Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

We are builders in a constant struggle with destroyers. let’s win this.

Historically it was a little unusual for the president to be an incoherent babbling moron.

fuckem (in honor of the late great efgoldman)

Anyone who bans teaching American history has no right to shape America’s future.

Conservatism: there are some people the law protects but does not bind and others who the law binds but does not protect.

… riddled with inexplicable and elementary errors of law and fact

Never entrust democracy to any process that requires republicans to act in good faith.

I really should read my own blog.

They traffic in fear. it is their only currency. if we are fearful, they are winning.

Republicans are the party of chaos and catastrophe.

Let me eat cake. The rest of you could stand to lose some weight, frankly.

You can’t love your country only when you win.

Prediction: the GOP will rethink its strategy of boycotting future committees.

When I decide to be condescending, you won’t have to dream up a fantasy about it.

So it was an October Surprise A Day, like an Advent calendar but for crime.

Whoever he was, that guy was nuts.

Yeah, with this crowd one never knows.

Shallow, uninformed, and lacking identity

It’s time for the GOP to dust off that post-2012 autopsy, completely ignore it, and light the party on fire again.

No one could have predicted…

Despite his magical powers, I don’t think Trump is thinking this through, to be honest.

Hot air and ill-informed banter

Thanks to your bullshit, we are now under siege.

A Senator Walker would be an insult to the state and the nation.

You are here: Home / Politics / Trumpery / Trump Crime Cartel / The Answer Is Yes. Yes, Trump Lied.

The Answer Is Yes. Yes, Trump Lied.

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This keeps getting more and more fun:

The House of Representatives is investigating whether President Trump lied to former special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation, the House general counsel told a federal appeals court Monday in Washington, D.C.

The statement came during arguments over Congress’s request to have secret grand jury evidence from the Mueller report released urgently for its impeachment inquiry.

The request followed closely on the heels of Friday’s conviction of longtime Trump friend Roger Stone. Testimony and evidence at his trial appeared to cast doubt on written replies from Trump to Mueller about the president’s knowledge about attempts by his 2016 campaign to learn more about the release of hacked Democratic emails by the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks.

“Did the president lie? Was the president not truthful in his responses to the Mueller investigation,” General Counsel Douglas N. Letter said. “The House is trying to determine whether the current president should remain in office. This is unbelievably serious and it’s happening right now, very fast.”

When asking if Trump lied, the answer is always yes.

Reader Interactions

103Comments

  1. 1.

    Roger Moore

    When asking if Trump lied, the answer is always yes.

    We know this, but it’s important to be able to prove that he lied about a specific thing in a specific case.

  3. 3.

    Tim C.

    New GOP rule.

     

    Lying about a sleazy extra-marital affair:  Impeach and Remove

     

    Lying about using money allocated by congress to extort bribes from a country that’s also the victim of the same dictator that supported your run for the White House:  Totally fine.

  4. 4.

    Jeffro

    Shouldn’t the default always be that he is lying, unless somehow he can prove without a doubt that he’s telling the truth?

    Like, “For lunch today, I had a Big Mac or six”. He’s lying until we see the six empty cartons, interview the ‘chef’ at the nearest Mickey Ds, etc. Even for something as simple and likely as that.

    He lies. He lies about everything. He learned it from Fred – it’s like an achievement for him, a validation.

  6. 6.

    Roger Moore

    @clay:

    And, even more importantly for impeachment purposes, that he lied to the FBI.

    Slightly more specifically, that his lying to the FBI was an attempt to obstruct justice, since precedent says that is definitely an impeachable high crime.

  8. 8.

    Roger Moore

    @Tim C.:

    Lying about a sleazy extra-marital affair: Impeach and Remove

    *Unless you’re lying about violating campaign finance laws by paying off the person you had the sleazy affair with so it won’t come out during your election campaign.

  10. 10.

    mrmoshpotato

    Yes.  They lied about inauguration crowd size days into this bastard administration when everyone could see the picture comparisons.

