It's not a transcript.

[Scooter]

Did we fall through the looking glass into a universe where political candidates are not subjected to having every aspect of their lives scrutinized for dirt that could be used by their opponents? Did I miss the memo where a political candidate would be immune to such scrutiny, so as to cause the village idiot to act as if it were anything less than routine?

[Lord Jim]

Yet another poll shows a majority now supporting Trump's removal from office:

Public opinion on whether Trump should be impeached remains mixed, but Americans now lean slightly more in favor of impeachment and removal from office compared with where they stood in June.

Currently, 52% say Trump should be impeached and removed from office, while 46% say he should not be. This is roughly the opposite of what Gallup found in June when asked in the context of special counselor Robert Mueller's investigation.

More:

https://news.gallup.com/poll/267491/con ... trump.aspx

And some encouraging signs in a North Carolina state poll:

Donald Trump's Approval Rating Drops Among North Carolina Voters as Republicans Walk Away Over Ukraine, Impeachment[Hopefully even more will walk away over Syria...]

President Donald Trump is losing support among GOP voters in North Carolina, a stronghold for Republican presidential candidates in nine of the last 10 elections, as he faces a House impeachment inquiry sparked by his conduct towards Ukraine.

According to the latest Meredith Poll, Trump's approval rating among all North Carolina voters has sunk to 39.9 percent, down from 44 percent in March.

"The most significant factor affecting President Trump's decline in job approval ratings among North Carolinians is his loss of Republican support," said David McLennan, Meredith Poll Director, in the new report.

McLennan continued that it is the Ukraine-Biden affair and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's opening of an impeachment inquiry that has "eroded his support among Republicans."

The poll shows that Trump still commands 74.7 percent approval among Republicans in North Carolina. But this is down from 86 percent party approval back in March at the height of speculation about the Mueller investigation, which was still ongoing at the time.

Since 1980, North Carolina has backed the Republican candidate at every single presidential election bar 2008, when it voted for Democrat Barack Obama over Republican John McCain, the late Arizona senator.

In the 2016 presidential election, Trump beat Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton in North Carolina by 49.83 percent to 46.17 percent, a difference of around 173,000 votes.

"President Trump's approval rating makes him more vulnerable in North Carolina," McLennan told Newsweek. "His approval ratings have been relatively consistent since the start of his presidency and his current approval rating of just under 40 percent is significant.

"It is too early to tell if his approval ratings will remain below his historical average, but with the pressures of an impeachment inquiry and the foreign policy disaster in Syria, lower approval ratings may be his new normal."

McLennan said if Trump's approval ratings remain around 40 percent then North Carolina will look attractive to the Democrats, though it depends on who the party nominates.

"A very liberal nominee—like Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders—might not play well with many North Carolina voters and keep a very damaged President Trump in a good position to carry the state in 2020," McLennan told Newsweek.

https://www.newsweek.com/trump-approval ... ns-1465278

[Scooter]

[Sue U]

Shorter Mulvaney: Quid pro go ... fuck yourselves.

[Lord Jim]

For anybody who thought Moscow Mitch was going to run some sort of one-day-and-out quickie Impeachment Trial farce (where they simply tossed the charges on a majority vote):

As Inquiry Widens, McConnell Sees Impeachment Trial as Inevitable

WASHINGTON — It was only a few weeks ago that the top Senate Republican was hinting that his chamber would make short work of impeachment.

But this week, Sen. Mitch McConnell, the majority leader, sat his colleagues down over lunch in the Capitol and warned them to prepare for an extended impeachment trial of President Donald Trump.

According to people who were there, he came equipped with a PowerPoint presentation, complete with quotes from the Constitution, as he schooled fellow senators on the intricacies of a process he portrayed as all but inevitable.

Few Republicans are inclined to convict Trump on charges that he abused his power to enlist Ukraine in an effort to smear his political rivals. Instead, McConnell, R-Ky., sees the proceedings as necessary to protect a half-dozen moderates in states like Maine, Colorado and North Carolina who face reelection next year and must show voters they are giving the House impeachment charges a serious review.

It’s people like Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, who will be under immense political pressure as they decide the president’s fate.

“To overturn an election, to decide whether or not to convict a president is about as serious as it gets,” Collins said.

