Meanwhile Trump is Guilty

48% of Americans think T rump should be impeached AND removed from office. 48% oppose his being removed. The thing is, the %'s are moving over time more in favor of his removal from office.

It is a forlorn hope, but I can’t help but hope against hope that enuf Americans accept the truth of T rump’s crime against our democracy and the Constitution. Crimes that have been on-going and will continue, if he is not removed.

Perhaps enuf Repub Senators will see the light and end America’s long T rump nightmare.

He had a bad day today. I saw articles about him losing 3 separate cases. He lost his appeal to keep his tax records private from investigators, one of his immigration policies was deemed illegal (that actually might have been 2 different rulings against his immigration policy. I didn’t read all the stories. One was about green cards for sure) and pulling funding from emergency funds for Trump Wall was ruled illegal.

It couldn’t happen to a worse guy.

How about those 2 criminals that worked for Giuliani (that got taken from the plane in an international flight before it took off)? They were trying to leave the country with a 1 way ticket. There is so much crap coming to the surface, that I think the danger is that it will all be too much for the public to process. Trump is clearly guilty of abusing the power of his office in order to influence Ukraine to dig up dirt on the Bidens. There is plenty of evidence already that shows T rump’s guilt in that. But he is probably also guilty of a bunch of other stuff that is gradually coming out. It’s just that being prolific in doing bad things is just another way of T rump avoiding punishment for his crimes, because the public can’t process and filter out T rump’s copious lies.

This calls for a summary:

Rachel Maddow looks at the role of Gordon Sondland, ostensibly U.S. ambassador to the E.U., in pursuing Donald Trump’s political interests in Ukraine, and highlights a new Wall Street Journal report about Michael Duffey, a Trump appointee at OMB who oversaw the hold on Ukraine aid and other funds. Aired on 10/10/19.

 

 

Those 2 guys, thralls of Giuliani, are conduits to all sorts of dirty deeds. Their names are Lev and Igor. Really.

Those 2 guys, thralls of Giuliani, are conduits to all sorts of dirty deeds. Their names are Lev and Igor. Really.
Just like a B movie script.

Now a little fact checking. Everyone talks about the two, but four people were on the warrant, one still at large:

Rudy Giuliani's relationship with arrested men is subject of criminal investigation

By AARON KATERSKY and JOSH MARGOLIN
Oct 11, 2019,

Two associates of Lev Parnas and igor Fruman,

David Correira and Andrey Kukushkin,

were indicted along with Parnas and Fruman on Thursday.

William Sweeney, FBI assistant director in charge of the New York Field office, said at a Thursday news conference that Kukushkin was taken into custody in San Francisco, while Correia had yet to be arrested. …

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/rudy-giulianis-relationship-arrested-men-subject-criminal-investigation/story?id=66212654

Thanks. I would just like to interject: Trump is clearly guilty of abusing the power of his office in order to influence Ukraine to dig up dirt on his current top polling political rival.

The already-gathered evidence shows that, to anyone who is not willing to bend reality. <b><i>T rump should be removed from the office of POTUS.</i></b> That is the message that must ring clear to anyone who is amenable to the truth and who also cares about our Nation.

(but jeesh, always some new crimes, and always some Russian/s mixed in somehow… Lev and Igor, I think, were born in Russia… then of course there is some rich Russian mob boss type mixed in with some of their shenanigans - yeah a B-rated movie)

T rump has turned our situation in Syria into one that is completely FUBAR.

Meanwhile, T rump is clearly guilty of abusing the power of his office in order to influence Ukraine to dig up dirt on his current top polling political rival. He has been actively doing these things to try to effect his chances in the 2020 election. Instead of doing anything to prevent foreign meddling in our election, since what happened in 2016, he has been actively promoting foreign interference.

T rump’s horrible performance as Commander in Chief, is distracting from his straight out crimes against the nation and the Constitution.

There is no chance in hell Trump is getting removed from office. Republicans invented party over country. McConnell is proud of his record of thwarting Democrat bills instead of doing his damned job. He scheduled Congress for a record short work year during Obama’s last year to make sure nothing got done. Nunes reported about the criminal investigation Congress was doing TO the criminal being investigated instead of to the investigators. The Benghazi investigations, which were totally not political, officially ended in December 2016, the month after they were no longer politically necessary. North Carolina drew district lines with the express purpose of disenfranchising black voters. Wisconsin Republicans immediately removed power from the governor when a Democrat won, before he could take office (and if I recall they were the second state to do that). These people don’t give two shits about the country, the rule of law or what is right. All that matters is that they get their way all the time. Hell, one of the times they shut down the government the compromise was essentially, “You give us everything we want and then we’ll give you what we both want.”

You are probably right about that. But I have been getting the feeling lately that there might be a chance in hell. Metaphorically speaking, that is. (We don’t believe in hell, unless you are referring to the dimensional plane of existence in which T rump is POTUS.)

However, our current dimension is not the mythical “hell” because not all who are here have abandoned hope. Audacious hope.

