DawgTalkers.net Forums DawgTalk Palus Politicus Impeachment: Unbreakable

I thought you hated safe spaces?

Sounds like you haven't had a good cry in days... lol

Lmao hot damn this swamp is getting deeper. Nunes was found to be projecting his ass off. And now graham! Yikes

Parnas Lawyer: Giuliani Delivered Graham Letter Calling for Sanctions on Ukrainian Officials

https://news.yahoo.com/parnas-lawyer-giuliani-delivered-graham-092514589.html

In late 2018, Rudy Giuliani said he delivered an unusual missive to Sen. Lindsey Graham, according to the lawyer of one of his ex-associates: a letter calling for sanctions on a host of Ukrainian government officials, including one widely viewed in the West as a brave reformer and another who helmed the company where Hunter Biden was a board member.
Joseph Bondy, the attorney for Lev Parnas, an indicted Florida businessman involved in the U.S.-Ukraine saga, told The Daily Beast that Giuliani showed his client the letter and told him he delivered it to Sen. Graham (the letter misspelled the South Carolina Republican’s first name as “Lingsey”). Bondy said Giuliani also showed Parnas a second, similar letter addressed to Sigal Mandelker, who at the time was a top official at the Treasury Department.
The letters, which The Daily Beast reviewed, claim that an eclectic mix of Ukrainian political figures and businesspeople were part of an alleged “organized crime syndicate.” The letters claim that the individuals were “actively involved in the siphoning of funds appropriated by the American government for aid to Ukraine.” And they claim that the alleged crime syndicate used those funds to buy black-market military parts from a Russian company under U.S. sanctions. All the while, they say, Ukraine’s then-prosecutor general (Giuliani ally Yuriy Lutsenko) couldn’t fight the crime because then President Petro Poroshenko wouldn’t let him take the case to court.
“It concerns me, as should any fellow American, that a taxpayer’s money is rudely been stolen in Ukraine [sic],” reads the letter to Mandelker.
The letter-writer introduces himself in the Mandelker missive as a Ukraine-born U.S. citizen named Michael Guralnik who graduated from the Soviet Military Academy and was “a 10-year veteran of the Soviet Army.” The letter to Graham, meanwhile, also bears Guralnik’s name but contains no introduction. It arrived a month before Giuliani tried to help former Ukrainian top prosecutor Viktor Shokin travel to the U.S. and meet with Graham, Bondy said. A few weeks before the date of the Guralnik letter, Giuliani sent Graham a letter of his own asking his staff to help three unnamed Ukrainians get visas so they could come to the U.S. and share information about the Bidens. The State Department did not give Shokin a visa.
The letters say that the “only way” to “stop this syndicate” is to sanction the individuals involved. Both letters list 12 people, along with phone numbers for some of them. Included on the list are Mykola Zlochevskiy, the head of the scandal-plagued Ukrainian company where Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden was a board member; Valeriya Gontareva, the head of the National Bank of Ukraine from mid-2014 to mid-2017; and Kateryna Rozhkova, who was her deputy.
Graham and Giuliani did not respond to repeated requests for comment, and it was not immediately clear if lawmakers ever even considered the sanctions. A spokesperson for Graham did not respond to a request for comment. Mandelker did not comment on the record for this story. When contacted, Guralnik hung up the phone and texted, “Do not call any more.”
The inclusion of Gontareva and Rozhkova’s names is notable. In 2016, Gontareva oversaw the Ukrainian government’s decision to seize control of a bank that belonged to oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky. Ukrainian officials alleged that Kolomoisky and his allies had misappropriated billions from the bank. Kolomoisky has pushed to regain control of the bank, even as the FBI has investigated him for financial crimes.
And in the wake of her decision, Gontareva has faced death threats and danger. Her home was vandalized, and someone left a coffin with her likeness inside it outside the Central Bank offices, as The Washington Post reported. Years after the nationalization of the bank, the danger persists. In August 2019, she was hit by a car in London and hospitalized. The next month, her home in Ukraine was burned down, per the Kyiv Post.
Gontareva’s fight to reform Ukraine’s financial sector won her devoted allies in the West, who saw her as one of Kyiv’s few genuine reformers. Kolomoisky, meanwhile, is an intimidating figure to many in Ukraine, and some have alleged he has ordered contract killings. He also funded a private militia that fought Russian-backed separatists in Eastern Ukraine. His connection to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has also long raised eyebrows; the TV show that boosted Zelensky’s public profile aired on a TV channel that Kolomoisky owns, and one of Kolomoisky’s former lawyers is now a senior aide to Zelensky (Giuliani and U.S. officials have raised concerns with Zelensky’s team about that aide, Andriy Bohdan).
Jordan Libowitz, a spokesperson for the government watchdog organization Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, told The Daily Beast that the Guralnik letters mean Giuliani should answer more questions about his Ukraine work.
“While we can’t obviously speak to the veracity of these claims, it does seem to look more and more like Rudy Giuliani is incredibly deeply involved with some seriously shady business in Ukraine and we need more information, not only on his activities, but his activities and those of his associates on behalf of or benefiting Donald Trump,” he said. “As bad as these things look on their face, they’re so much worse if you consider the involvement of the president of the United States. There is so little we know, but enough to know that we need to know a lot more.”

