US President Donald J. Trump Impeachment Megathread - Democrats commit mass political suicide

On September 24th, 2019, Nanci Pelosi did what everyone expected was some exceptional political posturing -- initiating a formal impeachment inquiry against President Donald Trump.

The initial "charge," such as it was, was "betraying his oath of office and the nation's security by seeking to enlist a foreign power to tarnish a rival for his own political gain." This, amusingly, was after it was discovered and widely reported on that the DNC had contacted the very same foreign power to attempt to tarnish Trump.

Specifically, this was all based on a rumor that Trump had asked the Ukraine to investigate how a prosecutor investigating Joe Biden's son for corruption had gotten fired, and withheld foreign aid until they had agreed. (He did ask the leader of the Ukraine to investigate what happened with the prosecutor, but did not hold up any foreign aid nor threaten anything of the like.)

Around this time, Trump did something they could not, and still cannot, understand: He publicly turned over all the documents. The transcript of the phone call they claimed showed him committing the crime of blackmailing the Ukraine into investigating Joe Biden for him was released, showing that Trump did nothing wrong. The only reaction the radical left had was arguing over the definition of "transcript" and spouting off a conspiracy theory about official state documents being edited.

At the same time, old video evidence of Joe Biden publicly bragging about blackmailing the Ukraine into NOT investigating his son came to light. Yes, this is exactly what they're accusing Trump of doing. The left is nothing if not subtle. Right after this, evidence came to light that Pelosi, Kerry, and Romney's kids had similar fake jobs in the Ukraine, getting paid ungodly amounts of money and embezzling US foreign aid to the Ukraine -- all things that Trump's Attorney General has openly discussed investigating.

By releasing the transcripts, the DNC was tripped up. Instead of being able to leak information from their secret investigation until November 2020, they were forced to play their hand publicly.

And they had no hand to play. The impeachment accusations came from second and third hand sources -- watercooler talk from Unelected Deep State Analysts with Trump Derangement Syndrome, outraged that President Trump refused to obey them when they felt they had a better idea as to how to run Foreign Affairs. Other allegations included that supposedly, the telepathic DNC members working in the state department knew what Trump was thinking (despite him literally saying the exact opposite) or could tell that Trump would do something even worse -- maybe something actually illegal -- in the future, and boy howdy, the imaginary Trump in their minds was a right bastard.

(As an aside, the name of the whistleblower, Eric Ciaramella, has been censored across pretty much all social media, a test run of whatever censorship they're going to enact in the next few months to try and swing the election.)

At the same time, the DNC performed significant amounts of partisan political fuckery to do this all publicly, but unofficially -- preventing the GOP from bringing forth witnesses or questioning the DNC's witnesses, or even reading the double plus secret evidence the DNC supposedly had. Those GOP that did get access to the evidence have confirmed it's a 3 pound 5 ounce nothingburger.

The charges have since mutated, with them initially being changed to "bribery" -- as "bribery" focus groups easier and is easier to spew out on Twitter.

On December 18th, 2019, along party lines and with bipartisan opposition, they finally drafted their articles of impeachment -- first for "Abuse of Power" and second for "Obstruction of Congress." Neither are actually crimes nor are they impeachable offenses, even if they were true -- which the DNC has provided no evidence of, explaining that it's the Senate's job to investigate and find the evidence.

Narrator: It is not the Senate's job to investigate and find the evidence.

The "Obstruction of Congress" charge is particularly egregious, as they are claiming that Trump, by reaching out to the courts to act as mediators in his dispute over the rules with Pelosi, was obstructing her. In other words, Pelosi's stance is that the President must obey her, even if she's being a batshit insane drunk. Many legal scholars, including Alan Dershowitz, have pointed out that this is absolute bullshit.

The latest development as of this writing on December 21th, 2019, is that Pelosi is demanding that the GOP recuse itself, allowing the DNC to reshape the Senate in order to make the process "fair" -- by creating a Kangaroo court. The GOP is refusing outright, as the Senate's role during this is very specifically to take the charges and all the evidence gathered from the house -- which is none -- and vote yes or no on impeachment. They need 2/3rd majority to vote yes, and the DNC does not have the votes.