McConnell is walking a careful line of his own in managing the fast-moving impeachment process. On Friday, the senator wrote a scathing op-ed criticizing the president’s decision to pull back troops from northern Syria, calling it a “grave strategic mistake,” without naming Trump. But McConnell, who is known for his ruthless partisan maneuvering, also views it as his role to protect a president of his own party from impeachment, and in a recent fundraising video, he vowed to stop it.

The mood among Republicans on Capitol Hill has shifted from indignant to anxious as a parade of administration witnesses has submitted to closed-door questioning by impeachment investigators and corroborated central elements of the whistleblower complaint that sparked the inquiry.

https://news.yahoo.com/inquiry-widens-m ... _test=1_04

[Bicycle Bill]

It’s people like Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, who will be under immense political pressure as they decide the president’s fate.

“To overturn an election, to decide whether or not to convict a president is about as serious as it gets,” Collins said.

I suppose you COULD look at it as overturning an election.
I prefer to see it as recognizing unlawful/unethical activity and holding the perpetrator (and enablers) accountable.  Taking out the trash, in other words.

-"BB"-

[Lord Jim]

The Dems REALLY need to get this guy testifying in a public hearing ASAP:

Top U.S. envoy ties Trump directly to Ukraine quid pro quo



William Taylor’s testimony provides some of the most damaging evidence yet in the Democrats’ impeachment inquiry.

The top U.S. envoy to Ukraine told House impeachment investigators on Tuesday that President Donald Trump sought to withhold critical military aid to Ukraine and refuse a White House meeting with the country’s president unless he pursued politically motivated investigations into Trump’s rivals.

The diplomat, William Taylor, painted a damaging portrait of events that directly tied Trump to a quid pro quo with Ukraine, according to his prepared remarks obtained by POLITICO and his responses to questions as described by sources in the room for the closed-door testimony.

The timeline Taylor laid out during his nearly 10 hours testifying before investigators is at the heart of Democrats’ impeachment inquiry into the president. The 50-year veteran of government service systematically dismantled Trump’s repeated denials that he sought to leverage American military and diplomatic might to coerce an ally into a coordinated campaign to damage his potential 2020 rival.

Trump himself and his congressional allies did not attempt on Tuesday to dispute the substance of Taylor’s claims, which were based on copious notes. Instead, the White House attacked Taylor personally, saying he was part of a band of “radical unelected bureaucrats waging war on the Constitution.”

In his opening statement, Taylor said Gordon Sondland, the U.S. ambassador to the European Union, told him that “everything” — including military assistance to Ukraine and a meeting between Trump and the Ukrainian leader — was contingent on the Ukrainians publicly announcing investigations into Trump’s political opponents. He told impeachment investigators that a White House budget official said on a secure phone call in July that Trump had personally directed that the military aid be withheld.

“It is a rancorous story about whistle-blowers, Mr. Giuliani, side channels, quid pro quos, corruption and interference in elections,” Taylor said, referring to Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, who was deeply involved in the shadow effort.

Taylor also testified that Sondland said Trump personally told him that he wanted Ukraine to “state publicly” that it would open such probes, before the U.S. would release the aid, which is viewed as critical for combating Russia’s aggression in the region. Taylor repeatedly underscored the damage that even a temporary hold on the aid had done to the U.S.-Ukraine relationship, at a time when the budding democracy was resisting an advance by Russian forces and fighting corruption at the highest levels of the government.

“Ambassador Sondland tried to explain to me that President Trump is a businessman. When a businessman is about to sign a check to someone who owes him something, he said, the businessman asks that person to pay up before signing the check,” Taylor said, according to his opening statement.

Taylor’s testimony described the intensity of the efforts among Trump’s allies to persuade Ukrainian officials to launch an investigation targeting former Vice President Joe Biden and another probe centering on a debunked conspiracy theory regarding the 2016 election.

Taylor prompted sighs and gasps inside the secure hearing room when he read his lengthy, 15-page opening statement, two of the sources said. Democrats who emerged from the deposition said the revelations could speed up their impeachment probe.

“The body language of the people hearing it was, ‘holy s---’ — seriously,” Rep. Harley Rouda (D-Calif.), a member of the House Oversight and Reform Committee, said in reference to Taylor’s opening statement.

