What drives the anti-anti-Trump left?
ml1 said:
paulsurovell said:
Great article about the title of this thread. Excerpts later:
glad to see you have finally come around to exactly the point that I've been arguing to you for months.
Confirms that you don't read my posts.
drummerboy said:
paulsurovell said:
The current investigation about "abuse of power" which is not a crime, and much of it relates to policy disagreements.
Dude, a few posts ago you wanted to impeach for backing out of a treaty. Where's the crime there?
You should keep notes on what you say and refer to them often - a little consistency would be nice.
The House has total discretion on why to impeach. Doesn't have to be a crime, can be about policy disagreements. So let's impeach for policy disagreements that matter. Like quitting treaties designed to prevent nuclear war and address climate change.
Quid-pro-quo is a loser because there's Biden's tape.
It was an abuse of power to ask for dirt on Biden, but Trump should be censured, not impeached.
Questions about Ukraine meddling in the 2016 election are legitimate.
If the House can impeach for policy reasons then anytime the House is controlled by the opposite Party to that of the President they will impeach.
Impeachment is not a Parliamentary vote of no confidence.
drummerboy said:
This pretty much invalidates everything these guys will ever write forever.
Taibbi's point is more complex https://taibbi.substack.com/p/were-in-a-permanent-coup
You showed us what Breitbart said that Greenwald said. I'm sure you agree we shouldn't rely on Breitbart, so please show us what Greenwald said.
If you can't it will invalidate everything you write forever.
paulsurovell said:
Confirms that you don't read my posts.
confirms that you probably misinterpreted the article
STANV said:
If the House can impeach for policy reasons then anytime the House is controlled by the opposite Party to that of the President they will impeach.
Impeachment is not a Parliamentary vote of no confidence.
What exactly is the House impeaching for now?
paulsurovell said:
If you can't it will invalidate everything you write forever.
Nothing posted on MOL invalidates anything forever.
I'll start with the excerpts. If you have any question about why I selected them, I'll be happy to answer:DaveSchmidt said:
Excerpts or no excerpts, I wouldn’t mind hearing Paul elaborate on why he thought the Salon article was a great take on what drives the anti-anti-Trump left.
(my bold)
https://www.salon.com/2019/10/13/donald-trump-is-a-criminal-and-impeachment-is-a-murky-amoral-struggle-both-these-things-are-true/
[ . . . ]
Without getting drawn too deeply into caveats and “on the other hand,” I think we also have to go there a little. Because on the other hand, the congressional Democrats who are now claiming the constitutional high ground have been eager and active participants, for decades, in the process of democratic decay that got us here. They have supported endless, destructive wars and expanded surveillance programs and a set of economic policies that siphoned wealth upward to the already-rich, under the puzzling theory that somehow that would create prosperity for all.
Furthermore, while the pseudo-interlocking conspiracy theories that Rudy Giuliani and Bill Barr and other Trump minions have been chasing around the world are absurd and incoherent, there is a tiny, troubling grain of reality down there at the bottom of it all. The whistleblower whose complaint against Trump has led to an official impeachment inquiry is a CIA agent. Let's just sit a moment with that, shall we?
[ . . . ]
First of all, I am absolutely never going to be OK with the upside-down new political reality in which Democrats and "liberals" are suddenly superfans of the CIA and the FBI and, at least by extension, the NSA and all the other stuff we barely know anything about. Come at me all you like with your justifications about patriotism and Russia and how it's not like the old days and "well, in this case." Because those are ******** excuses for an exercise in naked power politics. So can we please be honest about that, at least?
[ . . . ]
Look me in the eye, right now, and tell me you believe that current or former functionaries of the CIA or the Pentagon or other agencies of the national-security state are first and foremost concerned with protecting democracy. I'll wait.
[ . . . ]
To describe the whistleblower as “the ballcarrier in the Beltway’s latest
partisan power contest,” as Matt Taibbi did recently, strikes me as entirely reasonable.
Taibbi’s Rolling Stone article arguing that we shouldn’t call that person a “whistleblower,” and that the Ukraine scandal has to some degree been stage-managed by the intelligence community, the Democratic Party and the mainstream media, was met with a lot of high-minded outrage. Honestly, I think both Taibbi and his critics make valid points, and both also dodge some of the thornier questions. (Yes, I know that’s exasperating.)
