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Francisco 2.0

Certifiably Surly
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Posts posted by Francisco 2.0

  1. https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-ponders-violent-retribution-as-the-white-house-projects-impeachment-calm

     

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    As President Donald Trump wrapped up his swing through New York City on Thursday, he stopped by the luxury restaurant Cipriani to deliver remarks at a high-roller breakfast fundraiser. 

    Fresh off meetings at the United Nations, the president clearly couldn’t take his mind off a certain anonymous whistleblower whose recently declassified complaint has threatened to blow up his administration. According to an attendee at the breakfast, Trump brandished a printed copy of the memo of his now-infamous Ukraine phone call, flaunting it as he blasted Democratic lawmakers for being mean to him. After waving the document around and receiving cheers from the gathering of Republican donors and supporters, the president boasted about how much money—$13 million in 24 hours—he had raised for his reelection effort, the attendee noted.

     

     

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    It was yet another illustration of how Trump’s big week in New York has been overshadowed and bedeviled by revelations that he and his personal attorney Rudy Giuliani had urged Ukrainian officials to investigate the son of Joe Biden, the former vice president who remains likely to be Trump’s 2020 election opponent. 

    Over the past few days, the president has helped raise millions for the 2020 fight and has been lavished with praise by world leaders. And yet he’s remained, through it all, obsessed over the scandal unfolding back in Washington, D.C., as Democratic members of Congress inched closer to impeachment proceedings. According to three people with knowledge of the situation, Trump has compulsively monitored TV and cable-news coverage of the Ukraine-related scandal and has repeatedly asked those around him about the whistleblower and rumors that the complainant is hostile to or biased against him.

     

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    Through it all, the president’s demeanor and approach to the rapidly unfolding scandal has vacillated between spoiling for a fight and hoping for a dĂ©tente. Often, it depended on who he was talking to or what setting he found himself in. According to those in attendance at his Thursday breakfast fundraiser, the president was upbeat and fired up, telling donors that he and his political team were ready to punch back hard. In private, however, there was genuine consternation regarding how a brutal impeachment process would affect his legacy and his White House, with much of his staff sharing those same anxieties. Those close to Trump say the president never expected House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) to back any major impeachment moves—at least not until this week.

    Although one senior White House aide said the mood there “is fine,” others said Trump has taken the past week personally, as if Democrats and what his allies call the “deep state” had just crashed his party. 

     

    Spoiler

    On Tuesday, the president took to Twitter to accuse liberals of deliberately ruining and degrading his “important day” at the UN. And according to a Los Angeles Times report, Trump also used his time at a private event for U.S. officials at the Intercontinental Hotel in New York on Thursday morning to rage about the whistleblower and whoever supplied that individual with information. 

    “I want to know who’s the person—who’s the person who gave the whistleblower the information? Because that’s close to a spy,” Trump said, speaking just as Joseph Maguire, his acting director of national intelligence, testified about the whistleblower complaint detailing allegations that the president pressured the Ukrainian government to interfere in the 2020 election and that White House officials attempted to cover up records of that call. “You know what we used to do in the old days when we were smart? Right? The spies and treason—we used to handle it a little differently than we do now.”

    It is unclear what punishments the president has envisioned and the White House did not provide clarification on it when asked. According to the senior White House official, shortly after the president returned to the White House on Thursday, he told his lieutenants that there was no current need to start a “war room” or any special initiative to combat impeachment fever. 

    A report that Trump was bringing back his former 2016 campaign manager Corey Lewandowski to spearhead such an effort, the official said, was an attempt at “self-aggrandizement” by those officials on the outside. And the White House, indeed, subsequently denied the reports. In the president’s inner circle, some continued to believe that the rush to embrace impeachment by Democratic leadership amounted to a politically tinged bluff.

    This is all theater,” Jay Sekulow, one of Trump’s lawyers who worked with Giuliani to defend the president during the Mueller probe, told The Daily Beast on Wednesday. “Nancy Pelosi didn’t announce anything that hasn’t been going on already,” he added, referring to how House Democrats had weeks ago declared they were launching proceedings simply to decide if they should impeach Trump. 

    While the White House was attempting to project an all-is-calm demeanor, outside groups were preparing for war. According to a senior Republican National Committee official, the RNC’s in house research team has begun putting together materials to counter-attack House Democrats and a “war room” of its own to deal with Trump impeachment. 

    As Trumpworld’s strategy for how to handle growing impeachment woes comes together, the president and his staff will have to adjust to a reality in which even less progress is made on his agenda than was before. 

