It's not a transcript.

[Lord Jim]

The best argument that Trump supporters on The Hill could make now, (weak-assed as it is) would be something like:

"Yes, what the President attempted to do was wrong, and inappropriate, and he shouldn't have done it, but it doesn't rise to the level of taking the extreme step of removing him from office. At the end of the day, the aid for Ukraine still flowed, and Zelensky didn't do what Trump asked. On top of that, we have an election right around the corner, so let's let the people pass judgement on the President, not the Congress"...

The problem of course is, that Trump himself will have absolutely none of that...

Any GOP member of Congress who stood up and offered the kind of semi-rational defense I'm suggesting would no doubt find themselves the object of Trump's virulent wrath; he might even find himself banished by Il Boobce to the camp of "human scum"...

The Mad King continues to insist that his conduct was "perfect" and impeccable and beautiful, and he's demanding that his supporters in Congress say the same...

So far he's managed to get a few of his biggest bootlicking oath-violating sycophants in the House to join him in engaging in this fantasizing, but not many in the Senate...

I saw a Trump shill pundit on CNN this evening claiming that based on her "sources" that GOP Senators aren't worried that the facts that come out about the Ukraine Scandal are going to get worse...

I'm sorry, have you met Donald Trump?

This is a Trump Scandal, and the record clearly shows that the one thing you can absolutely positively count on about a Trump Scandal, is that no matter how awful things may look at the moment, just wait a couple of minutes...

Things are certain to get worse...

The Senate Republicans know this, and they also don't know how much further the public hearings will move voter sentiment in favor of Trump's removal...

This is why we repeatedly see the hilarious spectacle of United States Senators running away from pursuing microphone-wielding reporters like crooked businessmen used run away from Mike Wallace on 60 Minutes...

They don't want to say a damn thing about this...

[Econoline]

• Trump says he wants to have a firesign chat.
  
  Oh wait.
  
  He said "fireside."
  
  Never mind.

(credit: David Gerrold)



ETA: I think they're all bozos under that bus...

[RayThom]

We could use a man like Nick Danger to sort this whole mess out.

[Lord Jim]

I think Trump would make an excellent contestant for Beat The Reaper...

[Joe Guy]

If they gave Trump a shot of sodium pentothal it would probably kill him.

[RayThom]

If the family can force Trump to chew a few Ex-Lax on his deathbed they'll be able to bury him in a shoe box.

[Lord Jim]

[Bicycle Bill]

From the "You're Never Too Old to Learn Something New" Department —

Here in the upper Midwest we have a chain of pizza restaurants, started by a couple of college students in Madison WI back in 1974, that goes by the name of "Rocky Rococo's Pan-Style Pizza".  Since I don't usually eat there (I'm not a big fan of deep-dish pan-style pizza) I never really concerned myself with where they came up with the name, but after Googling "Nick Danger" I discovered that the Firesign Theatre created the persona of 'Rocky Rococo' as Nick Danger's criminal nemesis, basing him on the 'Joel Cairo' character as portrayed by Peter Lorre in the film "The Maltese Falcon".

So I hied myself over to the pizza company's Wikipedia article, where it is freely acknowledged that they lifted the name from the Firesign Theatre sketch (and successfully defended against a copyright violation claim by the radio group), first calling on a local artist to sketch a character based on the 'White Spy' character from "Mad Magazine", and later hiring comic actor Jim Pederson to portray their "Rocky Rococo" mascot as a mustachioed Italian wearing a white suit, wide-brimmed hat, and sunglasses as depicted above.

-"BB"-

[Econoline]

Any GOP member of Congress who stood up and offered the kind of semi-rational defense I'm suggesting would no doubt find themselves the object of Trump's virulent wrath; he might even find himself banished by Il Boobce to the camp of "human scum"...

The Mad King continues to insist that his conduct was "perfect" and impeccable and beautiful, and he's demanding that his supporters in Congress say the same...

You pretty much nailed it, Jim...

[Big RR]

And so, I guess Trump has no trouble with asking a foreign power to intervene in our elective process. That's so much better.

Asshole.

[Econoline]

“TRANSCRIPT”

[Lord Jim]

That's an interesting tweet for several reasons...

