Lev Parnas testifies to House

You remember Lev.

Parnas, who had cooperated in Trump's first impeachment inquiry into his dealings with Ukraine, was convicted of fraud and campaign finance crimes in 2021. He was sentenced to 20 months in prison and ordered to pay $2.3 million in restitution for the charges.

[...]

In a statement to NBC News, Parnas’ attorney, Joe Bondy, said that since his client first appeared in the Southern District of New York in October 2019, he had been prepared to meet with federal prosecutors and provide information to them, including about Trump and his private counsel.

“We asked (then-Attorney General) Bill Barr to recuse himself over what we believed was his actual conflict of interest, with no response,” Bondy said. “We reached out to former U.S. Attorney Scott Brady’s Office to proffer information, with no reply at all. Had anyone let Lev speak back then, perhaps America would have been in a vastly different place today.”

  NBC News

"He" being Trump, of course.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE 11:40 am:

Reminder

Trump has shifted his positions on the war in Ukraine. Shortly before Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the invasion, Trump called Putin "smart" and "savvy" because Putin had declared portions of Ukraine "independent," something Putin had no right to do.

After the invasion began, Trump defended his saying that Putin was "smart," then called President Biden "weak" and described NATO countries as "not so smart."

"The problem is not that Putin is smart — which of course he is smart," Trump told a crowd at the Conservative Political Action Conference. "But the real problem is that our leaders are dumb. Dumb. So dumb."

  NPR

Let's revisit HIS dealings with Ukraine.

A "perfect" call, it was not. Then-President Donald Trump was withholding hundreds of millions of dollars in aid for Ukraine's defense as he was asking its president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, to investigate Trump's potential 2020 rival, Joe Biden, and his son, Hunter Biden. That 2019 call got Trump impeached. But the Senate acquitted him, and he dismissed the controversy as a politically motivated hit job — and his base went along.

[...]

"There's just a lot of evidence that Trump was wrong on this issue [Ukraine] and that in many ways, we undermined the NATO alliance and we undermined Zelenskyy's position in the eyes of Russia and Putin," said Kevin Madden, a Republican strategist and former senior adviser on Mitt Romney's 2012 presidential campaign.

[...]

As scenes of war and death in Ukraine at the hands of Russia have played out for the world to see on television screens all day for days on end, Trump has changed his tune.

In recent days, he called what's happening there a "holocaust"; said many times over that the war would never have happened if he were still president; and even called for the U.S. to attack Russia but make it look like it was actually China — by flying American planes with a Chinese flag on the side.

[...]

It's the kind of simple-sounding amateur solution that Trump has floated throughout his political life, one that is impracticable in a complicated world.

Fucking idiot.

"I do think this is a situation where it's going to be harder for Trump to bring that base along," Hayes said. "And maybe that's one of the reasons that we're starting to see him soften that position."

You think? Trump was never leading the MAGA crowd. He was following. And giving them permission to be loud, vicious idiots themselves.

"I think it is a risk," Madden said. "But if the question is, how motivated are our base Republican voters on issues of national security and foreign policy or the threat of Russia? It's not as big an issue as some of these other cultural issues, where there is much closer alignment with Trump."

[...]

Few Republicans, however, have called Trump out for his coziness toward Russia and his initial softer stance toward Putin. Instead, they are speaking more clearly in their denunciation of Putin but charging that Biden has botched the response.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Still stocking the snake pit

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

John Bolton is still a whore

Will the House try subpoenaing him again?

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Read the transcript!

So release it.

All we've seen to date is a memo describing the call, which Lt. Col. Vindman says leaves off important information.  The more complete record is still sitting on a very secure server.

But even the memo, especially taken together with testimony given to the House, is incriminating.

Was this a smart move?

Seems like giving it another airing could hurt Trump as much - and maybe more - than helping. 

Also, is the best use of your time attacking Adam Schiff.  Perhaps if you have no defense of Trump.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Dickhead

President Trump raised some eyebrows during a campaign rally in Wisconsin on Tuesday night after he said the late President Lyndon B. Johnson was “probably looking down — or looking up” on America today.

