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bountyofbeads · 5 years

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/what-you-missed-while-not-watching-day-7-of-the-impeachment-inquiry-drama/2019/09/30/24a38cf0-e38c-11e9-a6e8-8759c5c7f608_story.html

Here’s a guide to standout moments from another newsy day in the impeachment drama engulfing the Trump presidency. This does not include Mike Pompeo flying to Italy with Nazi Sébastian Gorka flying aboard the taxpayer trip:🤢🤬🤬🤬

What you missed while not watching Day 7 of the impeachment inquiry drama

By Michael Scherr | Published September 30 at 8:15 PM | Washington Post | Posted September 30, 2019 |

Here’s a guide to standout moments from another newsy day in the drama engulfing the Trump presidency:

6:08 a.m. Seven days into the impeachment morass, former government officials have begun to speak up without hewing to partisan talking points. On Sunday, the new face was President Trump’s former homeland security adviser Thomas Bossert, who went on ABC News to say he was “deeply disturbed” by Trump’s call to Ukraine. He also said it was “far from proven” that Trump withheld foreign aid as part of an effort to dig up dirt on former vice president Joe Biden. Today the new voice is former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine John Herbst, a veteran of the George W. Bush administration, who tries to drop some historical context on NPR listeners. “This is highly abnormal,” Herbst says of Trump’s July call with Ukraine.

6:12 a.m. Herbst also contradicts the Trump argument that Biden did something wrong by pushing to fire Viktor Shokin, a Ukrainian prosecutor who once investigated a company that employed Biden's son. Herbst says Shokin was an untrustworthy “corrupt prosecutor,” who the United States, the European Union, the International Monetary Fund and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development all wanted out of the job. Herbst also notes that the Shokin affidavit saying Biden’s concerns over his son’s company caused his firing was written to aid attorneys for Dmytro Firtash, an oligarch U.S. officials are seeking to extradite on a warrant of bribery. “The folks who are pushing this conspiracy theory are citing this as proof,” Herbst says of the affidavit. “And in fact it undermines their position.”

8:32 a.m. Kate Bedingfield, Biden’s deputy campaign manager, is asked a question that will not go away anytime soon. Does the former vice president have any regrets about not keeping son Hunter Biden from working for the Ukrainian firm while Biden oversaw Ukrainian policy at the White House? “No, because he didn’t do anything wrong,” Bedingfield says of the younger Biden on CNN’s “New Day.”

8:46 a.m. Former senator Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), who quit after undermining his reelection hopes by opposing Trump, calls on other Republican senators “to risk your careers in favor of your principles.” In a Washington Post opinion piece, he describes removing Trump from office through impeachment as a tough call, but argues that opposing Trump’s reelection is a moral necessity. “Trust me when I say that you can go elsewhere for a job,” he writes. “But you cannot go elsewhere for a soul.”

9:44 a.m. Attorneys for the whistleblower who launched this process share a letter sent Saturday to the Director of National Intelligence. “The purpose of this letter is to formally notify you of serious concerns we have regarding our client’s personal safety,” it reads. The concerns were created by Trump. “I want to know . . . who’s the person that gave the whistleblower the information, because that’s close to a spy,” the president said Thursday at an event in New York. “You know what we used to do in the old days when we were smart? Right? With spies and treason, right? We used to handle them a little differently than we do now.”

10:36 a.m. The president’s 2016 opponent Hillary Clinton takes a stab at Trump’s Twitter crown with a seven-word tweet devoid of context. “The president is a corrupt human tornado,” it reads. She premiered the meteorological epithet last week with CBS News.

11:07 a.m. Letters have become as hip as tweets. Republican Sens. Charles E. Grassley (Iowa) and Ron Johnson (Wis.), release a new missive, dated Friday. The senators ask Attorney General William P. Barr to reveal any Justice Department investigation into alleged efforts by Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign or her allies to get Ukrainians to help dig up dirt on Trump and his former campaign manager, Paul Manafort. “Ukrainian efforts, abetted by a U.S. political party, to interfere in the 2016 election should not be ignored,” the senators write. Ukrainian officials have denied any effort to help Clinton in the 2016 election.

11:18 a.m. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) goes on CNBC to confirm what his office has previously made clear. If the House impeaches Trump, the Senate must hold a trial under Senate rule and precedent. “I would have no choice but to take it up,” McConnell says. This will come as a disappointment to Diamond and Silk, who call themselves “Trump’s Most Loyal Supporters” on Twitter. A few hours ago, they called on the GOP to “enforce the rules to end the games,” by which they meant McConnell should ignore the rules and not take up impeachment.