First, I think I've done a reasonably good job of being able to sort out Trump's motives for seemingly strange and/or self-destructive pronouncements, (usually it has to do with him wanting to change the main media story from something that's even worse for him) but I have to admit this whole "read the transcript" thing has had me stumped...

As I said it's like the bank robber who's caught on video tape robbing the bank, begging people to watch the video...

But I think I may have finally sorted it out...

I think the key to understand why he's doing this is to remember who the target audience for this begging is...

It's not me, or most of the people here, or any person who engages in independent thought...

It's his koolaid guzzling hardcore Trumpanzee base...

Trump realizes that those people read just about as much as he does, (which is to say pretty much not at all...)

I see where a bunch of Trump Zombies were set up as stage props behind him at his rally last night wearing "Read The Transcript" tee shirts...I would dearly love to have been able to ask those folks how many of them had actually read the edited summary; I would venture to guess not many...For starters, anyone who actually read it would know that on page one it says "this is not a verbatim transcript"...

But even though they never read it, they will conclude (given their general issues with logic and complete mental confusion regarding Trump) that Fearful Leader would never be telling people to "read the transcript" if "the transcript" reflected anything other than the "perfect conversation" that he describes...

The second reason Trump keeps taking about the "the transcript" is to try to pretend (and define the case against him) that this edited summary, damning as it is, is the one and only cause of his Impeachment troubles...His strategy is, "convince enough people that 'the transcript' isn't impeachable, and there's no basis for Impeachment"...

I'm sure it hasn't escaped Trump's notice that despite his and his Congressional lackeys efforts to obstruct the investigation, in the past several weeks 10 witnesses have thus far come forward not only confirming the most damning aspects of the edited summary, but providing evidence that even more damning proof of Presidential misconduct was left out of the edited summary, and even more importantly that the conversation itself was no "one off" effort to use US government leverage on the Ukrainians to obtain personal political benefit...

But instead was just a piece of a larger on-going conspiracy, orchestrated, facilitated and approved by Trump and carried out by the "shadow state department" efforts of Rudy Giuliani, that even predate the current Impeachable acts...

There's substantial evidence emerging that it may go back to the previous Ukrainian government in 2017, when Trump successfully achieved the quid pro quo of the benefit of having that government drop it's investigation of Paul Manafort (something Trump would very much want since, he knew the damage Manafort could cause for him if he turned rat) in exchange for a White House visit for the Ukrainian President:

In Ukraine, the quid pro quo may have started long before the phone call

What led to Trump’s first meeting on June 20, 2017, with Ukraine’s then-President Petro Poroshenko? Ukraine had hired the lobbying firm BGR Group in January 2017 to foster contact with Trump, but nothing had happened . . . and then the door opened. Why?

On June 7, less than two weeks before Poroshenko’s White House meeting, Trump’s lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, had visited Kyiv to give a speech for the Victor Pinchuk Foundation, headed by a prominent Ukrainian oligarch. While Giuliani was there, he also met with Poroshenko and his prosecutor general, Yuriy Lutsenko, according a news release issued by the foundation.

Just after Giuliani’s visit, Ukraine’s investigation of the so-called black ledger that listed alleged illicit payments to former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort was transferred from an anti-corruption bureau, known as NABU , to Poroshenko’s prosecutor general, according to a June 15, 2017, report in the Kyiv Post. The paper quoted Viktor Trepak, former deputy head of the country’s security service, saying: “It is clear for me that somebody gave an order to bury the black ledger.”

The New York Times reported in May 2018 that Ukraine had “halted cooperation” with Mueller’s investigation. The paper quoted Volodymyr Ariev, a parliament ally of Poroshenko, explaining: “In every possible way, we will avoid irritating the top American officials.”

Was there any implicit understanding that Poroshenko’s government would curb its cooperation with the U.S. Justice Department’s investigation of Manafort, who would later be indicted by Mueller?

More:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions ... story.html

Of course once the public hearings begin it will no longer be possible for Trump to try and claim the only evidence for impeachment is this one phone call, so he's doing his best to define it that way now...

I also see the genesis of a fall back position for Trump in that tweet:

...a few Republican Senators are saying that President Trump may have done a quid pro quo, but it doesn’t matter, there is nothing wrong with that, it is not an impeachable event. Perhaps so, ...