  The Hill

That line got cheers from the MAGAheads when he used it against John Dingell, but it got him a lot of blowback from his own party. He wanted to use it again for the crowd adulation, but he had to find another victim. How in hell (if I may) did he come up with Lyndon Johnson?

The comment came while Trump was defending a phone call he shared with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky last July that was the subject of the whistleblower complaint that helped spark the House Democrats’ impeachment inquiry.

“This is based on a perfect phone call. Did anybody read the transcript? It’s a perfect call. In fact, if you go back and look at Lyndon Johnson, all of ‘em, you know, Lyndon Johnson was sort of a tough guy. Can you imagine his phone calls?” he said at the rally in Milwaukee.

As far as we know, Lyndon Johnson never bullied or bribed any foreign leaders for his own personal benefit.  The apt comparison would be Reagan, who made a secret deal with Iran to hold the hostages - those 52 hostages Trump wanted to use as a retaliatory number - until after the election that put him in office and drove Jimmy Carter out. 

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Read the transcript

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

The Rand Paul pretzel

This is pathetic beyond words.

(And, technically, we don't know if he said "my rival" or not, because we have only seen the readout of the call that Trump released.  We know by Lt. Col. Vindman's testimony that it wasn't all inclusive of what was said.)

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

In defense of the indefensible

There is by now no question that Trump asked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to launch two investigations that would benefit him politically, one targeting former vice president Joe Biden and the other aimed at undermining the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. There’s no serious question that Trump leveraged his position to pressure Ukraine to announce those new probes, with his ambassador to the European Union testifying under oath that there existed a quid pro quo in which an announcement of new investigations would earn Ukraine a White House visit.

But Trump’s defenders, by definition, have to defend him. So over the past two months and, particularly, during the public testimony offered during the past two weeks as part of the impeachment inquiry, Trump’s allies in the media and on Capitol Hill have whipped up a slew of ways to cast Trump’s actions as innocent or acceptable, ranging from disparagement of House Democrats’ motives to picayune disputes over process.

[...]

[I]f Republicans (and voters) accept that Trump only wanted the investigations to aid himself, then his use of his position to get it becomes deeply problematic. So Trump’s call for an investigation into Biden is transformed into merely one part of Trump’s long-standing crusade against corruption — a crusade that somewhat inconveniently was never manifested in any significant way before his call with Zelensky.

Day after day, during his comments at the start of the public hearings, Rep. Devin Nunes (Calif.), the House Intelligence Committee’s ranking Republican, would detail a litany of ways in which Ukraine allegedly tried to swing the election: an opinion piece from an ambassador, a Democratic National Committee contractor who was trying to learn more about work done in Ukraine by Trump’s then-campaign chairman Paul Manafort. Ukraine was cast as somehow equivalent to Russia in its efforts in 2016. And even when a witness on Thursday, former National Security Council staffer Fiona Hill, told House Republicans directly that this equivalence was both wrong and working to Russia’s favor, Nunes continued to bang the same drum.

[...]

The argument hinges on a 2017 Politico article, which itself notes that there’s no evidence of any systematic effort by Ukraine to interfere in the election, and Nunes’s cherry-picked examples of places where Ukraine and 2016 overlap are obviously flimsy. But even if it were a robust argument, it fails as a defense simply because it’s not what Trump actually asked of Zelensky.

This is what he asked Zelensky, according to the rough transcript released by the White House: “I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine, they say CrowdStrike … I guess you have one of your wealthy people … The server, they say Ukraine has it,” Trump said.

[...]

What was he talking about? He was elevating a baseless conspiracy theory that goes like this. The Democratic National Committee was hacked in 2016. The hack was conducted by Russia, as The Post reported at the time and as determined in part by analysis of the DNC network by the California-based firm CrowdStrike. Since Russian culpability was problematic to both Trump and Russia at the time, their defenders looked for ways to undermine the attribution. Some settled on the idea that CrowdStrike’s analysis was suspect because one of the firm’s co-founders is part of a nonprofit organization that receives funding from a wealthy Ukrainian. Bingo-bongo, you’ve got yourself a conspiracy theory.