11:21 a.m. Ukraine’s former top law enforcement official Yuri Lutsenko, who took over after Shokin was fired, recounts yet again the efforts by Trump to pressure him to investigate the Biden family. In an interview in Kiev with the Los Angeles Times, Lutsenko says he told Trump lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani there was no evidence that the former vice president or his son had broken Ukrainian laws. “I told him I could not start an investigation just for the interests of an American official,” he said. This restates comments he made to The Post last week. Earlier this year, Lutsenko told a conservative columnist for The Hill newspaper that he would be happy to share what he knew with Barr.

12:36 p.m. Trump’s Twitter tally today stands at 13 so far. He has denounced the “witch hunt,” called the whistleblower “Fake Whistleblower” and declared “the Bidens were corrupt!” He also raised the possibility that Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.) should be arrested “for treason” for using words Trump never spoke to dramatize the president’s call to Ukraine. Trump tweets #fakewhistleblower in an effort to get the hashtag trending, but at the moment the top trending tags include #civilwarsignup and #civilwar2, both references to another tweet the president sent Sunday quoting a pastor warning of a “civil warlike fracture” if Trump is ever removed from office. Most of these tweets are not from Team Trump.

12:49 p.m. Another data point from the political twitter wars: Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) has about 25,700 retweets on his reaction to Trump’s civil war tweet, which reads, “@realDonaldTrump I have never imagined such a quote to be repeated by a President. This is beyond repugnant.” Trump’s original tweet, by contrast, only has 17,200 retweets.

2:39 p.m. In an Oval Office pool spray, Trump makes television of his morning tweets. “We’re trying to find out about a whistleblower,” Trump says. This may run counter to the whistleblower protections that are codified in law and rule. “In recognition of the importance of whistleblowing and whistleblowers to the effectiveness and efficiency of government, whistleblowing is protected by Federal laws, policies and regulations,” reads a Web page maintained by the Director of National Intelligence. “These protections ensure that lawful whistleblowers are protected from reprisal as a result of their Protected Disclosure.”

3:05 p.m. A national poll by Quinnipiac University finds that the share of American voters who support impeaching Trump has grown from 37 percent to 47 percent over one week. Among closely watched independents, the share opposing impeachment fell from 58 percent to 50 percent over the same period, while the share supporting impeachment rose from 34 percent to 42 percent. In a separate question, voters support the impeachment inquiry of Trump by a margin of 52 percent to 45 percent. That number closely tracks with Trump’s overall approval in the poll, with 53 percent disapproving of the way he is handling his job and 41 percent approving.

3:30 p.m. Schiff signs a fundraising text for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. “Rest assured I won’t back down from holding the president accountable, and neither will my Democratic colleagues,” he writes. “That’s why I’m reaching out.” The ask is $5.

3:55 p.m. The House Intelligence, Oversight and Foreign Affairs committees release a subpoena demanding documents from Giuliani and three of his business associates. The documents concern 23 separate items, including communications about potential meetings with Barr or any of his associates.

4 p.m. CNN releases new national polling that closely tracks the Quinnipiac numbers. Young people are particularly drawn to the effort, with 65 percent younger than 35 saying they want to impeach and remove Trump from office, compared with 43 percent who felt that way in May.

4:07 p.m. The afternoon news dump begins. The Wall Street Journal reports that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo took part in the July phone call between Trump and the new president of Ukraine. The source is a senior State Department official.

4:19 p.m. The New York Times reports that Trump pushed Australia’s prime minister to help gather information that he hopes will discredit the investigation by former special counsel Robert S. Mueller III. The sources are two American officials with knowledge of the call. Australian officials tipped off the FBI in 2016 to alleged Russian overtures to a Trump campaign foreign policy adviser. The Russians were said to have boasted about having dirt on Clinton.

5:11 p.m. The Post reports that Barr has held private meetings overseas with foreign intelligence officials seeking their help in a Justice Department inquiry that Trump hopes will discredit U.S. intelligence analysis of Russian interference in the 2016 election. This includes overtures to British, Australian and Italian officials. The sources are people familiar with the matter.

What you missed while not watching Day 3 of President Trump’s impeachment drama

Acting director of national intelligence Joseph Maguire testifies before the House Intelligence Committee on Capitol Hill on Thursday. (Melina Mara/The Washington Post)

By Michael Scherr | Published September 26, 2019 | Washington Post| Posted September 30, 2019 |

This is what you missed if you weren’t watching Day 3 of the impeachment inquiry into President Trump:

6:07 a.m. A weary nation awakens to find its combatants emerging from cable news makeup chairs, ready for battle. It’s been two days since Democrats announced they would pursue the impeachment of President Trump, and one day since the White House released call records showing Trump had urged Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to help find dirt on a political rival. Today, the acting director of national intelligence will testify, and there are already reports that the whistleblower complaint at the center of the Ukraine scandal has been declassified and will be released shortly. Here we go.

