Here’s a nice, clean new post for when the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence comes back in to session after the scheduled morning votes in the House to resume hearing the testimony of Ambassador Yovanovitch.
Here’s the live feed:
by Adam L Silverman| 209 Comments
This post is in: 2020 Elections, America, Domestic Politics, Election 2016, Foreign Affairs, Impeachment, Open Threads, Politics, Russia, Silverman on Security
Here’s a nice, clean new post for when the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence comes back in to session after the scheduled morning votes in the House to resume hearing the testimony of Ambassador Yovanovitch.
Here’s the live feed:
by Adam L Silverman| 191 Comments
This post is in: 2020 Elections, America, Domestic Politics, Election 2016, Foreign Affairs, Impeachment, Information Warfare, Open Threads, Politics, Russia, Silverman on Security
The second day of the House impeachment hearings is scheduled to get started at 9:00 AM EST. Expect more of what we observed on Wednesday. The Democrats on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence focused on fact finding through Ambassador Yovanovitch’s testimony while the Republicans attempt to use the hearing as an information laundry to promote the conspiracy theories and agitprop that they want people to believe exonerates the President.
Update at 9:10 AM EST
News broke late last night that one of the senior career civil servants at the Office of Management and Budget assigned to the White House with firsthand information of the illegal orders to hold up the congressionally mandated and appropriated aid for Ukraine will give a closed door deposition if subpoenaed. We now know the officials name, that he has been subpoenaed, and that he’ll likely sit for that deposition tomorrow.
Mark Sandy, a senior White House budget official, is prepared to testify Saturday to House impeachment investigators about the halt in Ukrainian aid moneyhttps://t.co/dzwopQIOxM
— POLITICO (@politico) November 15, 2019
The President is going to have a very, very, very, very bad weekend. As is Mick Mulvaney. And several others.
Here’s the live feed:
Open thread!
House Impeachment Hearings Day 2: Ambassador YovanovitchPost + Comments (191)
by ruemara| 68 Comments
This post is in: 2020 Elections, First Posts, Impeachment, Impeachment Inquiry, Information Warfare, Open Threads, Organizing & Resistance, All we want is life beyond the thunderdome, Bitter Despair is the New Black
¡Buenas noches, Juicers! Yeah, I was going to start things off with my usual elan and graciousness, but due to circumstances where I really wish I could slap the stupid out of people’s genes, I’m going to commence with rant and we’ll do the formal howdy doody and cat pics the minute we get images to work on the blog? Ok? Good talk, glad we’re on the same page.
Lo, the ultrafuckery. And it’s not even CNN?! I can’t tell if I’m marveling at CNN not delving into this level of commentary or disappointed at NBC News for grabbing a shovel and digging right to the Marianas Trench level of analysis. Deep Stupid, indeed.
Whenever I’ve said I was against impeachment, even to the point of don’t discuss impeach club, the media was why. We don’t have great journalism. We never had universally great journalism, but we had a standard that managed to keep mostly on target. Regular old journalism is boring statement of facts. Some obvious, some not, & some you have hunt them down because they’re hella elusive. Instead, we have a packs of styrofoam peanuts shoved into Hugo Boss suits always looking for a hot mic. The American press is always looking for the highest highs, the flashiest story. Much like watching McG’s cinematic oeuvere, they think everything should be the noisiest, most explosive drama, no matter how serious the issue is. When our media behaves like this, no wonder we’re pretty far gone into fascism. I can’t see a future where we survive this mess and the press stays the same. I’ve watched it locally and seen how it mirrors the national media. Reporters, pundits, analysts – they want flash & smoke. What they don’t get is that this teaches people who need to be told about the facts, that the issues aren’t really that important. …
It’s a good profession, journalism. Pity so few are actually working in it.
Maybe somewhere, a batch of good journos are trying to do something about this mess bourne of 24/7 news channels and the idea that news should be as glitzy as tv show. I bid them good luck. And I chuck a hefty twitter brick at this media analysis about impeachment hearings needing PIZZAZZ.
Dems shouldn’t be required to put on a carnival for members of the 4th estate to do their duty on reporting cleanly, smartly and accurately so we have an informed citizenry.
alright, I’m trying to finish 3 pages today, back to work.
by Adam L Silverman| 55 Comments
This post is in: 2020 Elections, America, Domestic Politics, Election 2016, Foreign Affairs, Impeachment, Information Warfare, Open Threads, Politics, Russia, Silverman on Security, Our Failed Political Establishment
We are just under 24 hours out from the first of the publicly facing House impeachment hearings. The first hearing begins tomorrow at 10:00 AM EST and if we have a functional blog, I’ll have a live feed up for you all.
Tomorrow’s hearings are Ambassador William Taylor, the Acting US Ambassador to Ukraine, at 10:00 AM and Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs in the afternoon. The next day of public hearings will be Friday when Ambassador Yovanavitch, the former US Ambassador to Ukraine will be testifying.
Next week’s schedule was released earlier today.
