Thursday, September 19, 2019

When the Con Artist Sells Our Nation To the Other End of the Phone Call

Thursday was a deadline for drama, and oh dear God did it deliver...

If you'll recall last weekend, a whistleblower got word to Congress that trump's White House was sitting on "urgent" and credible national security matters. The acting Director of National Intelligence Maguire was required by law to pass information to Adam Schiff's committee by Tuesday (he did not) and was required to give testimony in closed session today (it ended up being the agency's Inspector General who alerted Schiff in the first place).

Whatever that testimony was, the reports and scuttlebutt around it are deeply serious. If we can refer to Emptywheel's coverage on this:

The Washington Post reported more details Wednesday evening about the whistleblower complaint:
Trump’s communications with foreign leader are part of whistleblower complaint that spurred standoff between spy chief and Congress, former officials say...
One bit stood out for me in the lede:
The whistleblower complaint that has triggered a tense showdown between the U.S. intelligence community and Congress involves President Trump’s communications with a foreign leader, according to two former U.S. officials familiar with the matter...

With some updating for today:

Important to note that the IC IG is a Trump appointee — Michael Atkinson. He’s responsible for the determination that the unidentified whistleblower’s complaint was credible and an “urgent concern.”
ADNI broke the law as Amee Vanderpool noted here because the complaint was deemed credible:
50 USC § 3033(k)(5)(C): the DNI is required to transmit details on “urgent complaints” to congressional intel committees w/in 7 days-only exemption is if the complaint isn’t “credible.”
If Schiff’s claims that the complaint is credible are correct, the acting DNI broke the law. pic.twitter.com/xgmgEr7ZzK
Earlier speculation was that the whistleblower sent up flares over a phone call trump made to Putin back in late July. The current thinking is that the call instead involves Ukraine, where trump's lackeys - especially Rudy Giuliani - were openly pressuring that nation's government into starting their own investigations into Joe Biden's son (who did business in that country). Back to Emptywheel:

It was Trump about Ukraine with a phone call to Zelensky, according to the latest report by WaPo...
Explains why the suggestions the matter was part of an ongoing investigation; the House was already investigating whether Trump and his lawyer Rudy Giuliani were trying to persuade President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky to help dig up dirt on Joe Biden to help Trump’s 2020 campaign.
Now we need to know if the $250M aid to Ukraine was dependent on this matter, as well as a meeting later this month between Trump and Zelensky — and if Vladimir Putin had been involved in this exchange in any way.

As I type this, Rudy was on CNN getting questions about his fishing expeditions and possible attempts at (more) collusion between trump and a foreign power. He wasn't doing so well responding, probably because he may realize that one way or another he was caught breaking laws that even trump and AG Barr can't cover up.

All we know for certain is that there's a whistleblower in the intelligence community who couldn't keep quiet about trump "promising" someone a deal that violated our nation's security.

All we know for certain is that trump was willing - eager - to sell out the presidency, sell out the United States, to a foreign nation. By all rights, this is fucking treason.

What the hell is going to stop this con artist in the Oval Office from dealing away our nation's integrity and sovereignty one phone call at a time?

1 comment:

dinthebeast said...

Perhaps something to do with the $250 million in military aid Fergus was withholding to try and extort Ukraine into opening a bogus investigation of the Bidens to help his reelection campaign, which current polling has losing to Biden by double digits.

The DoJ has no authority over whistle-blowers in the IC. There is black letter law that protects them and spells out the exact steps to be taken in evaluating the information they provide, that are being followed carefully here.

But the flouting of those protocols pales in comparison to what Fergus' lawyers claimed in court in an attempt to keep his tax documents hidden:
According to them, a sitting president can not be investigated.
No, not just indicted as per the bogus OLC memo, but investigated.

These fools have to go. They're saying that if Fergus shot someone on 5th Avenue, he couldn't be investigated as a suspect.

Now, his policies have killed way more than just the one victim he's bragged about, but "the law doesn't apply to me" is a different statement in a court filing than it is at a campaign rally, and all of these fuckers have to go, and they have to stay the fuck gone.
No rebranding themselves as independents and slinking away from accountability this time. Burn the fucking lifeboats.

-Doug in Oakland