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You are here: Home / Archives for Politics / Impeachment / Impeach the Motherfucker!

Impeach the Motherfucker!

No Backlash

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This is worth noting from the latest CNN poll on Trump’s impeachment, which basically shows no movement (50/43 for impeachment and removal):

Looking at the 538 polling averages, support flipped when the Ukraine stuff came out and has held pretty steady since. There’s enough polling on this, and enough time has passed, that quoting one poll or another to prove a point doesn’t make any sense.

The crosstabs [pdf] from that CNN poll show that 23% of the respondents haven’t been following the impeachment news closely (or at all), but only 1% don’t have an opinion (probably the textbook definition of the kind of people who will pick up a polling call – they’ve got opinions, dammit!). So maybe more hearings will move the needle, but we’re pretty dug in.

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There Will Be No Testimony

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One of Josh Marshall’s readers who’s also a federal prosecutor sent in an email setting up a possible showdown where John Roberts would be making rulings on whether players like Bolton and Mulvaney could be forced to testify. His theory is that, with everyone watching, Roberts will be a pretty straight referee who will allow subpoenas for those who haven’t testified yet, and force the Senate to vote to overrule him. Read it all here.

This made me wonder about witnesses in general. Let’s look at what happened at Clinton’s impeachment:

A resolution on rules and procedure for the trial was adopted unanimously on the following day; however, senators tabled the question of whether to call witnesses in the trial. The trial remained in recess while briefs were filed by the House (January 11) and Clinton (January 13). […]

Over three days, February 1–3, House managers took videotaped closed-door depositions from Monica Lewinsky, Clinton’s friend Vernon Jordan, and White House aide Sidney Blumenthal. On February 4, however, the Senate voted 70–30 that excerpting these videotapes would suffice as testimony, rather than calling live witnesses to appear at trial. The videos were played in the Senate on February 6, featuring 30 excerpts of Lewinsky discussing her affidavit in the Paula Jones case, the hiding of small gifts Clinton had given her, and his involvement in procurement of a job for Lewinsky.

In other words, the Senate adopts its own rules for impeachment, and given the makeup of the Senate, it’s unlikely that they will call witnesses if they think it will damage Trump.

If someone knows more about this, please sound off in the comments, but from what I see, there ain’t no savior rising from these streets.

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Facebook Is For Republicans

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This Buzzfeed piece is getting a lot of attention today. Here’s an example:

As for articles mentioning the witnesses by name, Vindman and Yovanovitch have been targeted the most heavily. The second-most-shared story about Vindman was a Breitbart piece titled “Alexander Vindman Admits Making Up Parts Of Trump Call Summary” (97,300 engagements). The top story about Yovanovitch was by the New York Post, titled “Marie Yovanovitch Admits Obama Admin Prepped Her On Hunter Biden” (141,100 engagements), which was shared 15,000 times from the Texas for Donald Trump 2020 Facebook page and 10,000 times from the Silent Majority page.

The point of the piece is that in the Facebook/right-wing bubble, all the little bullshit droppings left by Nunes, Jordan, etc. are magnified into stories that are then shared by people who didn’t watch the hearings.

We all know that there’s a hard floor for Trump’s support in the upper-30s to low 40-s. My question after reading the story is whether the shares that are documented in the piece mainly have an audience of upper-30 percenters, or if they’re swaying the undecided or the uninformed. I’m thinking the former, not the latter.

Another way of saying this is that I’m perfectly willing to accept that the Republicans aren’t going to do shit about Trump in the House or the Senate, that Fox News viewership is up, that shit-sharing on Facebook is up, and that generally the core Republican base is going to shrug off impeachment. I’m not willing to say that those facts further damage our chances in the 2020 election, or that impeachment didn’t hurt Trump. I’ll wait to see some polls and fundraising numbers, because those matter a hell of a lot more than shares in the Facebook Republican bubble.

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Post Break Thread

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Smilin’ Gordon Sondland’s mass execution of the upper echelons of the Trump Administration was just interrupted by a potty break, so here’s a thread for when they get back. As Nunes predicted in his opener, Sondland is going to get smeared today, but I don’t think he meant it the way it’s going to happen.

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Impeachment Probe Expands?

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Breaking news from CNN:

Washington (CNN) The House of Representatives is now investigating whether President Donald Trump lied to special counsel Robert Mueller in written answers he provided in the Russia investigation, the House’s general counsel said in federal court Monday.

“Did the President lie? Was the President not truthful in his responses to the Mueller investigation?” House general counsel Douglas Letter told the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit about why the House now needs access to grand jury material Mueller collected in his investigation.

As we know, it’s all the same story, really. The Ukraine scandal is an outgrowth of the earlier Russia scandal. It had three goals: 1) soothe Trump’s ego for needing a Putin booster seat to win in 2016, 2) justify rolling back sanctions on Trump’s benefactor, and 3) tee up interference in the 2020 election.