6:33 a.m. Impeachment is legally prescribed by the Constitution, but political in practice and therefore made for TV. The judges and jurors all hold elected office. They answer to the American voters, most of whom have better things to do right now, like make breakfast and get their kids out the door. Morning Joe talks about Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) saying Wednesday that the whistleblower allegations against Trump are “very troubling.” Fox and Friends plays clips of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) opposing President Bill Clinton’s impeachment in 1998. “It doesn’t matter about facts. It doesn’t matter about truth,” says Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) in an appearance on the show. He means that Democrats have no scruples.

8:03 a.m. Starting the day at his Fifth Avenue penthouse, Trump fires off a fusillade of tweets, landing faster than they can be read. He wants people to know what his pundit friends, family and Republican operatives think. All seem to agree it is perfectly fine for Trump to ask Ukraine’s leader to help the Justice Department and his personal attorney investigate a rival candidate for president, as the phone call summary revealed Wednesday. First daughter Ivanka Trump is proud of her president. Vice President Pence thinks Trump “has been completely vindicated.” Former daytime talk show host Geraldo Rivera suggests Trump’s reelection is now more likely. “STICK TOGETHER, PLAY THEIR GAME, AND FIGHT HARD REPUBLICANS. OUR COUNTRY IS AT STAKE!” reads one Trump tweet, which is later deleted.

8:41 a.m. The House Intelligence Committee drops the whistleblower repo rt. The complaint confirms, with detailed notation, the outlines of charges Democrats have leveled against Trump. The central allegation is that the president is “using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country in the 2020 U.S. election.” In a new disclosure, the document describes a political effort by unnamed senior White House officials to “lock down” all records of the phone call between Trump and Ukraine’s president by moving paper records to a “codeword-level” computer system. It also describes separate alleged efforts by the Trump administration to get Ukraine to “play ball” in the spring. It provides a detailed analysis of the internal Ukrainian politics Trump has allegedly been trying to manipulate for months.

9:13 a.m. As everyone struggles to make sense of the document, Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.) opens a hearing of the House Intelligence Committee. The witness is Joseph Maguire, the acting director of national intelligence, who previously decided not to give the whistleblower report to Congress, as the law seemingly requires, after consulting the White House and Justice Department. Schiff wears his serious face. He says the Trump call to Ukraine “read like a classic organized crime shakedown.” Then, instead of reading from the document, he decides to dramatize it with made up words from an imaginary mob boss. “I’m going to say this only seven times, so you better listen good,” Schiff says. “I want you to make up dirt on my political opponent understand.” This is, Schiff says, “the most consequential form of tragedy.”

9:22 a.m. The committee’s ranking Republican, Rep. Devin Nunes (Calif.), congratulates Democrats on the “rollout of their latest information warfare operation against the president.” He talks about the “Democrat’s mania to overturn the 2016 elections,” and uses the words “hoax,” “fake story,” “hysteria,” “frenzy,” “gambit,” “charade,” and “grotesque spectacle.” He also falsely asserts that former vice president Joe Biden “bragged that he extorted the Ukrainians into firing a prosecutor who happened to be investigating Biden’s own son.” Biden did push to fire a prosecutor who had previously investigated a firm on where his son, Hunter Biden, worked. But Biden and other Western officials said the prosecutor was not sufficiently pursuing corruption cases. The investigation into the firm was dormant at the time and Hunter Biden had not been accused of wrongdoing, according to former Ukrainian and U.S. officials.

9:29 a.m. Maguire describes his work history, taking note that he has 11 times sworn an oath to the Constitution. “No one can take an individual’s integrity away,” he says. “It can only be given away.” Then he explains two reasons that he did not give the whistleblower complaint to Congress, after consulting with the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel and the White House. First, he said he was advised by the Justice Department that it could contain privileged information about the internal workings of the executive branch. Second, there was a question of whether the complaint fell inside his purview because it concerned behavior by the president who is “outside the intelligence community.” At the same time, he is pleased that the information is now public. He says the whistleblower has behaved lawfully and “acted in good faith.”

9:44 a.m. For the next several hours, Maguire takes questions from members of Congress, most of which consist of efforts by Republicans or Democrats to score points for their teams.

11:18 a.m. Pelosi takes the stage at the Capitol building to announce that she is sad, prayerful and patriotic. She tries to put a headline on the now-released whistleblower report. “This is a coverup,” she says, in reference to the claim that White House officials tried to move information to a highly classified computer system. She also says the acting director of national intelligence “broke the law” by not immediately turning over the whistleblower complaint. Then she quotes Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Paine.