j/c
So it seems the Trump defense has shifted at least a couple of times throughout this process. I'm interested to see if anyone actually wants to defend this.

- Allegedly there was no proof Trump ordered the money held. Wrong.
- Allegedly Trump was legally within his rights to hold the money. Wrong.
- Then there was no witness to Trump orchestrating this or making the request for a Biden investigation. Wrong.
- Then there was no quid-pro quo (and again no witness). Wrong per Bolton. In addition to that - Trump has prevented any first hand witness to actually testify. (gosh wonder why?).

So here we are and the Trump defense now says - after 2 days saying something different - "Ok - even if there was quid pro quo - and even if Trump did it ... this isn't an impeachable offense" .....

So what is it? Which is it? Like so much that is Trump ... why does the story have to change 2-3-4 times throughout the process. Clinton was impeached for far less in my opinion .... so what's the story with Trump? What precedent are Trump supporters willing to set if he's guilty as charged - but they claim/decide that doesn't rise to the level of impeach-ability?

Here’s a new defense:

Dershowitz: If President does something to win election, it's OK unless it's illegal

https://thehill.com/homenews/administrat...n-its-ok-unless

So cringe worthy

https://www.yahoo.com/news/dershowitz-tr...-212733088.html

Dershowitz: Trump can't be impeached because he believed his reelection is in the national interest
Dylan StablefordSenior Writer,Yahoo News•January 29, 2020
0:07 5:06

Schiff responds to Trump Lawyer Dershowitz's 'very odd argument'

Retired Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz argued in President Trump’s impeachment trial Wednesday that the president’s demand for Ukraine to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden — a leading candidate to oppose him in the presidential campaign — is not an impeachable offense because Trump was acting on the belief that his reelection is “in the public interest.”

“If a president does something which he believes will help him get elected in the public interest, that cannot be the kind of quid pro quo that results in an impeachment,” Dershowitz said in response to Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, on the first of two days during which the opposing legal teams answer written questions from the senators.

Cruz had asked, “As a matter of law, does it matter if there was a quid pro quo?”

Trump has repeatedly denied the existence of a quid pro quo in his dealings with Ukraine, but that defense suffered a blow with the disclosure that his former national security adviser John Bolton has firsthand evidence that the president intended precisely that. Accordingly, his lawyers have shifted to the argument that even if there was one, it does not rise to the level of an impeachable offense.

But Dershowitz’s argument seemed to go well beyond that, asserting that a president is entitled to take action that will advance his reelection chances on the basis of his own belief that it’s for the good of the country — as Abraham Lincoln did in 1864, ordering that troops from Indiana be given leave to return home to vote in an election to keep the state government in Republican hands.

Dershowitz offered the hypothetical scenario of a Democratic president offering a quid pro quo to help solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — a long-standing goal of American foreign policy that if successful would also boost his or her reelection prospects.

The president’s lawyer and frequent defender on Fox News — who nevertheless says he didn’t vote for him and opposes many of his policies — did not address the fact that in (allegedly) withholding military aid to Ukraine in exchange for electoral help, Trump was in fact acting against official U.S. policy, which was to aid that country in its war with Russia.