There will be anxious speculation on whether bringing any question from the Mueller probe into the current impeachment inquiry risks “complicating the narrative.” I think any risks are outweighed by the benefit of establishing that Trump’s eagerness to accept foreign help, lies and obstruction are an ongoing danger.

Another possible implication: What if the impeachment inquiry and subsequent trial in the Senate are protracted enough to start affecting Democratic primary campaigns? Pelosi said yesterday that the inquiry might stretch into next year. McConnell will use every perverse trick in the book to keep the several senators who are running off the campaign trail, if he thinks that would help Republicans.

If it looks like we’re heading that way, what should Democrats do? Folks without senate jobs would have Iowa all to themselves, which isn’t a level playing field. Maybe Tom Perez could make it clear the party frowns on non-senatorial Democrats taking advantage of their primary opponents’ absence? (Yeah, that’s gonna happen.)

What say you?

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Whether You’re High or Low

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Since it looks like time for another thread, here are a few things I noticed watching a good part of the hearings today.

First, is there an Occam’s Razor for goobers? Maybe Gomer’s Butter Knife? Because the Republican Committee Counsel is a real fucking goober, asking pointless questions and running himself into corners like a haywire Roomba. So, either he’s an idiot, or he was on some kind of leash. I think Gomer’s Butter Knife would dictate that the answer is both: he’s not that smart (because a smart person wouldn’t want the job) and morons like Nunez have him on a leash.

Second, “moderate” Elise Stefanik, from my great state (NY-21), was definitely walking the tightrope. First, she participated in a dumb fucking stunt that anyone with a brain could tell was for the consumption of Fox News:

Then, she went out of her way to laud Yovanovich with praise, and finished her precious time by reading some horseshit about the whistle blower into the record. Look, I’m loyal but reasonable! Don’t primary me!

Stefanik has been elected three times in a R+4 district by at least 10 point margins. It’s a tough district for Democrats: it has Fort Drum and the Adirondacks, which are both fairly conservative places, yet it has had a Democrat (Bill Owens) get elected there three times (first in a special when Obama appointed John McHugh to be Secretary of the Army, then twice in the general). I don’t think her 2020 race will be as easy as her last three.

What are your thoughts?

Update: Here’s a link to donate to Tedra Cobb, Stefanik’s Democratic opponent in NY-21.

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The Worst People

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Donald Trump is a dim-witted conman, but like any half-bright male baboon, he knows how to dominate rivals. Our long national nightmare of governance by a lesser primate (any random baboon would be a VAST improvement) is interspersed with darkly comic glimpses of arrogant fanatics and sundry knaves being ritually humiliated for disobedience and/or publicly shitting in their own hats when commanded to do so by a corrupt and ridiculous buffoon.

Secretaries of State Tillerson and Pompeo illustrate the two options admirably. Tillerson gave up being a powerful executive of a rapacious multinational polluter to take orders from an absurd cocksplat, endure serial humiliations and then get fired while on the toilet. In the final analysis, he may have escaped the Trump orbit less ignominiously than his successor, who has publicly shat his hat: [The Times]

WASHINGTON — As President Trump’s first C.I.A. director, Mike Pompeo was briefed by agency officials on the extensive evidence — including American intercepts of conversations between participants — showing that Russian hackers working for the government of Vladimir V. Putin had interfered in the 2016 American presidential campaign. In May 2017, Mr. Pompeo testified in a Senate hearing that he stood by that conclusion.

Two and a half years later, Mr. Pompeo seems to have changed his mind. As Mr. Trump’s second secretary of state, he now supports an investigation into a discredited, partisan theory that Ukraine, not Russia, attacked the Democratic National Committee, which Mr. Trump wants to use to make the case that he was elected without Moscow’s help. “Inquiries with respect to that are completely important,” Mr. Pompeo said last month. “I think everyone recognizes that governments have an obligation — indeed, a duty — to ensure that elections happen with integrity, without interference from any government, whether that’s the Ukrainian government or any other.”

Mr. Pompeo’s spreading of a false narrative at the heart of the Ukraine scandal is the most striking example of how he has fallen off the tightrope he has traversed for the past 18 months: demonstrating loyalty to the president while insisting to others he was pursuing a traditional, conservative foreign policy. Mr. Pompeo, 55, now finds himself at the most perilous moment of his political life as veteran diplomats testify to Congress that Mr. Trump and his allies hijacked Ukraine policy for political gain — and as congressional investigators look into what Mr. Pompeo knew of the machinations of Mr. Trump and Rudolph W. Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer.

