Last Call For Graham, Cracked

So it turns out that GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham, while inexplicably remaining one of Donald Trump's greatest public supporters, and the fact he's chair of the Senate Judiciary committee cannot be overlooked, is still very, very bad at this whole espionage and skullduggery thing.

Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham has in the last year become something of a congressional point man for President Donald Trump’s negotiations with Turkey, leading discussions on everything from Ankara’s purchase of a Russian missile system over the summer to their more recent incursion into northern Syria.

So when he received a call from a man he thought was Turkey’s minister of defense earlier in August, it didn’t strike him as unusual. “Thank you so much for calling me, Mr. Minister,” Graham said. “I want to make this a win-win, if we can.”

But it wasn’t the Turkish defense minister at all. Instead, it was Alexey Stolyarov and Vladimir Kuznetsov, Russian pranksters with suspected ties to the country’s intelligence services who go by “Lexus and Vovan.” The duo have become notorious in recent years for their cold calls to unwitting, high-profile Western politicians, including Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff, leading some to suspect that they’ve had help from the Kremlin, according to The Guardian. (A Schiff spokesman said at the time that the House Intelligence Committee “informed appropriate law enforcement and security personnel of the conversation.”)

Kevin Bishop, a spokesman for Graham, confirmed the call’s authenticity to POLITICO. “We have been successful in stopping many efforts to prank Senator Graham and the office, but this one slipped through the cracks,” he said. “They got him.”

The substance of Graham’s conversation with Stolyarov, who was posing as Turkish Defense Minister Hulusi Akar, is newly relevant in light of the South Carolina senator’s push for sanctions on Turkey as punishment for their offensive against the Kurds in northern Syria. Graham labeled the Kurds a “threat” to Turkey in the call, seemingly contradicting what he has said publicly in recent days.

Graham also mentions Trump’s personal interest in a “Turkish bank case” in the call that appears to refer to a U.S. case involving Reza Zarrab, an Iranian-Turkish gold trader and client of Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani. Bloomberg reported on Wednesday that Trump had asked then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson in 2017 to help persuade the Justice Department to drop the Zarrab case.

The pranksters’ conversation with Graham, a Trump ally who has the president’s ear on national security issues, also raises obvious questions about potential security breaches. While the pranks appear on their face to have been relatively harmless, the incident suggests it’s getting easier for bad actors to elicit sensitive information from policymakers. Stolyarov provided POLITICO with a recording of their call.

No doubt that Graham's about-face on Syrian Kurds and possible break from Trump is exactly why this call was released.  Expect Graham's efforts to introduce bipartisan Senate sanctions against Turkey to immediately go down the toilet.  Graham just got a very ugly reminder as to whom he really works for, and it's not the people of the Palmetto State.

Of course, Trump just got an equally ugly reminder as to whom he works for, as well.

So here's a recap of today from CNN's Jim Sciutto:

Fruman/Parnas indictments are about as direct foreign interference as you could dream up: funneling foreign money to a US candidate to help remove an ambassador who refused to do the president’s bidding attacking a political rival. Btw, they worked with Trump’s personal lawyer.

— Jim Sciutto (@jimsciutto) October 10, 2019

And there are only two things keeping Trump from prison right now:  AG Bill Barr, and GOP Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell.  Without those two people, Trump would have been trashed months ago.

Ukraine In The Membrane, Con't

Well now.  Remember Rudy's two foreign friends he was working with to fabricate dirt on Joe Biden in Ukraine?  The ones who ignored House Democratic depositions on Monday?

Yesterday I talked about how Energy Secretary Rick Perry apparently was trying to get two Giuliani associates on the board of Ukraine's biggest natural gas company. Those two associates are now at the center of the latest fight between House Democrats at the Trump regime, with the two men, Igor Fruman and Lev Parnas, having lawyered up in record time and saying they will not comply with any House Democratic requests for documents or depositions.

The two contacted former White House Counsel John Dowd to defend them.  But then Wednesday night the two did something stupid.

They tried to skip the country.

The Feds were waiting for them at the airport...with campaign finance charges for illegally donating foreign money to Trump.

Igor Fruman and Lev Parnas, two foreign-born donors who gave money to a political action committee supporting President Donald Trump, were arrested Wednesday night and face charges tied to campaign-finance violations, two law enforcement officials confirmed to NBC News. 

The pair are expected to appear in federal court Thursday.

Fruman and Parnas worked with Rudy Giuliani, Trump's personal attorney, Giuliani has previously said, as part of his dealings in Ukraine that involved efforts to encourage the nation to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden and his son, Hunter Biden. Parnas is Ukrainian, while Fruman is Belarusian, according to the indictment unsealed Thursday. 

The Wall Street Journal was first to report on the arrests. 

According to the indictment, filed in the Southern District of New York, the two men, along with fellow defendants David Correia and Andrey Kukushkin, "conspired to circumvent the federal laws against foreign influence by engaging in a scheme to funnel foreign money to candidates for federal and state office so that the defendants could buy potential influence with candidates, campaigns, and the candidates' governments." 

The indictment describes an elaborate scheme to conceal the real source of the political donations through the use of secret agreements, limited liability corporations and straw donors. 

The defendants deceived "the candidates, campaigns, federal regulators, and the public by entering into secret agreements, laundering foreign money through bank accounts in the name of limited liability corporations, and through the use of straw donors ... who purported to make legal campaign contributions in their own names, rather than in the name of the true source of the fund," according to the document. 

Two senior law enforcement officials told NBC News that Parnas and Fruman were arrested at Dulles airport in Washington, D.C. Wednesday. The two were slated to depart on an flight that would have taken them outside the U.S., the sources said. Their exact destination was not immediately known. Kukushkin was arrested in San Francisco Wednesday. The status of the fourth person charges in the scheme, Correia, is not immediately known. 

The Trump campaign declined to comment to NBC News while John Dowd, an attorney for the two men, did not immediately respond to a request for comment from NBC News. Reached by NBC News, Giuliani said he could not yet comment.

