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The Formal Impeachment Inquiry of Trump

Discussion in 'BBS Hangout: Debate & Discussion' started by RESINator, Sep 24, 2019.

  1. Amiga

    Amiga I get vaunted sacred revelations from social media
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  2. NewRoxFan

    NewRoxFan Contributing Member

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    Not impeachable because trump says these things all the time... a good defense?

     
  3. vlaurelio

    vlaurelio Contributing Member

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    LOL if you have done treason multiple times then...
     
  4. NewRoxFan

    NewRoxFan Contributing Member

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    The trump defenders' arguments become more and more ridiculous...

     
  5. No Worries

    No Worries Contributing Member

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  6. DaDakota

    DaDakota If you want to know, just ask!

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    We have to draw a line in the sand for decency even if the GOP is so spineless they won't support it.

    DD
     
  7. Os Trigonum

    Os Trigonum Contributing Member
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    Jonathan Turley's theory of the impeachment proceedings:

    https://jonathanturley.org/2019/11/...by-shaping-impeachment-to-fail-in-the-senate/

    Is Pelosi Saving Trump By Shaping Impeachment To Fail In The Senate?
    Posted by jonathanturley

    As President Donald Trump continues to counterpunch his way into an impeachment, many Republicans appear conspicuously and ominously silent about the Ukrainian scandal. That would normally spell growing danger for an increasingly isolated president looking at a Senate trial.

    Trump, however, may have a curious ally in House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. When she held a press conference to announce the impeachment inquiry, some of us expressed doubt that she had dropped her opposition to it. Since then, every move she has made strongly supports suspicions that Pelosi is less of a convert than a collaborator in the House impeachment effort. While Trump aides such as Rudy Giuliani have now caused untold damage to the White House position, Pelosi repeatedly has intervened to steer impeachment efforts into either a wall or, more recently, over a cliff.

    For three years, Pelosi has been widely credited with slowing down the impeachment efforts despite many of her fellow Democrats campaigning on an impeachment pledge in 2018. Pelosi has struggled to maintain the appearance of wanting to impeach the president while preventing any meaningful steps toward actual impeachment. She wants Trump mortally wounded but still alive in 2020. Moreover, she understood the Russia investigation was not producing clear criminal or impeachable conduct.

    Indeed, earlier this year, I wrote a column exploring whether the real scandal was not likely Russian but Ukrainian in its origins. I noted that various Trump figures, along with Democrats including Hunter Biden, were involved in suspect dealings in Ukraine. The investigation by former special counsel Robert Mueller found no conspiracy or collusion with the Russians. The Justice Department correctly rejected obstruction. Pelosi moved to put impeachment to bed, saying she would not accept one that was not based on articles with “overwhelming and bipartisan” support.

    Everything was going according to plan, until Trump called the Ukrainian president. The danger of pretending that you want to impeach Trump is that you may accidentally stumble over a potentially impeachable offense. Moreover, with a whistleblower complaint, Pelosi lost all her control. The Democratic base was simply not going to accept another bait and switch.

    So Pelosi was forced to hold her bizarre press conference to announce that an impeachment inquiry would begin in the House, despite other Democrats declaring for weeks that they already were conducting such an inquiry. Despite her recent pledge, she pushed through an impeachment vote with no support from Republicans, and the country divided right down the middle on the issue. Pelosi then took two unexpected steps.

    She reportedly said she wanted to limit any impeachment investigation to Ukraine, not the stuff that she and others claimed was clearly criminal and impeachable for three years. She also removed the investigation from the House Judiciary Committee, which was looking more broadly at Russian matters with special impeachment counsel, and then gave it to the House Intelligence Committee to hold hearings behind closed doors. After single handedly slowing down impeachment efforts for years, Pelosi now is pushing for a quick impeachment vote by the end of the year. Why?

    The day this story broke, I stated on air that the greatest threat to Trump would be White House national security adviser John Bolton, a disgruntled former aide who was the most likely witness to have damaging evidence of any quid pro quo. Yet Democrats have done relatively little to get his testimony. Bolton seemed willing to testify but he wanted to be legally compelled to do so. On Friday, his attorney even dangled a promise of “relevant” undisclosed evidence. Democrats have subpoenaed various officials but refused to do so with Bolton. They shrugged off his refusal to testify and said they simply had no time to go to court for an order. Why?

