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Impeachment inquiry


TheStatGuy

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Discrediting Bolton Won’t Be Easy for Team Trump: https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/01/trump-impeachment-trial-john-bolton-not-easy-to-discredit/

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I’m with the Bush–Cheney team, and I’m here to stop the count.”

Those words were bellowed by John Bolton in a Tallahassee library in December 2000, when he was part of a team of Republican lawyers trying to stop the Florida recount of votes cast in the presidential race between George W. Bush and Al Gore. Until now, it was the most famous utterance President Trump’s former national-security adviser had ever made. That’s about to change with the looming publication of his book, due out in March, about serving in the Trump administration. It’s even vaguely possible Bolton could make an appearance in Trump’s impeachment trial this week.

Still, it’s worth considering the irony of Bolton’s earlier words. The Bush–Gore Florida recount wasn’t the beginning of our divided times, but it was a major inflection point. It pushed the internal combustion engine of partisanship into a higher gear, and we’ve never really revved back down. Now, Bolton is in the strange position of not fitting comfortably on either side of the partisan divide.

The gist of Bolton’s story is that the president’s story is not true. According to an account of the book’s contents reported in the New York Times, Bolton heard Trump say he was withholding aid to the Ukrainians pending an investigation into Biden and other Democrats. (One wonders who these other Democrats were.)

The Times story says the book also contradicts statements about who knew what and when inside the administration, no doubt causing heartburn for acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, Attorney General William Barr, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, off-book fixer Rudy Giuliani, and, of course, all of the GOP senators determined to avoid hearing from witnesses in the impeachment trial.

The response from Trump World is predictable. Bolton is a disgruntled liar, bitter over being fired and desperate to sell books. I have no doubt Bolton, a former colleague of mine at the American Enterprise Institute, is disgruntled. I’m also sure he very much wants to sell books. But I don’t buy the lying part.

Bolton may be many of the things his detractors claim, but he’s also an incredibly adept lawyer and bureaucratic infighter. On different occasions when National Security Council staffers Fiona Hill and Tim Morrison were dismayed by what the president was up to with Ukraine, Bolton’s advice was to “tell the lawyers” (in Morrison’s words). When Hill told Bolton that she’d heard Gordon Sondland — Trump’s EU ambassador and administration point person on the Ukrainian scheme — tell the Ukrainians that he and Mulvaney would arrange a White House meeting in exchange for an investigation of Biden, Bolton replied, “You go and tell [NSC counsel John Eisenberg] that I am not part of whatever drug deal Sondland and Mulvaney are cooking up on this, and you go and tell him what you’ve heard and what I’ve said.”

The notion that Bolton, a legendary note-taker, would volunteer to testify (if subpoenaed) only to perjure himself is absurd. That he would make false allegations in a book without contemporaneous corroboration seems far-fetched as well. There’s only one way to know, though: Have Bolton tell his version under oath.

As of this writing, the ink on the official “Destroy Bolton” narrative hasn’t dried yet, but an early contender is the charge that this is all just a replay of the tactics Democrats used to try to derail Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination. Promoting his new podcast, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas tweeted, “Last week we had Lev Parnas on Maddow & ‘secret tapes’; this week, the ‘Bolton revelations.’ It’s the same approach Dems & media followed during the Kavanaugh hearing.”

Except it’s not at all. The only thing similar about the two controversies is that new allegations kept inconveniencing politicians who wanted to move on. By that standard, nearly every unfolding Washington scandal is like the Kavanaugh hearings.

Putting aside the hilarity of John “Stop the Count” Bolton being a willing pawn of the Democrats, there were no recorded telephone calls confirming elements of the allegations against Kavanaugh. None of the Kavanaugh accusations had the sort of corroboration and material evidence already in the public record in the impeachment case. And Trump’s former national-security adviser is relying not on a decades-old unverifiable recollection but on his memory of events from a few months ago.