Now, this raises a whole lot of questions here.  Parnas and Fruman were obviously on the FEC and DOJ's radar for a long time to have these charges ready to go, but trying to flee the country to avoid the House impeachment depositions subpoena meant that the SDNY had to act.

Now with these two in pocket, a LOT can happen, things that have to be making Trumpworld very, very nervous.  The indictment says that these two (on top of being Rudy's two intel gophers on Biden) are in fact connected to "Foreign-National-1", a Russian, pouring money into the Trump campaign.  We've kinda come full circle, really, as Marcy Wheeler discusses.

What the indictment is less clear about is who the Russian bankrolling all this is. A key part of Parnas and Fruman’s crime is that they were laundering funds for “a foreign national Russian citizen and businessman.”

From in or about June 2018 through April 2019, LEV PARNAS, IGOR FRUMAN, DAVID CORREIA, and ANDREY KUKUSHKIN, the defendants, and others known and unknown, conspired to make political donations — funded by Foreign National-1 [the Russian] — to politicians and candidates for federal and State office to gain influence with candidates as to policies that would benefit a future business venture.

Putting together the Dowd letter and the indictment, it becomes clear that the John Solomon propaganda that Trump was pushing (and which Rudy sent to Mike Pompeo’s State Department as part of the effort to get rid of Yovanovitch and which Lindsey Graham just invited Rudy to come present to the Senate Judiciary Committee) was funded by an as yet unnamed Russian.

There are US congressmen mentioned in the indictment too as getting money from this scam, one of them is apparently former Rep. Pete Sessions, the other is current House GOP minority leader Kevin McCarthy.  Tada!

Oh, and House Republicans have issued subpoenas for these two due October 16.

It's all connected to Trump and Russia.  It always is.

The Reach To Impeach, Con't

As FiveThirtyEight's Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux reminds us, it took more than two years for Republicans to abandon Nixon, but when it happened, it happened in the span of two weeks.

On July 23, 1974, Rep. Lawrence Hogan, Sr., a Republican on the House Judiciary Committee, bought airtime on TV networks across his home state of Maryland. He had a big announcement to share: Hogan was the first Republican on the House Judiciary Committee to publicly say he would vote to impeach Nixon. It was just over two weeks before Nixon would announce his resignation, and the Judiciary Committee was poised to approve three articles of impeachment against the president — except nobody knew that yet.

Today, as another impeachment drama unfolds, it’s easy to see Republicans like Hogan, who were willing to break ranks with their party, as a fundamental difference between Watergate and today. And it’s true that Republicans are currently staying in President Trump’s corner. But while we tend to focus on the bipartisan rebellion that led to Nixon’s resignation, it’s also worth understanding how public opinion and the party eventually turned against the president.

Support for impeachment had grown slowly over the course of 1974, but there still wasn’t an overwhelming public consensus behind it until right before Nixon left office in early August. And Republican support for Nixon had remained mostly strong, even in the face of a scandal that consumed his second term. As the truth about the scope of Nixon’s misconduct emerged, though, impeachment became increasingly popular and the president lost even his most fervent defenders in Congress. Of course, there are many differences between the Nixon impeachment and the Democrats’ current inquiry, which is still in its early stages, and each impeachment investigation will unfold differently. But as today’s Republicans are scrutinized for signs that they might turn on Trump, it’s important to remember that even in Watergate, it took more than a year of investigation — and a lot of evidence against Nixon — to reach the point where Republicans like Hogan were voting for impeachment.

When the House of Representatives voted in February 1974 to give the House Judiciary Committee subpoena power to investigate Nixon, it did not have the weight of public opinion behind it. According to a poll conducted by Gallup just days before the vote, only 38 percent of Americans were in favor of impeachment. And although a solid majority of Americans did eventually come to support impeachment, that moment didn’t arrive until quite late in the game.

But this didn’t mean the public wasn’t souring on Nixon as the Watergate scandal unfolded. After winning a sweeping victory in the 1972 election, the president began his second term with an approval rating around 60 percent, according to FiveThirtyEight’s tracker of presidential approval. Then that spring saw a stunning 30-point drop in Nixon’s support starting around when one of the people charged with breaking into the Democratic National Committee headquarters confessed to a judge that he and the other conspirators had been pressured to stay silent.

Support for Nixon continued to plunge throughout the long summer of 1973, while former White House lawyer John Dean testified in Senate hearings that the president had been involved in a cover-up of the burglary and a White House aide confirmed in closed-door testimony that Nixon had set up a secret White House taping system. And by the time of October’s Saturday Night Massacre — where Nixon ordered the firing of special prosecutor Archibald Cox, who had been demanding those tapes, and the closing of the special prosecutor’s investigation — his approval rating had plunged to 27 percent, which is about where it stayed until Nixon resigned.

As Nixon’s approval ratings fell, support for impeachment was rising more gradually, reaching solid majority support by early August 1974. That was right in the midst of the crucial two-week period when the Supreme Court ordered Nixon to turn over the White House tapes, the House Judiciary Committee voted to approve three articles of impeachment and Nixon released the transcript of what became known as the “smoking gun” tape, which showed that he had helped orchestrate the cover-up. His support among his allies (who had included some conservative southern Democrats as well as Republicans) had already started to erode significantly, but it was the “smoking gun” tape that finally forced his resignation on August 8, before the House could vote on impeachment. At that point, the public was clearly behind impeachment, although a significant minority of Americans — including most Republicans — still didn’t think Nixon should be removed from office.

Of course, the biggest difference today is that there are zero moderate Republicans, they're all zombies who have enabled Trump for three years...or lost their jobs trying.

Still, the poll numbers now show a slim majority for both impeachment and removal from office...at FOX News State TV.

More than half of US voters want President Donald Trump impeached and removed from office, according to a Fox News Poll out on Wednesday. 

The poll marks the fourth in two days that showed public opinion is shifting on the impeachment inquiry. A formal impeachment inquiry, launched by the House last month, centers on Trump's July phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, after a whistleblower filed a complaint about the call. A transcript of the conversation released by the White House shows Trump repeatedly pushed Zelensky to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden and his son, Hunter. There is no evidence of wrongdoing by either Joe or Hunter Biden in Ukraine. 