It’s wrong in two ways. The first and most obvious is that there’s no evidence at all that the third-degree relationship of the Ukrainian in any way affects CrowdStrike’s work. The other way in which it’s wrong is that CrowdStrike wasn’t the only group to determine that Russia was responsible. In fact, the government determined that independently, and special counsel Robert S. Mueller III obtained indictments against a dozen Russians that included detailed analysis of how the hack was conducted and the stolen material distributed.

  WaPo

It's crazy that anyone has to explain this.

Trump has constantly questioned the DNC hacking in various ways, lifting up questions about it as a way of offering slivers of doubt about Russia’s role — and by extension the validity of the Russia probe, in which members of his campaign were implicated. He spoke regularly, for example, about how the DNC didn’t turn over “its server” to the FBI, a claim that’s goofy because (a) there wasn’t a server at the DNC but instead a cloud-based network of databases that was accessed, and (b) the FBI got images of the necessary devices, which were precise copies of what those devices contained.

[...]

All of that background brings us to Friday morning, when Trump called in to Fox News’s morning show “Fox & Friends” to discuss the impeachment inquiry. Now, remember: We’ve spent two months poring over Trump’s interactions with Ukraine and his call with Zelensky, and we’ve spent two weeks in which Republicans have scrambled to put together a feasible defense of his actions. By now, every American should know that what Trump presented to Zelensky about the server is nonsensical and that even his own party isn’t trying to defend that specific request as viable.

But everyone in America does not recognize that. Specifically, Trump doesn’t.

Here is an excerpt of his interview on Friday.

TRUMP: Lot of it had to do, they say, with Ukraine.

HOST BRIAN KILMEADE: But Mr. President …

TRUMP: You know, it’s very interesting. It’s very interesting. They have the server, right, from the DNC — Democratic National Committee.

KILMEADE: Who has the server?

TRUMP: Now, the FBI went in and they told them, get out of here. You’re not getting — we’re not giving it to you. They gave the server to CrowdStrike or whatever it’s called, which is a country — which is a company owned by a very wealthy Ukrainian. And I still want to see that server. You know, the FBI has never gotten that server. That’s a big part of this whole thing. Why did they give it to a Ukrainian company?

HOST STEVE DOOCY: Are you sure they did that? Are you sure they gave it to Ukraine?

I don't think Doocy is questioning him here. I think he wants Trump to repeat it for the base.

TRUMP: Well, that’s what the word is. That’s what I asked, actually, in my phone call, if you know. I mean, I asked it very point blank because we’re looking for corruption. There’s tremendous corruption. We’re looking for — why should we be giving hundreds of millions of dollars to countries when there’s this kind of corruption?

KILMEADE: Right.

TRUMP: And if you look at my call, I said, you know, corruption. I think he said it to me. He’s looking. He got elected on the basis of corruption.

Trump did not say "corruption". That was one of the things stressed in the hearings: that he never said that.

“They have the server, right”: Wrong.

“They gave the server to CrowdStrike or whatever it’s called”: Wrong.

“Which is a company owned by a very wealthy Ukrainian”: Wrong.

“The FBI has never gotten that server”: Wrong.

Trump doesn’t even get his own conspiracy theory right.

[...]

At the end, he sort of shifts back onto his talking points, but even there he trips over his own feet.

“And if you look at my call, I said, you know, corruption,” Trump says, which he didn’t. He catches himself: “I think he said it to me.”

Read the transcript!

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE:

UPDATE:

Vindman, Wiliams testimony

This morning's hearing went as we all imagined it would.  This clip of Representative Maloney's questioning pretty much sums it up, and is my personal favorite, in no small part because of the ending.

My second favorite: 

UPDATE:

From Jennifer Williams (Mike Pence adviser) testimony

Filling in the ellipses on the "perfect" call.

Imagine that.

Will Trump be especially paranoid now that Pence is setting himself up to take over Trump's jo?

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE:

Could be he went to Walter Reed yesterday for a bleeding ulcer.