11:45 a.m. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) takes the same stage before the same flags with another patriotic message. “America is too great for a vision so small of just impeachment and investigation,” he says. He attacks Pelosi for opening an inquiry before the records of the call to the Ukrainian president were released. “Let’s be very clear — the president did not ask to investigate Joe Biden,” McCarthy says. This is not clear at all. In the call summary released by the White House, Trump tells Ukraine’s president, “There’s a lot of talk about Biden’s son, that Biden stopped the prosecution and a lot of people want to find out about that so whatever you can do with the Attorney General would be great.” When a reporter points this out, McCarthy stands his ground. “What you’re reading and what you’re trying to — my belief is you are misstating,” McCarthy says.

11:50 a.m. The Associated Press moves a story saying Vermont Gov. Phil Scott just declared himself the first Republican chief executive in the nation to support impeachment proceedings against Trump.

12:47 p.m. The Los Angeles Times publishes a story quoting from a private speech Trump gave this morning at a New York hotel. In an audio recording taken from the room, Trump calls reporters “scum” and attacks the unidentified whistleblower, suggesting that he has committed a crime historically punished by death. “I want to know who’s the person, who’s the person who gave the whistleblower the information? Because that’s close to a spy,” Trump says in the recording. “You know what we used to do in the old days when we were smart? Right? The spies and treason, we used to handle it a little differently than we do now.”

12:48 p.m. The cable networks start showing a hallway news conference by Schiff, just as Air Force One, carrying the president back from New York, makes its final approach at Joint Base Andrews. Trump immediately tweets, “Adam B. Schiff has no credibility. Another fantasy to hurt the Republican Party!” On television, Schiff says his team will keep working on Trump’s impeachment over the next two weeks, when the rest of Congress heads home for a recess.

12:52 p.m. A reporter at the Capitol asks Schiff about Trump’s four-minute-old, in-flight insult tweet. “I’m always flattered when I’m attacked by someone of the president’s character,” Schiff says, before ducking into an office.

1 p.m. With Schiff off television, Trump steps off the plane to address reporters. “Adam B. Schiff doesn’t talk about Joe Biden and his son walking away with millions of dollars from Ukraine, and then millions of dollars from China,” Trump says. This is an inaccurate statement. Hunter Biden did collect significant income from a Ukrainian company, but there is no evidence Joe Biden made money from either country, and Hunter Biden’s lawyer denies that he made any money from a China investment deal he advised. Trump says three times that his call with the Ukrainian president was “perfect.” “Absolutely perfect phone call,” he says.

1:54 p.m. The New York Times reports that the whistleblower is a CIA officer who was detailed to the White House.

2:21 p.m. The Washington Post updates its tally of House members who now support the opening of an impeachment inquiry. The new tally notches 219 Democrats and Rep. Justin Amash (I-Mich.), who announced this summer that he had left the Republican Party. A simple majority of 218 members is required to adopt articles of impeachment and prompt a Senate trial of the president.

3:35 p.m. Joe Biden’s presidential campaign releases a statement quoting the former vice president’s appearance the night before on “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” Biden said then that Trump’s efforts were “18 out of 10” on the outlandish scale. Kate Bedingfield, Biden’s deputy campaign manager, says Biden deserves indirect credit for Trump’s dealings with Ukraine. “It is all borne from his deep, fully substantiated fear that Joe Biden will beat him in November 2020,” she says.

3:44 p.m. CBS News announces that former secretary of state Hillary Clinton called Trump a “corrupt human tornado” in a new interview. She supports an impeachment inquiry.

4:28 p.m. Former director of national intelligence James R. Clapper Jr., a longtime critic of Trump, says on CNN that the president’s morning comments comparing the whistleblower to a treasonous spy is “witness retaliation.” “What’s really bad about it is this is going to have a very chilling effect on any other potential whistleblowers,” Clapper says.

7:02 p.m. The evening spin time begins. Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), a candidate for president, appears on MSNBC to throw a bunch of punches. She calls Trump a “lawless president.” She calls the situation “outrageous.” She calls the White House “a racket.” She says there was a “coverup.” After a clip of Trump talking plays, she adds, “He sounds like a criminal.”

8:28 p.m. Former House speaker Newt Gingrich goes on Fox News to say that Democrats are making “a really bad decision” that will ultimately destroy Biden’s presidential campaign. Gingrich is qualified to make this claim because he lost his job running Congress after pushing the impeachment of President Clinton. What went wrong? “What happens is you get in a room, you are surrounded by your partisans, you only listen to yourself,” Gingrich tells Tucker Carlson and the primetime Fox audience.