The Fox News poll found 51% of registered voters want Trump impeached and removed from office and another 4% want the President impeached but not removed from office. Forty percent of respondents were opposed to impeachment altogether.

The breakdown of that poll is fascinating:

39% of independent voters, 38% of rural white voters, 39% of white non-college voters, and 28% of white evangelical voters all say Trump should be impeached and removed.  Even 12% of Trump voters say he should go, and considering Trump effectively won by less than half of one percent, that's dismal news for him.

And remember, Democrats haven't even gotten to hearings yet, really.

If these numbers get worse...and they will, mainly because Trump can't stop criming... then even the Senate GOP may have to dump him.  We'll see.

Last Call For It's Nobody's Business But The Turks

We've reached the point now where the Trump regime is coming apart, and the wall of silence that protected Trump until now has cracked wide open and the White House is leaking like Niagra Falls with stories of Trump's previous misdeeds flowing out into the DC swamp.

President Donald Trump pressed then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to help persuade the Justice Department to drop a criminal case against an Iranian-Turkish gold trader who was a client of Rudy Giuliani, according to three people familiar with the 2017 meeting in the Oval Office. 

Tillerson refused, arguing it would constitute interference in an ongoing investigation of the trader, Reza Zarrab, according to the people. They said other participants in the Oval Office were shocked by the request. 

Tillerson immediately repeated his objections to then-Chief of Staff John Kelly in a hallway conversation just outside the Oval Office, emphasizing that the request would be illegal. Neither episode has been previously reported, and all of the people spoke on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the conversations. 

The White House declined to comment. Kelly and Tillerson declined to comment via representatives. Another person familiar with the matter said the Justice Department never considered dropping the criminal case. 

Zarrab was being prosecuted in federal court in New York at the time on charges of evading U.S. sanctions against Iran’s nuclear program. He had hired former Attorney General Michael Mukasey and Giuliani, who has said he reached out repeatedly to U.S. officials to seek a diplomatic solution for his client outside the courts. 

The president’s request to Tillerson -- which included asking him to speak with Giuliani -- bears the hallmarks of Trump’s governing style, defined by his willingness to sweep aside the customary procedures and constraints of government to pursue matters outside normal channels. Tillerson’s objection came to light as Trump’s dealings with foreign leaders face intense scrutiny following the July 25 call with Ukraine’s president that has sparked an impeachment inquiry in the House. 

The episode is also likely to fuel long-standing concerns from some of Trump’s critics about his policies toward Turkey and his relationship with its authoritarian president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Zarrab’s release was a high priority for Erdogan until the gold trader agreed to cooperate with prosecutors in New York.

This by itself would be a massive scandal under any other circumstances: a sitting Oval Office occupant asking the Secretary of State to get Justice to drop an ongoing federal case involving a foreign national who was allegedly helping Iran evade sanctions would be the death knell of any administration.

It's simply "Wednesday" here in Trumpland.

Both Tillerson and Kelly need to be subpoenaed immediately about this.

Russian To Judgment, Con't

With all the impeachment news, the fact that the Senate Intelligence Committee's final report on Russian interference in the 2016 election came out this week was missed by most folks, and it's brutal.

A bipartisan panel of U.S. senators Tuesday called for sweeping action by Congress, the White House and Silicon Valley to ensure social media sites aren’t used to interfere in the coming presidential election, delivering a sobering assessment about the weaknesses that Russian operatives exploited in the 2016 campaign.  

The Senate Intelligence Committee, a Republican-led panel that has been investigating foreign electoral interference for more than 2½ years, said in blunt language that Russians worked to damage Democrat Hillary Clinton while bolstering Republican Donald Trump — and made clear that fresh rounds of interference are likely ahead of the 2020 vote.  

“Russia is waging an information warfare campaign against the U.S. that didn’t start and didn’t end with the 2016 election,” said Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.), the committee’s chairman. “Their goal is broader: to sow societal discord and erode public confidence in the machinery of government. By flooding social media with false reports, conspiracy theories, and trolls, and by exploiting existing divisions, Russia is trying to breed distrust of our democratic institutions and our fellow Americans.”

Though the 85-page report itself had extensive redactions, in the visible sections, lawmakers urged their peers in Congress to act, including through the potential adoption of new regulations that would the disclosure of ad buyers more transparent. The report also called on the White House and the executive branch to adopt a more forceful, public role, warning Americans about the ways in which dangerous misinformation can spread while creating new teams within the U.S. government to monitor for threats and share intelligence with industry.

The recommendations call for Silicon Valley to more extensively share intelligence among companies, in recognition of the shortage of such sharing in 2016 and also the ways that disinformation from Russia and other countries spreads across numerous platforms — with posts linking back and forth in a tangle of connections.

“The Committee found that Russia’s targeting of the 2016 U.S. presidential election was part of a broader, sophisticated and ongoing information warfare campaign,” the report says. The Russian effort was “a vastly more complex and strategic assault on the United States than was initially understood... an increasingly brazen interference by the Kremlin on the citizens and democratic institutions of the United States."

The report found that the bulk of social media efforts by Russians to hurt Hillary Clinton and help Donald Trump were targeted at conservative voters to get them angry, but again the efforts were also targeted at African-American voters, to either get us to vote third-party or to not vote at all.

It's information we've been told before, and again the Trump regime is ignoring it, choosing instead to blame the Obama administration for "doing nothing to stop the Russians" when of course Mitch McConnell made it clear that preventing the Russians from helping Trump would be viewed as war. He won't allow a vote on any of these recommendations, either.

Again, we're already seeing efforts by Russia, Iran, and other foreign countries to disrupt our elections, and the Trump regime knows allowing them to continue is the best shot they have of winning in 2020.

Ukraine In The Membrane, Con't

It seems like every day we get new information on Trump's Ukraine efforts to pressure the country into fabricating evidence against Joe Biden in order to affect the 2020 race, and today is no different. 