The first perfect phone call

Gee, no mention of Devin Nunes' quick quip retort in the Yovanovitch hearing that there were three calls.  Imagine that.

Colonel Vindman declined to comment. A person familiar with White House preparations did not know why language about corruption was included in the news release about the April phone call but said that talking points given to Mr. Trump before the call specifically mentioned corruption and the president chose not to discuss the issue with Mr. Zelensky.

  NYT

Intentional coverup.

Mr. Trump has argued that the tenor of both phone calls was appropriate, but Colonel Vindman, who listened to both conversations, has told impeachment investigators that Mr. Trump’s tone was noticeably different during the call this summer.

“The tone in the call on the 21st of April was very positive, in my assessment. The call, the tone of the call on July 25 was not,” he told investigators during the closed-door deposition.

“I’m struggling for the words, but it was not a positive call. It was dour,” Colonel Vindman said. “The difference between the calls was apparent.”

Vindman was not responsible for making the final update to the readout, according to a person familiar with his account, who said he recalls that then-press secretary Sarah Sanders held onto the readout before turning it over for public release.

  WaPo

Good old Sarah Sanders comes back around.

Regarding Trump's first perfect call

Source: Daily Beast

This needs to get more press.

UPDATE:  At a later point in the Yovanovitch hearing, someone brought this up, to which Devin Nunes quipped, "There were three phone calls."    To be continued?

UPDATE 11/16:

Gee, no mention of Devin Nunes' quick quip retort in the Yovanovitch hearing that there were three calls.  Imagine that.

Memory problems

There's a simple answer if it didn't happen:  No.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Like we didn't already know

Because, in one sense, he IS the most transparent president ever.

President Trump has been threatening for weeks to fire acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, but senior advisers have counseled him to hold off on such a drastic step amid a high-stakes impeachment probe, according to three people familiar with the discussions.

Trump has expressed particular anger over Mulvaney’s performance in an Oct. 17 news conference in which Mulvaney stunned White House aides by saying military aid to Ukraine was withheld to pressure its government to launch investigations that could politically benefit Trump, two of the people said.

[...]

Senior advisers have cautioned Trump that removing Mulvaney at such a sensitive time could be perilous, the people said — both because Mulvaney played an integral role in the decision to freeze the aid, and because of the disruption that would be caused by replacing one of Trump’s most senior aides.

“I don’t think you’ll see him going anywhere until after December,” said one Trump adviser. [...] “But the president was very unhappy with that press conference. That was a very bad day for the president.”

  WaPo

What's magical about December?

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Ooooh, "tantalizing"

I can't even imagine what could be in the first phone call that would mitigate what he said in the second one.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Also:  Not the most transparent president in history.  Unless we're talking about him personally, and not his presidential activity.

UPDATE 11/12:

Think he'll ask Zelensky's permission this time, or is he just giving the guy advance warning?

Trump's corruption includes multiple agencies and Congress

At this point, the broad contours of the Ukraine scandal are well understood. President Trump appears to have used hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer money appropriated as military aid to extort a vulnerable ally into helping him rig the 2020 election on his behalf.

  WaPo

Succinctly and clearly, that's it.

But there are two other aspects of this scandal that need elaboration. The first is the degree to which this whole scheme is corrupting multiple government agencies and effectively placing them at the disposal of Trump’s reelection effort.

The second is that two of the scheme’s goals — getting Ukraine to validate a conspiracy theory absolving Russia of 2016 sabotage, and to manufacture smears of one of Trump’s leading 2020 rivals — are really part of the same story.

The New York Times has a remarkable piece detailing Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s role in this whole scheme.

[...]

As the Times points out, newly released transcripts of witness testimony in the impeachment inquiry fill in that part of the story. It involves a disinformation campaign directed at Yovanovitch, which Pompeo didn’t defend her from, despite her being a senior diplomat.

[...]

Mr. McKinley said he personally urged Mr. Pompeo three times to issue a defense; the revelation of that detail in a transcript released on Monday undercut a declaration Mr. Pompeo made in an interview last month that he “never heard” Mr. McKinley “say a single thing” about Ms. Yovanovitch’s ouster.

