  Hard to say which is worse.

Australia...In The Membrane?

Yep, as widely expected, it wasn't just Ukraine's leader that Trump sought help in winning the 2020 election from, but Australian PM Scott Morrison as well on a different call, and this time it was to investigate the Mueller probe.

President Donald Trump sought help from the Australian prime minister to investigate the origins of former special counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation.

A Department of Justice spokesperson Monday evening confirmed the conversation, which an administration official described to NBC News as a routine call that occurs when a head of state seeks the assistance of another country’s law enforcement agencies. It was "asking his law enforcement to work with ours," the official said.

The call to Scott Morrison, the Australian leader, came recently after Attorney General William Barr in May asked John Durham, the U.S. attorney in Connecticut, to lead an inquiry into whether the FBI’s investigation into the Trump campaign was properly predicated. The Justice Department spokesperson said Barr asked Trump to make the call to seek Australia’s help.

"As the Department of Justice has previously announced, a team led by U.S. Attorney John Durham is investigating the origins of the U.S. counterintelligence probe of the Trump 2016 presidential campaign," spokesperson Keri Kupec said in a statement. "Mr. Durham is gathering information from numerous sources, including a number of foreign countries. At Attorney General Barr’s request, the President has contacted other countries to ask them to introduce the Attorney General and Mr. Durham to appropriate officials."

The New York Times first reported this story, later confirmed by NBC News. The news comes amid an ongoing impeachment inquiry stemming from allegations that Trump pushed the Ukrainian president to investigate Joe Biden and his son Hunter.

So it's on, apparently it's open season to see which foreign government can come up with something that will help Bill Barr discredit the Mueller probe first to justify sending Justice Department investigators to jail for daring to look at Donald Trump's crimes.

Meanwhile, the Ukraine call ropes in another major player who was 100% aware of it as he was on the call listening: Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was on the July phone call where President Donald Trump asked his Ukrainian counterpart to investigate Joe Biden and his son, a senior State Department official told NBC News. 

The July 25 phone call between Trump and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy and a related whistleblower complaint are now at the center of House Democrats' impeachment inquiry.

Pompeo's involvement in the call — during which Trump told Zelenskiy that Biden's conduct sounded "horrible" to him — was first reported by the Wall Street Journal. It's not unusual for the nation's top diplomat to be on a president's call with a foreign leader, but Pompeo has not acknowledged his involvement.

Pompeo dodged questions about the phone call and the complaint during an interview with ABC's "This Week" on Sept. 22, days before the White House released a summary of the call which showed Trump asking about the Bidens' dealings in Ukraine.

Pompeo had argued against releasing the transcript, saying it would set a bad precedent — never acknowledging he knew exactly what was in the call.
Asked about reports of the substance of the conversation, Pompeo said he wasn't familiar with them and couldn't comment on them. "You just gave me information about a [intelligence community] report, none of which we've seen," he said.

Pompeo went on the Sunday shows and lied through his teeth about the Ukraine call.  Not exactly the actions of an innocent person, huh?

All of these guys are guilty of aiding and abetting, and its starting to look like a race to get Trump out before he can trigger the mass purge of the Justice Department and start rounding up Obama officials.

StupidiNews!

• US Olympic sprinter Alison Felix won her 12th World Track and Field championship gold medal with a record-breaking performance in the 4x400 relay, surpassing Jamaican Usain Bolt's 11.
• UK PM Boris Johnson is facing new allegations he groped a female journalist's thigh 20 years ago, on top of allegations that he had an affair with a US businesswoman while London's Mayor.
• China marked its 70th anniversary of Communist rule on Tuesday with a massive military parade observed by President Xi Jinping and party officials in Beijing.
• Peru is facing a leadership showdown as President Martin Vizcarra has dissolved the opposition-controlled Congress while lawmakers have moved to declared the Presidency vacant.
• California has a new state law signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom that would allow college athletes to be paid for endorsements, the NCAA says it will sue and block all California schools from competing.

Last Call For It's All About Revenge Now, Con't

Republican senators are signaling that if Trump goes down because of Ukraine, well then that awful harridan Hillary Clinton is too.  No, I don't know how that works, but with Bill Barr, actual evidence isn't necessary.

As President Donald Trump's presidency is threatened by an impeachment inquiry, the Republican chairmen of two Senate committees, Ron Johnson and Chuck Grassley, are asking Attorney General William Barr to investigate any ties between Ukraine and Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign. 

In a letter to Barr released on Monday, Johnson (R-Wis.) and Grassley (R-Iowa) pressed the Justice Department to probe any connection between Clinton and Ukrainian operatives. They said they have "concerns about foreign assistance in the 2016 election that have not been thoroughly addressed." 