CNN is reporting now that Trump ordered Energy Secretary Rick Perry and both the State Department diplomats at the heart of the mess, former Ukraine special envoy Kurt Volker and EU Ambassador Gordon Sondland, to all meet with Rudy Giuliani in May, well before the July 25th call with Ukraine's president, in order to coordinate a plan of attack against Biden.

President Donald Trump directed Secretary of Energy Rick Perry and two top State Department officials to deal with his private attorney Rudy Giuliani when the Ukrainian President sought to meet Trump, in a clear circumvention of official channels, according to two sources familiar with the conversation. 

Trump believed Ukraine was still rampantly corrupt and said that if President Volodymyr Zelensky wanted to meet with him, Giuliani would have to be convinced first, one source said. 

"If they can satisfy Rudy, they can satisfy the President," a person familiar with the meeting said. 

Trump's push to have Giuliani as gatekeeper is more direct than what was previously disclosed by one of the meeting's participants in his statement to the House last week. It also further demonstrates how significant Giuliani was in brokering access to the President regarding Ukraine policy and in passing messages to other administration officials. 

CNN has reached out to the White House for comment. 

A key accusation in the whistleblower's complaint that has prompted the impeachment probe into the President's dealings with Ukraine is that Giuliani, a private citizen, had been presenting to Ukraine a US policy different than that from US diplomats. 

At the May 23 meeting, Perry, US Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland and Kurt Volker, then the State Department's special representative to Ukraine, were reporting back to Trump after they returned from Zelensky's inauguration. 

Their goal was to tell Trump that they had a favorable impression of Zelensky and his government, and that he was a reformer who Trump should trust and engage with, according to three sources familiar with the meeting. 

They were hoping to set up a meeting between Trump and Zelensky, the sources said. They believed Ukraine under Zelensky was a more trusted ally than previous Ukrainian regimes, and that a visit between Trump and Zelensky could demonstrate to the Russian government that the US embraced a free Ukraine, according to two of the sources. 

Notably, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was in Washington on May 23 but he did not attend the meeting with Trump. 

Perry had led the delegation who attended Zelensky's inauguration, and was a central figure in the May meeting with Trump. 

It became clear to the Trump administration officials, the sources said, that they would have to deal with Giuliani. 

Volker hinted last week in speaking to the House how central Giuliani was in the President's foreign policy approach to Ukraine.

So this backs up the AP reporting from a few days ago that Rick Perry was instrumental, and that the carrot was Zelensky's meeting with Trump in DC if Zelensky could deliver something on Biden. And we know that Ambassador Sondland spoke with Donald Trump directly after his now infamous "no quid pro quo" text.

In other words, these bozos have been caught red handed, Rick Perry and Mike Pompeo need to resign at the bare minimum, and Sondland's testimony was pulled at the last minute because it would have been fatal to Trump.

Again, it's up to the Dems to figure out where they want to go on inherent contempt, court fights, and impeachment.

StupidiNews!

• As many as 900,000 power customers in San Jose, California may be without power for up to a week as Pacific Gas & Electric says it will be shutting off power to avoid sparking wildfires.
• The Trump regime says it plans to sue Minneapolis's Target Center ahead of a scheduled Thursday rally as Mayor Jacob Frey is asking the campaign to pay costs up-front.
• More than 100 are dead and thousands wounded as Iraqi protests enter their second week, demonstrators are calling for the removal of PM Adel Abdul Mahdi and his government.
• Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders says he will "scale back" his presidential campaign appearances after his heart attack last week in Las Vegas, Sanders say he has no plans to drop out. 
• Sony is confirming the PlayStation 5 console will launch in 2020 in time for the holidays, the console will use 100GB optical discs as well as Sony's 4K Blu-Ray format. 

Last Call For Two Murders And Five To Ten

Yesterday I talked about the murder of Joshua Brown, the witness whose testimony against ex-Dallas cop Amber Guyger in the murder trial of Botham Jean was key to her conviction.

Brown ended up mysteriously dead in the parking lot outside his apartment building Friday night just days after Guyger was sentenced, and now Dallas police have a lead in the killing.

And by "lead" I mean the cops just happened to find a bunch of drugs in Brown's apartment and the suspects are from out of state.

Dallas police officials on Tuesday said at a news conference at Dallas Police headquarters that they have three suspects in connection with the shooting death of Joshua Brown. 

All three suspects came from Alexandria, La., to purchase drugs from Brown, police said. One suspect is in custody, and warrants have been issued for two other suspects. 

Brown was fatally shot Friday at an apartment complex on Cedar Springs Road.
Assistant chief Avery Moore identified the suspects as Thaddeous Charles Green, 22, Jacquerious Mitchell, 20, and Michael Diaz Mitchell, 32. Jacquerious Mitchell is in custody at Parkland hospital, Moore said. 

The announcement came as pressure increased from community leaders for an independent investigation into Brown's case. Brown was a witness in the murder trial of former Dallas police officer Amber Guyger, which ended last week in her conviction. The timing of Brown's death raised public speculation about whether the shooting was tied to his testimony. 

Moore gave condolences to the Brown family and said the department was working "diligently" to get the two suspects who are at-large. Moore then addressed the conspiracy theories and said they "simply are not true." 

Without pointing to specific statements, he issued a warning to community leaders. 

"I encourage those leaders to be mindful of their actions moving forward because their words have jeopardized the integrity of the city of Dallas as well as the Dallas Police Department," he said.

It's an open-and-shut case, you see. Three black suspects and a dead black man in a drug deal gone wrong.  Or, you'd better see, or else the Dallas cops will make you see.

According to police, the three suspects were in the same car when they arrived at Brown's apartment complex on Friday night. Green got out of the car and had an argument with Brown that escalated. Jacquerious Mitchell told police when he got out of the car, Brown shot him first. 

Jacquerious Mitchell told police he heard two more gunshots that Green fired as he lay inside the vehicle. 

