The Muscovite Candidate

[wesw]

...like useful idiot.

[Lord Jim]

none of those things have happened , jim.

until and unless they do, my point stands.

Some of us support a vigorous, public investigation into whether or not the evidence supports having them happen wes...

That's also a part of how the American system works...

ETA:

Your post immediately followed mine wes; if you're responding to something said earlier you could try quoting it in your post before responding...

That's the Plan B system...

[wesw]

what ever man....

did you hear the one about the never trumpers who couldn t figure out how to change the light bulbs in their table lamps?

[wesw]

...never trumpers only know how to screw things up.

now if you will excuse me I have venison to cook......

deer burger, with garden peppers chopped within, topped with the most delicious yellow heirloom tomatoes you have ever tasted......

maybe some bleu cheese too.....

cooked over mixed wood. with a greenish hickory finish....

[Econoline]

....there is that pesky election thing......

....not to mention that pesky Constitution thing......

Here's a very good article on "impeachment", "high crimes and misdemeanors", and what those words meant to the men who wrote the constitution. Sample quote:

• My study of both British and American impeachments convinces me that “high crimes and misdemeanors” does not limit congressional impeachment power to the necessarily idiosyncratic and antique list of misdeeds Parliament had addressed by 1787. Both Parliament and the Framers were acutely conscious that the sorts of dangerous public misconduct for which impeachment is a necessary remedy could not easily be described in advance.
  
  However, the Framers’ choice of “high crimes and misdemeanors” does set the baseline minimum for the scope of American impeachments. In other words, even if one accepts both the originalist approach to American constitutional interpretation and that the founders meant to restrict American impeachment within the boundaries set by British practice, that means American officials are properly impeachable for at least the range of conduct covered by British practice.
  
  A persistent theme in British impeachments was the charge that the impeached minister had pursued a policy at odds with the nation’s basic foreign policy interests. Impeachments on this ground were a constant beginning with the charges against William de la Pole in 1450 for his role in arranging the marriage of Henry VI to Margaret of Anjou. The Duke of Buckingham was impeached in 1626 in part for loaning English ships to the French to employ against the Protestant Huguenots at Rochelle. In 1678, the Earl of Danby was impeached for assisting King Charles in negotiations with France for British neutrality in the Franco-Dutch War. Lords Oxford, Bolingbroke, and Strafford were impeached in 1715 for their advocacy of the Treaty of Utrecht, which was widely despised as selling out Britain’s Dutch allies in favor of making accommodations with Britain’s traditional enemy France. And Warren Hastings’ 1787 impeachment, so central to George Mason’s thinking, centered on fundamental disagreements about the proper relationship of Great Britain to its Indian possessions and the states that abutted them.
  
  Over and over again, Parliament employed impeachment to assert an authority independent of the royal executive to define the nation’s true foreign policy interests. That Congress has believed itself to have similar authority is demonstrated by the first impeachment in American history, that of Sen. William Blount, charged in 1797 with conspiring to assist the British in acquiring Spanish territory in Florida. Blount was acquitted, but only because there were doubts that senators are “civil officers” subject to impeachment and because he had already resigned.
  
  President Trump’s disparagement or outright abandonment of long-established defense and trade relationships with democratic states in Europe, the Americas, and Asia in favor of self-destructive mercantilism, “America First” isolationism, and a growing affinity for authoritarian regimes such as Russia, China, Hungary, Turkey, and the Philippines is far more destructive for American interests than Sen. Blount’s failed Florida adventure or any of the policies for which Parliament routinely impeached royal ministers.
  
  A Congress with any sense of America’s true interests, or indeed with any sense of responsibility for the continued peace and prosperity of the world in general, would be entirely within its constitutional authority to impeach Donald Trump.

Read the whole article, dammit.

[Guinevere]

Wes picks and chooses the portions of the Constitution he wants to recognize and ignores those that are inconvenient for him. Just like his hero.

[wesw]

all you need is the votes.

it ain t rocket science.

my wood has not yet burned down sufficiently to cook on....

so you get blessed with my wisdom for a few more minutes.....

my next project is making my own charcoal.....

burning over wood is tasty, but is an inefficient use of time and wood....

eta... er..., cooking, hopefully not burning....

[Econoline]

If "all you need is the votes" 65,844,610 votes would beat 62,979,636 votes.

[Lord Jim]

all you need is the votes.

That's correct...

A majority in the House, and 2/3rds in the Senate...

[Lord Jim]

ELECTION!!!!!!!!

ARE YOU FREAKIN DENSE?

HE WAS ELECTED!!!!!!!