Their letter comes as Trump faces an impeachment inquiry from the House amid revelations that he sought help from Ukraine's president to probe former Vice President Joe Biden, a leading contender for the Democratic nomination. But these two Republicans say there's another story about government corruption allegations the Justice Department should be pursuing. 

"The Justice Department has yet to inform Congress and the public whether it has begun an investigation into links and coordination between the Ukrainian government and individuals associated with the campaign of Hillary Clinton or the Democratic National Committee. Ukrainian efforts, abetted by a U.S. political party, to interfere in the 2016 election should not be ignored," the two senators wrote in a letter dated Sept. 27. "Are you investigating links and coordination between the Ukrainian government and individuals associated with the campaign of Hillary Clinton or the Democratic National Committee? If not, why not?"

So we're not only going with "but her emails!" we're going with "but the REAL collusion was Hillary argle bargle!" Seriously boys, why not open a Benghazi investigation too while you're at it and ring up the trifecta?

Again, this is Trump's plan, to keep writing HILLARY DID IT on the ground in his own poop until the media cover the "allegations" which literally don't exist. I hope they don't fall for it again but frankly there about a 110% chance they will.

Ahh, but our boy Bill Barr has been a busy man, it seems.

Attorney General William P. Barr has held private meetings overseas with foreign intelligence officials seeking their help in a Justice Department inquiry that President Trump hopes will discredit U.S. intelligence agencies’ examination of Russian interference in the 2016 election, according to people familiar with the matter. 

Barr’s personal involvement is likely to stoke further criticism from Democrats pursuing impeachment that he is helping the Trump administration use executive branch powers to augment investigations aimed primarily at the president’s adversaries. 

But the high level Justice Department focus on intelligence operatives’ conduct will likely cheer Trump and other conservatives for whom “investigate the investigators” has become a rallying cry. 

The direct involvement of the nation’s top law enforcement official shows the priority Barr places on the investigation being conducted by John Durham, the U.S. attorney in Connecticut, who has been assigned the sensitive task of reviewing U.S. intelligence work surrounding the 2016 election and its aftermath.

The attorney general’s active role also underscores the degree to which a nearly three-year old election still consumes significant resources and attention inside the federal government. Current and former intelligence and law enforcement officials expressed frustration and alarm Monday that the head of the Justice Department was taking such a direct role in re-examining what they view as conspiracy theories and baseless allegations of misconduct. 

Barr has already made overtures to British intelligence officials, and last week the attorney general traveled to Italy, where he and Durham met senior Italian government officials and Barr asked the Italians to assist Durham, according to one person familiar with the matter. It was not Barr’s first trip to Italy to meet intelligence officials, the person said. The Trump administration has made similar requests of Australia, these people said. 

A Justice Department spokeswoman declined to comment.

Oh yes.  Bill Barr has been very busy executing his orders from Trump, who doesn't want to be the asterisk president any longer.  He's 100% in on the efforts to come up with evidence by any means necessary from foreign governments, even if those governments are close allies.  And he's putting down the shoe leather himself in order to see it done.

Bill Barr went outside his own agency in order to destroy it.  An Attorney General who has declared war on the FBI, CIA, NSA and the entire intelligence apparatus.

You thought the leaks roasting Trump were bad now? 

Just wait.

Another One Bites The Dust, Con't

Embattled GOP Rep. Chris Collins of upstate NY is gone, resigning effective tomorrow in order to plead guilty to the insider trading charges he's been fighting for over a year.

Rep. Chris Collins resigned Monday, a day before he is expected to plead guilty Tuesday to federal charges stemming from an insider trading scheme that prosecutors first detailed in an indictment nearly 14 months ago. 

A spokesman for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said her office received Collins' resignation letter Monday. The aide said Collins' resignation will become effective Tuesday. 

A new court filing in the case, filed in federal court in Manhattan, shows that U.S. District Court Judge Vernon S. Broderick scheduled a court hearing where Collins – who had pleaded not guilty to all the charges against him – will change his plea. 

A new entry on the docket in the case read: "As to Christopher Collins: Change of Plea Hearing scheduled for 10/1/2019 at 3 p.m." 

Moments after that docket entry was filed, a second appeared, indicating that Collins' co-defendants – his son Cameron Collins and Cameron Collins' prospective father-in-law, Stephen Zarsky – plan to change their not-guilty pleas as well. A hearing in their case is set for Thursday.

Details of the pending plea deals were not available. Collins' congressional office declined comment, and his lawyers did not return phone calls seeking comment. 