     

    Hell, they probably lied about shit during the transition that we’ve all forgotten about.  It’s been a long decade.

  11. 11.

    debbie

    @Tim C.:

     

    Someone also needs to point out to the GOP that Linda Tripp did not witness Monica servicing Bill in the Oval Office, so they were more than happy to accept hearsay and proceed to impeachment. They accepted it then; they must accept it now.

  15. 15.

    Boris, Rasputin's Evil Twin

    Trump’s first lie as president* was reciting the Oath of Office.

    If he announced the time, I’d look at my watch.

    Never thought I’d be considering Nixon’s virtues, or ever thinking he had many.

  17. 17.

    Steeplejack

    @Omnes Omnibus:
    Alert! Scaramouche coming up on TCM at 8:00 EST. “He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad.”

    Stewart Granger swashing his buckles mightily and Eleanor Parker and Janet Leigh straining at their bodices. What’s not to like?

  19. 19.

    gene108

    From a Republican point of view lying is fine.

     

    Doing it, when you are under oath or in sworn written statements, is a problem because the law is against you.

     

    But the general idea of lying to get ahead is okay.

  21. 21.

    Ella in New Mexico

    @Jeffro:

    He lies. He lies about everything. He learned it from Fred – it’s like an achievement for him, a validation

    Although it should be noted that Fred reportedly was not very happy with him and with his early and mid childhood bad behavior, enough to ship him off to military school in hopes he’d avoid becoming an axe murderer. Instead he became a “just this side of jail” sociopath by using his Daddy’s money and access to power.

     

    So maybe it started before Fred? Or maybe he inherited the traits from Fred who was just angry he wasn’t being clever enough at being bad?

  23. 23.

    Gvg

    @debbie: umm, that was proven by the dna in the seman on the blue dress. I hate even discussing it. It was sleazy television. Until they came out with that scientific evidence that wasn’t partisan, I had disbelieved the whole affair story because the republicans were obviously deranged partisan hacks with a dishonest agenda. They were still crooked hacks even after they proved he lied. Bill really was not being smart there.

  24. 24.

    West of the Rockies

    @Jeffro:

     

    And here’s the big (and often forgotten) point:  he lies because he is a criminal, because the truth reveals his absolute bankruptcy of integrity, ethics, compassion, and comprehension.

     

    We blithely say, ” He lies, he lies–lies–lies.”  That’s true, of course, but what his lying says about the man himself and his so-called policies is often more important than the lies themself.

     

    “I got the biggest crowd.”

     

    Lie.  A lie that, meh, doesn’t affect much.  A lie, however, that demonstrates his petty, vain, core disrespect for truth and honor.

  25. 25.

    NotMax

    @Steeplejack

    Channel 9 (WOR way back then) in NYC used to have a weekday program called Million Dollar Movie* with a, shall we say, limited inventory. That film was one of those which, when it did come around, would air repeatedly Monday through Friday.

    They sometimes did the same with such ‘gems’ as The Crawling Eye, a clunker which came around with alarming frequency.

    *Hyperbole to da max.

  26. 26.

    MomSense

    I don’t think anyone has seen him in public since his early, partial physical on Saturday.  I checked out his twitter and my hunch is someone else is tweeting for him.  Doesn’t seem vitriolic enough to be C+ Santa Monica fascist (h/t Jon Lovett) Stephen Miller so I’m guessing Ivanka.

     

    Wonder what’s up. It could be he had some medical event or maybe he is just looking for an out.

  27. 27.

    Roger Moore

    @Gvg:

    I think you’re missing the point.  The point is that the Republicans were perfectly happy starting an impeachment investigation based on what was clearly hearsay evidence, because they were eventually able to produce non-hearsay evidence.  Now they’re trying to say the whole Democratic investigation is illegitimate because it started with hearsay evidence even though it has succeeded in producing reams of non-hearsay since then.  It’s another case of them playing Calvinball.