9:01 p.m. Sean Hannity offers a coda on the day — a “Fox News Alert” — to say that everything that just happened didn’t matter. “The real story. The real corruption,” Hannity announces. “None of it, zero has to do with President Trump.” Stay tuned. He has a special report on Biden. We are just getting started.

What you missed while not watching Day 4 of President Trump’s impeachment drama

By Michael Scherr | Published September 27, 2019 | Washington Post | Posted September 30, 2019 |

Here’s a guide to standout moments from another newsy day in the drama engulfing the Trump presidency:

7:21 a.m. It’s Day 4 of the impeachment effort, and President Trump wants everyone to know he has done nothing wrong. His early tweets contain some typos, including a double preposition. “I had a simple and very nice call with with the new President of Ukraine, it could not have been better or more honorable, and the Fake News Media and Democrats, working as a team, have fraudulently made it look bad,” he writes. A White House spokesman, Hogan Gidley, goes on “Fox & Friends” to deny reporting from multiple news outlets that White House staff were alarmed by the call. “No one I’ve talked to is concerned at all about this,” Gidley says.

7:31 a.m. Trump’s chief adversary, House Speaker Nanci Pelosi (D-Calif.), makes her first public appearance of the day, arriving at an MSNBC set on a rooftop across from the U.S. Capitol. On “Morning Joe,” Day 4 is a special event. Rising sun. Brisk fall breeze. Pelosi has come with a glittery American flag brooch and talking points to hammer like a nail gun: “This is about national security.” “This is a sad time for our country.” “We have to be prayerful.” “He gave us no choice.” Attorney General William P. Barr has “gone rogue.” The bottom line: “The president of the United States used taxpayer dollars to shake down the leader of another country for his own political gain. The rest of it is ancillary.”

8:29 a.m. Trump calls on Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.) to resign and “be investigated” for reading a fake transcript of the president’s call with Ukraine at a hearing yesterday. In Trump’s telling, Schiff was “supposedly reading the exact transcribed version” and “GOT CAUGHT.” Schiff, who as chairman of the House Intelligence Committee is emerging as a key point person in the impeachment drama, had actually been a bit more nuanced. He introduced the fabulism by calling it “the essence of what the president communicates.” The moment was nonetheless potentially misleading, especially because sound bites are regularly chopped without context on social media.

9:04 a.m. The White House releases a memo headlined, “The swamp is beyond parody, but the American people aren’t laughing.” The argument is that Democrats are spending their time on a “political circus” instead of “real, pressing concerns” such as strong border security, real gun safety, affordable prescription drug prices and a new North American trade deal. “You can’t make this stuff up,” the memo reads.

10:20 a.m. Not much happening at the moment. A good time to catch up on the stories you might have missed last night. A Washington Post deep dive into former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani’s efforts to cultivate “a bevy” of current and former prosecutors in Ukraine. A Post visual guide to everyone mentioned in the whistleblower report. The Atlantic’s captivating interview with Giuliani, which Elaina Plott conducted from the back of an Uber. “It is impossible that the whistleblower is a hero and I’m not,” Giuliani told Plott. “And I will be the hero! These morons. When this is over, I will be the hero.”

10:37 a.m. Sen. Kamala D. Harris (D-Calif.), whose presidential campaign has been struggling to gain traction, calls for an investigation of the State Department’s apparent role in Giuliani’s meetings with Ukranian officials. She cites Giuliani’s appearance the night before on Fox News, in which he showed text messages he claimed to be from State Department officials urging him to reach out. Harris also addresses a tweet to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, telling him to “instruct State Department staff to preserve any communications involving” Giuliani.

10:50 a.m. CNN reports the White House had offered a statement confirming a central allegation of the whistleblower complaint: Records of Trump’s call with Ukraine were moved to a separate server inside the White House. National Security Council lawyers “directed that the classified document be handled appropriately,” the White House statement reads.

11:21 a.m. Former secretary of state Hillary Clinton takes a shot at Trump during an appearance at Georgetown University. “Now we know that in the course of his duties as president, he has endangered us all by putting his personal and political interests ahead of the interests of the American people,” she says.

11:30 a.m. Lara Trump, the president’s daughter-in-law and a senior adviser on his campaign, goes on Fox News to say Democrats are “unfortunately” tarnishing their name and overplaying their hand. “Just because it might not have been something every president would have said doesn’t make it an impeachable offense,” she says of the president’s phone call to Ukraine.

11:40 a.m. The Senate convenes for a pro forma session, which is like opening a store but locking the cash register. Nothing can really happen. Like members of the House, senators began a two-week break today. Schiff has said his staff will continue working during the break.