Collins, his son and Zarsky are charged with securities and wire fraud, conspiracy and lying to the FBI. They were arrested in August 2018 in connection with an alleged insider trading scheme involving Innate Immunotherapeutics, an Australian biotech. 

Collins, a Clarence Republican, served on Innate's board for years. Prosecutors said that while at a White House picnic in June 2017, he got inside information that the company's only product, an experimental drug for multiple sclerosis, had failed in clinical trials. 

Prosecutors say Collins then called his son, who started dumping his shares of Innate stock the next day. The indictment charges Cameron Collins with then sharing that inside information with Zarsky.

Collins held a press conference to proclaim his innocence not more than a few months ago.  Guess he was a lying sack of crap then, too.

Good riddance, Chris.

The Reach To Impeach, Con't

Things are moving quicksilver fast now, as a new CBS poll taken over Thursday and Friday finds a solid majority of Americans now support the House impeachment inquiry into Donald Trump.

More than half of Americans — and an overwhelming number of Democrats — say they approve of the fact that Congress has opened an impeachment inquiry into President Trump. But as the inquiry begins, there is no national consensus on how to assess the president's actions.

Partisans have immediately and predictably split: most Democrats call the president's handling of matters with Ukraine illegal, and deserving of impeachment.

Most Republicans call his actions proper — or, even if improper, then still legal — and feel they're an example of things that past presidents typically did, too. Most Americans think that because Congress is now taking up the matter, it will be unable to work on other issues.

Almost nine in 10 Democrats approve of the inquiry, and two-thirds strongly approve. Prior to the inquiry, some had wondered if taking up impeachment proceedings might divide a Democratic rank-and-file that has been long concerned with other policies like health care and guns. However, these findings suggest that it this is not the case: most moderate Democrats side with liberal Democrats in supporting impeachment proceedings. Of those who say they voted for a Democratic House candidate in 2018, nine in 10 feel this inquiry is necessary.

Characterizing the president's actions in particular, just under one-third of Americans say the president's handling of matters with Ukraine may have been improper but were nonetheless still legal. Just over a quarter, including most Republicans, says the president acted properly. Another four in 10, including most Democrats, feel he has acted illegally. 

There is division over whether the president's deserves to be impeached. Just slightly more feel he does than he doesn't, and almost a quarter feel it's too soon to say — most of them say they want to wait to see what the facts show. 

So that's 55% for an impeachment inquiry, along with 42% of Americans saying Trump deserves to be impeached.  Those are huge jumps in numbers in just a few days.  Democrats are going to have to deliver on hearings to convince a majority of Americans to go along, but as with Nixon's situation 45 years ago, the more evidence that comes out of these hearings, the worse things are going to get for Trump.

However, the specter of "both sides" lives on.  43% want further investigation into Hunter Biden, with 29% saying it's too soon to say whether to dismiss the allegations.  As I've pointed out before, the allegations are 100% junk.

Still, the speed and momentum at which this is moving is definitely well into "runaway train" territory.  The next big test will be later this week when the deadline for the Democratic subpoena of Ukraine documents from Secretary of State Mike Pompeo arrives on Friday, but I'm betting a lot will happen between now and then.

Stay tuned.

Last Call For Trump's Race To The Bottom

Donald Trump is in the White House not in spite of his contributions to white supremacy and institutionalized racism, but precisely because of it.

A former New Jersey police chief standing trial on charges he slammed a black teenager’s head into a doorjamb reportedly called President Trump “the last hope for white people” before the 2016 election.

“I’m telling you, you know what, Donald Trump is the last hope for white people, cause Hillary (Clinton) will give it to all the minorities to get a vote,” said Frank Nucera Jr., former chief of Bordentown Township, according to NJ.com’s reporting of a transcript displayed at trial this week. “That’s the truth! I’m telling you.”

Nucera, 62, is charged with a hate crime, deprivation of the suspect’s rights and making false statements to the FBI in connection with the September 2016 arrest of an 18-year-old black man.

Two officers were escorting the handcuffed teenager from a hotel into a police car when Nucera approached the teen from behind and slammed his head into a metal doorjamb, according to a criminal complaint filed in federal court in New Jersey.

The incident was part of what prosecutors alleged to be a “significant history” of racist behavior in which Nucera referred to African Americans with the n-word, compared them with the Islamic State, said he’d like to shoot them on a firing squad and tried to use police dogs to intimidate them. Bordentown, located outside the state capital of Trenton, is 77 percent white and 13 percent black.