  32. 32.

    piratedan

    to make matters worse…. I’m told that Trump composed his written testimony while wearing a tan suit and enjoying a burger with mustard on it… there is NO line that this President WILL not cross apparently….

  38. 38.

    Jeffro

    Speaking of lying, and how it’s not just a trumpov thing, Catherine Rampell is on point:

     

    trumpov and the Republicans are on the hunt for the Real Criminals

    Nothing President Trump does, it turns out, is a crime, let alone a “high” one. That’s not only because some crimes are not crimes, according to both Trump and his personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani. It is also not only because a sitting president is supposedly immune from criminal prosecution — including for shooting someone on Fifth Avenue, per another Trump lawyer.

    According to Republicans’ airtight legal reasoning, nothing Trump does can be considered criminal because somebody else somewhere might be doing something worse. And just as O.J. Simpson pledged to search for the real killer, Trump and his fellow Republicans are on the hunt for the Real Crimes.

    For instance: The Real Crime isn’t that Trump secretly withheld military aid to extort a desperate ally into announcing a sham investigation into a political rival. Heavens no. The Real Crime is that the public knows that this happened.

    At least so says Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), who recently railed against the whistleblower’s decision to “leak” information about Trump’s Ukrainian shakedown by reporting it to the intelligence community’s inspector general. That leak, Johnson complained, “exposed things that didn’t need to be exposed.”

    “This would have been far better off if we would’ve just taken care of this behind the scenes,” the senator said on NBC News’s “Meet the Press,” extrapolating on his dubious understanding of both the law and the Constitution. “We have two branches of government. Most people, most people wanted to support Ukraine. We were trying to convince President Trump.”

    In other words: The crime here isn’t the arson; it’s that snitching smoke alarm.

    …Again, the Real Crime isn’t the growing number of new possibly impeachable offenses; it’s that Democrats are cataloguing them.

    It’s all about the IOKIYAR, peeps.  Always and forever.  Dems = illegit, no matter what the facts.  GOP = the one true truth.

  39. 39.

    Steeplejack

    @zhena gogolia:
    I was thinking of you this afternoon when I watched part of No Leave, No Love (1946) on TCM. Van Johnson, Keenan Wynn, Edward Arnold and a British singer named Pat Kirkwood. So-so movie, very much of its time, but not awful.

    I looked up Kirkwood, because I had never seen her before, and found (on IMDB) that after the movie bombed she had a breakdown, attempted suicide and was in a sanatorium for eight months. Wow!

    Then she went back to England, where apparently she had a very successful career through the ’50s and beyond. Noël Coward wrote a musical (Ace of Clubs, 1950) specifically for her.

    Anyhow, I thought it was an interesting side story.

  40. 40.

    Emma

    @Gvg:

    Actually it was all hearsay at first. And just to put the cork in it, originally the investigation had nothing to do with sex. When Whitewater turned up zip, they expanded the investigation.

  41. 41.

    Hungry Joe

    In the novel “The Death of Vishnu,” author Manil Suri describes an office worker (in Mumbai, I think) who lies about EVERYTHING. Quoting from memory: ”He even lied about what he’d brought for lunch. Every day he’d climb to the top of the building and eat alone, on the roof, so no one would know that he’d lied.” When I read the book — late ‘90s, probably — I found it a hilarious exaggeration: Surely there are no such people in real life.

     

    Then …

  45. 45.

    zhena gogolia

    @Steeplejack:

     

    I’ve been following Phillipa Fallon down the rabbit hole (see the earlier thread where her beatnik poetry in High School Confidential was posted).

  52. 52.

    Dan B

    @MomSense: Interesting that Trump hasn’t been seen in public since his field trip to the big doctors.  It would fit with my partner’s belief that it was a stroke or many mini-strokes like when he can’t pronounce words mid speech.