[...]

As the Times concludes, Pompeo “had direct knowledge of Mr. Trump’s shadow policy, and seems to have enabled it.”

Crucially, Pompeo’s State Department has also sought to cover that project up. The department has tried to block the testimony of multiple officials.

[...]

Then there’s Attorney General William P. Barr. In an overlooked interview, the national spokesperson for the Republican National Committee claimed that when Trump pressed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to carry out the “investigations” Trump wanted, he wasn’t trying to help himself.

Instead, Trump was merely trying to get Zelensky to cooperate with the ongoing Justice Department review of the origins of the FBI investigation into Russian interference, the RNC spokesperson, Liz Harrington, said.

[...]

In other words, Trump and top officials at the GOP’s main national political committee are using Barr’s review to confer legitimacy on Trump’s extortion of Zelensky for his own corrupt purposes.

Trump himself instructed Zelensky on the July 25 call to enlist Barr to help carry out the scheme.

[...]

[T]he Justice Department denied that Trump had discussed with Barr any direct assistance to Zelensky, and distanced itself from any suggestion that military aid was withheld to pressure Ukraine into cooperating with Barr’s review.

But Barr keeps popping up in the middle of the plot. The Justice Department has announced that Barr’s review is vaguely examining Ukraine’s role in 2016. Barr is enlisting other foreign governments in this effort.

[...]

Barr’s Justice Department, like Pompeo’s State Department, has worked to keep the truth about all of this buried. It advised against transmitting the whistleblower complaint sounding the alarm about it to Congress and declined to criminally investigate the whistleblower’s charges.

All this comes at a time when new documents from the special counsel are underscoring just how eager Trumpworld was to profit from the Russian interference effort.

[...]

Multiple government agencies are actively helping Trump absolve Russia of sabotaging the last presidential election on his behalf — thus burying his own campaign’s eagerness to benefit from it — and helping him cover up his effort to solicit more foreign help in cheating his way to victory in the next one.

Flashback to November 3 (a week ago):

I can read that in no other way than that he is asking Republicans to lie for him.  Another test of their loyalty and willingness to perjure and debase themselves for his benefit. To place themselves and their careers under his thumb. Joseph Stalin II in the making.

I wondered how many Republicans would be willing to comply. Or maybe I should say - which Republicans would be willing to comply.

This is a straight-up command to Republicans that they produce transcripts that vindicate him. What would that look like? We know the answer to this because Republicans have already told it to us.

For weeks, numerous Republicans have claimed that the publicly confirmed and very damning revelations about Trump’s corruption aren’t actually damning, because behind closed doors, the witnesses’ stories have fallen apart.

Republicans tried this trick to discredit Ambassador William B. Taylor Jr.’s devastating testimony.

[...]

Rep. Lee Zeldin (R-N.Y.), a slavish Trump lickspittle, called for the release of the transcript of Taylor’s testimony, claiming: “Much of his leaked opening statement collapsed, but Schiff keeps the public in the dark on that!”

Zeldin then broadened his case. “The public is absolutely being misled about every single deposition that takes place,” Zeldin told the Washington Examiner.

[...]

Another Republican, Rep. Chris Stewart of Utah, claimed it’s “extraordinarily frustrating” that he cannot yet share the closed-door details supposedly showing that witness testimony has been debunked.

This line has also been pushed by Rep. Michael Turner (R-Ohio).

[...]

Let’s point out how ridiculous this whole line really is. First, much of the “leaked” testimony actually consisted of complete opening statements documented in black-letter text.

  WaPo

How could they be so stupid?  Or why would they risk it?

And now we have the actual testimony transcripts. I wonder what these people are saying now. It turns out Chris Stewart, a member of the Intelligence Committee only even attended half of the hearings. He skipped the big ones: Bill Taylor, Kurt Volker, Fiona Hill and George Kent.

Trump and Republicans know they can right now inject the claim into the discussion that the revelations were secretly debunked, because the media coverage won’t return to this, once the transcripts show what nonsense it is. [...] [T]he Times simply allowed Turner to float that claim, without pointing out its core absurdities.