The biggest difference between how the Senate handled the Kavanaugh smear campaign and how it’s handling the impeachment case is this: With Kavanaugh, Senate Republicans bent over backward to hear from witnesses; with Trump, they’ve gone into a defensive crouch to avoid it. And that may not be enough any longer.

On one side I want this Senate Trial to be over, on the other side it would be interesting to hear what Mr. Bolton has to say under oath.

 

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3 hours ago, Muda69 said:

Discrediting Bolton Won’t Be Easy for Team Trump: https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/01/trump-impeachment-trial-john-bolton-not-easy-to-discredit/

On one side I want this Senate Trial to be over, on the other side it would be interesting to hear what Mr. Bolton has to say under oath.

 

Nonetheless, does anyone even know the real text of the manuscript?  I can picture the text describing the President as hoping to hold funds contingent on the Ukes starting an investigation but in the end, he didn't because the Ukranians got their funding.  So in essence, there was no crime.  Yet, even if Bolton is allowed to testify, it still doesn't rise to the level of impeachment for "Obstruction of Congress" or "Abuse of Power" according to Dershowitz.....  

https://pjmedia.com/trending/lol-democrat-just-accidentally-admitted-house-impeachment-case-is-evidence-free/

There was an unintended moment of levity during a break at the Senate impeachment trial of President Trump on Tuesday.

Connecticut Senator Richard Blumenthal, one of the designated "spin doctors" sent to the microphones to clean up any damage to the Democrats' message caused by President Trump's impeachment attorneys, dropped an unintentional truth bomb during a media interview.

 

C-SPAN broke away from the proceedings in time to hear Blumenthal say this about the Trump defense lawyers:

 

It was a fact-free summation of a case bereft of evidence – we need the evidence. We need the witnesses and documents... They may have the votes at this moment, but I hope my colleagues will look themselves in the mirror ... [W]hat we want is the truth, not some quid pro quo on the witnesses...
Blumenthal's plea for witnesses and documents — "we need the evidence" — only underscores how hastily the House put their "bereft of evidence" case together.

In other words "We just listened to the Republicans summarizing the Democrats case which is bereft of evidence, but we need the evidence"  

Isn't the burden of proof normally on the prosecution?

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4 hours ago, swordfish said:

Nonetheless, does anyone even know the real text of the manuscript?  I can picture the text describing the President as hoping to hold funds contingent on the Ukes starting an investigation but in the end, he didn't because the Ukranians got their funding.  So in essence, there was no crime.  Yet, even if Bolton is allowed to testify, it still doesn't rise to the level of impeachment for "Obstruction of Congress" or "Abuse of Power" according to Dershowitz.....  

https://pjmedia.com/trending/lol-democrat-just-accidentally-admitted-house-impeachment-case-is-evidence-free/

There was an unintended moment of levity during a break at the Senate impeachment trial of President Trump on Tuesday.

Connecticut Senator Richard Blumenthal, one of the designated "spin doctors" sent to the microphones to clean up any damage to the Democrats' message caused by President Trump's impeachment attorneys, dropped an unintentional truth bomb during a media interview.

 

C-SPAN broke away from the proceedings in time to hear Blumenthal say this about the Trump defense lawyers:

 

It was a fact-free summation of a case bereft of evidence – we need the evidence. We need the witnesses and documents... They may have the votes at this moment, but I hope my colleagues will look themselves in the mirror ... [W]hat we want is the truth, not some quid pro quo on the witnesses...
Blumenthal's plea for witnesses and documents — "we need the evidence" — only underscores how hastily the House put their "bereft of evidence" case together.

In other words "We just listened to the Republicans summarizing the Democrats case which is bereft of evidence, but we need the evidence"  

Isn't the burden of proof normally on the prosecution?