The allegations represent striking racism from a jurisdiction’s top law enforcement officer and nod at the racial tensions underlying the 2016 presidential election. Trump’s campaign rallies were overwhelmingly white, while Clinton, the Democratic nominee, emphasized racial issues during some of the biggest speeches of her campaign.

Nucera’s comment about Trump came after a sergeant brought up the teenager’s arrest as he covertly recorded the chief, according to NJ.com. Sgt. Nathan Roohr and the FBI decided to tell Nucera a falsehood that the teenager’s family planned to sue the police department.

There's so much to go through here

• A cop, supposedly a respected peace officer,
• who assaulted a black suspect, 
• who had a long history of assaulting black suspects
• who basically made an entire career out of being a black-hating racist,
• who rose to chief of police of a township
• a town in New Jersey, and not in the South
• a town in a blue state and not a red one
• who thought Clinton was a race traitor
• who feared most of all "the minorities" getting a "vote" in how America was run
• who saw Trump as his last hope to maintain systemic racism
• that he himself was an integral part of.

Oh, and Nucera is currently collecting a six-figure pension.

America.

Ukraine In The Membrane, Con't

As Josh Marshall reports, we're now starting to see the full picture on Rudy Giuliani's efforts to manufacture a Ukraine scandal to try to sink Joe Biden.  FOX News contributors, the husband and wife team of Joe diGenova and Victoria Toensing, are apprently working with Rudy on Ukraine and they are two of the best ratfuckery agents the GOP has.

As I noted yesterday, material that has been surfacing from The Hill’s ‘opinion’ reporter John Solomon and then echoed by Giuliani seems to originate with one of Ukraine’s richest and most powerful oligarchs who is a former business partner of Paul Manafort and had to flee Ukraine after the overthrow of pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych in 2014. He is in Austria, fighting extradition to the United States to face bribery charges.

His name is Dimtry Firtash. 

Viktor Shokin is the ‘fired prosecutor’ at the center of all these stories. As part of Firtash’s effort to avoid extradition from Austria to the United States, he asked Shokin to swear out the affidavit in which Shokin accuses Biden of getting him fired to protect his son Hunter. (There is no evidence any of this happened. There was no investigation of Hunter Biden or the company on whose board he sat at the time Shokin was fired.) 

So to review, former Manafort business partner Firtash asks Shokin to swear out an affidavit in which he accuses Biden. The affidavit quickly gets into the hands of Giuliani and Solomon. And who just recently went to work for Firtash’s legal team? None other than diGenova and Toensing, as reported just this week by the Kyiv Post and other publications. 

So the duo who we now learned has been working on behalf of the President with Rudy Giuliani to extort the Ukrainian government just signed on to represent the oligarch behind the affidavit in which the disgraced prosecutor says Joe Biden got him fired. And yes, the oligarch who got booted from Ukraine in 2014 and is a former business partner of Paul Manafort.

And this is the scheme to literally fabricate evidence against Joe Biden.

Trump directed Giuliani, diGenova and Toensing to try to bring down Biden, with Paul Manafort's former business partner las the inside man in Ukraine giving a false affidavit against Biden in exchange for legal help from Trump's personal lawyers.

And let's recall, we know for a fact Joe Biden didn't get Shokin fired.

Ukraine’s top law enforcement official repeatedly rebuffed President Trump’s personal lawyer’s demands to investigate Joe Biden and his son, insisting he had seen no evidence of wrongdoing that he could pursue despite Trump’s allegations. 

In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, Yuri Lutsenko, former Ukraine prosecutor general, said he told Rudolph Giuliani that he would be happy to cooperate if the FBI or other U.S. authorities began their own investigation of the former vice president and his son Hunter but insisted they had not broken any Ukrainian laws to his knowledge. 

Lutsenko, who was fired as prosecutor general last month, said he had urged Giuliani to launch a U.S. inquiry and go to court if he had any evidence but not to use Ukraine to conduct a political vendetta that could affect the U.S. election. 

”I said, ‘Let’s put this through prosecutors, not through presidents,’ ” Lutsenko told The Times.

“I told him I could not start an investigation just for the interests of an American official,” he said. 

The revelations are at the heart of the House impeachment probe into whether Trump improperly delayed congressionally mandated military aid to Ukraine while urging leaders there to help find dirt on his political opponents to boost his 2020 reelection bid.

Do we understand just how screwed Trump is right now?

Sunday Long Read: The Reach To Impeach

Sue Glassner at the New Yorker recaps the week and the timeline on how quickly Donald Trump went from "getting away with it once again" to  "dead in the water", and the tipping point was Wednesday.