    Earlier in the week, a senior administration official bemoaned how much of a gigantic pain impeachment proceedings would be for the White House staff to manage. The official said that is, in part, because being impeached would inevitably devastate Trump’s focus, mood, actions, and agenda for the remainder of his first term. And White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham has said that “House Democrats have destroyed any chances of legislative progress for the people of this country by continuing to focus” on impeachment.

     

  2. 59 minutes ago, Ghost of LL said:

    So at what point do the Republicans figure out that they have a better chance in 2020 with Mike Pence at the top of the ticket?

    Trump will destroy Pence because reasons.

    If he can't be King, no one else (at least on Team R) will be either.

     

    • Like 2
  3. 7 minutes ago, DefinitelyNotHollywoodColt said:

    Those kids wouldn’t be in a situation where they need free lunches in order to not starve if they hadn’t made bad decisions.

    - @Johnny Sack

    aka the guy that grew up flying on his grandpa’s private plane.

    You aren't far from the truth.

    My wife has a coworker who feels very strongly that the free school lunch program should not exist at all.  She's known him for close to 15 years now, and he's always been Team R.  He drinks the Kool Aid as well, and he's now a full blown MAGA  convert.

    His position is the federal government has absolutely no business feeding children, and if they are hungry, so what, it's the parent's responsibility.  Wife has argued with him that is stupid, and (example) 6 year old kids with irresponsible parents can't help themselves here, but to no avail.  He hates the idea of the NSLP.

     

     

     

  4. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/26/us/politics/trump-whistle-blower-spy.html
     

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    WASHINGTON — President Trump on Thursday morning told a crowd of staff from the United States Mission to the United Nations that he wants to know who provided information to a whistle-blower about his phone call with the president of Ukraine, saying that whoever did so was “close to a spy” and that “in the old days,” spies were dealt with differently.

    The remark stunned people in the audience, according to a person briefed on what took place, who had notes of what the president said. Mr. Trump made the statement about several minutes into his remarks before the group of about 50 people at the event intended to honor the United States Mission. At the outset, he condemned the former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s role in Ukraine at a time when his son Hunter Biden was on the board of a Ukrainian energy company.

    Quote

    Mr. Trump repeatedly referred to the whistle-blower and condemned the news media reporting on the complaint as “crooked.” He then said the whistle-blower never heard the call in question.

    “I want to know who’s the person who gave the whistle-blower the information because that’s close to a spy,” Mr. Trump said. “You know what we used to do in the old days when we were smart with spies and treason, right? We used to handle it a little differently than we do now.”

     

  5. https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/pentagon-defense-letter-trump-excuse-ukraine-aid

     

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    A newly uncovered letter from the Pentagon debunks one of President Donald Trump’s excuses for delaying aid to Ukraine in late July.

    On Monday, Trump suggested he had withheld the aid to Ukraine only because he wanted to make sure the funds weren’t going to a corrupt government.

    “If you don’t talk about corruption, why would you give money to a country that you think is corrupt?” Trump said.

     

    Quote

    But a letter from the Defense Department sent to Congress in May, first obtained by NPR, shows that the Pentagon had “certified” that Ukraine had taken sufficient measures to combat corruption and was therefore was eligible for aid–before Trump’s call.

    “On behalf of the Secretary of Defense, and in coordination with the Secretary of State, I have certified that the Government of Ukraine has taken substantial actions to make defense institutional reforms for the purposes of decreasing corruption, increasing accountability, and sustaining improvements of combat capability enabled by U.S. assistance,” wrote John Rood, the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy.

     

     

  6. Hmmm.  From May 2018:

    https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/02/world/europe/ukraine-mueller-manafort-missiles.html

     

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    In the United States, Paul J. Manafort is facing prosecution on charges of money laundering and financial fraud stemming from his decade of work for a pro-Russian political party in Ukraine.

    But in Ukraine, where officials are wary of offending President Trump, four meandering cases that involve Mr. Manafort, Mr. Trump’s former campaign chairman, have been effectively frozen by Ukraine’s chief prosecutor.

     

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    The cases are just too sensitive for a government deeply reliant on United States financial and military aid, and keenly aware of Mr. Trump’s distaste for the investigation by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, into possible collusion between Russia and his campaign, some lawmakers say.

    The decision to halt the investigations by an anticorruption prosecutor was handed down at a delicate moment for Ukraine, as the Trump administration was finalizing plans to sell the country sophisticated anti-tank missiles, called Javelins.