Here's a look at public hearings scheduled for next week as part of the impeachment inquiry:
NOVEMBER 19
Jennifer Williams
Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman
Kurt Volker
Tim MorrisonNOVEMBER 20
Gordon Sondland
Laura Cooper
David HaleNOVEMBER 21
Fiona Hillhttps://t.co/x2rFHf6Pxr— CNN (@CNN) November 13, 2019
The procedure for these hearings will be that the chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI), Congressman Schiff, and the ranking member, Congressman Nunes, will each make an opening statement. Each session’s witness will then be given a chance to make an opening statement if they so desire. Questioning will begin with a forty-five minute round of questioning for the committee chair and ranking member, rather than the 5 minute rounds we’ve become accustomed to over the past several years. It has already announced that Congressman Schiff’s time will be taken by the majority (Committee) counsel, Dan Goldman, a former Federal prosecutor and former NBC/MSNBC legal analyst who was specifically hired by Congressman Schiff back in February to oversee this investigation. It is not clear yet whether Congressman Nunes will do the questioning himself, have his counsel conduct the questioning, or some combination thereof. It is important to remember that Congressman Schiff is, himself, a former Federal prosecutor and one of the few who has successfully prosecuted a case involving a US official engaged in spying for a hostile foreign power. Goldman was involved in very high profile prosecutions of Genovese crime organization members. Congressman Nunes has a degree in agriculture, states his occupation as farmer, but his family farm is now in Iowa, not in his congressional district in California. So expect more of the conspiracy theory laundering that Congressman Nunes has been doing throughout the closed door depositions when he could be bothered to actually show up to them.
After that, the questioning will devolve back to the alternating five minute blocks of questioning for each of the remaining Democratic and Republican members of the committee. I fully expect that the Republican members, like they do for every hearing, will have a coordinated a list of questions intended to derail and sidetrack the hearings into conspiracy theory territory so they can launder their misinformation, disinformation, and agitprop through the hearings. And since Congressman Jordan (R-Men’s Showers) has been temporarily placed on the committee so he can do his jacket off, sleeves rolled up, rapid fire, staccato badgering of witnesses, I fully expect a lot of the Republican questioning time will be yielded back to him so he can badger at will as we’ve seen in House Oversight Committee hearings earlier this year. The Democratic members of the committee, unlike their Republican counterparts, are largely former Federal and state prosecutors, law enforcement officers, and staff judge advocates in the US military so their questions will at least be on topic and germane even if they’re not coordinated. And they really should be coordinated, but I’m not counting on that type of message discipline in strategic communication.
Congressman Schiff has established the rules so that all of the various points of order and personal privilege and parliamentary procedure will be dealt with at the end of each hearing day to avoid the Republican members of the committee from grinding the hearing to a halt for up to an hour as soon as it begins as they’ve done with other high profile televised hearings over the past 10 months.
I have no idea what time the ritual bodily ejection of Congressman Gaetz (R-DUI) from the committee chambers is scheduled for. You’ll just have to watch the whole thing. Personally, I’m hoping Congressman Schiff has a Gaetz sized trebuchet installed so they can really go for distance! (that was sarcasm, lest anyone think I’m advocating for violence against Congressman Gaetz).
Expect a lot of what we already know from the now released deposition transcripts to be publicly confirmed. Expect the committee Republicans, their staff, and Congressman Gaetz to be disruptive and try to turn the hearings into a circus. And, provided the blog is actually up, running, and functioning with the change over to the new site, expect that I’ll have a live stream of the proceedings up as soon as I can get access.
Open thread.
T-12: The House Impeachment Hearings Begin Tomorrow AM, Here’s What to ExpectPost + Comments (55)
This post is in: Foreign Affairs, Impeach the Motherfucker!, Open Threads, Politics, Republican Stupidity, Assholes, General Stupidity
Donald Trump is a dim-witted conman, but like any half-bright male baboon, he knows how to dominate rivals. Our long national nightmare of governance by a lesser primate (any random baboon would be a VAST improvement) is interspersed with darkly comic glimpses of arrogant fanatics and sundry knaves being ritually humiliated for disobedience and/or publicly shitting in their own hats when commanded to do so by a corrupt and ridiculous buffoon.
Secretaries of State Tillerson and Pompeo illustrate the two options admirably. Tillerson gave up being a powerful executive of a rapacious multinational polluter to take orders from an absurd cocksplat, endure serial humiliations and then get fired while on the toilet. In the final analysis, he may have escaped the Trump orbit less ignominiously than his successor, who has publicly shat his hat: [The Times]
WASHINGTON — As President Trump’s first C.I.A. director, Mike Pompeo was briefed by agency officials on the extensive evidence — including American intercepts of conversations between participants — showing that Russian hackers working for the government of Vladimir V. Putin had interfered in the 2016 American presidential campaign. In May 2017, Mr. Pompeo testified in a Senate hearing that he stood by that conclusion.
Two and a half years later, Mr. Pompeo seems to have changed his mind. As Mr. Trump’s second secretary of state, he now supports an investigation into a discredited, partisan theory that Ukraine, not Russia, attacked the Democratic National Committee, which Mr. Trump wants to use to make the case that he was elected without Moscow’s help. “Inquiries with respect to that are completely important,” Mr. Pompeo said last month. “I think everyone recognizes that governments have an obligation — indeed, a duty — to ensure that elections happen with integrity, without interference from any government, whether that’s the Ukrainian government or any other.”