Green took Brown's backpack and gun, police said. Michael Mitchell was the driver and dropped off Green at an unknown location. Michael Mitchell then dropped off Jacquerious, who is his nephew, at the hospital.

So according to the cops and the witness who was shot, Brown is not only a drug dealer but an attempted murderer.  Surely this means Amber Guyger is due some leniency on appeal, right?  Maybe that conviction gets overturned?

Surely a scared black kid found with a bullet in him around the same time as Brown's death wouldn't be pressured into making a statement like this in order to cooperate with the cops, right?

And surely, the Dallas PD wouldn't be lying about a dead black witness who helped to convict a cop, right?

Police said when they searched Brown's apartment, they confiscated 12 pounds of marijuana, 143 grams of THC cartridges and $4,000 in cash.

Pretty open and shut case, right?  The information that Brown was a notorious drug dealer never came up in the Guyger trial, a drug dealer who was fearing for his life from three guys from Louisiana, one who jumped at the chance to testify against a cop, and was pushing 12 pounds of weed at the time, but hey, I'm sure that was an oversight.

Right?

The Reach To Impeach, Con't

The Trump regime today made it clear what their strategy is going forward: obstruction of justice and daring Nancy Pelosi to do anything about it.

The White House all but declared war on the House impeachment inquiry on Tuesday, intervening for the first time to block the testimony of a key witness as President Trump signaled his administration would try to starve investigators of more witnesses and documents. 

The decision to block Gordon D. Sondland, the United States ambassador to the European Union, from speaking with investigators for three House committees came just hours before he was to appear on Capitol Hill, provoking an immediate conflict with potentially profound consequences for the inquiry and for the president himself. 

Mr. Trump, defiant as investigators dig further into his efforts to pressure Ukraine to find dirt on his political rivals, declared the inquiry illegitimate in a signal that he plans to stonewall Congress, an act that could itself build the case for charging him in an impeachment proceeding with obstruction. 

“I would love to send Ambassador Sondland, a really good man and great American, to testify,” Mr. Trump wrote on TwitterTuesday morning around the time Mr. Sondland was to appear, “but unfortunately he would be testifying before a totally compromised kangaroo court, where Republican’s rights have been taken away.”

Trump openly tweeting that the decision to block Sondland came from himself here.  Again, open obstruction of justice, with a dare to do anything about it.

House Democrats quickly said they would regard the president’s stance as amounting to obstruction. Representative Adam B. Schiff, Democrat of California and chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said the administration’s refusal to allow Mr. Sondland to appear was “strong evidence” of “obstruction of the constitutional functions of Congress, a coequal branch of government.” 

Mr. Schiff told reporters that the State Department was also withholding text messages Mr. Sondland had sent on a private device that were “deeply relevant” to the inquiry. 

“The American people have the right to know if the president is acting in their interests, in the nation’s interests with an eye toward our national security, and not in his narrow personal, political interests,” Mr. Schiff told reporters. “By preventing us from hearing from this witness and obtaining these documents, the president and secretary of state are taking actions that prevent us from getting the facts needed to protect the nation’s security.” 

In a statement, Mr. Schiff and the chairmen of the two other committees leading the investigation said they would promptly issue a subpoena for Mr. Sondland’s testimony and documents. 

The decision to block Mr. Sondland from being interviewed was delivered at the last minute, after the ambassador had already flown to Washington from Europe, and lawmakers had returned from a two-week recess to observe the questioning.

From Trump's cynical, purely transactional viewpoint, it's a good strategy considering that additional impeachment charges won't matter as long as Mitch McConnell is there to simply dismiss the charges in a Senate trial.  The White House is selling the impeachment proceedings as "illegitimate if not illegal" on FOX State TV, and they've reached the point where additional testimony against Trump would be more damaging in the long run than covering it up.

From the Democratic side, this is the rubicon being crossed.  House Democrats have to decide what to do at this point because no further cooperation of any kind will be coming from the executive branch or its agencies.  A lengthy court battle during an election year could allow Trump to run out the clock, because at some point Nancy Pelosi is going to have to make the decision to go forward with articles of impeachment or shelve them.

So far, her response has literally been a sternly-worded letter. 

Now, having said that, Senate Republicans no doubt want those articles as soon as possible so that Mitch and 50 other GOP senators can vote to dismiss the charges as I said, calling them illegitimate.  Plenty of people say Pelosi's response must be drawing up and voting on articles now.  I think that's playing directly into McConnell's hands.

Dismissing the articles as soon as they are sent to the Senate is their best-case scenario if they feel they can get away with it, and McConnell has enough GOP senators to do that right now, especially if they use the "illegitimate" argument as a fig leaf.  The outcry would be massive, but then it becomes taking the matter to SCOTUS and hoping for a 5-4 ruling or better that confirms the Senate can make its own rules regarding a Senate impeachment trial.

And it all ends with a whimper.  That's still where I see all of this going.  We don't even get a Senate trial.

But for Pelosi and the Democrats, the longer things go forward now with Trump's obvious cover-up happening in real time, the worse the numbers get for him.  If support flags enough though, and multiple GOP senators say there has to be a rigorous trial, that starts leading down the path of Trump's removal.  The polls say half the country now wants Trump impeached by the House and removed by the Senate.

So, she has to thread the needle. She has to wait until the cry to remove Trump becomes overwhelming, and this obvious obstruction move will go a long way towards getting us to a maximum for removal.  But if Pelosi times things badly, this all blows up and Trump gets away, possibly to a second term.  We'll see how Dems respond, particularly to witnesses.  Inherent contempt for Sondland, for instance, won't help that much.  Inherent contempt for Mike Pompeo on the other hand, well...

Dems have come this far.  I trust they have the guts to finish it, because they have to or we lose the republic.

Ukraine In The Membrane, Con't

Yesterday I talked about how Energy Secretary Rick Perry apparently was trying to get two Giuliani associates on the board of Ukraine's biggest natural gas company.  Those two associates are now at the center of the latest fight between House Democrats at the Trump regime, with the two men, Igor Fruman and Lev Parnas, having lawyered up in record time and saying they will not comply with any House Democratic requests for documents or depositions.