Pompeo is evil, but he’s not stupid. He knows this crackpot “Ukraine framed Russia” conspiracy theory is garbage. But there he is, outsourcing U.S. foreign policy to Sean Hannity and treating the professionals he led at two separate federal organizations as extras in the Trump Show. Here’s hoping the cowardly, careerist fuckbucket gets a send-off that makes Tillerson’s toilet firing look like a gold Rolex retirement ceremony.

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House Committees Release Impeachment Inquiry Testimony

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As promised, the House committees are starting to release testimony from witnesses in the impeachment inquiry. You can find links to the testimony transcripts and highlights here. Trump tweeted this yesterday in anticipation of these releases:

If Shifty Adam Schiff, who is a corrupt politician who fraudulently made up what I said on the “call,” is allowed to release transcripts of the Never Trumpers & others that are & were interviewed, he will change the words that were said to suit the Dems purposes. Republicans… should give their own transcripts of the interviews to contrast with Schiff’s manipulated propaganda. House Republicans must have nothing to do with Shifty’s rendition of those interviews. He is a proven liar, leaker & freak who is really the one who should be impeached!

This is unsurprising since Trump doesn’t know what a “transcript” is and probably imagines the release of alt-transcripts like this from Jordan, Scalise, McCarthy, etc.:

“Donald Trump is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I’ve ever known in my life.”

Anyhoo, I’m still going through the material, but this from Senior Advisor to the Secretary of State Ambassador P. Michael McKinley jumped out at me:

Q: I think you’ve also said [in the opening statement] that part of the reason why you decided to resign was that you couldn’t be blind to what was happening, and what was happening was efforts to use the State Department to dig up dirt on a political opponent. Is that fair as well?

A: That is fair. And if I can underscore, in 37 years in the Foreign Service and different parts of the globe and working on many controversial issues, working 10 years back in Washington, I had never seen that.

Trump’s defense of, well, everything is to accuse his opponents of being just as bad if not worse than he is. Sadly, too many people are ready to believe that about the government. I hope the House Democrats can effectively communicate just how not-normal this shit is in the upcoming public hearings.

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Process vs. Substance

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Recently, Trump has been exhorting (and maybe extorting too, who knows?) Republicans to stop focusing on opposing the impeachment process and defend him on the substance instead. He did it again this morning on Twitter:

Republicans are very unified and energized in our fight on the Impeachment Hoax with the Do Nothing Democrats, and now are starting to go after the Substance even more than the very infair Process because just a casual reading of the Transcript leads EVERYBODY to see that…..

…..the call with the Ukrainian President was a totally appropriate one. As he said, “No Pressure.” This Impeachment nonsense is just a continuation of the Witch Hunt Hoax, which has been going on since before I even got elected. Rupublicans, go with Substance and close it out!

Since Trump is incandescently stupid, it’s possible he really does believe it’s okay to ask foreign leaders to interfere in a domestic election. There’s evidence he believes that; he described releasing the “Transcript” (which is not a transcript) as if it were exonerating (which it’s not):

“They never thought I’d release the conversation. They never thought in a million years that I’d release the conversation,” Trump told reporters at the White House that day. “When ‘Liddle’ Adam Schiff saw the text, when he read it, he couldn’t believe it. When Nancy Pelosi, who worked a day early — Nancy Pelosi called for essentially impeachment — “Let’s impeach the President” — before she saw the transcript.”

He’s probably right that Schiff “couldn’t believe it” when he read the not-transcript — couldn’t believe Trump and/or his handlers were dumb enough to give up such an incriminating document voluntarily. But as Greg Sargent at The Post notes, by insisting that Republicans defend him on “substance,” Trump is asking them to go on TV and insist that it’s okay for a president to ask foreign leaders to smear political opponents.

It’s going to get worse as Giuliani’s crackpot theory gets more scrutiny, and I don’t see how the activities of Giuliani and his henchmen don’t become a key part of the discussion as the hearings unfold. That’s where this is heading, probably. So, Trump will eventually ask Republicans to swallow that Kool-Aid too. Like good little cultists.

Open thread.

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Courage of the House vs. Cowardice of the Senate

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Here’s a video of Nancy Pelosi talking impeachment with Jane Mayer earlier this month at the New Yorker Festival (sorry about the pre-roll commercial; I couldn’t find an ad-free version).

[ETA: Replaced embedded video with THIS LINK to video since the original was autoplaying on some platforms. Attention, New Yorker: AUTOPLAY SUCKS!]

I’d missed this somehow, but it’s a wonderful account of the impeachment decision, and it contains details I hadn’t heard before about Pelosi’s phone call with Trump on the day she announced the decision to formally open an impeachment inquiry several weeks ago.