  54. 54.

    sdhays

    @Dan B: Don’t worry. The Press Secretary has assured us that he is “super-human” and “vigorous”, so I’m sure everything is fine.

  55. 55.

    Amir Khalid

    @Dan B:

    At some point Trump has to be seen in public, or by the media, or at least by the White House staff, while “presidenting”. As head of state and government he doesn’t really have the option of hiding for much longer than a weekend.

  56. 56.

    sdhays

    @Amir Khalid: His Executive Time is now too vigorous and important to allow for trivial things like “putting on pants” and “being seen in public”. That’s why he had to get Part 1 of his Annual Physical this weekend – to clear his schedule for all of the Executive Time he knew he’d need from now on. His powers of planning are super-human!

     

    I can’t wait for Annual Physical – Part Deux. Where will they find the time in his busy schedule??

  57. 57.

    zhena gogolia

    This is just impressionistic, but are we a little less testy now that we don’t have to keep typing in our nyms and e-mail addresses?

  58. 58.

    FlyingToaster

    Sounds like he might have had a TIA.  Worrisome enough for a trip to ambulatory care, not so much as the ER or checked-in to the hospital.

     

    My dad had a TIA a year before he had his stroke, which was a year and a half before they figured out that he had myoletic leukemia and 3 months to live.  It was pretty clear in hindsight that this was all of a piece, and the munged blood marrow was wreaking havoc years before it finally killed him.

     

    By the way, this is all crazy bad news to anyone who wants the Orange Shitgibbon to be re-elected.  His health will definitely NOT be up to it.

  59. 59.

    patrick II

    Question (hinted at on Ari tonight)

    If Trump would leave office tomorrow, would you let him walk?

    The Republicans in the Senate will not convict, he may not lose in 2020 (you never know). Is it worth the danger of his continuing presidency, or would you let him walk?

  60. 60.

    zhena gogolia

    The Holmes transcript is out and it is juicy.

     

    I am going to have a tough row to hoe tomorrow, as I will not be able to keep WaPo livestreaming the hearings. I really wish I could hear Vindman in real time.

  61. 61.

    cain

    @Jeffro:

    Just ask them why it wasn’t taken care of internally for Benghazi, Cletus, etc etc? You can get these guys so easily with whatever bullshit they are spouting because they’ve broken every rule in the book. There is nothing they have not done that we can’t call them on by showing actual examples. They are immoral boils that must be lanced.

  66. 66.

    cain

    @Steve in the ATL:

    You know good and well that Balloon Juice After Dark doesn’t start until 11 pm eastern

    Really? Wow. Will Shannon Tweed be joining us? (I tried to look up a male version, but there aren’t any popular ones!) In any case, all I need is my whiskey, folks!

  67. 67.

    mrmoshpotato

    @Jeffro: Better Call OJ!  Netflix, let’s talk!

    It’s all about the IOKIYAR, peeps. Always and forever.

    For ever and ever. Fuckem!

  68. 68.

    Jay

    According to the Mob, ( not sure if it’s the Russians or Italians), Dolt 45 lies, even when he doesn’t have to, just for the practice.

  73. 73.

    sdhays

    @patrick II: What do you mean “let him walk”? Let him resign? Absolutely. Let him move on without having to face consequences for his crimes? No. Congressional investigations must continue, and I expect the next Democratic Administration in 2021 to go after the traitorous fools.

     

    But if he resigns, I might be ok with not impeaching him, as long as Congress continues to get to the bottom of all the corruption in the Dump Dense administration. He may be central to the problem, but it’s much bigger than just him.

  75. 75.

    Steeplejack

    @sdhays:

    His Executive Time is now too vigorous and important to allow for trivial things like “putting on pants” and “being seen in public.”

    As the great efgoldman said: “Pants? You gotta put ’em on, you gotta take ’em off. They’re a lot of trouble.”

  76. 76.

    zhena gogolia

    @Miss Bianca:

     

    I don’t know — it’s on Kyle Griffin’s twitter so I thought it was something new.