Rep. Stephen Lynch (D-Mass.), a senior member of the Oversight panel, characterized the testimony as a “sea change” that “could accelerate” the impeachment inquiry. Another lawmaker, Democratic Rep. Tom Malinowski of New Jersey, said it was “the most thorough accounting we’ve had of the timeline.”

“I’ll tell you, as a former State Department political appointee, in my experience the difference between career folks and political appointees is the career folks take very good notes,” Malinowski said, hinting that Taylor provided corroboration to back up his recollections. Lawmakers roundly criticized Sondland, a political appointee and a donor to the 2016 Trump campaign, for failing to recall certain events and conversations during his deposition last week.

More:

https://www.politico.com/news/2019/10/2 ... ump-054259

Here's the professional bio of this “radical unelected bureaucrat waging war on the Constitution.”:

After Taylor graduated from West Point, he served in the Infantry for six years, including tours of duty in the 82nd Airborne Division at Fort Bragg, and the 101st Airborne Division in Vietnam during the War. He commanded a company in the 101st Division, and received a Bronze Star and Air Medal V for heroism. [Another one who earned his spurs on the battlefield as opposed to, well, you know...] Later, he was an aero-rifle commander in the 2nd Cavalry Regiment (United States) in Germany.[6]

As a civilian he served as Director of Emergency Preparedness Policy in the Department of Energy before serving for five years as Legislative Assistant on the staff of U.S. Senator Bill Bradley (D-N.J.). He then directed a Defense Department think tank at Fort Lesley J. McNair.

Following that assignment, he transferred to Brussels for a five year assignment as the Special Deputy Defense Advisor to the U.S. Ambassador to NATO, William Howard Taft IV. From 1992 until 2002 Taylor served with the rank of ambassador coordinating assistance to Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, followed by an assignment in Kabul coordinating U.S. and international assistance to Afghanistan. In 2004 he was transferred to Baghdad as Director of the Iraq Reconstruction Management Office.[7]

Until 2006 he then was the U.S. Government's representative to the Quartet's effort to facilitate the Israeli disengagement from Gaza and parts of the West Bank, led by Special Envoy James Wolfensohn in Jerusalem. The Quartet Special Envoy was responsible for the economic aspects of this disengagement.

Taylor was confirmed as United States ambassador to Ukraine by the U.S. Senate on May 26, 2006, and was sworn in on June 5, 2006; he held the post till May 2009.[2]

On September 30, 2009, U.S. President Barack Obama nominated John Tefft as U.S. ambassador to Ukraine.[8] Taylor was appointed Special Coordinator for Middle East Transitions in September 2011.[9]

In 2015, Taylor was appointed executive vice president of the United States Institute of Peace after serving a year in the same role in an acting capacity.[10][11]

Taylor became chargé d'affaires ad interim for Ukraine in June 2019, taking over the role from the deputy chief of mission, Kristina Kvien, after Marie Yovanovitch departed Ukraine.[12]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_B._Taylor_Jr.

Yes siree, that's the portrait of a foaming-at-the-mouth, America-hating, bomb throwing radical if I ever saw one...

Ambassador Taylor has served in government in every Administration, Republican and Democratic, since 1985...

And he was coaxed out of retirement to take the Ukraine assignment by that Trump hating radical Mike Pompeo...

Here's a link to Taylor's damning opening statement:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1vUI__s ... wQSE4/view

They really need to get the Ambassador reading this statement on national television...

He is clearly star witness in Arms for Dirt; he brings the smoking gun to the table with copious contemporaneous notes and armor plated credibility...

The Dems need to get the public hearings started to keep building the public support for Impeachment, and Ambassador Taylor should be the star of the show...

[RayThom]

Isn't just a demand by a sitting US president for dirt on a political opponent from a foreign entity enough to establish an impeachable offense? Why is everybody so quick to add the "quid pro quo" modifier?

To me it sounds like it becomes less of an offense when that term implies two people must be in agreement for it to be considered illegal.

It's giving our Big Grifter too much wiggle room on an illegal activity that is soundly based in our Constitution. If we don't get smart to this shit our asshole president is going to be rewarded with another four years in 2020.

We get the government we deserve.

[ex-khobar Andy]

I agree Ray. Not unlike the Mueller report and all the focus on collusion. To me the questions Mueller should have been looking at were these, in this order:
- did the Russians, or anyone else, attempt to influence the outcome of the 2016 election;
- if yes, can the effect of that attempted influence be estimated; and
- if yes, was there condonement or active participation by either of the two main candidates, their campaigns or anyone else?