[wesw]

good one , jim.....

[wesw]

econo..., are you dense!!!!!

trump barely campaigned in CA...., his supporters were getting beaten.....

change the constitution, and then you can count it that way...

too much trouble? then just keep bitching, penelopie...

[wesw]

and the deer burgers sucked, deer burger always sucks....

[Bicycle Bill]

Instead, Trump -- standing alongside Russian President Vladimir Putin -- touted Putin's vigorous denial and pivoted to complaining about the Democratic National Committee's server and missing emails from Hillary Clinton's personal account.

Maybe Trump should try to build his border wall out of those emails, since no one seems to be able to get over them.

-"BB"-

[Bicycle Bill]

and I proudly accept the title of village idiot.

I'll bet your mother is sooooo pleased...... her little bed-wetter has finally made good.

-"BB"-

[wesw]

and that general nastiness is why your party is gonna lose..., again.

[Econoline]

[Burning Petard]

This jaunt to Helsinki has revealed a wonderful way to save the American taxpayer a big bundle. Fire all the USA foreign intelligence workers and contract their tasks to the Russian Intelligence services. Trump has demonstrated the Russians are much more reliable and accurate.

If such a mass release of government employees would have a bad impact on the unemployed stats, keep some and give them the job of searching yet again though all of Hillary's emails for the smoking gun that proves Obama's birth certificate from Hawaii is fake. And the fate of Judge Crater is probably hidden in those emails as well. I am sure sneaky Bill Clinton had something to do with that. Not many purple know that.
Many people have told me that.

snailgate.

[RayThom]

Our present Congress, and every Democrat who fails to vote in November will be complicit, allowing Drumpf to get away with his treasonous, duplicitous, and most of all, psychotic, behavior. He must be condemned.

Democracy is teetering on the edge. Very scary.

The Orange Menace needs to go -- now more than ever.

[Guinevere]

Prescient- note the date of this piece (October 2016). We were warned. If you are confused about Trump’s love affair with Russia, just read. It’s very simple. He is financially entrenched and will continue to benefit financially if he aligns himself (and the U.S.) with Putin. He cares only about himself and his bank accounts and doesn’t give a damn about the county, our people, or our security.

On Friday, FBI Director James Comey set off a political blast when he informed congressional leaders that the bureau had stumbled across emails that might be pertinent to its completed inquiry into Hillary Clinton’s handling of emails when she was secretary of state. The Clinton campaign and others criticized Comey for intervening in a presidential campaign by breaking with Justice Department tradition and revealing information about an investigation—information that was vague and perhaps ultimately irrelevant—so close to Election Day. On Sunday, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid upped the ante. He sent Comey a fiery letter saying the FBI chief may have broken the law and pointed to a potentially greater controversy: “In my communications with you and other top officials in the national security community, it has become clear that you possess explosive information about close ties and coordination between Donald Trump, his top advisors, and the Russian government…The public has a right to know this information.”

Reid’s missive set off a burst of speculation on Twitter and elsewhere. What was he referring to regarding the Republican presidential nominee? At the end of August, Reid had written to Comey and demanded an investigation of the “connections between the Russian government and Donald Trump’s presidential campaign,” and in that letter he indirectly referred to Carter Page, an American businessman cited by Trump as one of his foreign policy advisers, who had financial ties to Russia and had recently visited Moscow. Last month, Yahoo News reported that US intelligence officials were probing the links between Page and senior Russian officials. (Page has called accusations against him “garbage.”) On Monday, NBC News reported that the FBI has mounted a preliminary inquiry into the foreign business ties of Paul Manafort, Trump’s former campaign chief. But Reid’s recent note hinted at more than the Page or Manafort affairs. And a former senior intelligence officer for a Western country who specialized in Russian counterintelligence tells Mother Jones that in recent months he provided the bureau with memos, based on his recent interactions with Russian sources, contending the Russian government has for years tried to co-opt and assist Trump—and that the FBI requested more information from him.

Does this mean the FBI is investigating whether Russian intelligence has attempted to develop a secret relationship with Trump or cultivate him as an asset? Was the former intelligence officer and his material deemed credible or not? An FBI spokeswoman says, “Normally, we don’t talk about whether we are investigating anything.” But a senior US government official not involved in this case but familiar with the former spy tells Mother Jones that he has been a credible source with a proven record of providing reliable, sensitive, and important information to the US government.