    The reason appears to be Pelosi. While she reluctantly agreed to allow members to impeach, she wants to submit an anemic impeachment to the Senate by the start of 2020. After moving for years at a glacial pace, she now wants an abbreviated and expedited impeachment process with just a few weeks of evidentiary preparation. Such an impeachment would go forward with a significantly undeveloped record with a couple of slapdash articles, along with ample room to acquit Trump in the Senate.

    The term for all of this is planned, or programmed, obsolescence. The term was created by former General Motors head Alfred Sloan Jr. to refer to products that suddenly stop functioning and have to be replaced. This was the basis of a huge class action lawsuit against Hewlett Packard over inkjet printers and cartridges allegedly designed to shut down at some undisclosed date. The company settled the case for millions of dollars.

    Similarly, this impeachment is looking like something designed to fail, to suddenly stop functioning in the Senate so Trump survives and Democrats can once run again on a “lesser of two evils” campaign. The design flaw is found in the artificially narrow foundation of articles on abuse of power. It is not true, as was suggested by former acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker, that abuse of power cannot be the sole basis for impeachment because abuse of power is not a crime. Not only can abuse of power be impeachable, but a proven quid pro quo can qualify as such an abuse.

    However, there is a reason why members of Congress have never sought the impeachment of a president on such a narrow ground. The Clinton impeachment was relatively narrow but involved the president lying under oath, which is a clearly defined criminal act. Abuse of power is stronger in the context of other offenses. The reason is that it is often very difficult to distinguish between the problematic statements or conduct of presidents. All politicians deal in their self interests, including members of Congress.

    To focus on this narrow abuse of power claim as the foundation for this impeachment, Pelosi maximizes the chances of acquittal for Trump. By pushing for an impeachment by December, with limited hearings and no compelled testimony by key witnesses, she would achieve her original goal to guarantee that Trump will stay in office at the start of primaries. That is indeed the perfect planned obsolescence product, one designed to fail just in time for the voters to be offered a product “upgrade” in the form of the Democratic presidential candidate and a Senate majority.

    Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University. He also served as the last lead counsel in a Senate impeachment trial and testified as a constitutional expert in the Clinton impeachment hearings. You can follow him on Twitter @JonathanTurley.
     
  8. RayRay10

    RayRay10 Houstonian

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    Interesting take and could definitely be a viable reality.
     
  9. No Worries

    No Worries Contributing Member

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    Unlikely. Delusional even.
     
    FranchiseBlade likes this.
  10. Amiga

    Amiga I get vaunted sacred revelations from social media
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    I prefer the flashlight theory. Focus, sharp and a quick flash then move on vs spread out, diluted and the slow flash might not even register given so many mini flashes from this WH on a regular basis.
     
  11. JuanValdez

    JuanValdez Contributing Member

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    Seems pretty unlikely that Pelosi would try to mastermind some scenario to use impeachment to beat Trump at the ballot box when she only has control of maybe 10% (to be generous!) of the variables. She's not Illuminati.
     
    mdrowe00, B-Bob and dmoneybangbang like this.
  12. jiggyfly

    jiggyfly Member

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    Really?

    The take does not really make any sense and it seems entirely based on not calling Bolton and wanting to rap it up quickly.

    We don't know if bolt on will be called or just maybe they are waiting for a reason.

    Pelosi is not the only person wanting a quick resolution how can he be putting that all on her?

    The final thing that really makes no sense is the fact that everybody knows the senate will not convict anyway yet he claims the need to add Mueller's case to these proceedings and that makes it a stronger case.

    Because why?

    Since when did Pelosi get this much power?

    I can see no way this is a viable reality.

    If stuff like this can gain traction we are really ****ed.

    I can already see the excuses for why some will not got or go with the protest vote.
     
  13. KingCheetah

    KingCheetah Contributing Member

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    You are so naive.

    @DeepHat
     
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  14. rocketsjudoka

    rocketsjudoka Contributing Member
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    I’m very disappointed in Congressmen like Thornberry and Hurd who have said what Trump is doing is wrong yet still making excuses for him. It is the height of irresponsibility for GOP congressmen to acknowledge that Trump is doing wrong yet do nothing about it or defend him.
     
  15. Amiga

    Amiga I get vaunted sacred revelations from social media
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    The Atlantic - Trump is innocent - trying to figure out why

    “I believe that it is inappropriate for a president to ask a foreign leader to investigate a political rival,” he said. “I believe it was inappropriate. I do not believe it was impeachable.”