That "perhaps so" indicates to me that Trump,despite his false claims about "fake news" is starting to lay the ground work for a "defense" that moves from "No Quid Pro Quo" to "A Quid Pro Quo Is Not Impeachable"...

With roughly half the country already favoring his removal from office before the evidence has even been fully laid out, good luck with that...

[Lord Jim]

The other game Trump has been trying to play here is to somehow make this all about the original whistle blower...

Another strategy destined to end in tears...

Again, 10 witnesses (and contemporary notes and text communications) and counting...

[Scooter]

So the White House and Congressional Republicans have been demanding the release of transcripts from the depositions, and transcripts of Marie Yovanavich's and Michael McKinley's depositions have been released. The result has been a flurry of new coverage about the testimony given in those depositions. Not sure how Republicans believed that revealing even more juicy tidbits from the depositions would help their case, but given the now clearly evident opportunity afforded for questioning by both minority counsel and individual members, it pretty much blows their "lack of due process" claims out of the water.

Trump went even more ballistic than usual, claiming that Democrats had doctored the transcripts and telling Republicans to issue "their own transcripts" of the depositions. in effect publicly calling on members of Congress to falsify evidence.

[Lord Jim]

Oh dear me...

Looks like the one and only witness to back up Trump on the "quid pro quo" question, would (in the words of Tommy Lee Jones in The Fugitive) "Like to change his bullshit story"...

Key diplomat changes testimony and admits quid pro quo with Ukraine

(CNN)In a significant reversal, a top US diplomat revised his testimony to impeachment investigators to admit there was a quid pro quo linking US aid to Ukraine with an investigation into President Donald Trump's political rivals.

US Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland sent the committee a three-page addition to his testimony on Monday, saying he had remembered a September 1 conversation that occurred on the sidelines of a meeting between Vice President Mike Pence and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, in which he told a top aide to Zelensky that the security aid and investigations were linked.

"I now recall speaking individually with Mr. (Andriy) Yermak, where I said resumption of U.S. aid would likely not occur until Ukraine provided the public anti-corruption statement that we had been discussing for many weeks," Sondland said.

Sondland's new testimony, which was included in the public release of his closed-door deposition transcript on Tuesday, adds to Democrats' evidence that the President connected the freezing of US security aid to Ukraine to investigations into the 2016 election and former Vice President Joe Biden, which cuts to the heart of their impeachment case against Trump.

https://www.cnn.com/2019/11/05/politics ... index.html

Since Sondland is a long time Trump crony and political appointee who got his job in exchange for a 1 million dollar contribution to Trump's slush fund Inaugural Committee, he's going to be a little tough to portray as a "deep state" Never Trumper, but our Donald is nothing if not imaginative...

[Scooter]

Once caught in his lies, Sondland wisely chose not to risk that his loyalty to Trump would get him a get-out-of-jail-free card on perjury and obstruction charges.

[Scooter]

Transcript of Kurt Volker's deposition

Transcript of Gordon Sondland's depostion, with an addendum of his "refreshed...recollection" about the events in question.

[Econoline]

[Bicycle Bill]

A day after saying he wouldn’t bother reading transcripts released by House Democrats in the impeachment inquiry into President Trump, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) now says he did read the testimony, and his conclusion is that the administration’s Ukraine policy was too “incoherent” for it to have orchestrated the quid pro quo that is at the heart of the probe.  So what he's stating, in effect, is that Trump is too incompetent, too inept, or just plain too fucking stupid to create a policy that would have allowed a quid pro quo.

Of course, Trump would never say so himself, because that would fly against his "I'm a stable genius and the smartest person around" rhetoric.  But if he did...  you know, THAT'S an alibi I could believe.

-"BB"-

[Lord Jim]

Trump is too incompetent, too inept, or just plain too fucking stupid to create a policy that would have allowed a quid pro quo.

That was essentially Mueller's rationale for not indicting Don Jr. on conspiracy charges despite mountain of collusion evidence...

Mueller would have had to prove to 12 jurors beyond a reasonable doubt that Donnie wasn't too stupid to know what he was doing, and trying to prove Jr. wasn't too stupid about anything would have been a very tough lift...