Image may contain: 1 person, possible text that says '"A PRESIDENT WHO DOESN'T COMPLY WITH CONGRESSIONAL REQUESTS FOR INFORMATION IS SUBJECT TO IMPEACHMENT." -LINDSEY GRAHAM, 1998 OCCUPY DEMOCRATS'

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The Senate will crush the Democrat coup within the next few days. The Democrats and their Fake News propaganda will return to their "snuggy" blanket of Russia.

John Bolton joins the list of Democrat super hero's which includes:

Michael Avenatti

Robert Mueller

Michael Wolf

Christine Blasey Ford

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43 minutes ago, gonzoron said:

You can make it up. That's what Cruz did. It's lies.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/lev-parnas-barred-from-impeachment-trial-makes-himself-its-star-anyway/2020/01/29/2cb47062-42d2-11ea-aa6a-083d01b3ed18_story.html

He was headed to the impeachment trial, where neither he nor anyone else has been called as a witness. He already suspected he would not be allowed inside. Though his lawyer, Joseph Bondy, had procured tickets from the office of Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), Parnas was wearing an electronic monitoring device around his ankle because he was under house arrest in Florida, charged with campaign finance violations. A New York federal judge permitted the travel but denied Bondy’s request to have his client’s monitor temporarily removed. Senate rules prohibited most electronic devices from the trial.

FAKE NEWS.......?

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https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/480617-ted-cruz-backtracks-after-lev-parnas-lawyer-calls-senators-tweet-fake-news

Parnas’s attorney, Joseph Bondy, responded to Cruz’s tweet calling him “Fake news Ted Cruz,” clarifying that Parnas did not get "ejected" from the trial, as he was not allowed in in the first place. His lawyers did attend, and Parnas later held a press conference and "unity walk."

 

Parnas also wasn't invited by Schumer to attend the trial, though as a New York constituent he did request seats for the gallery from Schumer's office.

“Like many other New York constituents, Mr. Bondy reached out and asked for gallery tickets, and we said yes,” a spokesman for Schumer said. 

Cruz went on to clarify hours later, once the Senate broke for dinner, admitting that information he was given in the Senate cloakroom was “slightly inaccurate.” He did not take down the original tweet.

“Instead of his being 'ejected' from the gallery, Parnas was told he wouldn’t be allowed into the gallery w/ his ankle bracelet, and so he didn’t actually try to go in,” Cruz explained. 

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16 minutes ago, TrojanDad said:

I don't give a %$#@ how your register...you are absolutely a liberal.  Don't see too many GOP libs.

Your resume compared to "Dersh's....yea....that's close.

Why so bitter man?  

Doesn't change the fact that he is a hypocritical media whore.

I'm pro life.  Don't pretend to know me.  Stick to the Dersh Bag.

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4 minutes ago, TrojanDad said:

I’ll continue to judge you from your same old repeated sarcastic bitter posts.  Don’t like it?  Eat dirt!

When it comes to trusting in someone knowing the law, I will trust a Dersh Bag over a DBag every time.  Got it?

Looks like you've got you panties in a twist.

I'll let you figure that out because I don't think I can take too many more of your triggered, off topic, personalized insults.

Your refusal to acknowledge Dershowitz's hypocritical stance on impeachment tells me all I need to know. 

Sad.

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A conservative viewpoint concerning Mr. Dershowitz's "hypocrisy":  https://spectator.org/dershowitz-defends-democracy/

 

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...

It has been both amusing and painful to watch videos surfacing of politicians who were speaking out at the time of the Clinton impeachment to make the exact opposite point of what they make now in the current trial. It has been refreshing to see at work, however, a true practitioner of the Socratic mode, who has exhibited the kind of consistency and principle that our Constitution deserves — Alan Dershowitz.

In his many years of teaching law at Harvard, he employed the mode of persistent, logic-based questioning to train some of America’s most brilliant students in law. His love for the political freedoms protected by the Constitution spark a constant passion the energy of which is evident in all that he does.

His motivations in the current impeachment trial come not from partisan politics. He has identified and registered as a Democrat and prominently endorsed Obama in both of his presidential runs.