“We may argue it’s not in the national interest for a particular president to be reelected,” Dershowitz told the Senate, “but for it to be impeachable you would have to discern that he or she made a decision solely on the basis of, as the house managers put it, corrupt motives.”

He added: “It is so dangerous to try to psychoanalyze a president to try to get into the intricacies of the human mind. Everybody has mixed motives.”

“[Dershowitz] just argued that a president who believes only he can fix it — who thinks his re-election is vital to the nation — can’t be impeached for abusing his power to corrupt the next election in his favor because by definition he’s doing what he thinks best for the country!!” tweeted Laurence Tribe, a Harvard law professor and a constitutional scholar who is frequently at odds with Dershowitz.

“Accepting this argument would put us on a short path toward dictatorship, benevolent or otherwise. It’s incompatible with government of, by, and for the people,” Tribe added. “It’s government by egomania.”

Taking the argument to a reductio ad absurdum, the Atlantic magazine’s Adam Serwer wrote on Twitter: “If the president drops nuclear bombs on New York and California to neutralize their electoral votes because he believes it is in the national interest, it is not impeachable, according to Alan Dershowitz.”

“The president lawyers are arguing that if the president ordered his election opponent arrested that would be fine because he’s pursuing the national interest in order to get re-elected,” MSNBC’s Chris Hayes tweeted. “Just to be clear this is the unavoidable logical extension of Dershowitz’s argument.”

In response to a follow-up question from Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer, Adam Schiff, the lead impeachment manager for House Democrats, countered with a hypothetical of his own: What if, in 2011, President Barack Obama had asked Russia to launch an investigation into Mitt Romney, his Republican opponent in the 2012 election, in exchange for U.S. military aid?

“Do any of us have any question that Barack Obama would be impeached for that kind of misconduct?” Schiff asked. “Are we really ready to say that would be OK?”

“All quid pros are not the same,” Schiff added. “Some are legitimate and some are corrupt. You don’t have to be a mind reader to figure out which are which. For one thing, you can ask John Bolton.”

So today I learned that if the POTUS and his counsel first deny, then delay, then claim privilege, then delay again... nothing can ever be resolved placing the POTUS well above the law.

Yes. The entire trump reign has been a circus. A hellish embarrassing circus that can’t end soon enough.

Removing stupidity from my view so I can watch General Hospital is not a "safe space". I just have no interest in that crap, and it makes our country look bad. And most importantly, its interfering with my tv schedule.

A "safe space" is somewhere a liberal hides so their precious feelings arent hurt or offended.

Please do learn your definitions.

by Ryan Goodman and Andrew Weissmann
January 28, 2020

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Some Republican Senators, including potential swing voters like Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), have raised concerns that a subpoena for John Bolton will trigger a claim of executive privilege by the White House and then lead to undesirable drawn out litigation. House managers have sought to downplay the length of any such dispute, noting perhaps too optimistically that Chief Justice Roberts could decide the issue right then and there. They also argue that a court may not even entertain such a motion. Although the House Managers may prove to be right, we don’t address that here. What both sides ignore is a reason that the White House might never truly want to litigate the executive privilege question. That’s because it could cause a federal court (or the Chief Justice) in short order to make the determination that the President committed a crime. Those advising the President would be wise to think hard before taking the actual step of asserting executive privilege to block the testimony of John Bolton or others.

As a threshold question, the judge will most probably look to whether an exception to executive privilege applies. The court could find that the privilege does not apply, for example, in those instances where the privilege has been waived by the President or his agents having spoken about the contents of the conversation. But there is another threshold issue: if the proposed testimony involves evidence of criminal activity (more commonly understood as the “crime-fraud” exception in the context of attorney-client privilege). As former State Department Legal Adviser Harold Koh and his coauthors explained in a thorough analysis of executive privilege and its exceptions, “government officials cannot use constitutional privileges to hide evidence of crimes” (citing United States v. Nixon, United States v. Myers, Comm. on Judiciary, In Re Sealed Case).