Pelosi is refusing to send over the articles of impeachment until the GOP allows her to stack the Senate against Trump, an act that Dershowitz as well as Noah Feldman, the DNC's own star legal expert witness, has said is unconstitutional and "a problem," as Trump isn't impeached until the articles have been filed. Meanwhile, the DNC has put the House on vacation until the new year, while the Senate is exploring options including forcing the articles over without Pelosi's ok. Trump and the Senate have both went to the SCOTUS to ask them if any of this is constitutional.

tl;dr: Trump may have found where the Swamp was embezzling US Foreign Aid. Many politician's children working fake jobs for huge amounts of money in the Ukraine, blatantly selling influence. This caused the DNC to freak out and try and headshot Trump. They missed. The Democrats appear to have committed political suicide, making Trump a Martyr and only realizing in the aftermath that they didn't actually get rid of him or even weaken him in any way. They also appear to realize they fucked up and are trying to slow walk it back, keeping the "he's impeached!" victory while not actually having to let anyone read the evidence or have a trial on it.


@Yotsubaaa did a great writeup here with links to various winner posts: https://kiwifarms.net/threads/nancy...kraine-phone-call.61583/page-135#post-5606264

And @Yotsubaaa did a new version very late on the 21st of December: https://kiwifarms.net/threads/presi...chment-megathread.61583/page-260#post-5754920

Which are too big to quote here.



https://archive.fo/oVGIv

WASHINGTON — Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced on Tuesday that the House would initiate a formal impeachment inquiry against President Trump, charging him with betraying his oath of office and the nation’s security by seeking to enlist a foreign power to tarnish a rival for his own political gain.

Ms. Pelosi’s declaration, after months of reticence by Democrats who had feared the political consequences of impeaching a president many of them long ago concluded was unfit for office, was a stunning turn that set the stage for a history-making and exceedingly bitter confrontation between the Democrat-led House and a defiant president who has thumbed his nose at institutional norms.

“The actions taken to date by the president have seriously violated the Constitution,” Ms. Pelosi said in a brief speech invoking the nation’s founding principles. Mr. Trump, she added, “must be held accountable — no one is above the law.”

She said the president’s conduct revealed his “betrayal of his oath of office, betrayal of our national security and betrayal of the integrity of our elections.”

Ms. Pelosi’s decision to push forward with the most severe action that Congress can take against a sitting president could usher in a remarkable new chapter in American life, touching off a constitutional and political showdown with the potential to cleave an already divided nation, reshape Mr. Trump’s presidency and the country’s politics, and carry heavy risks both for him and for the Democrats who have decided to weigh his removal.

Though the outcome is uncertain, it also raised the possibility that Mr. Trump could become only the fourth president in American history to face impeachment. Presidents Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton were both impeached but later acquitted by the Senate. President Richard M. Nixon resigned in the face of a looming House impeachment vote.

It was the first salvo in an escalating, high-stakes standoff between Ms. Pelosi, now fully engaged in an effort to build the most damning possible case against the president, and Mr. Trump, who angrily denounced Democrats’ impeachment inquiry even as he worked feverishly in private to head off the risk to his presidency.

Mr. Trump, who for months has dared Democrats to impeach him, issued a defiant response on Twitter while in New York for several days of international diplomacy at the United Nations, with a series of fuming posts that culminated with a simple phrase: “PRESIDENTIAL HARASSMENT!” Meanwhile, his re-election campaign and House Republican leaders launched a vociferous defense, accusing Democrats of a partisan rush to judgment.

“Such an important day at the United Nations, so much work and so much success, and the Democrats purposely had to ruin and demean it with more breaking news Witch Hunt garbage,” Mr. Trump wrote. “So bad for our Country! For the past two years, talk of impeachment had centered around the findings of the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, who investigated Russia’s interference in the 2016 elections and Mr. Trump’s attempts to derail that inquiry. On Tuesday, Ms. Pelosi, Democrat of California, told her caucus and then the country that new revelations about Mr. Trump’s dealings with Ukraine, and his administration’s stonewalling of Congress about them, had finally left the House no choice but to proceed toward a rarely used remedy.