His main concern was evident only a few years ago in his public statements cautioning opponents of Hillary Clinton against trying to use criminal charges to fight their political battles against her. He warned us that use of power in a democracy is almost always controversial and that we must accept the discipline of being able to effect change through public discourse, through the slow and dedicated work needed to change peoples’ minds on a large scale.

As any student of law knows, we are not far removed in time or location from settling our political controversies through force. The losers have had their head put on the chopping block or the guillotine or have been offered as a target for the firing squad or the KGB pistol. Under the threat of criminalizing politics, not one of our freedoms will survive, for supporting the wrong cause even in writing or in speech would later — but more likely sooner — become criminal as well.

Dershowitz did not support Trump in the 2016 election. But even before the inauguration, passionate calls to impeach Trump were heard, and soon Dershowitz began to teach on the same theme again.

The theme is consistent. The Framers deliberately set a very high bar for impeachment by rejecting “maladministration” as the criterion for this process and accepting treason, bribery, and high crimes and misdemeanors instead. Their point was that this process should not be like a Parliamentary vote of no confidence, in which an administration is turned out for losing policy support, but rather only for crimes against the law. And not just any law, but only laws whose violation would directly and gravely injure our political system.

Thus, the Framers reserved impeachment only for the most serious of violations of core laws, well known and gravely important for the ongoing trust of citizens in their government.

In the midst of this bombardment of modern sophistry that has been the substance of so much of this long and grinding effort to remove Donald Trump from office, I had the pleasure of watching Dershowitz on TV as part of the president’s defense team. Speaking from the well of the Senate, he called on the senators to see that their most compelling duty is to save American democracy for our future generations. Articles of impeachment that never reference defined law are not worthy of a democracy. Vigorous exercise of power by our political opponents always seems abusive. Our democratic discipline is to translate our feelings about these matters into causes that will command the minds, hearts, and votes of our fellow citizens and remedy the problem at the ballot box.

Prosecution under vague and general terms was the weapon of tyrants in our English–American law history. The long fight for democracy insisted on removing such weapons from the political fray. From the Magna Carta to the Petition of Right to the Bill of Rights, we have discarded such tools as the general warrant, the bill of attainder, and laws written after the fact to target retroactively behavior we don’t like. That we must not instantly be gratified in our political passions is the cost of freedom.

Last night, Dershowitz spoke a classic truth. Socrates sacrificed his life for it. Everyone who has fought for this country has risked his or her life for that truth. Hearing Dershowitz speak out to the future about the principles of our democracy was bracing and comforting all at once. We must reject the new sophistry and not be of those who flatter the state to grab our power. Let us hear the call and once again commit to our great principles.

 

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Republican Senators Say the Truth Is Irrelevant in Evaluating the Gravity of Trump's Misconduct: https://reason.com/2020/01/29/republican-senators-say-the-truth-is-irrelevant-in-evaluating-the-gravity-of-trumps-misconduct/

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Donald Trump's lawyers have vigorously disputed the facts alleged in the articles of impeachment against him. But their fallback, bottom-line argument, which is especially important now that former National Security Adviser John Bolton seems prepared to confirm the aid-for-investigations quid pro quo at the heart of the House's case, is that the president's conduct would not constitute an impeachable offense even if he did everything the Democrats say he did. Leaving aside the questionable merits of proceeding with a hasty, party-line impeachment less than a year before Trump faces re-election, that position sets a dangerous precedent that Republicans may come to regret.

Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, a member of Trump's legal team who used to agree with the scholarly consensus that impeachment does not require a criminal offense, changed his mind in 2018, then changed it again this year. His current position is that impeachment requires "criminal-like behavior akin to treason and bribery," which for some reason does not include extorting the Ukrainian government into announcing an investigation of a political rival by delaying congressionally approved military aid.