In some jurisdictions (and one of our legal beagles can tell me if I'm full of it) if the prosecution goes for Murder 1 and the jury thinks that there is inadequate evidence of whatever it is that distinguishes Murder 1 from Murder 2, they can't downgrade the charge. The guy goes free.

In the same way I want Trump gone. I'd like him to have time (years) in the pen to contemplate his behavior; but I'd settle for him being confined to Trump Tower with an ankle tag if that's what it takes. Don't overcharge. As you say, seeking electoral help from a foreign entity is easily enough.

[Scooter]

Trump labelled decades long State Department staff as "human scum" and the Secretary of State just stood there without challenging it.

[BoSoxGal]

Are we all starting to understand now how things happened in 1930s Germany?

[Lord Jim]

Senate Republicans duck for cover after explosive Taylor testimony

But some GOP senators like Majority Whip John Thune acknowledged the picture being reported is “not a good one.”

If a top U.S. envoy’s testimony about Ukraine is a Capitol Hill bombshell, the Senate appears to be outside the blast zone.

Senate Republicans are largely dodging questions about the substance of William Taylor’s testimony, which rocked the GOP argument that President Donald Trump did not engage in a quid pro quo with the Ukrainian government.

While GOP senators aren’t defending the president’s alleged behavior, many are throwing out a litany of complaints about House Democrats’ procedural handling of the impeachment inquiry and demanding to see more documents and the full transcript of the deposition.

“The way the House is handling it now is like a rolling oppo dump. Every day they take in this testimony and they leak out the pieces that they want,” said Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), who has reviewed Taylor’s testimony and said he had no reason to doubt the words of the U.S. envoy to Ukraine. “It is a bad process, not just for the president. It’s a bad process for the country.”

Such sentiment may be a sign that the Senate Republicans who will determine whether Trump is removed from office in any impeachment trial aren’t ready to break with him just yet. But it also suggests that Republicans are more comfortable fighting on process grounds rather than substance, given they don't know what revelations might emerge next.

And some are refusing to play ball at all. Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), for example, said he has no plans to review any more daily, hourly or “minute-by-minute” coverage of the impeachment proceedings.

“I don’t know Bill Taylor from Adam. I know you better than I know Bill Taylor. I’ve been busy… doing important things, [like running for re-election, and trying to figure out how this whole thing is going to effect that]not participating in a sham process over in the House,” Cornyn said. “The drip drip drip of leaked testimony is producing daily news stories like you’re asking me about it. It’s part of their plan and scheme and I do not approve.”

Cornyn was not alone. Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.), who has rapped the president for pressing the Ukrainian president to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden, said he will “eventually” get around to reading about Taylor’s testimony but hasn’t yet.

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), a stark defender of the president, said he too hasn’t reviewed it.

Informed he is mentioned in Taylor’s opening statement, Johnson replied that he’ll “have to read it.”

There does not appear to be a coordinated strategy between the White House and Senate Republicans, leaving many in the party to choose their own way. The White House has not delivered a top-down message to all senators and their offices, according to Republican senators and aides.

Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.), the No. 2 Senate Republican, bashed House Democrats for not making public Taylor’s testimony.

But Thune also conceded that the first round of details could be damaging after Taylor testified that Trump refused to release military aid or hold a White House meeting with the Ukrainian president unless he probed Trump’s political opponents.

“The picture coming out of it based on the reporting we’ve seen is, yeah, I would say it’s not a good one,” Thune told reporters. “But I would say also, until we have a process that allows for everybody to see this with full transparency, it’s pretty hard to come to hard and fast conclusions.”

“It appears to be an important piece of evidence. But without being present for the Q and A and without more transparency in this process, it’s difficult to assess,” said Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine). Taylor “is certainly a credible individual with years of service to his country. By no means” should he be dismissed.

Yet some in her party were doing just that after seeing his opening statement and the subsequent reporting. Trump’s closest allies immediately tried to rebuff the notion that Taylor’s opening statement was explosive, despite the damning picture it painted of Trump dangling aid in exchange for public statements about opening investigations into Biden and the 2016 election.