President Trump began Wednesday in a dark place. “There has been no President in the history of our Country who has been treated so badly as I have,” he lamented on Twitter, before 8 a.m. The night before, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her party had made a momentous political shift and launched a full-scale impeachment investigation of the President. The move was triggered by a new scandal, the details of which have emerged in recent days: Trump, having escaped impeachment over the Mueller investigation, turns out to have asked Ukraine’s new President to investigate the former Vice-President Joe Biden, at the same time that he was holding up more than three hundred million dollars in U.S. military aid to Ukraine. The disclosure had proved to be too much, even for the cautious Pelosi. Now Trump faces the very real possibility that he will become only the fourth President in U.S. history to confront a House majority ready to impeach him.

Trump, however, had one play left. On Wednesday morning, he released the full White House account of his July 25th phone call with the Ukrainian leader, Volodymyr Zelensky. Trump, his allies, and his advisers promised that it would be less than meets the eye. Releasing the call summary, they insisted, would undercut the impeachment inquiry into the Ukraine matter before it even started. On Fox, the reporter Ed Henry quoted a Trump source who warned Democrats: “There’s no ‘there’ there.” The new editor of the conservative Washington Free Beacon tweeted, “Told reliably by source who has seen a transcript of the call that it isn’t likely to live up to the high expectations many have.” Trump himself got into the pre-spin game. “Will the Democrats apologize after seeing what was said on the call with the Ukrainian President?” he tweeted at 9:17 a.m. Wednesday. “They should, a perfect call—got them by surprise!”

Then, at precisely 10 a.m., the White House released its version of the call, which was based on notes taken at the time. It did not say what President Trump and his advisers had suggested it would say. Not at all. Usually in American politics, the goal in the expectations game is to tamp them down; in this case, Trump had succeeded at the opposite, promoting the notion that his phone call with Zelensky would be proved innocuous, with nary a whiff of impropriety. Instead, the document released by his own staff added new information to the scandal, revealing that Trump had not only requested an investigation of Biden and his son Hunter but had specifically asked Zelensky to coöperate with his private lawyer, Rudolph Giuliani, and the Attorney General, William Barr, on it. The President’s language was hardly subtle. Trump mentioned the Attorney General four times. “The United States has been very good to Ukraine,” Trump said early in the call, before quickly adding, “I wouldn’t say that it’s reciprocal necessarily.” After Zelensky responded by requesting approval to buy more U.S. anti-tank Javelin missiles, to aid his fight against Russia, Trump replied by explaining the reciprocity he really wanted: investigations of the Bidens and also of Ukraine’s role in the 2016 U.S. elections.

“I would like you to do us a favor though,” the President said, in a line that seems destined to land in the history books. “Whatever you can do,” Trump added later in the conversation, “it’s very important that you do it.” This was not the exculpatory moment that Trump had claimed it would be. Impeachment may have been an uncertain outcome before 10 a.m. on Wednesday. Afterward, it was a near-certainty. 

Trump blew it.

If he had shut up, if he had not released the transcript, he would have gotten away with it.  Everyone would be screaming at how Pelosi had messed up.  By the time Adam Schiff had gotten to the bottom of the mess, it would have been too late, the media would have moved on from "Pelosi's failed impeachment attempt" to something else.

But then Trump impeached himself.

Orange Implosion, Con't

Donald Trump has finally found somebody to blame for his imminent impeachment, and of course it's Acting WH Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney, the guy whose job it is to protect Trump from himself.

Acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney is on shaky ground in the wake of a bad week for President Trump, according to multiple sources with knowledge of discussions surrounding the whistleblower fallout. 

The sources say the President is not upset with Mulvaney for the White House releasing the summary of his July 25 call with Ukraine's leader or the whistleblower complaint because he had been convinced that it was necessary. 

What Trump and other aides are frustrated with, according to the sources, is that Mulvaney did not have a strategy for defending and explaining the contents of those documents as soon as they were publicly released. 

One of the sources says it's not just the President, but also widespread frustration in the White House about the lack of a response plan to deal with the fallout after the release of the whistleblower complaint ignited more controversy surrounding the President. The sources say Mulvaney is taking the heat for that. 

The White House did not immediately provide a comment when reached by CNN on Saturday. 

The feeling among some working to contain the controversy is that some aides who pushed for a response felt Mulvaney was getting in the way of allowing it. 

The frustration over a lack of a response plan poured over into a series of meetings at the White House Friday between the President and top aides, including his personal counsel and White House lawyers, to figure out a strategy moving forward. 

Sources caution that despite Mulvaney not being in a good place right now, the President may not be eager to fire Mulvaney anytime soon given the amount of tumult, even for a White House used to that.

Would you want Mick Mulvaney's job?