Indeed, Trump and Republicans also know that once the transcripts are released, they can simply change the subject by lying about what they actually do show. They’ll do this knowing that their propaganda network will amplify those lies, and that all-too-many mainstream outlets will launder them by treating them as merely one side in a legitimate good-faith dispute over the transcripts’ content and meaning.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

The test

He's testing their loyalty.  Forcing them to show their hand.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

He's gone too far for even Head Rat Bill Barr

President Trump wanted Attorney General William P. Barr to hold a news conference declaring that the commander in chief had broken no laws during a phone call in which he pressed his Ukrainian counterpart to investigate a political rival, though Barr ultimately declined to do so [...]

[...]

The request for the news conference came sometime around Sept. 25, when the administration released a rough transcript of the president’s July phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

As the rough transcript was released, a Justice Department spokeswoman said officials had evaluated it and the whistleblower complaint to see whether campaign finance laws had been broken, determined that none had been and decided “no further action was warranted.”

[...]

The request from Trump traveled from the president to other White House officials and eventually to the Justice Department. The president has mentioned Barr’s demurral to associates in recent weeks, saying he wished Barr would have held the news conference, Trump advisers say.

In recent weeks, the Justice Department has sought some distance from the White House, particularly on matters relating to the burgeoning controversy over Trump’s dealings on Ukraine and the impeachment inquiry they sparked.

[...]

A senior administration official said Trump praised the attorney general publicly and privately Wednesday.

  WaPo

That's the carrot. If Barr doesn't respond well soon, he'll be on the end of a nasty tweet tirade.

But those close to the administration also concede that the department has made several recent maneuvers putting it at odds with the White House at a particularly precarious time for the president.

[...]

A senior administration official said, “The DOJ did in fact release a statement about the call, and the claim that it resulted in tension because it wasn’t a news conference is completely false.”

From the moment the administration released the rough transcript, Barr made clear that whatever the president was up to, he was not a party to it.

Though the rough transcript shows Trump offering Zelensky the services of his attorney general to aid investigations of Biden and his son, a Barr spokeswoman said that Barr and Trump had never discussed that.

[...]

After acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney said at a televised briefing last month that Ukraine’s cooperation in the investigations Trump wanted was tied to hundreds of millions of dollars of aid that the United States had withheld from Kyiv, a Justice Department official quickly made clear to reporters that the department did not endorse that position.

“If the White House was withholding aid in regards to the cooperation of any investigation at the Department of Justice, that is news to us,” the official said.

Barr is dancing dangerously close to the edge.

Barr’s allies had previously confided to reporters that the attorney general was unhappy with Giuliani, particularly over his going outside of normal channels to pursue investigations of interest to the president.

Last month, after the department arrested two Giuliani associates who had worked on investigating the Bidens’ activities in Ukraine, the New York Times reported that Giuliani had participated in a meeting about a separate case with Brian A. Benczkowski, the head of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, and lawyers in the department’s fraud section.

The day after that report, the department issued an unusual statement saying those in the meeting were unaware of the case that led to charges against Giuliani’s associates for alleged campaign finance violations.

[...]

Some time after The Washington Post began reporting on the nature of the whistleblower’s complaint about Trump’s phone call, the Justice Department pushed to release the rough transcript. Leaders there believed — perhaps misguidedly — that doing so could quell the budding controversy, because in his conversation with Zelensky, Trump did not explicitly push for a quid pro quo tying U.S. aid for Ukraine to the politically beneficial investigations he sought. The White House was initially resistant.

I did not know that. I thought it was Trump's idea. He acted like it was. If not, my guess is whoever - and in this case, it seems to be Barr - talked him into it, considering it didn't clear him like he thought it would, is going to get stabbed in the back if not directly hit in the face.

Though Barr did not hold a news conference clearing Trump of any wrongdoing, the Justice Department did issue its statement saying it would not investigate the matter — at least for campaign finance violations. While that was a partial win for Trump, it has allowed Congress to expedite its impeachment inquiry without fear of impeding law enforcement.