Now of course some HAVE abandoned hope, faster than T rump abandons a Kurd. But not all.

The entire world needs T rump to be removed from office ASAP.

There is zero chance unless he shoots a baby in the face or something. And even that wouldn’t give him a 100% chance of being removed from office. Republicans don’t care about right and wrong. They only care about winning elections and taking personal freedoms from us to give to our corporate overlords. The ONLY way Republicans in general would vote to remove him from office is if the voters turned on him. Barring that, most of the Republicans with a shred of integrity have already left Washington once he got elected. They would rather be reelected then do the right thing. There’s a whole lot of money to be made in being reelected. You just have to sell your soul to corporate interests and then change the tax laws so you get to keep all the money.

So you’re saying there’s a chance (if he shoots a baby in the face).

So you’re saying there’s a chance
Is it at all possible to read that line without having a mental image of Jim Carrey saying it?

That’s just great… now I’m laughing while at work sitting in front of my computer and can’t hide the fact I’m not working.

Technically the probability of him being impeached and removed from office is nonzero, but statistically insignificant. At this point it looks like the chance of impeachment by the house is near 100% while the chance of removal from office is near 0%. A handful of Republicans will defect, IF McConnell bothers to bring it to a vote. I would say no more than 2 or 3, though. Even if there were a dozen who truly believed that he should be removed from office for this not all of them would vote for it. They would make sure that it was under 50% “yay”, regardless the consequences. Remember, this is the same party who doesn’t care that the earth is going to burst into flames if we don’t stop dumping crap into the air. What can Trump really do which would affect them at all? Start a war? Their kids all have bone spurs, so it’s nothing to them. Tank the economy? They’re rich enough that there’s money to be made in a down economy. You think they’re afraid he might cut their taxes some more on the backs of the middle class? They’d vote for that even if he did shoot a baby.

About the only think I can see actually getting him impeached and removed from office is if a recording came out with him talking about how stupid his supporters are, specifically spelling out that he’s bending them over the flag and giving them a good humping with his tax bill and they’re cheering him on for it. I’m sure he has expressed similar sentiment in private. But at this point I don’t even think the pee pee tape coming out would change the minds of his followers. Trump has never been a political figure. He’s a religious figure. That’s why we’ve had a MAGA Bomber and a MAGA Shooter already. Though you won’t hear them called that in the press, including in their comments sections. For all his bitching about the mainstream media they covered his ass to make sure the MAGA Bomber was NOT known by that name. They censored the hell out of their comments sections to keep that from taking hold and never used it themselves.

When the articles of impeachment go to the Senate, I believe it is the Supreme Ct Justice Roberts who will be in charge of the proceedings, not Moscow Mitch. So that’s a wee bit better, tho perhaps not much.

I’m betting that when it comes time for the Senate to deal with the impeachment there will be talk of letting the voters decide. And not just talk, that will be their decision. Drag their feet until after the election.

We don’t have to deal with his obviously criminal activity! There’s an election coming up! We can just let the voters decide if he’s guilty or not. If he loses by less than 5 million votes then he’s innocent and gets to remain president! If he loses by more than 5 million votes than it was rigged and a bunch of illegal Hispanics voted!

Did you guys see where Mulvaney actually admitted that there was a quid pro quo, destroying the Republican’s only defense of the president? And then he tried to walk it back later saying, “I didn’t say what I said! I said what I’m saying I said!” Ah, the old “You’re reading it wrong” defense usually used by Bible literalists. “What? I’ll tell you why I don’t kill witches as the Bible commands! The Bible doesn’t say what it says! It says what I SAY it says!”

That fits a tactical pattern the T rump syndicate characters use to deal with scandals. Steps include

  • establish and spread a false narrative about an adversary, that accuses them of scandalous behaviors like those that you did.
  • deny that you ever did those scandalous behaviors
  • when the truth is coming out, tout that the scandalous behaviors are not a crime
  • but continue to deny that you ever did those scandalous behaviors
  • when the evidence piles up that you did those scandalous behaviors, declare "So what? There is no crime, there. The President can do whatever he wants!"

I’m starting hear some rumblings from powerful Republican senators. They are at least stating that taking money from a foreign government for personal political gain is wrong.

What worries me about the wait for the voters approach is, if he loses, he will have 3 months in office with nothing to lose.

Oh for sure that is a concern.

Also, as far as the remote odds of getting enuf Repub Senators to vote for impeachment removal from office, it could be helpful to be sure not to bring that to the Senate trial until all the Repubs who are running for office again, have their local elections set, i.e., wait until the filing deadline for potential opponents. This is because some are in fear of being primaried if they so much as utter an anti-T rump peep. Once the filing deadline has come and gone, the likelihood of getting some more Repub votes increases.

SO we should not file articles of impeachment til those primary filing deadlines have come and gone.l

Another tactic that might help is changing the voting rules to secret ballot. This could be done with the help of just a handful of Repubs. It would make voting against T rump in the removal vote safer for the Repubs.