Trump was definitely trying to wheedle his way out of trouble over the whistleblower complaint when he called Pelosi. She says he called her ostensibly to discuss gun control legislation, then turned the conversation to his “perfect” call with Ukrainian President Zelensky. Pelosi understood immediately what Trump was trying to do, then told him “what we’re kind of observing here,” i.e., that Trump had violated his oath of office, undermined national security and jeopardized the integrity of U.S. elections. At that point, Trump complained that Pelosi was laying all of that on him right before he had to go do a speech at the U.N. General Assembly. So on brand!

Anyhoo, I thought it was a fascinating insight into the origins of the impeachment drama. Pelosi is under no illusions about what the Senate will do, but she says her job, should impeachment move forward, is to make an “iron clad” case so that the public can see the courage of the House in upholding its oath to protect and defend the Constitution and the cowardice of the Senate, which will almost certainly choose to prop up Trump instead.

As I mentioned in a comment to one of our weekend threads, I think Pelosi’s description of what she was saying to Trump when asked about the now-iconic photo of her confrontation with him at the White House — “all roads lead to Putin” — is significant. Notice that when House leaders commented on Trump’s cutting them out of advance notice of the al Baghdadi raid, they noted that Trump informed Russia before informing Congressional leaders.

Smart lady, our Madam Speaker. Open thread!

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Impeachment Inquiry Update

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Intriguing tidbits about State Department Ukraine envoy Bill Taylor’s testimony, courtesy of Politico reporter Andrew Desiderio’s Twitter feed:

Bill Taylor gave a very lengthy opening statement behind closed doors, per multiple lawmakers.

New: Per source in the room, Bill Taylor’s opening statement was 15 pages long and prompted “a lot of sighs and gasps.”

MORE >> Another source says the sighs & gasps were in reaction to Taylor describing “how pervasive the efforts were to tie an investigation of Burisma and 2016 election ‘interference’ to a White House meeting and aid being released.”

Sounds like Republicans are going to have to go with “yes, subverting U.S. foreign policy for personal political advantage is bad, but it’s not impeachable.”

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“Impeach the Motherfucker” (signed, “The Motherfucker”)

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Damn, is Nancy Pelosi a 13-dimensional chess playing, time-traveling, ninja Jedi master or what? Talk about “self-impeaching”!

He ran out of room, but what Scammy McFraudface was trying to say is that you can’t impeach a president when the economy is good. My recollection of the Clinton impeachment is hazy because I had a new baby at home back then, but I’m pretty sure the economy was roaring along, and the Republicans impeached ol’ Bill for a consensual blow job anyway.

In other news, Ronna ROMNEY McDaniel viewed the Hunter Biden interview and is troubled by the specter of nepotism:

The gargantuan gonads on these people! They’re going to try to just brazen it out. That’s all they’ve got:

What will Sondland tell the committee under oath, I wonder? NBC News says he’ll tell them U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch was “great” and that he was unaware of any issues that led to her ouster. And this:

Sondland will also testify that after he attended Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s inauguration in May, he met with Trump, Energy Secretary Rick Perry and former U.S. special envoy Kurt Volker in the Oval Office. In that meeting, Sondland will say, Trump told them that any in-person meeting between Trump and Zelenskiy would have to be approved by Rudy Giuliani.

Sondland will testify that it was only later that he became aware that a public commitment by Ukraine’s new government to address corruption – including Burisma Holdings – was a prerequisite for a Trump-Zelenskiy meeting. Sondland will also say that at the time that he learned that, he did not know that Burisma was linked to former Vice President Joe Biden’s son Hunter.

If that’s accurate, it sounds like maybe Sondland is ready to cut his losses? Anyhoo, we’ll find out on Thursday.

Open thread.

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Ask Not Toward Whom the Bus Rolls…

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Over the past couple of days, I’ve thought maybe Trump would toss Rudy Giuliani under the bus. Trump grunted out mouth-noises in response to questions about Giuliani that were similar to what he said about Michael Cohen before that worthy esquire was introduced to the undercarriage. But nope — here’s a tweet from Trump circa this morning:

First, let’s pause a moment here to note the hilarity of TRUMP calling RUDY “rough around the edges.” I mean, a normal person could get away with saying that, but from Trump it’s like one Kardashian calling another a “shameless self-promoter.”

But the more substantive issue here is that Trump can’t really embussen Rudy now, even if alarmed sycophants in the White House are encouraging it, and no matter how many shady South Florida clowns, Eastern European mob bosses and oligarchs come tumbling out of Rudy’s closet.

Trump and Rudy are both publicly committed to a wacky conspiracy theory that exonerates Putin and legitimizes Trump’s 2016 win. So, if Rudy ever does meet mass transit steel, it’ll be double-decker style, accompanied by Trump himself, and the corrupt and absurd Republican Party’s fingerprints will be on both their backs.

That’s my new theory, anyway. Open thread!

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