    Debatable, but coherent. But from there, things went off the rails. First, Thornberry inadvertently compared President Donald Trump to a rapist or murderer while critiquing the procedure House Democrats have used (though perhaps he is not far off). He then offered the defense that Trump couldn’t be impeached because the abuse of power in the Ukraine scandal is his standard operating procedure. “There’s not anything that the president said in that phone call that's different than he says in public all the time,” he said.

    Thornberry’s performance may have been stumbling, but he was still more persuasive than Senator Lindsey Graham. In September, the South Carolinian said, “If you're looking for a circumstance where the President of the United States was threatening the Ukraine with cutting off aid unless they investigated his political opponent, you'd be very disappointed. That does not exist.” As testimony leaked out that showed there was, in fact, a quid pro quo, Graham demanded full transcripts. And when it became clear that they backed the quid pro quo, he announced that he would not read the transcripts and said he had “written the whole process off.”

    Thornberry and Graham are both grappling in their own ways with a conundrum facing Republicans, in both the House and Senate. Most of them know what their conclusion is—Trump is innocent and should not be impeached or removed—but they haven’t figured out why, and no one is helping them out.

    Typically, this is the sort of role that the White House would play, with a war room designing and pushing out a message. But Trump has declined to set up such an operation, relying on his Twitter account to push his message. “He is the war room,” Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham told Fox News earlier this month. If Twitter is the president’s army, it’s a fighting force that’s ready and willing to go over the top at a moment’s notice, but one that eschews any kind of long-term strategic planning.

    The White House has made clear that it will launch an all-out offensive against any Republican who dares to criticize the president at all. As for affirmative defenses, the White House’s line—which is to say the president’s—is that Trump did absolutely nothing wrong or inappropriate, as he reiterated Sunday


    While a few Republicans are willing to adopt this line of argument, most are not. It’s simply a very hard claim to make based on the factual evidence, and consistently around two-thirds of Americans tell pollsters they believe what Trump did was inappropriate.

    Republicans aren’t getting much messaging help from the second-most powerful official in the party, either. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell told caucus members at a meeting in October that “their best bet was to calibrate their own message about the impeachment inquiry to fit their political situation,” according to the Associated Press. McConnell himself has studiously avoided taking a stance. In October he pointedly denied telling Trump his July 25 conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was “the most innocent phone call that I’ve read,” but did not offer an alternative assessment.

    A few Republicans have either labeled Trump’s call wrong or managed to avoid commenting. (Igor Bobic has a useful list on Senate Republican views.) But in the absence of guidance, the majority of Republican members who are trying to stick with Trump have been left to fend for themselves and come up with defenses. They’ve ended up in three main categories:


    The president did nothing wrong. The advantage of this position is that it puts you on the same side as the president, and means he won’t be taking shots at you publicly, the way he has at some other Republicans. The disadvantage is it puts you on the same side as the president—and against the judgment of most Americans. (Some of the people espousing it have constituencies that may be more Trump-friendly than the general populace.)

    The president did something wrong, but it’s not an impeachable offense. This is perhaps the simplest position to argue, since it allows members to concede that something is rotten without having to actually take the drastic step of backing impeachment. Yet it conflicts with the president’s insistence that he did nothing wrong and the call was “perfect,” making it a precarious ledge on which to stand.

    The president did nothing wrong, but his advisers did. This view, far more ridiculous than the “he did nothing wrong” defense, holds that although various Trump aides, including government officials and his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, may have extorted Ukraine to announce politically motivated investigations in exchange for a White House visit and the release of military aid, “there is no direct linkage to the president of the United States,” as Representative Mark Meadows put it. Never mind that Trump had made the demand himself in the call with Zelensky, to name one serious flaw in the argument.
     
  16. SamFisher

    SamFisher Contributing Member

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    It's almost past the point where it's worth deconstruction of these arguments as it lends them a dignity they don't deserve.

    Angry mean boy Mickey Mulvaney, let the cat out of the bag weeks ago in a rare moment of hubris fueled candor.

    Everything else is just theater for the decrepit malignancy to whom @Os Trigonum and the rest of his Facebook friends prostrate themselves.

    They're full of ****. No reason to argue with that.
     
  17. mtbrays

    mtbrays Contributing Member
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    It would be a waste of time to catch the murderer. He simply commits so many murders that stopping him would be pointless.
     
  18. NewRoxFan

    NewRoxFan Contributing Member

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  19. NewRoxFan

    NewRoxFan Contributing Member

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    trump lies all the time. But this time, it may lead to charges...


     
    No Worries and FranchiseBlade like this.
  20. NewRoxFan

    NewRoxFan Contributing Member

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