[ . . . ]
There is more bipartisan continuity in many of the terrible things Trump does, especially on foreign policy, than liberals would often like to admit, but the worst thing about Trump’s tax cuts, detention camps, child torture, Muslim bans, and gutting of civil-rights laws is not that these policies make wine moms in Prospect Heights who watch MSNBC feel sad.
[ . . . ]
Or was it rather the fact that Trump was going rogue on foreign policy, in an area (Russia vs. Ukraine) that is of intense interest to the national-security establishment of both parties but is almost never discussed or debated in public?
[ . . . ]
Whether the 2014
“revolution” in Ukraine is best understood as a popular uprising or a
U.S.-sponsored coup depends entirely on your point of view, but two
things are clear: It overthrew a legitimately elected government (if
perhaps a corrupt and reprehensible one) and it dramatically raised the
temperature of the proxy war between Russia and the West.
[ . . . ]
But what Bill Barr and Rudy Giuliani and their even less savory underlings are pursuing, in their globetrotting snipe hunt for imaginary enemies, is the shadow of a real question: Is Trump being impeached because he’s a threat to democracy, or because he’s an overly obvious threat to democracy, too stupid or too stubborn to play the game by the rules? Are his attackers defending the remnants of the peculiar republic bequeathed to us by Jefferson and Madison, as they claim, or just posturing amid the ruins for political advantage? We won’t know the answers, I suspect, until all this is over.
One thing I have absolutely no questions about is why you selected those excerpts.
I do have this question: What did you think about all the caveats, the “buts,” the other other hands, and that concluding wait-and-seeism?
paulsurovell said:
STANV said:
If the House can impeach for policy reasons then anytime the House is controlled by the opposite Party to that of the President they will impeach.
Impeachment is not a Parliamentary vote of no confidence.
What exactly is the House impeaching for now?
"In light of the historical background, we should be able to see why so many Democrats have been right to be cautious about impeachment proceedings against Mr. Trump. Untruthful tweeting, barbaric rhetoric, apparent indifference to climate change, a proposed citizenship question on the census, restrictions on entry into the United States by people from specified countries — none of these can easily be counted as a high crime and misdemeanor.
The constitutional background also helps explain the game-changing impact of President Trump’s conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. The facts are still emerging, but it is reasonable to worry that the president may have abused his authority in two different ways.
First, he appears to have pressed the leader of a foreign country to investigate a political rival — and thus to interfere with the democratic process in the United States. Second, he appears to have pressed that leader to commence a criminal investigation of two American citizens — and thus to intrude on civil liberty (assuming, as it appears, that the investigation would have been baseless). In the coming weeks, the House of Representatives will have to get clear on exactly what happened here, and also on whether other potential grounds for impeachment warrant serious consideration under the legal standard.
At age 78, Jefferson feared, “Our government is now taking so steady a course, as to shew by what road it will pass to destruction, to wit, by consolidation first; and then corruption, it’s necessary consequence.” Impeachment was meant to be the principal line of defense against that consequence."
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/27/opinion/impeachment-declaration-of-independence.html
Congress appropriated money for aid to Ukraine. Trump said he would not give that money to Ukraine unless they aided him politically by targeting his leading election opponent for investigation. Misusing government funds is certainly impeachable IMHO.
But until we see the actual Articles of Impeachment we cannot accurately answer Paul's question.
DaveSchmidt said:
I do have this question: What did you think about all the caveats, the “buts,” the other other hands, and that concluding wait-and-seeism?
Some I agree with some I don't.
STANV said:
Congress appropriated money for aid to Ukraine. Trump said he would not give that money to Ukraine unless they aided him politically by targeting his leading election opponent for investigation. Misusing government funds is certainly impeachable IMHO.
But until we see the actual Articles of Impeachment we cannot accurately answer Paul's question.
We don't know what they will use, but I don't think they have to investigate long. He has pretty much admitted to several impeachable offenses already.
paulsurovell said:
The House has total discretion on why to impeach. Doesn't have to be a crime, can be about policy disagreements. So let's impeach for policy disagreements that matter. Like quitting treaties designed to prevent nuclear war and address climate change.
No, that's not how it works.
paulsurovell said:
Quid-pro-quo is a loser because there's Biden's tape.