Nobody wants Mick Mulvaney's job.

Least of all, well, Mick Mulvaney.

Last Call For It's All About Revenge Now, Con't

You didn't honestly think the most corrupt regime in American history, led by a man whose entire life revolves around getting revenge on those who have wronged him, was simply going to let impeachment happen, did you?

The Trump administration is investigating the email records of dozens of current and former senior State Department officials who sent messages to then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s private email, reviving a politically toxic matter that overshadowed the 2016 election, current and former officials said. 

As many as 130 officials have been contacted in recent weeks by State Department investigators — a list that includes senior officials who reported directly to Clinton as well as others in lower-level jobs whose emails were at some point relayed to her inbox, said current and former State Department officials. Those targeted were notified that emails they sent years ago have been retroactively classified and now constitute potential security violations, according to letters reviewed by The Washington Post. 

State Department investigators began contacting the former officials about 18 months ago, after President Trump’s election, and then seemed to drop the effort before picking it up in August, officials said. 

Senior State Department officials said that they are following standard protocol in an investigation that began during the latter days of the Obama administration and is nearing completion. 

“This has nothing to do with who is in the White House,” said a senior State Department official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about an ongoing probe. “This is about the time it took to go through millions of emails, which is about 3 1/2 years.” 

To many of those under scrutiny, including some of the Democratic Party’s top foreign policy experts, the recent flurry of activity surrounding the Clinton email case represents a new front on which the Trump administration could be accused of employing the powers of the executive branch against perceived political adversaries. 

The existence of the probe follows revelations that the president used multiple levers of his office to pressure the leader of Ukraine to pursue investigations that Trump hoped would produce damaging information about Democrats, including potential presidential rival Joe Biden.

This "everyone but Hillary's e-mails!", along with the long-rumored completion of the Justice Department IG report investigating Mueller and the investigators, apparently due out next month, was always going to be the 2020 strategy.

Impeachment kicked this plan B into overdrive.  The story makes it clear that this effort was brought back to the table about the same time as when the White House originally got word of the whistleblower complaint, which was last month.  It also goes on to say that the State Department really isn't happy doing this, and morale is basically worse than under Rex Tillerson.

Those targeted began receiving letters in August, saying, “You have been identified as possibly bearing some culpability” in supposedly newly uncovered “security incidents,” according to a copy of one letter obtained by The Washington Post. 

In many cases, the incidents appear to center on the sending of information attributed to foreign officials, including summaries of phone conversations with foreign diplomats — a routine occurrence among State Department employees. 

There is no indication in any of the materials reviewed by The Post that the emails under scrutiny contained sensitive information about classified U.S. initiatives or programs. In one case, a former official was asked to explain dozens of messages dating back to 2009 that contained messages that foreign officials wanted relayed rapidly to Washington at a time when U.S. Foreign Service officers were equipped with BlackBerrys and other devices that were not capable of sending classified transmissions. The messages came in through “regular email” and then were forwarded through official — though unclassified — State Department channels.

In other wods, this is a massive effort to make the whistleblower look like part of a huge conspiracy against Trump, while making it very clear what will happen to anyone who might be thinking of joining the whistleblower in ratting out Trump.

And on top of that, it gets Hillary Clinton's emails back into the news along with dozens of targets to harass and maybe even arrest. Impeachment then becomes "the corrupt Democrat effort to end the investigation into evil Hillary and her flunkies!"

Now the real fight begins...

Scaring The Scardey Cats

David Atkins sums up very well what I think of the pants-on-head idiocy of the latest threat from the Right-Wing Noise Machine, that the next Democratic president will be impeached on day one of office.

First, what we already know of Trump’s behavior alone puts him in an unprecedented category of presidential criminality. We have a president who is openly profiting from his office, including and especially from foreign powers, in violation of the emoluments clause; who openly lied about violating campaign finance laws in secretly paying off an adult film actress so as not to embarrass his campaign; who admitted to firing James Comey to take pressure off him in the Russia investigation in a cut-and-dried case of obstruction on national television; and who has now been caught abusing the classification system to hide records of calls with foreign governments in which he is alleged to have engaged in a variety of high crimes and misdemeanors for personal and partisan gain. And that’s just what we know of explicitly so far just from a corruption standpoint: it doesn’t touch on what might be lurking in his tax returns, or more policy-oriented issues like abuse of asylum seekers and potential violations of their human rights under international law. If you don’t impeach a president for this, there is no circumstance in which impeachment would be warranted. These high crimes and misdemeanors far outstrip those of Andrew Johnson or Richard Nixon, to say nothing of Bill Clinton.