“Right now, we have to strike while the iron is hot,” she told House Democrats in a closed-door meeting in the basement of the Capitol. Emerging moments later to address a phalanx of news cameras, Ms. Pelosi, speaking sometimes haltingly as she delivered a speech from a teleprompter, invoked the Constitution and the nation’s founders as she declared, “The times have found us” and outlined a new stage of investigating Mr. Trump.

At issue are allegations that Mr. Trump pressured the president of Ukraine to open a corruption investigation of former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., a leading contender for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, and his son. The conversation is said to be part of a whistle-blower complaint that the Trump administration has withheld from Congress. And it occurred just a few days after Mr. Trump had ordered his staff to freeze more than $391 million in aid to Ukraine.

Mr. Trump has confirmed aspects of his conversation with the Ukrainian leader in recent days, but he continues to insist he acted appropriately.

The president said on Tuesday that he would authorize the release of a transcript of the conversation, part of an effort to pre-empt Democrats’ impeachment push. But Democrats, after months of holding back, were unbowed, demanding the full whistle-blower complaint and other documentation about White House dealings with Ukraine, even as they pushed toward an expansive impeachment inquiry that could encompass unrelated charges.

President Trump’s personal lawyer. The prosecutor general of Ukraine. Joe Biden’s son. These are just some of the names mentioned in the whistle-blower’s complaint. What were their roles? We break it down.

Ms. Pelosi told fellow Democrats that Mr. Trump told her in a private call on Tuesday morning that he was not responsible for withholding the whistle-blower complaint from Congress. But late Tuesday, the White House and intelligence officials were working on a deal to allow the whistle-blower to speak to Congress and potentially even share a redacted version of the complaint in the coming days, after the whistle-blower expressed interest in talking to lawmakers.

Although Ms. Pelosi’s announcement was a crucial turning point, it left many unanswered questions about exactly when and how Democrats planned to push forward on impeachment.
 
Ostatnio edytowane:
Now that Movaleny has admitted to Quid Pro Quo live on television, how much egg do you guys all have on your face now?

 
Ostatnio edytowane:
Now that Movaleny has admitted to Quid Pro Quo live on television, how much egg do you guys all have on your face now?



...Didn’t Mulvaney outright say the money had nothing to do with Biden? lol
 
I just let them have their victory lap, they only get to do it for about 24-48 hours before all the networks have to make a retraction.

I wonder if there are people out there genuinely convinced that Mueller is still only biding his time before he nails Trump to the wall.

How many smoking guns have we had that are quietly retracted in footnotes? How many times does this happen before they’re burnt out?
 
This constant impeachment bullshit just comes off like a alcoholic that just says he needs "one more beer" and he'll quit forever
Just one more impeachment inquiry and they will surely nail Trump this time
The dem debates must be such a shit show they have to have this to distract from it.
 
We all live and work on the event horizon of the black hole that is Poe's Law, man. You only have to look to the twitter feed of any of the folks we study in the lolcow forums, or the communities we watch, to see the same sort of posts in all seriousness all but verbatim.

It's virtually impossible to declare someone "obviously" a troll, when you can just click up a couple forums to see people behaving the same way for real.
There are two standard things to check for to determine whether or not you're being baited, regardless of where on the political spectrum the user is presenting:
1. Low investment in the account (recently created, no avatar, long gaps between a spree of posts, activity limited to a select few threads)
2. Low investment in the conversation (posts are pithy and short, only replies to the hottest of takes and ignores more measured responses, drive-by posting in the thread)

If an account has a bunch of signs of either of that you're probably falling for a troll and should stop feeding them. It happens to everyone, I'm pretty sure I fed a troll yesterday in the 4th debate thread.

EDIT: Also on KF you can probably tell looking at comments on their user profile whether or not they're trolling.
 
I beg to differ.

Buckle up your Boring Seatbelts™ , because we're going to be looking at The House Practice: A Guide to the Rules, Precedents and Procedures of the House, which is a reference source for information on the rules and selected precedents governing the House procedure. More specifically, we're going to be looking at the version adopted by the 115th congress and still in place today as of March 2017, which I don't recommend reading in its entirety, since it's fucking 1,065 pages long, but I'm a shitposter, not a cop. Do whatever you want.