Indeed, the Chief Judge in the District of Columbia courthouse, where the White House would need to bring a court case to block testimony based on a claim of executive privilege, has dealt with the crime fraud exception to the attorney-client privilege (which is generally more absolute than the executive privilege). Judges even warn counsel away from contesting the issue in these kinds of situations by noting that the court would then be compelled to determine if the relevant communications involved criminal activity. Paul Manafort’s counsel knows this lesson well, where the court issued a lengthy decision finding that his communications with his legal counsel in 2016-17 concerning FARA fell within the crime fraud exception. Notably, as the court held, it is not necessary for both parties — the client and lawyer — to be involved in the fraud; it is sufficient that the client was seeking to perpetrate the fraud. The same should apply to the analysis of a claim of executive privilege. As a recent law review article observes, “The crime-fraud exception could potentially also apply. There is no official case in which the crime-fraud exception has been applied to communications otherwise protected by the executive privilege, but it is likely that a court would follow the policy underlying the crime-fraud exception to other privileges.”

Given the list of federal crimes that leading legal experts conclude applies to the alleged scheme with Ukraine, a federal court finding could be a significant blow to the White House both in the impeachment itself and more generally as it would not be coming from members of the other party. It would also strengthen the hand of prosecutors who may be investigating others, like Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, as co-conspirators in such a scheme.

In short, there’s a legal buzzsaw that would await the White House in asserting a claim of executive privilege as it would open the door to a judge finding that the crime fraud exception applies.

Here is all the Senate needs to end this bogus impeachment.

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/schiff-bolton-lack-credibility-senate-impeachment-trial

Laugh while you still can because you and the others are about to embarrass yourselves once again with this get Trump stuff.

I warned you when this all started, He who laughs last laughs best.

None of us expected nor expect now that McConnell's Swein Campf would remove Trump. But America sees...

They got new writers and changed the storylines from eternally boring to super fascinating. So I NEED my soaps!

For only the third time in US history, a president was impeached!

And for the first time in US history we have an impeachment with an asterisk.

Oh that's not an asterisk, that's a sphincter depicting who was impeached.

Yep. trump impeached. No asterisk is happening. Obamacare is still covering pre existing conditions. The economy continues to grow at the same pace during the Obama corruption free era. Spending is at an all time high. Mexican’s aren’t paying for a wall, and it’s reported this morning part of the existing wall is falling over and falling apart. Bin Laden is still dead. Enjoy your corrupted do nothing trump era.

Yes, he is, thanks to the work of George W. and Seal Team 6!

Rewriting history is what GOPers do best.

Bro, if trump was soooooo concerned about corruption, why hasn’t he frozen aid to Israel until the PM’s upcoming trial is done, seeing as Bibi just got Indicted on corruption and fraud charges?

Or, literally ANYTHING the saudis do?

The senate isn’t going to do their job regardless. And even if trump is beaten in November he won’t leave the WH until he’s carried out kicking and screaming or dead.

Long live the king.

Yep. We all know what the outcome is.

Which is great actually, because apparently the GOP didn’t learn their lesson in 2018. This year might see another blue wave, this time in the senate and Oval Office.

Oh well.

You laughed in 2018 and then disappeared.

That was truly funny.

Biggest turnover of seats in like 50+ years.

Ya'll laughed and said "you're not going to be a president" in 2016 ...and then ya'll go on a three year pouting and throwing a tantrum spree...

Says the guy that went on a 8 year pouting and tantrum spree over a corruption and scandal free Obama administration.

You know who else likes "Safe Spaces" Children,,,, Trump is the biggest baby I know,,

yea, we went on a tantrum like the GOP did in 2016. and oh look, it worked!

So the latest updated, new revised version of the new revised version of the new revised version of the Trump defense ..... As long as Trump believes he's the best President for the Nation he's therefore acting with the best interest of the country at heart and he can't be impeached for any action he takes that is aimed at keeping him POTUS. . . . I kid you not.

And I have no doubt someone ... Maybe many Trumpians agree. Smdh

Obama’s ‘Scandal-Free Administration’ Is a Myth

Jan 16th, 2017



Hans A. von Spakovsky


Election Law Reform Initiative and Senior Legal Fellow
Hans von Spakovsky is an authority on a wide range of issues – including civil rights, civil justice, the First Amendment, immigration.
Copied

You often hear that the Obama administration, whatever its other failings, has been “scandal-free.” Valerie Jarrett, the president’s closest adviser, has said he “prides himself on the fact that his administration hasn’t had a scandal and he hasn’t done something to embarrass himself.”