Republican senators who dismiss the significance of Bolton's potential testimony are leaning hard on that dubious conclusion. "I don't think anything he says changes the facts," Majority Whip John Thune (R–Thune) told CNN. "I think people kind of know what the fact pattern is….There's already that evidence on the record." Sen Kevin Cramer (R–N.D.) concurred: "I think Bolton sounds like a lot of the other witnesses, frankly. I don't know that he's got a lot new to add to it."

Thune and Cramer, in other words, think Democrats have already established that Trump used the military aid as leverage to obtain the "favor" he wanted from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy: "a major investigation into the Bidens," as the president himself put it. But although Trump and his lawyers have strenuously denied that nexus, Thune and Cramer say it does not matter.

Sens. Roger Wicker (R–Miss.), Roy Blunt (R–Mo.), Tim Scott (R–S.C.), John Cornyn (R–Texas), and Thom Tillis (R–N.C.) agreed that the quid pro quo is irrelevant to the question of whether Trump committed an impeachable offense. "I don't think the testimony of Ambassador Bolton would be helpful because I basically am in agreement with the very scholarly approach that Mr. Dershowitz took that there's no article there that's grounds for impeachment and removal," Wicker told CNN.

These senators' incuriosity is more than a little troubling given the details of the accusations against Trump. Here are the key alleged facts, which for the sake of this argument we have to assume are true:

1. Trump did not really care about rooting out official corruption in Ukraine or any other legitimate foreign policy goal. He pressed the Ukrainian government to announce an investigation of former Vice President Joe Biden because he hoped to improve his chances of winning another term by discrediting the Democratic presidential contender he views as the biggest threat to his re-election.

2. The claim that Biden improperly used his influence as vice president to protect his son from a Ukrainian corruption investigation, as Trump alleged in his July 25 phone call with Zelenskiy, is transparently spurious. In pressing for the removal of Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin, Biden was simply implementing Obama administration policy, which was consistent with a widely held view that Shokin was ineffectual and corrupt. Hence there was no legitimate reason for the Ukrainian government to investigate Biden.

3. Trump was so keen on tarnishing Biden that he jeopardized Ukraine's ability to defend itself against Russian aggression and compromised U.S. foreign policy goals, to the dismay of all his top advisers and members of Congress from both parties.

4. Trump was so keen on tarnishing Biden that he did not care whether his aid freeze was legal, which it wasn't, or whether he was unconstitutionally usurping the legislative branch's authority to appropriate taxpayer money, which he was.

5. To cover up this unseemly scheme, Trump lied over and over again about what he did and why, and he stonewalled the House's attempt to investigate the matter by refusing to provide relevant documents and telling current and former administration officials that they should not testify.

Some of these claims are well-established, while some rely mainly on circumstantial evidence and debatable inferences that could be reinforced by Bolton's testimony. But Thune et al. say the truth of these allegations is irrelevant for the purpose of deciding whether Trump's removal is constitutionally justified. Or as Dershowitz put it, "Nothing in the Bolton revelations—even if true—would rise to the level of an abuse of power or an impeachable offense."

Suppose Bolton testified that Trump told him, in so many words, that he was blocking the military aid to Ukraine solely because he wanted to undermine Biden as a presidential candidate by making him look corrupt. In Dershowitz's view, apparently, that would not constitute even an abuse of power, let alone an impeachable offense.

The Democrats say Trump abused his power for personal gain by encouraging a foreign government to unfairly impugn the integrity of a political rival. To further that goal, they say, he violated the law (the Impoundment Control Act), the Constitution (by disregarding the separation of powers), and his oath of office (in which he promised to "faithfully execute" his office and "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States"). If the allegations against him are true, Trump also undermined the rule of law in Ukraine by encouraging Zelenskiy to abuse his power, since an investigation of Biden was justified only by Trump's domestic political interests.

This is the Republican response, which we should keep in mind the next time a Democrat occupies the White House: So what?

 

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