Lawrence Lewis of the Daily Kos Community pulled out a tidbit from the *Washington Post* saying the GOP plans to spend only two weeks on the impeachment trial of the nasty guy. That seems long enough for the GOP to say “See! We did the trial you asked us to do!”
Lewis says to prevent that Democrats need to force testimony from the nasty guy minions who flouted subpoenas and to get the transcripts from that super secure server. The Dems also need to hold hearings into the abuses in the Mueller Report.
Otherwise the nasty guy will know he can get away with anything.
Also while we wait some of the Senators who will be jurors in that trial (some of them using that excuse to avoid talking to the media) met with the nasty guy (the defendant) to “map out a strategy” for the impeachment trial. Yeah, that sounds corrupt. In particular, Senator Susan Collins of Maine who likes to pretend how moderate she is, has gone to the White House for lunch, likely to give a chance for the nasty guy to bribe her.
Paul Krugman of the New York Times notes:
The inquiry hasn’t found a smoking gun; it has found what amounts to a smoking battery of artillery. Yet almost no partisan Republicans have turned on Trump and his high-crimes-and-misdemeanors collaborators. Why not? The answer gets to the heart of what’s wrong with modern American politics: The G.O.P. is now a thoroughly corrupt party. Trump is a symptom, not the disease, and our democracy will remain under dire threat even if and when he’s gone.
Fiona Hill, a Russian expert on the National Security Council scolded those corrupt Republicans during her testimony:
Some of you on this committee appear to believe that Russia and its security services did not conduct a campaign against our country—and that perhaps, somehow, for some reason Ukraine did. This is a fictional narrative that has been perpetrated and propagated by the Russian security services themselves. [That Russia was behind the interference] is beyond dispute, even if some of the underlying details must remain classified. … Russia's security services and their proxies have geared up to repeat their interference in the 2020 election. We are running out of time to stop them."
Please not promote politically driven falsehoods that so clearly advance Russian interests. … If the President, or anyone else, impedes or subverts the national security of the United States in order to further domestic political or personal interests, that is more than worthy of your attention. But we must not let domestic politics stop us from defending ourselves against the foreign powers who truly wish us harm.
House Intelligence Committee Chair Adam Schiff, the guy in charge of these hearings, said:
My Republican colleagues, all they seem to be upset about with this is not that the president sought an investigation of his political rival, not that he withheld a White House meeting and $400 million in aid we all passed in a bipartisan basis to pressure Ukraine to do those investigations. Their objection is that he got caught. Their objection is that someone blew the whistle, and they would like this whistleblower identified, and the president wants this whistleblower punished. That's their objection. Not that the president engaged in this conduct, but that he got caught.
Kerry Eleveld of Daily Kos says Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is in a bind. He listened in on that phone call between the nasty guy and the president of Ukraine, knew the quid pro quo was for the nasty guy’s personal interest and not those of the country, and did nothing. Yet, a series of State Department career professionals and seasoned diplomats, have been ignoring their boss Pompeo and offering damning testimony. Those employees are annoyed that Pompeo didn’t stand up for them when the nasty guy attacked them. And the nasty guy raged that Pompeo can’t control his staff and make them serve only himself. Gosh, such a squeeze.
Will Stancil is a lawyer who does metropolitan policy research and tweets his personal opinions:
Okay, let’s review:
-Democrats avoided confronting Trump directly for nine months because of fear of backlash
-Democrats are refusing to investigate key leads or witnesses because they want to stop impeaching ASAP, because backlash
-this is the backlash:
[a tweet from] Sahil Kapur
First governor elections since the impeachment inquiry began
* Kentucky (Trunp+30): Dem +0.4…
Sarah Kendzior wrote an opinion piece for the Globe and Mail saying the impeachment hearings need to go beyond Ukraine. Kendzior first talks about former ambassador Marie Yovanovich, who testified at the hearings.
There is nowhere for Ms. Yovanovitch to go. There is no longer refuge in this world. Like many Americans, she lives in a simulacrum of democracy dependent on the refusal of elites to admit the severity of the crisis. Ms. Yovanovitch swore to tell the whole truth, but to tell the whole truth is to terrify everyone. To tell the whole truth is to say what officials gloss over but what citizens can see: This is apparently a transnational crime syndicate masquerading as a government.
…
There is nowhere Ms. Yovanovitch can be safe, because Donald Trump is everywhere. His accomplices are everywhere, and when one of them gets imprisoned – such as Russian operative Paul Manafort, Mr. Trump’s campaign manager who worked for Kremlin interests in Ukraine – others, such as Mr. Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani and his indicted followers Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, take their place.
…
Democratic leaders claim they want to limit the scope of the impeachment proceedings to Mr. Trump’s 2019 Ukraine shakedown, but that’s both impossible and insulting. The 2019 Ukraine shakedown is a continuation of the 2016 election heist, which was a continuation of Mr. Trump’s apparent lifelong connection to the Kremlin and his schemes with corrupt actors from the former USSR. Limiting the impeachment scope does a grave disservice to people such as Ms. Yovanovitch, whose lives are endangered by the unwillingness of officials to examine crimes in context, and the refusal of institutions to hold perpetrators accountable.
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