“It made it easier for me to say this is all bullshit. We don't try somebody in America by releasing an opening statement,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.). “Where is the cross examination? I want to hear him under oath. Nobody would accept this if we were doing it to a Democrat. I can only imagine the pushback we would get.”

“This is a one-side show trial, don’t they do that in Russia?” added Sen. David Perdue (R-Ga.). “How could anybody be concerned about it until they hear the counter?”

Those comments, however, don’t reflect the majority of the Senate Republicans, who are likely to sit in judgment of the president in the coming weeks after the House impeaches him. Many GOP senators are approaching the actions of the president and his allies with caution, even as they rail on the process of the impeachment inquiry.

That last sentence is really the bottom line here...They can't defend Trump based on what's already publicly known, and they have no idea how much worse its going to get or how much more the public is going to shift towards favoring impeachment and removal, so they bitch about the process and try to say as little as possible...

This is actually good news for the cause of justice; they may not be Profiles In Courage, bu they're not marrying themselves to Trump either...

Nearly everyone of them from Mitch on down is in "let's wait and see where this goes" mode...

[ex-khobar Andy]

“It made it easier for me to say this is all bullshit. We don't try somebody in America by releasing an opening statement,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.). “Where is the cross examination? I want to hear him under oath. Nobody would accept this if we were doing it to a Democrat. I can only imagine the pushback we would get.”

Can someone point out to Sen Graham - whom I used to think of as one of the more tractable republican senators - that this happens every day in America and it's called a grand jury? They will have their chance for cross examination if and when the inquiry recommends and the house accepts movement to impeach.

[Lord Jim]

Leningrad Lindsey came out and said publicly a few days ago that there were circumstances under which he might vote to remove Trump in an impeachment trial, so now he obviously feels he has to do double butt-sucking duty to try and keep in Trump's good graces...(Or more importantly in the good graces of Trump-supporting South Carolina Republican primary voters)

There is probably no member of the US Senate who has been more disappointing to me than Lindsey Graham...(someone like Mike Lee or Rand Paul could never disappoint me, because I've never expected anything but the worst from them...and they almost always deliver on my expectations...)

I have liked and respected Graham going back to his days in the House during the Clinton Impeachment, and would have enthusiastically supported him for the Presidency in 2016 had he won the nomination...

Now I wouldn't vote for him for rat-catcher...(let alone dog catcher)

[ex-khobar Andy]

Forgive me if I've said this before here: but I've often wondered if Trump, from his long experience as a hotel proprietor, has files on the mischievous lifestyles of the rich and famous which he has curated over the years. If so, what's he got on Graham? Inquiring minds want to know.

[RayThom]

Re. Leningrad Lindsey.

Hey, jes' sayin'. "… not that there's anything wrong with that."

Is it homophobic to speculate about a politician’s sexuality?
https://www.washingtonblade.com/2019/02 ... sexuality/

[Econoline]

[ex-khobar Andy]

For a while I thought AOC was more image than substance.

I was wrong.

[ex-khobar Andy]

Trump wants to read the "transcript" out to us in a "fireside chat" presumably so that those of us who cannot read can be convinced that it was in fact a perfect call. (Actually he might have a point there - his support among those who eschew the pleasures of the written word is, I'm guessing, quite high.)

CNN's Chris Cillizza thinks that this would be a terrible idea. I quote:

But the transcript doesn't do what Trump seems to think it does. It, in fact, does the opposite of what Trump thinks it does -- revealing a clear attempt to link the US's work for Ukraine to a reward for you know, for the effort.

And

Plus, and don't undersell this reality, Trump's demeanor doesn't exactly lend itself to a "fireside chat" sort of vibe. Any time he speaks off of a teleprompter, he sounds robotic, rehearsed and tired. But when he's not reading off the prompter, well, he can sound angry and offensive.

For these reasons and more, I think it's a wonderful idea.

[Lord Jim]

This thing about Trump insisting that the "transcript" (which says on page one that it isn't a transcript) of his conversation with Zelensky somehow exonerates him, and especially his imploring people to read it, is really strange, even by Trump standards...

Trump has insisted (falsely of course) that the Mueller Report "exonerates" him, but he hasn't been stupid or crazy enough to beg people to read The Mueller Report...

This is like a bank robber who's been caught on video tape robbing a bank, begging people to watch the video because it proves he didn't rob the bank...