The Impeachment Process Has Officially Begun (20 Viewers)

Thread Attachment browser

Users who are viewing this thread

    Total: 21 (members: 0, guests: 21)
    Andrus

    Andrus

    Admin
    Staff member
    Joined
    Oct 6, 2018
    Messages
    2,268
    Reaction score
    944
    Age
    65
    Location
    Sunset, Louisiana
    Offline
    By Laura Bassett

    After months of internal arguing among Democrats over whether to impeach President Donald Trump, the dam is finally breaking in favor of trying to remove him from office. The Washington Post reported that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi would announce a formal impeachment inquiry on Tuesday, following a bombshell report that Trump illegally asked Ukraine’s government to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden, one of his political opponents. (He essentially admitted to having done so over the weekend.)

    “Now that we have the facts, we’re ready,” Pelosi said Tuesday morning at a forum hosted by The Atlantic. At 5 p.m. the same day, she was back with more. "The actions taken to date by the president have seriously violated the constitution, especially when the president says Article Two says I can do whatever I want," referring to the segment of the Constitution that defines the power of the executive branch of the government. Pelosi's message was that checks and balances of those branches are just as central to the Constitution. And one more thing: "Today, I am announcing the House of Representatives is moving forward with an official impeachment inquiry," she said at a conference broadcast on Twitter by the Huffington Post. ...

    Read the Full Story - InStyle
     
    Jim, I’m just not sure what point you’re making. Yes, the DOJ would be the proper place to start an investigation into alleged wrongdoing by either Hunter or Joe Biden. Neither request by the president on that phone call was actually proper. One could maybe be overlooked though, and one rises above that when we look at the entire picture.

    If you ignore that avenue (the DOJ) to send your personal attorney over to Ukraine to try to strong arm a foreign leader and you hold up properly authorized American military aid to add incentive to the extortion, then yes, that’s evidence of corrupt intent. If, in fact, you recall an esteemed member of the diplomatic corps, not because she did anything wrong, but because she is insisting your personal attorney go through proper channels, yes, that’s evidence of corrupt intent. If your aides take a problematic phone call readout where you specifically mention the Bidens as a target for the announced investigation more than once and put it on a highly classified server where it doesn’t belong, then that too is evidence of corrupt intent. I could go on, there’s actually more.
     
    MT15 said:
    Jim, I’m just not sure what point you’re making. Yes, the DOJ would be the proper place to start an investigation into alleged wrongdoing by either Hunter or Joe Biden. Neither request by the president on that phone call was actually proper. One could maybe be overlooked though, and one rises above that when we look at the entire picture.

    If you ignore that avenue (the DOJ) to send your personal attorney over to Ukraine to try to strong arm a foreign leader and you hold up properly authorized American military aid to add incentive to the extortion, then yes, that’s evidence of corrupt intent. If, in fact, you recall an esteemed member of the diplomatic corps, not because she did anything wrong, but because she is insisting your personal attorney go through proper channels, yes, that’s evidence of corrupt intent. If your aides take a problematic phone call readout where you specifically mention the Bidens as a target for the announced investigation more than once and put it on a highly classified server where it doesn’t belong, then that too is evidence of corrupt intent. I could go on, there’s actually more.
    Click to expand...
    To be clear here, this is a legitimate question - you clearly know the details better than most - and certainly better than me:
    In the testimony and evidence you know of - is there a clear demarcation between the demand for Burisma vs. the demand for 2016? Sondland was the only witness I got to see most of the testimony, and he seemed to tie the two together - the demands seemed to be essentially one (for the most part, but lets not quibble :D )

    REpeating myself - but I am having trouble demarcating between the two or understanding why the 2016 investigation is somehow above board but a sham while the Burisma demand is illegal and warrants removal from office.
     
    JimEverett said:
    REpeating myself - but I am having trouble demarcating between the two or understanding why the 2016 investigation is somehow above board but a sham while the Burisma demand is illegal and warrants removal from office.
    Click to expand...

