Just how Crazy is Donald Trump!

[NomisNirrad]

Re: Just how Crazy is Donald Trump!

Dan Bongino - Dan Bongino Exposes How Impeachment Scam Is a HOAX! | Facebook

Better than Steven Colbert videos! Enjoy!

[NomisNirrad]

Re: Just how Crazy is Donald Trump!

Dan Bongino - Jim Jordan Drops Mic on Biased Reporters, Reads Them Testimony | Facebook

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Re: Just how Crazy is Donald Trump!

Dan Bongino - Jim Jordan Drops Mic on Biased Reporters, Reads Them Testimony | Facebook

I subscribe to Dan's posts,.

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Re: Just how Crazy is Donald Trump!

TICK TOCK
The More We Learn, the Worse Things Look for Trump
Republicans insisted that the full account would vindicate the president, but that’s not how it’s worked out.

Just wait for the whole story, Republicans pleaded for weeks, as closed-door depositions piled up with witnesses in the House impeachment inquiry.


“The public is absolutely being misled about every single deposition that takes place,” complained Representative Lee Zeldin.


Democrats were engaged in “secret hearings and selective leaks to the pro-impeachment press,” according to The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board. “This hide-the-witness strategy fits the way Democrats are handling impeachment more broadly.” (Never mind that Kim Strassel, now the most stalwart Trump defender within the Journal’s editorial pages, had celebrated the private hearings in the Benghazi process as a model of rectitude.)



Republicans complained that they had been instructed by House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff not to discuss the hearings, only to see information getting to reporters anyway. “I’m confined to a large degree in what I can say,” said Representative Chris Stewart. “It’s extraordinarily frustrating.”


The Democratic majority “is now abusing its power to discredit democracy, by using secret interviews and selective leaks to portray the president’s legitimate actions as an impeachable offense,” House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy charged on October 31, closely echoing the Journal’s talking point.


Representative Liz Cheney had a solution in mind: “The selective leaking in which the House Intelligence Committee has been engaged must end immediately and the full and complete record must be provided for the American people to see,” she wrote in a letter to Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Friday.


Like previous Republican demands for public hearings, this request was politically canny: Democrats had already signaled they would hold public hearings and release transcripts, meaning Cheney was guaranteed a win when they did so.


But it proved a Pyrrhic victory. The Intelligence Committee has so far released four transcripts—interviews with Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch, former State Department Senior Adviser Michael McKinley, Ambassador Gordon Sondland, and Ambassador Kurt Volker. And so far, the transcripts haven’t delivered the exculpatory or exonerating evidence that Republicans hoped and implied they would.


Instead, they’ve both closely tracked the leaks that have already emerged and deepened the president’s jeopardy. Sondland’s testimony, including an addendum he submitted after being contradicted by later witnesses, confirms that he told Ukrainian officials that the U.S. would not provide military aid until Kiev published a public statement citing Burisma and the 2016 U.S. election. That, along with other documents released yesterday, confirms that the president not only demanded a quid pro quo, but demanded a corrupt one.


Yovanovitch’s account of how she was recalled with no explanation shows the pusillanimity and disorder of administration officials, and undercuts the idea that she was somehow undermining Trump’s policies. (You can’t undermine a policy that hasn’t been communicated to you.) McKinley, speaking under oath, contradicted Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s claim to the press that no one had asked him to make a statement in support of Yovanovitch.


With the exception of Sondland’s updated testimony, which was submitted only Monday, there haven’t been huge revelations from the transcripts. That’s not all that surprising: Democrats leaked anything that aided their cause. Republicans would have leaked anything that helped theirs, too—the problem is that there doesn’t appear to be any such material in the transcripts so far.


At the same time, the transcripts show Republican members using their time in depositions erratically, trying to throw up various process-related roadblocks and working the refs. Representative Scott Perry asked Yovanovitch about the intelligence practice of “unmasking” and whether her staff was involved, puzzling the ambassador. In one peculiar exchange, Mark Meadows asked Yovanovitch where her nickname, Masha—a common Russian nickname for Maria—comes from.


Finally, the release of the testimony vindicates the Democratic claim that witnesses ought to be heard in private to avoid coordinating testimony. (This was, in point of fact, Intelligence Committee Republicans’ claim, under former Chairman Trey Gowdy, before it was Democrats’.) Sondland told investigators he’d conferred with Energy Secretary Rick Perry to “refresh [his] memory,” yet Sondland submitted his addendum, including the explosive quid pro quo claim, only after other witnesses contradicted his claims.