     

    Quote

    The State Department issued an export license for the missiles on Dec. 22, and on March 2 the Pentagon announced final approval for the sale of 210 Javelins and 35 launching units. The order to halt investigations into Mr. Manafort came in early April.

    Volodymyr Ariev, a member of Parliament who is an ally of President Petro O. Poroshenko, readily acknowledged that the intention in Kiev was to put investigations into Mr. Manafort’s activities “in the long-term box.”

     

     

    Spoiler

    “In every possible way, we will avoid irritating the top American officials,” Mr. Ariev said in an interview. “We shouldn’t spoil relations with the administration.”

    The Ukrainian investigators had been tracing money paid to Mr. Manafort and a New York law firm, Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, by figures in the political party of Viktor F. Yanukovych, the Russian-leaning Ukrainian president who was ousted by street protesters and fled the country in 2014. Mr. Manafort was a longtime adviser to Mr. Yanukovych, working with him to revamp his public image and acquire a pro-Western patina that helped him win the presidency in 2010.

    The new government established a special prosecutor to pursue corruption in the former administration. By late last year, the prosecutor, Serhiy Horbatyuk, had opened about 3,000 cases, including four related to Mr. Manafort’s consulting for the former president and his political party.

    The order issued in April isolated these four investigations. The cases were not closed, the prosecutor general’s office said in a statement, but the order blocked Mr. Horbatyuk from issuing subpoenas for evidence or interviewing witnesses.

    “We have no authority to continue our investigation,” Mr. Horbatyuk said in an interview.

    One inquiry dealt with possible money laundering in a single $750,000 payment to Mr. Manafort from a Ukrainian shell company. The payment formed one part of the multimillion dollar transfers to Mr. Manafort from politicians in Ukraine that underpin indictments filed by Mr. Mueller in federal court in Washington and Virginia. Before the case was frozen, prosecutors had subpoenaed records from Ukrainian banks.

    Another concerned a former chairman of the Ukrainian Parliament’s foreign relations committee, Vitaly Kalyuzhny, who had signed nine of 22 entries designated for Mr. Manafort in a secret ledger of political payoffs uncovered after the 2014 revolution. The ledger showed payouts totaling $12.5 million for Mr. Manafort.

    The handwritten accounting document, called in Ukraine the Black Ledger, is an evidential linchpin for investigating corruption in the former government. Mr. Manafort denied receiving under-the-table payments from the party and his spokesman said the ledger might be a forgery.

    The other two cases looked at Skadden Arps, which wrote a report with Mr. Manafort’s participation that was widely seen as whitewashing the politically motivated arrest and imprisonment of Mr. Yanukovych’s principal rival, Yulia V. Tymoshenko.

    Two months before Ukraine’s government froze the cases, Mr. Horbatyuk reached out to Mr. Mueller’s office with a formal offer to cooperate by sharing evidence and leads. Mr. Horbatyuk said that he sent a letter in January and did not receive a reply, but that the offer was now moot, since he has lost the authority to investigate.

    But entries in the ledger appear to bolster Mr. Mueller’s money laundering and tax evasion case against Mr. Manafort, said Serhiy Leshchenko, a lawmaker who has closely followed the investigation. They indicate, for example, payments from Ukraine to a Cypriot company, Global Highway Limited, that was also named in an indictment Mr. Mueller filed in federal court in Virginia this year. The company covered hundreds of thousands of dollars of Mr. Manafort’s bills at a high-end men’s clothing store and antique shop in New York.

    In another move seeming to hinder Mr. Mueller’s investigation, Ukrainian law enforcement allowed a potential witness to possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia to leave for Russia, putting him out of reach for questioning.

    The special counsel’s office has identified the man, Konstantin V. Kilimnik, Mr. Manafort’s former office manager in Kiev, as tied to a Russian intelligence agency. Mr. Kilimnik was also under investigation in Ukraine over espionage, but no charges were filed before he left the country, sometime after June. During the 2016 campaign, Mr. Kilimnik met twice with Mr. Manafort. In December, a court filing in the United States said Mr. Kilimnik was “currently based in Russia.”

    But in the United States, Mr. Mueller’s office appears still keenly interested in Mr. Manafort’s ties to Russia. Among the questions Mr. Mueller would like to ask Mr. Trump, according to a list provided to the president’s lawyers, was: “What knowledge did you have of any outreach by your campaign, including by Paul Manafort, to Russia about potential assistance to the campaign?”