     

    Maybe this was already leaked but now it’s official.

    NEW: The House Intelligence Committee has just released the depositions of Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs David Hale and State Dept. official David Holmes. David Hale: David Holmes:

     

  85. 85.

    mrmoshpotato

    @zhena gogolia:

    I will not be able to keep WaPo livestreaming the hearings

    I’m sure everyone who broadcasts it will have it in full on YouTube.

    (Don’t watch the Russthuglican “questioning” while eating or around anything throwable.)

  86. 86.

    Villago Delenda Est

    @Jay: White Supremacists should be treated like Al Qaeda, like Daesh.

     

    And that’s also how the NRA should be treated.

  87. 87.

    J R in WV

    @Amir Khalid:

     

    The inveterate lying and the charm are often both part of the sociopath’s skill set.

    Poor Donald — he got all the lying, and NONE of the charm~!!~

  88. 88.

    Another Scott

    @Sm*t Cl*de: Yup.

    As Capt. Mnemo reminds us, Donnie is a narcissist:

    […]

    2. Break the spell and stop focusing on them
    When there’s a narcissistic personality in your orbit, attention seems to gravitate their way. That’s by design — whether it’s negative or positive attention, those with narcissistic personalities work hard to keep themselves in the spotlight.

    You might soon find yourself buying into this tactic, pushing aside your own needs to keep them satisfied.

    If you’re waiting for a break in their attention-seeking behavior, it may never come. No matter how much you adjust your life to suit to their needs, it’s never going to be enough.

    If you must deal with a narcissistic personality, don’t allow them to infiltrate your sense of self or define your world. You matter, too. Regularly remind yourself of your strengths, desires, and goals.

    Take charge and carve out some “me time.” Take care of yourself first and remember that it’s not your job to fix them.

    […]

    8. Insist on immediate action, not promises
    People with narcissistic personalities are good at making promises. They promise to do what you want and not to do that thing you hate. They promise to generally do better.

    And they might even be sincere about these promises. But make no mistake about it: The promise is a means to an end for someone with a narcissistic personality.

    Once they get what they want, the motivation is gone. You can’t count on their actions matching their words.

    Ask for what you want and stand your ground. Insist that you’ll only fulfill their requests after they’ve fulfilled yours.

    Don’t give in on this point. Consistency will help drive it home.

    […]

    Supposedly he said that he’s “strongly considering” providing written testimony to the House. Sure he is…

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  92. 92.

    lgerard

    @NotMax:

     

    Jeez, I saw The Crawling Eye a billion times on Million Dollar Movie back in the day.  It was right up there with The Giant Behemoth and The Giant Claw in my trinity of great cinema.

  96. 96.

    wuzzat

    “Did the president lie? Was the president not truthful in his responses to the Mueller investigation,” General Counsel Douglas N. Letter said.

    I mean, yes, obviously, but also that’ s a little stilted. Do you think he phrased it like that so the press couldn’t spin it, or does General Counsel Douglas N. Letter always talk like he’s a character in the SuperDictionary? (Example)

  99. 99.

    Citizen Alan

    @sdhays: I’d still want to impeach him post-resignation because I don’t want my tax dollars being squandered on overpriced Mar-A-Lago golf carts for the Secret Service agents who would otherwise follow Shitgibbon around for the rest of his life. I would want impeachment proceedings to continue even if he died in office because I don’t want any of his garbage-children to get any sort of benefit as a result of his presidency*.

  100. 100.

    barbequebob

    @NotMax: I watched that movie a gazillion times  I love The Crawling Eye.  Also used to watch March of the Wooden Soldiers every Thanksgiving, but think it was on Channel 11, WPIX.

  102. 102.

    Uncle Cosmo

    @mrmoshpotato: Remember how the Thugs used to cackle that Bill Clinton “never told the truth when a lie would do” – ?

     

    Once again, accusation is confession.

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