The Trumposphere often operates on an esoteric argument that if only all the facts were revealed, the totality of the evidence would clearly show that the president was innocent and that his detractors are the guilty ones. A version of this faith animated the Republican demand for full transcripts. Now that the transcripts are being released and aren’t yielding exoneration, it should—but won’t—prompt a reevaluation of this esotericism.


Instead, GOP leaders have simply swapped out their talking points.


“I don’t know that you need all the transcripts,” Representative Jim Jordan said Monday. “Like I’ve said, the facts have always been there, the facts have been clear from the get-go.”


The problem for Trump is that Jordan is probably right.

[SalesServiceGuy]

Re: Just how Crazy is Donald Trump!

The evidence that President Trump attempted to use his position to influence a foreign gov't to investigate a political opponent has been corroborated by so many sources that impeachment by Congress seems almost a certainty.

Far less likely is the certainty that Trump will be impeached by the Senate and removed from office before the election in Nov 2020.

Impeachment by Congress may not have much impact on Trump's loyal base of voters. Many independents and voters who were on the Trump train last election may find impeachment by Congress to be the last straw for them making the President unacceptable for a second term.

It seems that the harder Team Trump tries to deny a wrong doing, the truer it eventually becomes.

[bsm2]

Re: Just how Crazy is Donald Trump!

President Donald Trump ordered to pay $2M to collection of nonprofits as part of civil lawsuit

President Donald Trump has been ordered by a New York State judge to pay $2 million to a group of nonprofit organizations as part of a settlement in a civil lawsuit stemming from persistent violations of state charities laws.


The payment is the final resolution to a case brought by the New York attorney general's office after the Trump Foundation held a fundraiser for military veterans during the 2016 campaign.


The televised fundraiser took in nearly $3 million in donations that were dispersed on the eve of the Iowa caucuses as directed by then-campaign chief Corey Lewandowski.


The two million must be paid by President Trump himself for breaching his fiduciary duty to properly oversee the foundation that bears his name.


"I direct Mr. Trump to pay the $2,000,000, which would have gone to the Foundation if it were still in existence, on a pro rata basis to the Approved Recipients," Judge Saliann Scarpulla wrote.


The lawsuit filed by the state's attorney general accused President Trump -- along with his children, Donald Jr., Eric and Ivanka -- of conflating charity with politics, repeatedly using charitable donations for personal, political and business gains, including legal settlements, campaign contributions and even to purchase a portrait of Trump to hang at one of his hotels..

[SalesServiceGuy]

Re: Just how Crazy is Donald Trump!

President Trump's personally appointed Dept of Education Cabinet Secretary Betsy Devos was fined $100,000.00 today for contempt of court for violating a federal court judge's order on student loans.

Betsy DeVos found in contempt of court for violating order on student loans - CBS News

The judge had already ordered the Department of Education to stop collecting on loans taken out by student borrowers to attend a for-profit institution that is now defunct. But more than 16,000 borrowers were erroneously told they owed a payment after the court order, and many had those payments garnered from their wages, according to court documents.
U.S. Magistrate Judge Sally Kim ordered the Department of Education to pay $100,000 to a fund for the affected borrowers who attended Corinthian Colleges, Inc.

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Re: Just how Crazy is Donald Trump!

Trump rages about impeachment on Twitter, but he has Republicans to blame for the rules
Trump and his GOP defenders can continue their crusade against the procedures Democrats are using, but those procedures were authorized and utilized by Republicans first.

Last week, President Donald J. Trump complained that he would be getting “no lawyer” and “no due process” during the House impeachment hearings, set to begin Wednesday.


The irony of course is that if Trump is unhappy with how the impeachment process is unfolding, he has mostly Republicans to blame. After all, they are the ones who have written the rules that impeachment investigations follow.


Donald J. Trump
✔
@realDonaldTrump
It was just explained to me that for next weeks Fake Hearing (trial) in the House, as they interview Never Trumpers and others, I get NO LAWYER & NO DUE PROCESS. It is a Pelosi, Schiff, Scam against the Republican Party and me. This Witch Hunt should not be allowed to proceed!


After weeks of Republican demands for a vote on an impeachment resolution, the House of Representatives did just that and approved, along party lines, a resolution that establishes the procedural guidelines for the impeachment investigation of Trump. House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff announced that public hearings will commence Wednesday.


The impeachment process Democrats just approved, and which Trump will doubtless spend the next several weeks slamming publicly, is the same process Republicans have used to govern their oversight investigations during the past three decades. The GOP has controlled the majority of the House's investigative powers for 20 of the last 25 years. (And I spent five of those years working at the House Oversight Committee as a spokesperson and a senior adviser under the chairmanship of Republican Darrell Issa, R-Calif.)