    In Kiev, the missile sale was seen as a political victory for Mr. Poroshenko, indicating American backing for his government in the war in eastern Ukraine against Russia-backed separatists and against the threat of a wider Russian intervention in the country. After Ukraine announced on April 30 that it had received the missiles, Mr. Poroshenko posted on Facebook that “the long-awaited weapon arrived in the Ukrainian Army.”

    Apart from the missiles, the Ukrainian government is propped up with about $600 million in bilateral aid from the United States annually. Mr. Poroshenko’s office did not respond to a request for comment on Tuesday.

    David Sakvarelidze, a former deputy prosecutor general who is now in the political opposition, said he did not believe that the general prosecutor had coordinated with anybody in the United States on the decision to suspend the investigations in Ukraine, or that there had been a quid pro quo for the missile sale.

    Ukrainian politicians, he said, concluded on their own that any help prosecuting Mr. Manafort could bring down Mr. Trump’s wrath.

    “Can you imagine,” Mr. Sakvarelidze said, “that Trump writes on Twitter, ‘The United States isn’t going to support any corrupt post-Soviet leaders, including in Ukraine.’ That would be the end of him.”

    Last summer, another member of Parliament, Andrey L. Derkach, initiated an investigation into leaks to the news media about Mr. Manafort’s dealings from Ukrainian law enforcement, saying they put at risk vital American aid to Ukraine. He has openly opposed any Ukrainian role in aiding the special counsel’s investigation.

    Ukraine, Mr. Derkach said in an interview, would be taking grave risks if it assisted in what he called a politicized investigation in the United States. In Ukraine, he said, “everybody is afraid of this case.”

     

    • Like 5
  7. 35 minutes ago, henrygandorf said:

    obviously this has been going on for a while.

    who'd have thought the idea that the entire democratic party getting hijacked by a 29 year old freshman congresswoman would be not only completely believable, but also such red meat for the right.

    so odd.

    Not just any 29 year old.

    One with brown skin and a ethnic last name.  

     

  8. 8 minutes ago, Mo Horn said:

    It took me maybe 5 minutes to read it. It was supposedly a 30 minute conversation. They must have talked very slowly. 

    Probably going to blame that on the translations necessary.*

     

    *Zelensky speaks english.

  9. Just now, jimmyjazz said:

    Do we know where the DNC server was physically located?

    Not too many can grasp the idea the "server" may have been in multiple countries simultaneously (thanks cloud!).  Someone probably said Ukraine at one time, and in the minds of the Infowars crowd/modern day GOP/MAGA mindspeak, that's all that was needed.

    I seriously doubt the DNC housed their stuff in Ukraine.

     

  10. Gee, imagine that:

    https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/office-legal-counsel-dni-whistleblower-complaint-not-release-congress

     

    Quote

    In a new opinion, the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel declared the director of national intelligence does not have to release the contents of whistleblower complaint that centers on President Trump’s call with Ukraine to Congress.

    The OLC argues that the conduct described in the complaint does not involve an “urgent concern” as the intelligence community inspector general described it. The OLC said it made that determination because it “does not relate to ‘the funding administration, or operation of an intelligence activity’ under the authority of the Director of National Intelligence.”

    “As a result, the statute does not require the Director to transmit the complaint to the congressional intelligence committees,” the opinion reads.

     

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    The content of the whistleblower complaint has fueled an explosive tug-of-war between the House Intelligence Committee and the White House in recent days. The complaint reportedly focuses on Trump’s alleged efforts to get the Ukrainian government to dig up dirt on his political opponent — former Vice President Joe Biden. Trump reportedly withheld nearly $400 million from Ukraine in the week leading up to the phone call with the Ukrainian president.

    The complaint and the call with Ukrainian President Volodymr Zelensky are now at the center of House Democrats’ impeachment inquiry. The director of national intelligence is set to testify before the House Intelligence Committee on Thursday. The White House released its version of the call between Trump and Zelensky on Wednesday morning.

     

     

  11. Apparently, Barr had no idea Trump name-dropped him in the phone call:

    https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/25/us/politics/ukraine-transcript-trump.html

     

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    The Justice Department said Wednesday that Mr. Barr was unaware that Mr. Trump had told Mr. Zelensky that he would contact him. The department said that Mr. Barr has never spoken with Mr. Trump about working with Ukraine to investigate anything related to the Bidens and that he has never spoken with Mr. Giuliani about “anything related to Ukraine.”

     

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