Two South Florida businessman who peddled supposedly explosive information from Ukraine about corruption involving Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton will not comply with a request for documents and depositions from three House committees overseeing an impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump.

Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman will not respond to a Monday deadline for documents and do not plan to appear for depositions scheduled for Thursday and Friday, their attorney John Dowd told the Miami Herald.

“No response planned,” Dowd, who helped defend Trump during part of the recently concluded Russia investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller, said in email.

Democrats working on the burgeoning impeachment inquiry said Parnas and Fruman’s decision to ignore a request issued last Monday will lead to subpoenas, which would compel them to testify and provide documents or face criminal charges. 

At this point, with a former White House lawyer representing the pair, the odds of the two of them having a letter that says "Attorney General Barr advised us not to talk" claiming executive privilege and refusing the subpoenas is pretty high, and I don't expect House Democrats to have the balls to do anything about it.  Certainly they're not going to bother to refer them to the DoJ for criminal prosecution, they won't lift a finger.  Besides, the White House has to protect them.

“While we have engaged with counsels for these witnesses, they have so far refused to agree to testify or turn over relevant documents. If they continue to fail to comply, they will be served with subpoenas in short order,” an official working on the impeachment inquiry said.

Dowd sent the House Intelligence Committee an email on Oct. 3 detailing his objections to the request for documents and depositions. In the email, which was released on Monday, Dowd said getting up to speed on Parnas and Fruman’s legal situation “will take some time” and that their discussions with Giuliani regarding Trump would be covered by “attorney-client, attorney work and other privileges.” Dowd began representing Parnas and Fruman last week.

He also called the request for documents “overly broad and unduly burdensome,” saying he has reached the “inescapable conclusion that the Democratic Committee members’ intent is to harass, intimidate and embarrass my clients.”

Parnas told the Miami Herald last month that Ukraine’s government has access to information on alleged wrongdoing by Joe Biden and his son Hunter and other U.S. officials overseas — but that the U.S. government proved indifferent to receiving it through official channels. Parnas said his and Fruman’s friendship with Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani was their avenue to get the information into the Trump administration’s hands.

“I got certain information and I thought it was my duty to hand it over,” he told the Miami Herald on September 26.

So of course any subpoena by House Democrats would be part of the plot to "protect Joe Biden".  Hell, I'm betting Parnas in particular will be considered a "whistleblower" by the end of the week.

Giuliani himself won't comply either, it looks like.

Congressional Democrats asked Parnass and Fruman for documents on Sept. 30. They also subpoenaed Giuliani that same day for documents. Giuliani told The Daily Beast he has not decided whether or not to comply.

"I have a real question about whether I should recognize their legitimacy,” he said. “I think they are totally illegitimate... I’m going to go in front of a committee with a chairman who is a liar.”

Going on offense against congressional investigators is a central part of the strategy that Trump’s allies are using to defend him. Chairman Adam Schiff of the Intelligence Committee has become their top foe. And the president himself has also lambasted the California Democrat, calling him “Shifty Schiff.”

“I haven't made up my mind,” Giuliani continued, “but one of the issues is, do you acknowledge an illicit committee?”

Democrats aren't going to get a word out of any of these crooks as this mobster lawyer stuff drags on, unless they start using some muscle.

StupidiNews!

• NASA's Mars Curiosity rover has found more evidence that the Red Planet was home to saltwater crater lakes some 3.5 billion years ago.
• Socialist Prime Minister Antonio Costa emerged as the winner in Sunday's national elections in Portugal, right-wing conservatives were trounced and Costa is expected to form a coalition.
• A federal judge ruled that the White House had to release Donald Trump's tax returns to Manhattan DA Cyrus Vance, an emergency appeal to the 2nd Circuit blocked the order pending review.
• Hong Kong city administrator Carrie Law vowed to end the "limitless and lawless" protests in the city, in what could signal a major military crackdown coming for demonstrators.
• The 2019 Nobel prize for Medicine has gone to two Americans and a British researcher for their shared, decades-long work on how the human body senses that it needs oxygen.

Last Call For The Coming Kurdish Catastrophe

Turkish build-up along the border with Syria has been growing for months now, and a few weeks ago our Syrian Kurdish allies made it known that they were very nervous.

Despite the creation of a security zone on the border between Turkey and northeast Syria that has defused some tension in recent weeks, Syrian Kurds still fear the movement of Turkish ground and aerial forces in their backyard could be a prelude to an assault on the country’s Kurdish minority population. 

“If they can, they will go to Damascus,” said Ilham Ahmed, a co-chair of the Syrian Democratic Council, the political arm of the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) that are responsible for liberating northeastern Syria from the Islamic State, told Foreign Policy through an interpreter in a recent interview in Washington. 

The debate over the area—which U.S. officials have labeled a “security mechanism” rather than a safe zone—is deeply personal for Ahmed, who grew up in the northwest Syrian town of Afrin. The Turks and their proxy forces swept into Afrin last year, waging a violent campaign on the Kurdish-controlled town. Ahmed’s entire family was forced to flee and now lives in tents outside the city, she said. 

U.S. support to the Syrian Kurds has been a major source of tension between Ankara and Washington since the U.S. military began arming the group in 2014. The military arm of the SDF is led by the People’s Protection Units (YPG), a mostly Kurdish militia that Ankara views as an extension of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK. Both Turkey and the United States have designated the PKK, which has waged a three-decade insurgency in Turkey, a terrorist group.

Ankara has been pushing for a Turkish-controlled “safe zone” on the border for months as a necessary measure to address its security concerns. U.S. President Donald Trump even promised a 20-mile safe zone in a January tweet, which officials later walked back. But the Syrian Kurds fear a Turkish assault on the area’s civilian population, which Ahmed has said could be a “catastrophe” for her people.