Mr. Pompeo’s spreading of a false narrative at the heart of the Ukraine scandal is the most striking example of how he has fallen off the tightrope he has traversed for the past 18 months: demonstrating loyalty to the president while insisting to others he was pursuing a traditional, conservative foreign policy. Mr. Pompeo, 55, now finds himself at the most perilous moment of his political life as veteran diplomats testify to Congress that Mr. Trump and his allies hijacked Ukraine policy for political gain — and as congressional investigators look into what Mr. Pompeo knew of the machinations of Mr. Trump and Rudolph W. Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer.
Pompeo is evil, but he’s not stupid. He knows this crackpot “Ukraine framed Russia” conspiracy theory is garbage. But there he is, outsourcing U.S. foreign policy to Sean Hannity and treating the professionals he led at two separate federal organizations as extras in the Trump Show. Here’s hoping the cowardly, careerist fuckbucket gets a send-off that makes Tillerson’s toilet firing look like a gold Rolex retirement ceremony.
by Betty Cracker| 209 Comments
This post is in: Impeach the Motherfucker!, Open Threads
As promised, the House committees are starting to release testimony from witnesses in the impeachment inquiry. You can find links to the testimony transcripts and highlights here. Trump tweeted this yesterday in anticipation of these releases:
If Shifty Adam Schiff, who is a corrupt politician who fraudulently made up what I said on the “call,” is allowed to release transcripts of the Never Trumpers & others that are & were interviewed, he will change the words that were said to suit the Dems purposes. Republicans… should give their own transcripts of the interviews to contrast with Schiff’s manipulated propaganda. House Republicans must have nothing to do with Shifty’s rendition of those interviews. He is a proven liar, leaker & freak who is really the one who should be impeached!
This is unsurprising since Trump doesn’t know what a “transcript” is and probably imagines the release of alt-transcripts like this from Jordan, Scalise, McCarthy, etc.:
“Donald Trump is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I’ve ever known in my life.”
Anyhoo, I’m still going through the material, but this from Senior Advisor to the Secretary of State Ambassador P. Michael McKinley jumped out at me:
Q: I think you’ve also said [in the opening statement] that part of the reason why you decided to resign was that you couldn’t be blind to what was happening, and what was happening was efforts to use the State Department to dig up dirt on a political opponent. Is that fair as well?
A: That is fair. And if I can underscore, in 37 years in the Foreign Service and different parts of the globe and working on many controversial issues, working 10 years back in Washington, I had never seen that.
Trump’s defense of, well, everything is to accuse his opponents of being just as bad if not worse than he is. Sadly, too many people are ready to believe that about the government. I hope the House Democrats can effectively communicate just how not-normal this shit is in the upcoming public hearings.
House Committees Release Impeachment Inquiry TestimonyPost + Comments (209)
by Betty Cracker| 113 Comments
This post is in: Foreign Affairs, Impeach the Motherfucker!, Open Threads, Politics, Republican Stupidity
Recently, Trump has been exhorting (and maybe extorting too, who knows?) Republicans to stop focusing on opposing the impeachment process and defend him on the substance instead. He did it again this morning on Twitter:
Republicans are very unified and energized in our fight on the Impeachment Hoax with the Do Nothing Democrats, and now are starting to go after the Substance even more than the very infair Process because just a casual reading of the Transcript leads EVERYBODY to see that…..
…..the call with the Ukrainian President was a totally appropriate one. As he said, “No Pressure.” This Impeachment nonsense is just a continuation of the Witch Hunt Hoax, which has been going on since before I even got elected. Rupublicans, go with Substance and close it out!
Since Trump is incandescently stupid, it’s possible he really does believe it’s okay to ask foreign leaders to interfere in a domestic election. There’s evidence he believes that; he described releasing the “Transcript” (which is not a transcript) as if it were exonerating (which it’s not):
“They never thought I’d release the conversation. They never thought in a million years that I’d release the conversation,” Trump told reporters at the White House that day. “When ‘Liddle’ Adam Schiff saw the text, when he read it, he couldn’t believe it. When Nancy Pelosi, who worked a day early — Nancy Pelosi called for essentially impeachment — “Let’s impeach the President” — before she saw the transcript.”
He’s probably right that Schiff “couldn’t believe it” when he read the not-transcript — couldn’t believe Trump and/or his handlers were dumb enough to give up such an incriminating document voluntarily. But as Greg Sargent at The Post notes, by insisting that Republicans defend him on “substance,” Trump is asking them to go on TV and insist that it’s okay for a president to ask foreign leaders to smear political opponents.
It’s going to get worse as Giuliani’s crackpot theory gets more scrutiny, and I don’t see how the activities of Giuliani and his henchmen don’t become a key part of the discussion as the hearings unfold. That’s where this is heading, probably. So, Trump will eventually ask Republicans to swallow that Kool-Aid too. Like good little cultists.
Open thread.