Page 613 of the PDF concerns impeachment. The keys we're looking for are articles of impeachment that pass the house, specifically House Resolution 803 of the 93rd congress.

"Authorizes the House Committee on the Judiciary to investigate fully and completely whether sufficient grounds exist for the House of Representatives to impeach President Richard M. Nixon.
States that the Committee may require, by subpoena, interrogatory, or otherwise, the furnishing of such information as it deems necessary to such an investigation. Provides that such authority may be exercised by the chairman and the ranking minority member acting jointly or by the committee acting as a whole or by subcommittee."

A formal impeachment inquiry requires the cooperation of the minority members of committees, something which Pelosi and the House at large has utterly failed to do. You could argue that this only applied to Nixon's (theoretically inevitable) impeachment, so we'll defer back to the House Practices, page 617.

"In 1974 the grounds for invoking the impeachment power against the President were illustrated when the House initiated an inquiry into President Nixon’s conduct [...]"​
But we have three important impeachment proceedings against a President to examine: Andrew Johnson, Nixon, and Bill Clinton. With Andrew Johnson, no official impeachment inquiry was offered, rather it was just a resolution before the drafting of articles of impeachment, which was a revolt against his removal of a cabinet member; a move the House vehemently disagreed with. Bill Clinton was similar in that there wasn't an official impeachment inquiry, as the impeachment was based on what had occurred during the Ken Starr independent counsel investigation.

Nixon was different in that it was the House who did the investigating. So with Johnson, it was a policy conflict, and with Clinton, the investigating had already happened. If anything, Trump's impeachment ought to mirror Nixon's with a smattering of Clinton's thrown in on top of it, because the investigation (Mueller) has already happened. That being said, I can't help but notice that at no point has the House been injecting the Mueller report into these hearings, which is just more evidence that his investigation turned up exactly Jack and shit. They could have included it, but they haven't.

Likewise, the Andrew Johnson impeachment led to the precedent after its defeat in the Senate that the House should not impeach the president based on policy conflicts. The best comparison to this for a modern audience would be the House attempting to impeach Trump over firing Mattis. Obviously, they haven't done that either.

Now the important part: Page 624 of the PDF.

"Under the modern practice, an impeachment is normally instituted by the House by the adoption of a resolution calling for a committee investigation of charges against the officer in question."​
Pelosi and the Democrats are officially--by the House Practices which have been updated as recently as March 2017-- in violation of impeachment proceedings per modern practice.

"In the 105th Congress, an independent counsel transmitted to the House [...] a communication containing evidence of alleged impeachable offenses by [Clinton.]"​
"The House adopted a privileged resolution [...] referring the communication to the Committee on the Judiciary, immediately releasing portions to the public, restricting Members’ access to the communication, and restricting access to committee meetings and hearings"​
"Later, the House adopted a privileged resolution reported by the Committee on the Judiciary authorizing an impeachment inquiry by that committee"​
"Resolutions introduced through the hopper that directly call for an impeachment are referred to the Committee on the Judiciary"​

As you can see, this is very similar to what's happening right now, with several fairly important differences. The least of which not being that there was a formal resolution before-hand, as in an actual vote and then another one was held thereafter for the inquiry. More importantly, Matt Gaetz--who is in the House Judiciary--has been completely cut out of the "impeachment proceedings", yet again violating their own, modern practice.

Not only is there not a single privileged resolution (essentially a House resolution that gets priority over other House business) authorizing any of this, but this all has to go through the House Judiciary committee, which Nancy Pelosi has driven out of the proceedings on partisan lines.

All of this should have been put to a vote as a privileged resolution, and the Democrats have thoroughly and completely failed to do so. None of this is actual, proper procedure, and until they hold a vote, it is legally meaningless.

“It’s not about an underlying crime,” said Josh Blackman, an associate professor of law at the South Texas College of Law in Houston. “It’s not about whether Trump colluded with Russia, it’s about whether he interfered with or obstructed the investigation of that charge.”

But to be charged with obstruction of justice, a person has to have acted with a “corrupt intent,” which makes the crime that much harder to prove.