12:14 p.m. The Post reports that a group of lawmakers in Ukraine are seeking to launch a new probe into Burisma Holdings, the gas company where Joe Biden’s son Hunter served on the board during his father’s time as vice president. The younger Biden has not been accused of wrongdoing.

12:53 p.m. Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii) becomes the last Democratic candidate for president who has qualified for the October debate to announce that she supports impeachment proceedings against Trump. She had been attacked Thursday night on this point by the primary opponent running for her House seat. “This inquiry must be swift, thorough, and narrowly-focused,” Gabbard says in a statement shared by a campaign adviser. “It cannot be turned into a long, protracted partisan circus that will further divide our country and undermine our democracy.”

2:17 p.m. The House Appropriations and Budget committees announce sending a letter to the White House demanding documents and answers by next week regarding the Trump administration’s “involvement in the withholding of foreign aid, including nearly $400 million in crucial security assistance funding for Ukraine.”

2:30 p.m. The Associated Press alerts that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has previously committed to holding a trial of Trump if the House votes to impeach him. “If the House were to act, the Senate immediately goes into a trial,” McConnell told NPR in March. The regular rules for conducting an impeachment trial in the Senate are spelled out in the United States Senate Manual, and they include lots of specificity: When the House delivers the impeachment articles, the senate sergeant at arms must proclaim the following words, “All persons are commanded to keep silence, on pain of imprisonment, while the House of Representatives is exhibiting to the Senate of the United States articles of impeachment against” whoever is being impeached. The chief justice of the United States “shall preside,” and the doors to the chamber “shall be kept open,” unless directed otherwise for deliberation.

3:41 p.m. Trump previews how he hopes the impeachment fight will play out in the 2020 election if Biden becomes the Democratic nominee. He posts a 30-second campaign ad. “Biden promised Ukraine a billion dollars if they fired the prosecutor investigating his son’s company,” the narrator says, over ominous music. “But when President Trump asks Ukraine to investigate corruption, the Democrats want to impeach him.” Much of this is misleading. Biden threatened to withhold aid that had been promised to Ukraine if it did not fire the prosecutor; he did not promise to give $1 billion for doing so. The Ukranian prosecutor in question did not have an active investigation of the company where Biden’s son worked at the time. Biden’s son was never a subject of the investigation. The Democrat’s current impeachment investigation focuses on Trump’s specific request to the current Ukrainian president for aid in an investigation of Biden, his political rival. Such details might get lost in a war of sound bites and paid advertising.

4:03 p.m. The House Foreign Affairs, Intelligence and Oversight committees announce a new subpoena of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo for documents related to the Ukraine investigation that were requested earlier this month and never delivered. The letter concludes by alleging that Pompeo’s continued refusal to provide the documents “impairs Congress’ ability to fulfill its Constitutional responsibilities to protect our national security and the integrity of our democracy.”

4:58 p.m. The Washington Post reports that Rudy Giuliani, the president’s personal attorney who has been helping lead Ukraine outreach, is scheduled to make a paid appearance at a Kremlin backed conference in Armenia. Russian President Vladimir Putin is scheduled to attend. Giuliani declined to say how much he will make. “I will try to not knowingly talk to a Russian until this is all over,” he says.

6:09 p.m. Giuliani tells reporters he will no longer attend the conference. “Just found out Putin was going and I don’t need to give the Swamp press more distractions,” he tells The Post in a text message.

6:10 p.m. Kurt Volker, Trump’s envoy to Ukraine, has resigned, reports the State Press, the student newspaper of Arizona State University. Volker is also the director of ASU’s McCain Institute for International Leadership. Giuliani had posted a reputed text message exchange with Volker on Thursday and boasted on television of their communications. House leaders announced Friday that they planned to interview Volker next week.

8:26 p.m. More comes out. The Washington Post reports that Trump told two Russian officials in a 2017 Oval Office meeting that he was unconcerned about Russian interference in the 2016 election. This assertion prompted alarm in the White House, leading officials to limit access to the remarks to an unusually small number of people. The source of this information is three former officials with knowledge of the matter.

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uniteordie-usa · 7 years

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The Slimy Business of Russia-gate

http://uniteordiemedia.com/the-slimy-business-of-russia-gate/ https://consortiumnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/645997-300x200.jpg The Slimy Business of Russia-gate Special Report: As the U.S. government doles out tens of millions of dollars to “combat Russian propaganda,” one result is a slew of new “studies” by “scholars” and “researchers” auditioning for the loot, reports Robert Parry. By Robert Parry The “Field of Dreams” slogan for America’s NGOs...