If you read the material in other peoples' posts here, you know that's wrong. "Biden's tape" describes removal of an official who was an obstacle to investigating and fighting corruption.
[Edited to add] I broke Paul's comments up into individual thoughts, to make sure my responses didn't get "lost" in the event Paul decides to respond.
paulsurovell said:
It was an abuse of power to ask for dirt on Biden, but Trump should be censured, not impeached.
It was an abuse of power to use the machinery and assets of the government to gain some advantage in his own re-election campaign. He wanted to be bribed, to receive something of value to him personally, in exchange for carrying out a government act.
That's something that impeachment was put into the constitution to address.
If it bothers you that much, after the House issues Articles of Impeachment the Senate can debate whether to render a verdict of "censure" (after "acquitting" of course).
paulsurovell said:
Questions about Ukraine meddling in the 2016 election are legitimate.
What "meddling" do you say would be looked at? What Trump was talking about, or something else?
And if something else, what exactly?
paulsurovell said:
Some I agree with some I don't.
OK. I admit I was wrong. You didn't misinterpret the article. You just discarded the parts you don't like.
nohero said:
paulsurovell said:
The House has total discretion on why to impeach. Doesn't have to be a crime, can be about policy disagreements. So let's impeach for policy disagreements that matter. Like quitting treaties designed to prevent nuclear war and address climate change.
No, that's not how it works.
How does it work?
nohero said:
paulsurovell said:
Quid-pro-quo is a loser because there's Biden's tape.
If you read the material in other peoples' posts here, you know that's wrong. "Biden's tape" describes removal of an official who was an obstacle to investigating and fighting corruption.
[Edited to add] I broke Paul's comments up into individual thoughts, to make sure my responses didn't get "lost" in the event Paul decides to respond.
Yes, the removal of an official by a quid pro quo.
ml1 said:
paulsurovell said:
Some I agree with some I don't.
OK. I admit I was wrong. You didn't misinterpret the article. You just discarded the parts you don't like.
Why don't you post the excerpts that you like.
paulsurovell said:
nohero said:
paulsurovell said:
Quid-pro-quo is a loser because there's Biden's tape.
If you read the material in other peoples' posts here, you know that's wrong. "Biden's tape" describes removal of an official who was an obstacle to investigating and fighting corruption.
[Edited to add] I broke Paul's comments up into individual thoughts, to make sure my responses didn't get "lost" in the event Paul decides to respond.
Yes, the removal of an official by a quid pro quo.
Shokin's removal was a goal of US and EU foreign policy. An investigation of Biden is a goal of Trump's re-election campaign.
I believe this difference -- between action taken on behalf of a government's goals and action taken on behalf of one's personal goals -- to be significant. I think it's especially significant when those personal goals are pursued using public money.
Paul seems to disagree with this, if I'm understanding him correctly, seeing no significant difference. I'd be interested to hear his reasoning.
nohero said:
paulsurovell said:
Questions about Ukraine meddling in the 2016 election are legitimate.What "meddling" do you say would be looked at? What Trump was talking about, or something else?
And if something else, what exactly?
Efforts by the Ukrainian government to help Hillary and damage Trump. I've been posting about that for more than two years. John Solomon of The Hill, is a regular on Fox and surely has Trump's ear:
In three parts.
Part 1 of 3
The boomerang from the Democratic Party’s failed attempt to connect Donald Trump to Russia’s 2016 election meddling is picking up speed, and its flight path crosses right through Moscow’s pesky neighbor, Ukraine. That is where there is growing evidence a foreign power was asked, and in some cases tried, to help Hillary Clinton.
In its most detailed account yet, the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington says a Democratic National Committee (DNC) insider during the 2016 election solicited dirt on Donald Trump’s campaign chairman and even tried to enlist the country's president to help.
In written answers to questions, Ambassador Valeriy Chaly's office says DNC contractor Alexandra Chalupa sought information from the Ukrainian government on Paul Manafort’s dealings inside the country in hopes of forcing the issue before Congress.
Chalupa later tried to arrange for Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko to comment on Manafort’s Russian ties on a U.S. visit during the 2016 campaign, the ambassador said.