    IMO, the line of demarcation is the perception that he is using the office of the Presidency to do something that benefits him personally. The repeated attempts by the President to remove Russia as the culprit for the 2016 election interference seems very odd but ultimately I don't see how he receives any personal gain from it. An investigation into Burisma and the Bidens would directly weaken his most formidable (according to polls but I don't want to talk about polls) political opponent.
     
    Burtifus said:
    IMO, the line of demarcation is the perception that he is using the office of the Presidency to do something that benefits him personally. The repeated attempts by the President to remove Russia as the culprit for the 2016 election interference seems very odd but ultimately I don't see how he receives any personal gain from it. An investigation into Burisma and the Bidens would directly weaken his most formidable (according to polls but I don't want to talk about polls) political opponent.
    Click to expand...
    Are all the Democratic candidates for President protected from any investigation because they could possibly be Trump's 2020 opponent?
     
    SaintForLife said:
    Are all the Democratic candidates for President protected from any investigation because they could possibly be Trump's 2020 opponent?
    Click to expand...

    Of course not. If Joe Biden or his son did something wrong they should be exposed for it. The DOJ and/or State Dept. should be directing that though and it shouldn't be orchestrated by POTUS and his personal attorney. The way it was handled gives the appearance that you're just looking for political dirt and using the office of the Presidency to get it whether it exists or not.
     
    JimEverett said:
    Does the 2016 investigation demand pass muster simply because DOJ has an attorney investigating it? That is what initially got me thinking about this when people were so focused on the concern (really the lack of concern) that the Administration had taken towards Ukranian corruption.
    Click to expand...

    I must have missed something. When the DOJ acknowledge that they had active investigation into 2016 Crowdstrike server? When did this investigation start? Did the DOJ ask Giuliani to represent them in meeting with Ukrainian officials?

    I'm having a hard time understanding how this all of a sudden became legitimate.
     
    Nebaghead said:
    I literally think Trump is looking for a physical server with the DNC emails on it. Probably similar to one he was shown back in the 90's when one of his hotels gave him a tour of their top of the line data center.
    Click to expand...
    MT15 said:
    Well, I know not much about servers, either, except I haven’t seen one at work for years.
    Click to expand...
    FullMonte said:
    So, apparently, he thinks that the DNC gave their physical server to Crowdstrike (a california based company owned by an American citizen who was born in Russia---not in the Ukraine), and Crowdstrike sent that physical server to somewhere in Ukraine, where it is still sitting there....
    Click to expand...


    Just blanket replying.

    First off, the DNC uses Google Suite for email. That may not have been the case in 2016, but that's where their MX records are now. Google does not have one server that just the DNC uses, nor does Google have datacenters in Ukraine. So there's not some physical box to be picked up from some office in Ukraine.

    But let's assume the DNC was hosting their own mail in 2016.

    I'd be surprised if the DNC had a physical server for just email. Single purpose servers are inefficient and not common for larger organizations, even in 2016. It is much more common to be virtualized (one physical server will host multiple virtual servers), and some larger environments will have external storage as well. So we're talking more than just a box on the floor. All that is to say - why are you leaving (potentially) tens of thousands of dollars of equipment 5,000 miles from where you have physical access to it? To trust your email to Ukrainian internet? The concept of the DNC server physically being in Ukraine is silly. There also aren't (to my knowledge) AWS or Azure datacenters in Ukraine, so even if the DNC servers are in the cloud, the physical hardware still isn't in Ukraine.
     
    JimEverett said:
    To be clear here, this is a legitimate question - you clearly know the details better than most - and certainly better than me:
    In the testimony and evidence you know of - is there a clear demarcation between the demand for Burisma vs. the demand for 2016? Sondland was the only witness I got to see most of the testimony, and he seemed to tie the two together - the demands seemed to be essentially one (for the most part, but lets not quibble :D )

    REpeating myself - but I am having trouble demarcating between the two or understanding why the 2016 investigation is somehow above board but a sham while the Burisma demand is illegal and warrants removal from office.
    Click to expand...