Since the security mechanism—which involves joint U.S. and Turkish ground and aerial patrols between the Syrian border towns of Tell Abyad and Ras al-Ain—was established earlier this month, Ahmed said the SDF has kept to its side of the bargain. YPG fighters have surrendered the area to local security forces, removed fortifications and tunnels on the border, and withdrawn heavy weapons such as tanks and artillery by 12 miles.

But the presence of Turkish troops and military equipment on the border is still a threat, Ahmed said. The Kurds are particularly concerned about Turkish surveillance drones operating in the area as part of the joint patrols, she noted.

“Unless the border goes back to normality, where things on the border are normal with no troops on the two sides, then we cannot say that the problem is solved,” she said. 

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s threat to resettle 3 million Syrian refugees currently residing in Turkey into the safe zone is also “troubling,” Ahmed said. Most of the refugees in Turkey are not native to northeast Syria, and their presence there could displace the Kurdish residents in that area, she added. 

“Every day, there is escalation from Turkey and threats,” she said. 

U.S. defense and military officials expressed cautious optimism that an uneasy peace between the Turks and the Kurds can be maintained. But experts say continued U.S. presence on the ground as a “credible interlocutor” will be key to assuring both sides.

Over the weekend, Turkish President Erdogan upped the threats considerably.

Turkey’s president, in his strongest warning yet, threatened Saturday to launch a military operation into northeastern Syria, where U.S. troops are deployed and have been trying to defuse tensions between Washington’s two allies — Turkey and the Syrian Kurds. 

Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s threats were a warning that a U.S.-Turkish deal to secure Syria’s troubled border with Turkey was faltering. He said a Turkish military operation against the U.S-backed Kurdish forces could begin “maybe today, maybe tomorrow.” 

The Turkish military has been dispatching units and defense equipment to southeastern Sanliurfa province in the past month. Erdogan had expressed frustration, threatening a unilateral operation, but this was his most specific threat amid concerns from the Syrian Kurdish forces of a limited military operation. 

“We have given all kinds of warning regarding the (area) east of the Euphrates to the relevant parties. We have acted with enough patience,” Erdogan said. 

A Turkish military operation, however limited, would put major pressure on the more 1,000 U.S. troops in northeastern Syria and who operate closely with the Kurdish-led forces, whether to implement the security mechanism or in fighting IS. 

The Turkish leader has repeatedly expressed frustration with Washington’s support for Kurdish groups in Syria. His threats continued despite a deal reached with Washington in August to carry out joint patrols and move Syrian Kurdish fighters away from the border. 

Last night, the Trump regime issued a response to this that cannot be categorized as anything other than an invitation to Turkey to begin the wholesale slaughter of Syrian Kurds.

The White House said Sunday that Turkey will soon invade Northern Syria, renewing fears of a slaughter of Kurdish fighters allied with the U.S. in a yearslong campaign against the Islamic State group. 

For months, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has been threatening to launch a military assault on the Kurdish forces in Northern Syria, many of whom his government considers terrorists. The Kurdish forces bore the brunt of the U.S.-led campaign against Islamic State militants, and Republicans and Democrats have warned that allowing the Turkish attack would send a troubling message to American allies across the globe. 

U.S. troops “will not support or be involved in the operation” and “will no longer be in the immediate area,” in Northern Syria, White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham said in an unusual late-Sunday statement that was silent on the fate of the Kurds. 

It was not clear whether that meant the U.S. would be withdrawing its 1,000 or so troops completely from northern Syria. 

The announcement came after a call between President Donald Trump and Erdogan, the White House said.

Donald Trump just sold out Syrian Kurds to Erdogan, Assad, and Putin.  And today that price came in blood.

Turkish forces carried out attacks against Kurdish forces and the anti-Assad Syrian Democratic Forces militia in Syria and Iraq near the Turkish border on Monday evening. 

Turkish forces attacked SDF positions in the city of al-Malikiyah in the Hasakah area in northern Syria, according to Syrian state news agency SANA. 

The SDF includes Kurds and others in eastern Syria which the US has helped train, assist and advise during the war on ISIS. 

Earlier on Monday, the United States announced that it would be withdrawing from Syria. 

Turkey will move forward with its long-planned military operation to create what it calls a "safe zone" in northern Syria and U.S. forces will not support or be involved in it, the White House press secretary announced early Monday morning. 

"The United States Armed Forces will not support or be involved in the operation, and United States forces, having defeated the ISIS territorial 'Caliphate,' will no longer be in the immediate area," said the White House press secretary on Monday morning. 

The SDF withdrew from an oil field in the Deir ez-Zor area and headed towards the Turkish border on Monday, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. The SDF lead protests against Iranian-backed militias in the Deir ez-Zor area in September.

Not only has Donald Trump created a hot war as a distraction to help himself, he's done it by betraying US Kurdish allies.  Again.

It will be a lifetime before anyone trusts the US again.

Two Murders And Five To Ten

Last week, former Dallas PD officer Amber Guyger got ten years for the murder of Botham Jean, an unarmed black man who was killed by Guyger when she went into the wrong apartment, thinking it was hers after a shift, and she shot him dead on the couch.  

A conviction was surprising enough, the ten year sentence for murder shouldn't shock anyone a fraction of the time other convicted murderers got in the state of Texas.  Still, people don't convict cops without overwhelming evidence, and that's still no guarantee.

Part of the evidence against Guyger was provided by the testimony of Joshua Brown, Botham Jean's neighbor from across the hall.  On Friday night, Brown was found dead from multiple gunshots in the parking lot of his new apartment complex.

Authorities say that, on Friday, Dallas police were called to Brown’s new apartment complex, about five miles from where Jean was murdered, at about 10:30 pm local time, where they found Brown lying in the parking lot with multiple gunshot wounds. He was taken to the hospital, where he was pronounced dead from his injuries.
Throughout the murder trial against Guyger, Brown testified, sometimes emotionally, about the moments when he heard gunshots ring out as he approached his apartment, and about Guyger’s behavior immediately after she killed Jean on September 6, 2018. Guyger has said she believed the apartment was her own, and that she mistook Jean for an intruder.