Democrats to begin public impeachment hearings this week as diplomats testify to a quid pro quo

Trump might label this an attack on “due process,” but his fight isn’t with Speaker Nancy Pelosi or Schiff, it’s with the Republican-led investigative committees who instituted this precedent during their investigations of President Bill Clinton’s administration in 1997 and 1998. That practice was extended in the 112th, 113th, 114th and 115th congresses.


For all Trump’s griping about lawyers, the House impeachment inquiry isn’t a trial at all. But the reason he won’t have a lawyer representing his interests in the hearings is because Republicans made a point to continue the procedure during the Benghazi investigation. During that investigation, Republican committee members approved rules specifically stipulating that “counsel … for agencies under investigation may not attend.”




We’ve seen this pattern of Trump and Republicans objecting to rules they created consistently throughout the impeachment investigation.


In recent weeks, House Republicans have extended a lot of energy and rhetoric railing against “closed-door depositions.” Yet, according to a report released by congressional investigative experts at Co-Equal, a group intended to help Congress remain a check on the executive branch, House Republicans conducted depositions of more than 140 administration officials during their impeachment inquiry of Clinton. While the Trump administration has tried to obstruct the current impeachment investigation by blocking witnesses from appearing for depositions, during the Benghazi inquiry alone, House Republicans took testimony from more than 60 career employees who served under President Barack Obama.


Debunking the GOP's impeachment defenses, from the laughable to the dangerous
Even much of the authority to conduct depositions for investigations stemmed from Republicans. Republicans first gave this authority to a congressional committee during the Clinton investigation, then expanded it to the House Oversight Committee in 2011, and again in 2014 as part of the Benghazi probe, again in 2015 to include four additional committees, and finally in 2017 to include all House congressional committees. (Previously, “depositions had been authorized by the House only for specific investigations.”)


Interestingly enough, the effort to expand deposition authority to all congressional committees was spear-headed by Reps. Jim Jordan and former Rep. Mike Pompeo who said, “The ability to interview witnesses in private allows committees to gather information confidentially and in more depth than is possible under the five-minute rule governing committee hearings. This ability is often critical to conducting an effective and thorough investigation.”


Even much of the authority to conduct depositions for investigations stemmed from Republicans.


This is the same Pompeo, who, as secretary of state, has refused to cooperate with the congressional investigation and the same Jordan, who, as the ranking member of the House Oversight Committee, has labeled the impeachment investigation a “sham process.” Jordan has yet to explain how this process is a “sham” when it’s being conducted under the very rules and powers that he specifically helped enact when he thought Hillary Clinton was going to be the president of the United States.


Trump officials such as White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, acting-Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought, Energy Secretary Rick Perry, and Pompeo have refused to testify in a blatant act of obstruction, and yet, Republican chairs took 141 depositions from Clinton officials, including from two White House chiefs of staff, two White House counsels, the vice president’s chief of staff and the first lady’s chief of staff.




The bottom line is Trump and his Republican defenders can continue their embarrassing crusade against the rules and procedures that Democrats are using, but the inescapable fact is those very rules and procedures were authorized and utilized by Republicans first. When the impeachment hearings begin Wednesday, congressional Democrats would be wise to remind Trump and his faithful servants that if they are looking for someone to blame, they need only to look in the mirror.

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Re: Just how Crazy is Donald Trump!

Enjoy

[Zaxxon]

Re: Just how Crazy is Donald Trump!

I will start this thread but the responses will be varied. I would take Obama or Romney or McCain or Bush back in a heart beat.

I think America really stepped in it this time!

Make America great again, for old white rich guys.

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Re: Just how Crazy is Donald Trump!

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Trump Ally Roger Stone Found Guilty On All Counts |
Trump associate Roger Stone was found guilty on all seven counts at a trial stemming from the special counsel’s investigation. Former federal prosecutor Glenn Kirschner reports from the courthouse.

Pretty good for a witch hunt!

[NomisNirrad]

Re: Just how Crazy is Donald Trump!

Outlaw Morgan - Republicans Respond To Impeachment Sham | Facebook
Impeachment hearings aren't going so well, what a surprise? NOT
As bsm2 would say, Tick Tock!!!

[slimslob]

Re: Just how Crazy is Donald Trump!

Outlaw Morgan - Republicans Respond To Impeachment Sham | Facebook
Impeachment hearings aren't going so well, what a surprise? NOT
As bsm2 would say, Tick Tock!!!

Tick tock for the Democrat Party. A number of them from battleground states are considering crossing the aisle because of Schiff's antics. They are hoping to be able to keep their seats on election day.