“It’s a very general and vague concept and at the time it was written the idea was 'we’ll know it when we see it,' ” said Rory Little, a law professor at the UC Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco, who served as an associate deputy attorney general under U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno.

“It was an intentionally open-ended concept because the varieties of human experience will exceed the ability of language to capture them,” he added.

 
Nah, y'all right. I'm not going down this rabbit hole again. Frank, you're a a troll, or else you're indistinguishable from one. Go 'way. If you want to have a discussion, listen to the actual presentation, don't just read the talking points on CNN. If you did that, you wouldn't embarrass yourself quite so much.
 
@Manwithn0n0men

"You can't defend yourself from accusations of impropriety, because doing so implies you don't think you're guilty, and that makes other people possibly think you aren't guilty, and that's obstruction."

Only in clown world are you guilty of obstruction if your opponents fail to railroad you.
 
So no one here can actually explain how this isn't quid pro quo, something the regime has been denying for weeks now?
I am also curious about that.

This obviously isn't about Biden, like the """whistleblower""" claims. But ignoring the question of how we got here, what could Mulvaney have meant that isn't suspicious? He specifically talked about the 2016 email server business.

And to the other side, why is this definitely bad? It was supposedly bad before because it was investigating a political opponent, Joe Biden. Now that it's apparently about something else, you need to clearly lay out your case.

I feel both sides are shuffling goalposts all over.
 
Now that Movaleny has admitted to Quid Pro Quo live on television, how much egg do you guys all have on your face now?


Firstly, CNN. Nigger, really?

Secondly, draw up articles of impeachment. Fucking do it. If you're not going to do it, shut the fuck up. I am so tired of this impeachment bullshit. "Oh we're having an 'inquiry'. Now we're having an 'investigation'." No, you aren't. You are doing neither until the house sits the fuck down, draws up articles of impeachment, then sends out subpoenas that aren't made out of toilet paper. Nobody is 'stalling' or 'avoiding the law' because no formal inquiry has been launched because nobody put pen to paper for the fucking formal inquiry.

You can spin it to the general public however you want. But until the articles of impeachment are formally written, anything Congress does, no matter how many whistle blowers they have, no matter how many times Adam Schiff cries when his asshole gets blown out again and again, matter. None of it matters.

So until I have actually seen articles of impeachment written by a dumbfuck harpy who rules over a state overrun by medieval diseases and a man who cries every time he sees his penis, this is a waste of fucking time, a farce and it should be treated as such.
 
This obviously isn't about Biden, like the """whistleblower""" claims. But ignoring the question of how we got here, what could Mulvaney have meant that isn't suspicious? He specifically talked about the 2016 email server business.

And to the other side, why is this definitely bad? It was supposedly bad before because it was investigating a political opponent, Joe Biden. Now that it's apparently about something else, you need to clearly lay out your case.

Well, you kind of answered your own question, in part. Even if a quid-pro-quo situation existed, it's not the one everyone has spent the last, what, two weeks? going on about. Nobody has ever said that quid-pro-quo situations never exist in politics. Nobody is that fucking retarded. It was only ever a story at all if you accepted about three very specific premises to begin with, starting with "looking into corruption that a Biden - any Biden - is involved in is treason if Trump does it". The words people are playing jigsaw with? Not about that in any event.

But if you actually listen to Mulvaney's speech, it's not quite what the cut-and-paste job would have you believe, in any event. He attributed the hold up of funds to two primary reasons: a general amount of local corruption (And here he specifically references the Puerto Rico disaster and their witholding of funds there for the same reason... It was not, as some of the cut-and-pasters have tried to imply, him talking about Biden or the servers, just that the whole region was (and is) notoriously corrupt), as well as a lack of European contributions. The whole bit that's supposedly the smoking gun line? It was essentially an aside. He admitted that, yes, at some point in the past, trump had mentioned the servers to him in a discussion, but to place that statement in context, he said (referring to the corruption and the lack of European contributions) "those were the driving factors", then made his aside, and then said "but that was the reason", which to me grammatically seems to link back to the corruption and lack of European contributions.

Feel free to go ahead and call me a "Trumptard" or whatever because I disagree with the media spin on it.
 
Wstecz
Top Na dole