Special Report: As the U.S. government doles out tens of millions of dollars to “combat Russian propaganda,” one result is a slew of new “studies” by “scholars” and “researchers” auditioning for the loot, reports Robert Parry.

By Robert Parry

The “Field of Dreams” slogan for America’s NGOs should be: “If you pay for it, we will come.” And right now, tens of millions of dollars are flowing to non-governmental organizations if they will buttress the thesis of Russian “meddling” in the U.S. democratic process no matter how sloppy the “research” or how absurd the “findings.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin, following his address to the UN General Assembly on Sept. 28, 2015. (UN Photo)

And, if you think the pillars of the U.S. mainstream media – The Washington Post, The New York Times, CNN and others – will apply some quality controls, you haven’t been paying attention for the past year or so. The MSM is just as unethical as the NGOs are.

So, we are now in a phase of Russia-gate in which NGO “scholars” produce deeply biased reports and their nonsense is treated as front-page news and items for serious discussion across the MSM.

Yet, there’s even an implicit confession about how pathetic some of this “scholarship” is in the hazy phrasing that gets applied to the “findings,” although the weasel words will slip past most unsuspecting Americans and will be dropped for more definitive language when the narrative is summarized in the next day’s newspaper or in a cable-news “crawl.”

For example, a Times front-page story on Thursday reported that “a network of Twitter accounts suspected of links to Russia seized on both sides of the [NFL players kneeling during the National Anthem] issue with hashtags, such as #boycottnfl, #standforouranthem and #takeaknee.”

The story, which fits neatly into the current U.S. propaganda meme that the Russian government somehow is undermining American democracy by stirring up dissent inside the U.S., quickly spread to other news outlets and became the latest “proof” of a Russian “war” against America.

However, before we empty the nuclear silos and exterminate life on the planet, we might take a second to look at the Times phrasing: “a network of Twitter accounts suspected of links to Russia.”

The vague wording doesn’t even say the Russian government was involved but rather presents an unsupported claim that some Twitter accounts are “suspected” of being part of some “network” and that this “network” may have some ill-defined connection – or “links” – to “Russia,” a country of 144 million people.

‘Six Degrees from Kevin Bacon’

It’s like the old game of “six degrees of separation” from Kevin Bacon. Yes, perhaps we are all “linked” to Kevin Bacon somehow but that doesn’t prove that we know Kevin Bacon or are part of a Kevin Bacon “network” that is executing a grand conspiracy to sow discontent by taking opposite sides of issues and then tweeting.

Yet that is the underlying absurdity of the Times article by Daisuke Wakabayashi and Scott Shane. Still, as silly as the article may be that doesn’t mean it’s not dangerous. The Times’ high-profile treatment of these gauzy allegations represents a grave danger to the world by fueling a growing hysteria inside the United States about being “at war” with nuclear-armed Russia. At some point, someone might begin to take this alarmist rhetoric seriously.

Yes, I understand that lots of people hate President Trump and see Russia-gate as the golden ticket to his impeachment. But that doesn’t justify making serious allegations with next to no proof, especially when the outcome could be thermonuclear war.

However, with all those millions of dollars sloshing around the NGO world and Western academia – all looking for some “study” to fund that makes Russia look bad – you are sure to get plenty of takers. And, we should now expect that new “findings” like these will fill in for the so-far evidence-free suspicions about Russia and Trump colluding to steal the presidency from Hillary Clinton.

If you read more deeply into the Times story, you get a taste of where Russia-gate is headed next and a clue as to who is behind it:

“Since last month, researchers at the Alliance for Securing Democracy, a bipartisan initiative of the German Marshall Fund, a public policy research group in Washington, have been publicly tracking 600 Twitter accounts — human users and suspected bots alike — they have linked to Russian influence operations. Those were the accounts pushing the opposing messages on the N.F.L. and the national anthem.

“Of 80 news stories promoted last week by those accounts, more than 25 percent ‘had a primary theme of anti-Americanism,’ the researchers found. About 15 percent were critical of Hillary Clinton, falsely accusing her of funding left-wing antifa — short for anti-fascist — protesters, tying her to the lethal terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya, in 2012 and discussing her daughter Chelsea’s use of Twitter. Eleven percent focused on wiretapping in the federal investigation into Paul Manafort, President Trump’s former campaign chairman, with most of them treated the news as a vindication for President Trump’s earlier wiretapping claims.”

The Neocons, Again!

So, let’s stop and unpack this Times’ reporting. First, this Alliance for Securing Democracy is not some neutral truth-seeking organization but a neoconservative-dominated outfit that includes on its advisory board such neocon luminaries as Mike Chertoff, Bill Kristol and former Freedom House president David Kramer along with other anti-Russia hardliners such as former deputy CIA director Michael Morell and former House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers.