Brown said that he saw Guyger enter the hallway from Jean’s apartment, crying, and speaking on the phone. Attorney Lee Merritt, who represented the Jean family in the trial, wrote on Facebook that Brown’s testimony played a key role in challenging Guyger’s account of the incident and her claims that she had shouted commands at Botham before shooting him.
“She didn’t. No one heard that. No neighbors. No passerby’s. Not Joshua as he walked down the corridor. No one,” Merritt wrote.

Dallas police officials have not yet identified Brown as the victim of Friday’s shooting, but his mother confirmed his death through Merritt. Officials have also not yet identified a suspect or potential motive, and autopsy details have not yet been released. Witnesses have said that a four-door sedan was seen speeding away from the scene of the shooting.

On social media, Merritt, the attorney, called for answers.

“Brown deserves the same justice he sought to ensure the Jean family,” Merritt wrote. “The Dallas County criminal justice system must [be] mobilized to identify his killer and see that he is held accountable for this murder.

There are unsubstantiated rumors that Brown was shot in the mouth, which would be a clear message killing that Brown was gunned down because he dared to testify against a white female cop in Texas, a modern lynching.  Even if he wasn't shot in the mouth however, a dead black witness in a trial where a cop was convicted based in no small part on the testimony of that witness is still a clear message of fear and hatred.

If you are black in America like me, this is a stark reminder that you draw breath only because the police haven't decided to take your life.

Not-So-Slick Rick, Con't

The completely applicable adage of "The Trump Regime is always actually doing what they accuse Democrats of doing" is an adage not necessarily because it was was Nazi propagandist Joeseph Goebbels most cynical and effective tactic, but because Trump regime folks simply lack the imagination to come up with anything creative other than "Well, what illegal things are we up to?"

As Rudy Giuliani was pushing Ukrainian officials last spring to investigate one of Donald Trump’s main political rivals, a group of individuals with ties to the president and his personal lawyer were also active in the former Soviet republic.

Their aims were profit, not politics. This circle of businessmen and Republican donors touted connections to Giuliani and Trump while trying to install new management at the top of Ukraine’s massive state gas company. Their plan was to then steer lucrative contracts to companies controlled by Trump allies, according to two people with knowledge of their plans.

Their plan hit a snag after Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko lost his reelection bid to Volodymyr Zelenskiy, whose conversation with Trump about former Vice President Joe Biden is now at the center of the House impeachment inquiry of Trump.

But the effort to install a friendlier management team at the helm of the gas company, Naftogaz, would soon be taken up with Ukraine’s new president by U.S. Energy Secretary Rick Perry, whose slate of candidates included a fellow Texan who is one of Perry’s past political donors.

It’s unclear if Perry’s attempts to replace board members at Naftogaz were coordinated with the Giuliani allies pushing for a similar outcome, and no one has alleged that there is criminal activity in any of these efforts. And it’s unclear what role, if any, Giuliani had in helping his clients push to get gas sales agreements with the state-owned company.

But the affair shows how those with ties to Trump and his administration were pursuing business deals in Ukraine that went far beyond advancing the president’s personal political interests. It also raises questions about whether Trump allies were mixing business and politics just as Republicans were calling for a probe of Biden and his son Hunter, who served five years on the board of another Ukrainian energy company, Burisma.

On Friday, according to the news site Axios, Trump told a group of Republican lawmakers that it had been Perry who had prompted the phone call in which Trump asked Zelenskiy for a “favor” regarding Biden. Axios cited a source saying Trump said Perry had asked Trump to make the call to discuss “something about an LNG (liquefied natural gas) plant.”

While it’s unclear whether Trump’s remark Friday referred specifically to the behind-the-scenes maneuvers this spring involving the multibillion-dollar state gas company, The Associated Press has interviewed four people with direct knowledge of the attempts to influence Naftogaz, and their accounts show Perry playing a key role in the effort. Three of the four spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation. The fourth is an American businessman with close ties to the Ukrainian energy sector.

A spokeswoman for the U.S. Energy Department said Perry, a former Texas governor and Republican presidential candidate, was not advancing anyone’s personal interests. She said his conversations with Ukrainian officials about Naftogaz were part of his efforts to reform the country’s energy sector and create an environment where Western companies can do business.

The Trump and Giuliani allies driving the attempt to change the senior management at Naftogazt, however, appear to have had inside knowledge of the U.S. government’s plans in Ukraine. For example, they told people that Trump would replace the U.S. ambassador there months before she was actually recalled to Washington, according to three of the individuals interviewed by the AP. One of the individuals said he was so concerned by the whole affair that he reported it to a U.S. Embassy official in Ukraine months ago.

So the mystery of Rick Perry's resignation is now quite clearly solved.  Following up on Saturday night's Last Call, we know that Perry was trying to get Americans on the board of Ukraine's biggest natural gas company.

Among other changes, Perry pushed for Ukraine’s state-owned natural gas company Naftogaz to expand its board to include Americans, two people familiar with the matter said. Two long-time energy executives based in Perry’s home state of Texas were among those under consideration for that role, one source familiar with the administration’s dealings with the company said.

Perry was in deep on the whole Ukraine mess, hence his sudden resignation last week.  Do read the entire piece, Giuliani was in on it too, and the plan is laid out here in rich detail by AP's reporters, Desmond Butler, Mike Biesecker, and Rich Lardner.

StupidiNews!

• Legendary comedian and character actor Rip Taylor has died at age 84 after being hospitalized for a seizure, Taylor's stage and screen career spanned nearly five full decades.
• Pope Francis is blaming wildfires in the Amazon basin on destructive corporate "interests" and warns that humanity needs to do a better job of stewardship of the planet.
• Talks between GM and United Auto Workers' union have hit a wall as the auto worker strike enters its third week, the UAW says GM's latest offer was one the union had previously rejected.
• Backlash against Hong Kong's latest emergency powers decree has set off a new round of violence as police are arresting those wearing face masks to protest.
• Researchers at Stanford are working on a fire-retardant gel that can be spread over dry forest to prevent wildfires, the non-toxic gel can survive light rain and can last several months.