Even Trump adviser Peter Thiel seems to agree. When the New York Times’s Maureen Dowd observed during an interview that Mr. Obama’s administration was “without any ethical shadiness,” Mr. Thiel accepted the premise, saying: “But there’s a point where no corruption can be a bad thing. It can mean that things are too boring.”

In reality, Mr. Obama has presided over some of the worst scandals of any president in recent decades. Here’s a partial list:



• State Department email. In an effort to evade federal open-records laws, Mr. Obama’s first secretary of state set up a private server, which she used exclusively to conduct official business, including communications with the president and the transmission of classified material. A federal criminal investigation produced no charges, but FBI Director James Comey reported that the secretary and her colleagues “were extremely careless” in handling national secrets.

• Operation Fast and Furious. The Obama Justice Department lost track of thousands of guns it had allowed to pass into the hands of suspected smugglers, in the hope of tracing them to Mexican drug cartels. One of the guns was used in the fatal 2010 shooting of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry. Congress held then-Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt when he refused to turn over documents about the operation.

• IRS abuses. Mr. Obama’s Internal Revenue Service did something Richard Nixon only dreamed of doing: It successfully targeted political opponents. The Justice Department then refused to enforce Congress’s contempt citation against the IRS’s Lois Lerner, who refused to answer questions about her agency’s misconduct.

• Benghazi. Ambassador Chris Stevens and three others were killed in the attack on a U.S. diplomatic compound in Libya. With less than two months to go before the 2012 election, the State Department falsely claimed the attack was not a terrorist attack but a reaction to an anti-Muslim film. Emails from the secretary later showed that she knew the attack was terrorism. Justice Department prosecutors even convinced a magistrate judge to jail the filmmaker.

• Hacking. Mr. Obama presided over the biggest data breach in the federal government’s history, at the Office of Personnel Management. The hack exposed the personnel files of millions of federal employees and may end up being used for everything from identity theft to blackmail and espionage. OPM Director Katherine Archuleta, the president’s former political director, had been warned repeatedly about security deficiencies but took no steps to fix them.

• Veterans Affairs. At least 40 U.S. veterans died waiting for appointments at a Phoenix VA facility, many of whom had been on a secret waiting list—part of an effort to conceal that between 1,400 and 1,600 veterans were forced to wait months for appointments. A 2014 internal VA audit found “57,436 newly enrolled veterans facing a minimum 90-day wait for medical care; 63,869 veterans who enrolled over the past decade requesting an appointment that never happened.” Even Mr. Obama admitted, in a November 2016 press conference, that “it was scandalous what happened”—though minutes earlier he boasted that “we will—knock on wood—leave this administration without significant scandal.”

All of these scandals were accompanied by a lack of transparency so severe that 47 of Mr. Obama’s 73 inspectors general signed an open letter in 2014 decrying the administration’s stonewalling of their investigations.

One reason for Mr. Obama’s penchant for secrecy is his habit of breaking rules—from not informing Congress of the dubious prisoner swap involving Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl and the Taliban, to violating restrictions on cash transfers to Iran as part of a hostage-release deal.

The president’s journalistic allies are happily echoing the “scandal-free” myth. Time’s Joe Klein claims Mr. Obama has had “absolutely no hint of scandal” in his presidency. The media’s failure to cover the Obama administration critically has been a scandal in itself—but at least the president can’t be blamed for that one.

This piece originally appeared in The Wall Street Journal
Get Inside Information on the Policies Shaping America


https://www.heritage.org/political-process/commentary/obamas-scandal-free-administration-myth

Bro that is so embarrassing. And more people are no embracing that trash ass defense.

Started reading and some of your "scandals" are simply false. Faux News. As expected. Obama administration in comparison to Trump looks squeaky clean.

Resistance is Futile.

Just heard on the radio that Schiff was trying to accuse Trump of something that was not in the trial proceedings. Heard this would have actually been cause to dismiss if it were a regular trial.

With the stock market the way it is, unemployment lows, high earnings for middle wage workers, USMCA, at this point the Democrats are actually harming the country. In effect they are saying they don't want these good things to continue. Any attempt to change the tide of good will be looked upon very poorly. Do Democrats not like the things I listed above?