How many of these guys, do you think, were assuring us that Iraq was hiding WMDs back in 2003?

This group clearly has an ax to grind, a record of deception, and plenty of patrons in the Military-Industrial Complex who stand to make billions of dollars from the New Cold War.

The neocons also have been targeting Russia for regime change for years because they see Russian President Vladimir Putin as the chief obstacle to their goal of helping Israel achieve its desire for “regime change” in Syria and a chance to bomb-bomb-bomb Iran. Russia-gate has served the neocons well as a very convenient way to pull Democrats, liberals and even progressives into the neocon agenda because Russia-gate is sold as a powerful weapon for the anti-Trump Resistance.

The Times article also might have mentioned that Twitter has 974 million accounts. So, this alarm over 600 accounts is a bit disproportionate for a front-page story in the Times, don’t you think?

And, there’s the definitional problem of what constitutes “anti-Americanism” in a news article. And what does it mean to be “linked to Russian influence operations”? Does that include Americans who may not march in lockstep to the one-sided State Department narratives on the crises in Ukraine and Syria? Any deviation from Official Washington’s groupthink makes you a “Moscow stooge.”

And, is it a crime to be “critical” of Hillary Clinton or to note that the U.S. mainstream media was dismissive of Trump’s claims about being wiretapped only for us to find out later that the FBI apparently was wiretapping his campaign manager?

However, such questions aren’t going to be asked amid what has become a massive Russia-gate groupthink, dominating not just Official Washington, but across much of America’s political landscape and throughout the European Union.

Why the Bias?

Beyond the obvious political motivations for this bias, we also have had the introduction of vast sums of money pouring in from the U.S. government, NATO and European institutions to support the business of “combatting Russian propaganda.”

For example, last December, President Obama signed into law a $160 million funding mechanism entitled the “Combating Foreign Propaganda and Disinformation Act.” But that amounts to only a drop in the bucket considering already existing Western propaganda projects targeting Russia.

So, a scramble is on to develop seemingly academic models to “prove” what Western authorities want proven: that Russia is at fault for pretty much every bad thing that happens in the world, particularly the alienation of many working-class people from the Washington-Brussels elites.

The truth cannot be that establishment policies have led to massive income inequality and left the working class struggling to survive and thus are to blame for ugly political manifestations – from Trump to Brexit to the surprising support for Germany’s far-right AfD party. No, it must be Russia! Russia! Russia! And there’s a lot of money on the bed to prove that point.

There’s also the fact that the major Western news media is deeply invested in bashing Russia as well as in the related contempt for Trump and his followers. Those twin prejudices have annihilated all professional standards that would normally be applied to news judgments regarding these flawed “studies.”

On Thursday, The Washington Post ran its own banner-headlined story drawn from the same loose accusations made by that neocon-led Alliance for Securing Democracy, but instead the Post sourced the claims to Sen. James Lankford, R-Oklahoma. The headline read: “Russian trolls are stoking NFL controversy, senator says.”

The “evidence” cited by Lankford’s office was one “Twitter account calling itself Boston Antifa that gives its geolocation as Vladivostok, Russia,” the Post reported.

By Thursday, Twitter had suspended the Boston Antifa account, so I couldn’t send it a question, but earlier this month, Dan Glaun, a reporter for Masslive.com, reported that the people behind Boston Antifa were “a pair of anti-leftist pranksters from Oregon who started Boston Antifa as a parody of actual anti-fascist groups.”

In an email to me on Thursday, Glaun cited an interview that the Boston Antifa pranksters had done with right-wing radio talk show host Gavin McInnes last April.

And, by the way, there are apps that let you manipulate your geolocation data on Twitter. Or, you can choose to believe that the highly professional Russian intelligence agencies didn’t notice that they were telegraphing their location as Vladivostok.

Mindless Russia Bashing

Another example of this mindless Russia bashing appeared just below the Post’s story on Lankford’s remarks. The Post sidebar cited a “study” from researchers at Oxford University’s Project on Computational Propaganda asserting that “junk news” on Twitter “flowed more heavily in a dozen [U.S.] battleground states than in the nation overall in the days immediately before and after the 2016 presidential election, suggesting that a coordinated effort targeted the most pivotal voters.” Cue the spooky Boris and Natasha music!

…

Read More: https://consortiumnews.com/2017/09/28/the-slimy-business-of-russia-gate/

#Bill Kristol #neoconservatives #New York Times #Propaganda #Robert Parry #Russia #Washington Post

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