Moreover, Democrats would be fools to base their own actions on potential retribution and recrimination from Republicans. The GOP has already shown itself willing to steal a Supreme Court justice and dozens of other federal justices, to shut down the federal government in an effort to take away the healthcare of millions, and much more. The level of partisan gamesmanship and acrimony from the Republicans in the McConnell era is unprecedented in the modern era. And, of course, it was Republicans who only two decades ago chose to impeach a Democratic president over lying about sex. The only reason they didn’t impeach Obama is that he ran a literally unimpeachable presidency where the biggest scandals the GOP could concoct were wild misrepresentations on Solyndra and Benghazi.

If the current ideological incarnation of the Republican Party ever does regain control of the House of Representatives–and there are reasons to suspect that it may not–will it impeach the next Democratic president over trivialities? Probably. But the moral bankruptcy and tactical desperation of the Republican Party should not guide Democratic policy.

If there is one lesson to be learned from the Trump era, it is that one of America’s political parties, however imperfect, is acting at least somewhat responsibly to solve the country’s problems. The other is not. And the responsible party should not be taking its behavioral cues from its dissolute counterpart.

Democrats should never be afraid of these clowns again.

The Reach To Impeach, Con't

Democrats are doing silly things during this impeachment inquiry phase, things like "following up on threats with subpoenas" and other actual use of powers granted to them.

Democrats hit the gas on their impeachment inquiry Friday, subpoenaing Secretary of State Mike Pompeo for documents they demanded weeks earlier that describe a pattern of interactions between President Donald Trump, his lawyer Rudy Giuliani and senior Ukrainian officials who they pressured to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden.

Rep Eliot Engel (D-N.Y.), chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, issued the subpoena in consultation with House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff and House Oversight Committee Chairman Elijah Cummings, who have been probing Trump's solicitation of foreign help in the 2020 election.

"The subpoenaed documents shall be part of the impeachment inquiry and shared among the Committees. Your failure or refusal to comply with the subpoena shall constitute evidence of obstruction of the House’s impeachment inquiry,” the three chairmen wrote in a letter to Pompeo.

The State Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The move by the chairmen, however, suggests the House is moving rapidly to advance its fledgling efforts to investigate and draw up articles of impeachment related to Trump's conduct toward Ukraine.

The House subpoena was accompanied by a schedule of depositions for senior State Department officials who have been identified as important players in the Ukraine episode — which was first brought to Congress' attention by an intelligence community whistleblower. The whistleblower, whose story was deemed "urgent" and "credible" by an agency watchdog, indicated that Trump had abused his power to pressure Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to help his reelection chances during a phone call -- and then the transcript of the call was inappropriately hidden on a highly classified server.

This is the first real big fight for impeachment.  If Pompeo refuses both the documents and the depositions, Democrats are going to have to start playing real hardball.

Meanwhile, Trump still can't keep his mouth shut over this, and keeps incriminating himself further on a near daily basis.

President Trump, who has alleged that Hunter Biden got the Chinese to put $1.5 billion into an investment fund, said during private remarks this week that he raised the matter with a U.S. executive who has served as his intermediary on trade talks with Beijing. 

Trump’s comments could attract interest in light of the impeachment inquiry underway by House Democrats. That investigation is focused on the president’s effort to extract information about Hunter Biden’s job on the board of a Ukrainian gas company at a time when his father was overseeing U.S. policy in that country. Given Trump’s comments, investigators may want to try to learn whether the president similarly sought information about the Bidens in China.

In remarks to the U.S. Mission to the United Nations on Thursday morning, Trump said he discussed Biden’s China work with Stephen Schwarzman, the chief executive of the investment company Blackstone. 

“I was with the head of Blackstone . . . Steve Schwarzman,” Trump said, according to a video of the remarks obtained by The Washington Post. After alleging that Hunter Biden got $1.5 billion from the Chinese, Trump said he asked Schwarzman, “ ‘Steve, is that possible?’ ” Trump said Schwarzman asked, “Who got that?” and Trump responded, “Biden’s son.” 

Trump said he asked Schwarzman how that could happen, and the executive responded: “Maybe I shouldn’t get involved, you know it’s very political.” 

Schwarzman declined to comment. His spokeswoman, Jennifer Friedman, said in a statement that “Steve never spoke to the President about Joe Biden or his family, nor has he had any conversations with the Chinese about Biden or his family.”

Schwarzman wrote in his just-published autobiography “What It Takes” that he traveled to Beijing eight times in 2018 “on behalf” of the Trump administration during trade negotiations. He is unofficially known as Trump’s “China whisperer.” 