    OK, so here is the timeline as I understand it. Going from memory so anyone can feel free to correct.

    At first the “ask” involved the silly Crowdstrike investigation and the “stick” involved withholding the promised WH visit. Volker (career diplomat with credibility) seems to be willing to go along with that. Smarmy and unethical, maybe, but not impeachable certainly. Ukraine didn’t bite. They said they didn’t want to get involved in US domestic politics. Then as Rudy got more involved the ask also added the announcement of an investigation into the Bidens, not that the investigation take place, just that it get announced very publicly and the “stick” came to include the military aid which Trump ordered put on hold. That’s when they lost Volker, who famously texted that he thought it was crazy to withhold military aid for a political purpose. And Rudy and Trump removed Yovanovitch because she was insisting that proper channels be followed. And the famous phone call where Trump makes it crystal clear that the investigation needs to cover both the Bidens. And in the words of Fiona Hill “here we are”.
     
    SaintForLife said:
    Are all the Democratic candidates for President protected from any investigation because they could possibly be Trump's 2020 opponent?
    Click to expand...

    you shouldn’t want the President using the power of his office to extort a sham investigation by a foreign government into any US citizen. Remember it was testified that all that was required was the announcement of an investigation. The investigation itself was not important to the President. This was in the testimony.

    If a US citizen committed crimes overseas, they will still be investigated by the DOJ. That would be the proper channel to launch an investigation. Similar to the one bearing down on Giuliani currently like a freight train.

    It’s clear what happened after the testimony. The only possible argument is whether or not this level of corruption is impeachable. There’s really nothing left other than that to argue over.
     
    SaintForLife said:
    I agree that the Trump Russia election collusion investigation does appear that way.
    Click to expand...

    I agree with that as well. Nearly all the Democrats started with a desired outcome in mind when it comes to the Trump campaign colluding with Russia and rooted for those results from the Mueller investigation. The key difference is Democrats weren't in charge of the investigation and had no power or opportunity to leverage the results of it like we see here. If they had that chance, I'd bet they would have put their thumb on the scale as well. For me, that doesn't make what happened here OK. If we keep excusing this behavior because the other side would do it too, we're going to end up with political parties with no boundaries when in power.
     
    SaintForLife said:
    Are all the Democratic candidates for President protected from any investigation because they could possibly be Trump's 2020 opponent?
    Click to expand...

    I feel like everyone has been consistent in saying feel free to investigate the Bidens. I’m not sure anyone in this thread has said he’s above investigation.

    Myself and a couple others have gone as far as saying you’re doing Democratic voters a favor.
     
    SaintForLife said:
    Turley talks about the 3 things House Democrats need to do to prove the case for impeachmen.
    Click to expand...

    Support blocking all senior level officials from testifying; concern troll about how Democrats would really improve their case if they had more people that spoke regularly to Trump.....Even though we already have the transcript of Trump conditioning an official act on investigating his chief political rival and their party.
     
    insidejob said:
    apple.news

    Former White House counsel Donald McGahn must comply with House subpoena, judge rules — The Washington Post

    The finding came in a case testing whether top presidential advisers have absolute immunity from congressional demands for information. The ruling in a lawsuit brought by the House Judiciary Committee has implications for witnesses that could be sought in the impeachment inquiry and for a...
    apple.news apple.news

    So there's this. Maybe this will get Bolton in front of the committee too.
    Click to expand...

    I doubt anything will happen especially considering Barr's DOJ is going to appeal.
     

    Create an account or login to comment

    You must be a member in order to leave a comment

    Create account

    Create an account on our community. It's easy!

    Register

    Log in

    Already have an account? Log in here.

    Share this page

    General News Feed

    Fact Checkers News Feed

    Back
    Top Bottom