In June, the former Western intelligence officer—who spent almost two decades on Russian intelligence matters and who now works with a US firm that gathers information on Russia for corporate clients—was assigned the task of researching Trump’s dealings in Russia and elsewhere, according to the former spy and his associates in this American firm. This was for an opposition research project originally financed by a Republican client critical of the celebrity mogul. (Before the former spy was retained, the project’s financing switched to a client allied with Democrats.) “It started off as a fairly general inquiry,” says the former spook, who asks not to be identified. But when he dug into Trump, he notes, he came across troubling information indicating connections between Trump and the Russian government. According to his sources, he says, “there was an established exchange of information between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin of mutual benefit.”

This was, the former spy remarks, “an extraordinary situation.” He regularly consults with US government agencies on Russian matters, and near the start of July on his own initiative—without the permission of the US company that hired him—he sent a report he had written for that firm to a contact at the FBI, according to the former intelligence officer and his American associates, who asked not to be identified. (He declines to identify the FBI contact.) The former spy says he concluded that the information he had collected on Trump was “sufficiently serious” to share with the FBI.

Mother Jones has reviewed that report and other memos this former spy wrote. The first memo, based on the former intelligence officer’s conversations with Russian sources, noted, “Russian regime has been cultivating, supporting and assisting TRUMP for at least 5 years. Aim, endorsed by PUTIN, has been to encourage splits and divisions in western alliance.” It maintained that Trump “and his inner circle have accepted a regular flow of intelligence from the Kremlin, including on his Democratic and other political rivals.” It claimed that Russian intelligence had “compromised” Trump during his visits to Moscow and could “blackmail him.” It also reported that Russian intelligence had compiled a dossier on Hillary Clinton based on “bugged conversations she had on various visits to Russia and intercepted phone calls.”

The former intelligence officer says the response from the FBI was “shock and horror.” The FBI, after receiving the first memo, did not immediately request additional material, according to the former intelligence officer and his American associates. Yet in August, they say, the FBI asked him for all information in his possession and for him to explain how the material had been gathered and to identify his sources. The former spy forwarded to the bureau several memos—some of which referred to members of Trump’s inner circle. After that point, he continued to share information with the FBI. “It’s quite clear there was or is a pretty substantial inquiry going on,” he says.

This is something of huge significance, way above party politics,” the former intelligence officer comments. “I think [Trump’s] own party should be aware of this stuff as well.”

The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment regarding the memos. In the past, Trump has declared, “I have nothing to do with Russia.”

The FBI is certainly investigating the hacks attributed to Russia that have hit American political targets, including the Democratic National Committee and John Podesta, the chairman of Clinton’s presidential campaign. But there have been few public signs of whether that probe extends to examining possible contacts between the Russian government and Trump. (In recent weeks, reporters in Washington have pursued anonymous online reports that a computer server related to the Trump Organization engaged in a high level of activity with servers connected to Alfa Bank, the largest private bank in Russia. On Monday, a Slate investigation detailed the pattern of unusual server activity but concluded, “We don’t yet know what this [Trump] server was for, but it deserves further explanation.” In an email to Mother Jones, Hope Hicks, a Trump campaign spokeswoman, maintains, “The Trump Organization is not sending or receiving any communications from this email server. The Trump Organization has no communication or relationship with this entity or any Russian entity.”)

According to several national security experts, there is widespread concern in the US intelligence community that Russian intelligence, via hacks, is aiming to undermine the presidential election—to embarrass the United States and delegitimize its democratic elections. And the hacks appear to have been designed to benefit Trump. In August, Democratic members of the House committee on oversight wrote Comey to ask the FBI to investigate “whether connections between Trump campaign officials and Russian interests may have contributed to these [cyber] attacks in order to interfere with the US. presidential election.” In September, Sen. Dianne Feinstein and Rep. Adam Schiff, the senior Democrats on, respectively, the Senate and House intelligence committees, issued a joint statement accusing Russia of underhanded meddling: “Based on briefings we have received, we have concluded that the Russian intelligence agencies are making a serious and concerted effort to influence the U.S. election. At the least, this effort is intended to sow doubt about the security of our election and may well be intended to influence the outcomes of the election.” The Obama White House has declared Russia the culprit in the hacking capers, expressed outrage, and promised a “proportional” response.

There’s no way to tell whether the FBI has confirmed or debunked any of the allegations contained in the former spy’s memos. But a Russian intelligence attempt to co-opt or cultivate a presidential candidate would mark an even more serious operation than the hacking.

In the letter Reid sent to Comey on Sunday, he pointed out that months ago he had asked the FBI director to release information on Trump’s possible Russia ties. Since then, according to a Reid spokesman, Reid has been briefed several times. The spokesman adds, “He is confident that he knows enough to be extremely alarmed.”

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/20 ... ald-trump/