Chaly says that, at the time of the contacts in 2016, the embassy knew Chalupa primarily as a Ukrainian American activist and learned only later of her ties to the DNC. He says the embassy considered her requests an inappropriate solicitation of interference in the U.S. election.
“The Embassy got to know Ms. Chalupa because of her engagement with Ukrainian and other diasporas in Washington D.C., and not in her DNC capacity. We’ve learned about her DNC involvement later,” Chaly said in a statement issued by his embassy. “We were surprised to see Alexandra’s interest in Mr. Paul Manafort’s case. It was her own cause. The Embassy representatives unambiguously refused to get involved in any way, as we were convinced that this is a strictly U.S. domestic matter.”
“All ideas floated by Alexandra were related to approaching a Member of Congress with a purpose to initiate hearings on Paul Manafort or letting an investigative journalist ask President Poroshenko a question about Mr. Manafort during his public talk in Washington, D.C.,” the ambassador explained.
Reached by phone last week, Chalupa said she was too busy to talk. She did not respond to email and phone messages seeking subsequent comment.
John Solomon on Ukraine meddling in 2016
Part 2 of 3:
Chaly’s written answers mark the most direct acknowledgement by Ukraine’s government that an American tied to the Democratic Party sought the country’s help in the 2016 election, and they confirm the main points of a January 2017 story by Politico on Chalupa’s efforts.
In that story, the embassy was broadly quoted as denying interference in the election and suggested Chalupa’s main reason for contacting the ambassador’s office was to organize an event celebrating female leaders.
The fresh statement comes several months after a Ukrainian court ruled that the country’s National Anti-Corruption Bureau, closely aligned with the U.S. Embassy in Kiev, and a parliamentarian named Serhiy Leshchenko wrongly interfered in the 2016 American election by releasing documents related to Manafort.
The acknowledgement by Kiev’s embassy, plus newly released testimony, suggests the Ukrainian efforts to influence the U.S. election had some intersections in Washington as well.
Nellie Ohr, wife of senior U.S. Justice Department official Bruce Ohr, acknowledged in congressional testimony that, while working for the Clinton-hired research firm Fusion GPS, she researched Trump's and Manafort’s ties to Russia and learned that Leshchenko, the Ukrainian lawmaker, was providing dirt to Fusion.
Fusion also paid British intelligence operative Christopher Steele, whose anti-Trump dossier the FBI used as primary evidence to support its request to spy on Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.
In addition, I wrote last month that the Obama White House invited Ukrainian law enforcement officials to a meeting in January 2016 as Trump rose in the polls on his improbable path to the presidency. The meeting led to U.S. requests to the Ukrainians to help investigate Manafort, setting in motion a series of events that led to the Ukrainians leaking the documents about Manafort in May 2016.
The DNC’s embassy contacts add a new dimension, though. Chalupa discussed in the 2017 Politico article about her efforts to dig up dirt on Trump and Manafort, including at the Ukrainian Embassy.
Federal Election Commission records show Chalupa’s firm, Chalupa & Associates, was paid $71,918 by the DNC during the 2016 election cycle.
Exactly how the Ukrainian Embassy responded to Chalupa’s inquiries remains in dispute.
Chaly’s statement says the embassy rebuffed her requests for information: “No documents related to Trump campaign or any individuals involved in the campaign have been passed to Ms. Chalupa or the DNC neither from the Embassy nor via the Embassy. No documents exchange was even discussed.”
But Andrii Telizhenko, a former political officer who worked under Chaly from December 2015 through June 2016, told me he was instructed by the ambassador and his top deputy to meet with Chalupa in March 2016 and to gather whatever dirt Ukraine had in its government files about Trump and Manafort.
Telizhenko said that when he was told by the embassy to arrange the meeting, both Chaly and the ambassador’s top deputy identified Chalupa “as someone working for the DNC and trying to get Clinton elected.”
Over lunch at a Washington restaurant, Chalupa told Telizhenko in stark terms what she hoped the Ukrainians could provide the DNC and the Clinton campaign, according to his account.
“She said the DNC wanted to collect evidence that Trump, his organization and Manafort were Russian assets, working to hurt the U.S. and working with [Russian President Vladimir] Putin against the U.S. interests. She indicated if we could find the evidence they would introduce it in Congress in September and try to build a case that Trump should be removed from the ballot, from the election,” he recalled.