Schwarzman for years has declined to comment about his many conversations with Trump, so it is unusual for him to dispute Trump’s description of the supposed exchange.

Now maybe this is Trump having a senior moment, but it sounds like to me that Steve Schwartzman just earned himself a House subpoena in this growing impeachment mess.

And the impeachment mess is definitely growing.  One of the biggest reveals from the whistleblower complaint is the fact the White House had a separate, classified information system for Trump's most politically sensitive and potentially damaging transcripts of calls with world leaders, and that Trump's National Security Council directed the Ukraine call with President Zelensky on that server almost immediately after it happened.

The White House acknowledged Friday that administration officials directed a now-infamous Ukraine call transcript be filed in a highly classified system, confirming allegations contained in a whistleblower complaint that have roiled Washington. 

In a statement provided to CNN, a senior White House official said the move to place the transcript in the system came at the direction of National Security Council attorneys. 

"NSC lawyers directed that the classified document be handled appropriately," the senior White House official said. 

White House officials say the transcript was already classified so it did nothing wrong by moving it to another system.

The admission lends further credibility to the whistleblower complaint description of how the July 25 transcript with the Ukrainian president, among others, were kept out of wider circulation by using a system for highly sensitive documents. 

But the statement did not explain whether anyone else in the White House was part of the decision to put the the Ukraine transcript in the more restrictive system. 

Nor did it delve into an accusation in the complaint that other phone call transcripts were handled in a similar fashion.

Other phone call transcripts.

Now, why would other phone call transcripts be on that classified server?  Who would Donald Trump be talking to that he would want those conversations to be hidden oh my god It's Putin and the Saudi crown prince isn't it...

White House efforts to limit access to President Donald Trump's conversations with foreign leaders extended to phone calls with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and Russian leader Vladimir Putin, according to people familiar with the matter. 

Those calls -- both with leaders who maintain controversial relationships with Trump -- were among the presidential conversations that aides took remarkable steps to keep from becoming public. 

In the case of Trump's call with Prince Mohammed, officials who ordinarily would have been given access to a rough transcript of the conversation never saw one, according to one of the sources. Instead, a transcript was never circulated at all, which the source said was highly unusual, particularly after a high-profile conversation. 

The call - which the person said contained no especially sensitive national security secrets -- came as the White House was confronting the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, which US intelligence assessments said came at the hand of the Saudi government. 

With Putin, access to the transcript of at least one of Trump's conversations was also tightly restricted, according to a former Trump administration official. 

It's not clear if aides took the additional step of placing the Saudi Arabia and Russia phone calls in the same highly secured electronic system that held a now-infamous phone call with Ukraine's president and which helped spark a whistleblower complaint made public this week, though officials confirmed calls aside from the Ukraine conversation were placed there. 

But the attempts to conceal information about Trump's discussions with Prince Mohammed and Putin further illustrate the extraordinary efforts taken by Trump's aides to strictly limit the number of people with access to his conversations with foreign leaders.

Of course those records were moved to the separate system.  Of course the phone calls with Putin and MBS were that bad or worse than the Zelensky calls.

The inn-person meetings?  Those were even more awful.

Of course Donald Trump is screwed.

President Trump told two senior Russian officials in a 2017 Oval Office meeting that he was unconcerned about Moscow’s interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election because the United States did the same in other countries, an assertion that prompted alarmed White House officials to limit access to the remarks to an unusually small number of people, according to three former officials with knowledge of the matter. 

The comments, which have not been previously reported, were part of a now-infamous meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, in which Trump revealed highly classified information that exposed a source of intelligence on the Islamic State. He also said during the meeting that firing FBI Director James B. Comey the previous day had relieved “great pressure” on him.

A memorandum summarizing the meeting was limited to all but a few officials with the highest security clearances in an attempt to keep the president’s comments from being disclosed publicly, according to the former officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters. 

The White House’s classification of records about Trump’s communications with foreign officials is now a central part of the impeachment inquiry launched this week by House Democrats. An intelligence community whistleblower has alleged that the White House placed a record of Trump’s July 25 phone call with Ukraine’s president, in which he offered U.S. assistance investigating his political opponents, into a code-word classified system reserved for the most sensitive intelligence information. 

The White House did not provide a comment Friday.

It is not clear whether a memo documenting the May 10, 2017, meeting with Lavrov and Kislyak was placed into that system, but the three former officials said it was restricted to a very small number of people. The White House had recently begun limiting the records of Trump’s calls after remarks he made to the leaders of Mexico and Australia appeared in news reports. The Lavrov memo was restricted to an even smaller group, the former officials said.

This just got blown to hell, guys.  Absolute hell.