After the meeting, Telizhenko said he became concerned about the legality of using his country’s assets to help an American political party win a U.S. election. But he proceeded with his assignment.
Telizhenko said that as he began his research, he discovered that Fusion GPS was nosing around Ukraine, seeking similar information, and he believed they, too, worked for the Democrats.
As a former aide inside the general prosecutor’s office in Kiev, Telizhenko used contacts with intelligence, police and prosecutors across the country to secure information connecting Russian figures to assistance on some of the Trump organization’s real estate deals overseas, including a tower in Toronto.
Telizhenko said he did not want to provide the intelligence he collected directly to Chalupa and instead handed the materials to Chaly: “I told him what we were doing was illegal, that it was unethical doing this as diplomats.” He said the ambassador told him he would handle the matter and had opened a second channel back in Ukraine to continue finding dirt on Trump.
John Solomon on Ukraine meddling in 2016 part 3 of 3:
Telizhenko said he also was instructed by his bosses to meet with an American journalist researching Manafort’s ties to Ukraine.
About a month later, he said his relationship with the ambassador soured and, by June 2016, he was ordered to return to Ukraine. There, he reported his concerns about the embassy’s contacts with the Democrats to the former prosecutor general’s office and officials in the Poroshenko administration: “Everybody already knew what was going on and told me it had been approved at the highest levels.”
Telizhenko said he never was able to confirm whether the information he collected for Chalupa was delivered to her, the DNC or the Clinton campaign.
Chalupa, meanwhile, continued to build a case that Manafort and Trump were tied to Russia.
In April 2016, she attended an international symposium where she reported back to the DNC that she had met with 68 Ukrainian investigative journalists to talk about Manafort. She also wrote that she invited American reporter Michael Isikoff to speak with her. Isikoff wrote some of the seminal stories tying Manafort to Ukraine and Trump to Russia; he later wrote a book making a case for Russian collusion.
“A lot more coming down the pipe,” Chalupa wrote a top DNC official on May 3, 2016, recounting her effort to educate Ukrainian journalists and Isikoff about Manafort.
Then she added, “More offline tomorrow since there is a big Trump component you and Lauren need to be aware of that will hit in next few weeks and something I’m working on you should be aware of.”
Less than a month later, the “black ledger” identifying payments to Manafort was announced in Ukraine, forcing Manafort to resign as Trump’s campaign chairman and eventually to face criminal prosecution for improper foreign lobbying.
DNC officials have suggested in the past that Chalupa’s efforts were personal, not officially on behalf of the DNC. But Chalupa’s May 2016 email clearly informed a senior DNC official that she was “digging into Manafort” and she suspected someone was trying to hack into her email account.
Chaly over the years has tried to portray his role as Ukraine’s ambassador in Washington as one of neutrality during the 2016 election. But in August 2016 he raised eyebrows in some diplomatic circles when he wrote an op-ed for The Hill skewering Trump for some of his comments on Russia. “Trump’s comments send wrong message to world,” Chaly’s article blared in the headline.
In his statement to me, Chaly said he wrote the op-ed because he had been solicited for his views by The Hill’s opinion team.
Chaly’s office also acknowledged that a month after the op-ed, President Poroshenko met with then-candidate Clinton during a stop in New York. The office said the ambassador requested a similar meeting with Trump but it didn’t get organized.
Though Chaly and Telizhenko disagree on what Ukraine did after it got Chalupa’s request, they confirm that a paid contractor of the DNC solicited their government’s help to find dirt on Trump that could sway the 2016 election.
For a Democratic Party that spent more than two years building the now disproven theory that Trump colluded with Russia to hijack the 2016 election, the tale of the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington feels just like a speeding political boomerang.
John Solomon is an award-winning investigative journalist whose work over the years has exposed U.S. and FBI intelligence failures before the Sept. 11 attacks, federal scientists’ misuse of foster children and veterans in drug experiments, and numerous cases of political corruption. He serves as an investigative columnist and executive vice president for video at The Hill. Follow him on Twitter @jsolomonReports.
John Solomon - surely one of the most dishonest "journalists" of the last 20 years.
You can sure pick your sources.
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Excerpts or no excerpts, I wouldn’t mind hearing Paul elaborate on why he thought the Salon article was a great take on what drives the anti-anti-Trump left.