Armitage72
Philosopher
So you're saying that they should be placed in a nuclear reactor for prolonged neutron bombardment?
House Impeachment Inquiry
- Thread starter Squeegee Beckenheim
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So you're saying that they should be placed in a nuclear reactor for prolonged neutron bombardment?
Minor nit pick: Republican Congressman Will Hurd from Texas
Who seems like a pretty good person generally, but I have not seen his performance in this hearing, yet. Sadly: "On August 1, 2019, Hurd announced that he will not run for reelection to Congress in 2020 after finishing his third term.[9]"
kellyb
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There are independents and others who are "agnostic" towards Trump impeachment lurking about. You can engage with the Trump supporters to catch their ear if nothing else.
kellyb
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Oh wow! That's even cooler! Surprising, but cooler, Thank you!
Sad indeed if he's not running again because of having to quit politics because Trump's that bad.
kellyb
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It's all about the Trump impeachment agnostics (independents, "libertarians", super-conspiratorial ultra ultra leftwingers) in my mind, for right at this moment in history.
If "people" eventually accepted that there were no WMDs in Iraq, and that there never were, "they" can eventually at some point in the future if nothing else, come to see that this impeachment is legit and the morally correct course for the country.
I'm of two minds of this.
Part of me thinks Trump does not really have a huge statistically meaningful amount of actual supporters in the traditional sense, he just has an army of like minded trolls who are cheering him on to see how much damage he can do, not because they give one tin **** about anything he's actually doing in the literal sense. That's certainly what every Trumper online seems to be. That's why they not only never bother to answer "Why are you okay with him doing this?" they really can't without running the game they are playing because the answer is never more complicated then "It makes the libruls made and/or hurts 'the system' and that's good enough for me." That's why Trumpers never make arguments, only distractions and stalls.
But that's really cynical and I think a little overly focused mainly on the internet political fandom bubbles which contrary to popular belief do no accurately represent America, American politics, or even the parties/"sides" accurately. He has to have actual support of some kind in the "real world."
Part of me thinks Trump does not really have a huge statistically meaningful amount of actual supporters in the traditional sense, he just has an army of like minded trolls who are cheering him on to see how much damage he can do, not because they give one tin **** about anything he's actually doing in the literal sense. That's certainly what every Trumper online seems to be. That's why they not only never bother to answer "Why are you okay with him doing this?" they really can't without running the game they are playing because the answer is never more complicated then "It makes the libruls made and/or hurts 'the system' and that's good enough for me." That's why Trumpers never make arguments, only distractions and stalls.
But that's really cynical and I think a little overly focused mainly on the internet political fandom bubbles which contrary to popular belief do no accurately represent America, American politics, or even the parties/"sides" accurately. He has to have actual support of some kind in the "real world."
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Belz...
Fiend God
Wow, this guy is seriously lacking in self-reflexion.
I Am The Scum
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Absolutely. Over the next month or so, there's going to be a lot of "Trump Supporters Remain Unconvinced On Impeachment" headlines all over the country, and it's about as meaningful as "Flat Earthers Remain Unconvinced On Globe Model."
The goal is not to convince the worst people in the country to not be bad, it's to convince all the other people to stand up and do something about it next November. I hope the impeachment hearing really gets the not-so-politically-engaged among us to realize that the president is irredeemably corrupt.
Trebuchet
Penultimate Amazing
Since then, Mulvaney has changed his mind and will not join the lawsuit, just defy the subpoena. Probably because a judge might not rule the way he wants.
kellyb
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Doesn't he run the risk of getting sent to "special congress jail thing in the house of representative's basement" (or whatever's going on with that) if he doesn't comply? Or, are the dems almost definitely just going to add his absence to the list of Trump's obstruction charges? Anyone know or able to kinda guess from what we do know there?
W.D.Clinger
Philosopher
Yesterday, the House Intelligence Committee heard public testimony from George Kent (Deputy Assistant Secretary of State) and William Taylor (charges d'affaires in Kyiv, Ukraine).
I watched the entire five and a half hours. (I did not watch the thirty anticlimactic minutes of the committee's proceedings after Kent and Taylor left the room.) It was a bit like watching a baseball game, only more so: there were perhaps thirty minutes that mattered. I'm about to summarize my selection of those minutes. A transcript of the entire shebang is available online, but that transcript gets some things out of order; having relied on that transcript for many of the quotations below, I am sure I will get some things out of order as well.
Imagine a less nerdy version of Colin Firth's character in "Kingsman: The Secret Service", without the glasses, with muted polka dots on his bow tie, with an American accent, and with considerably greater competence. That's George Kent.
William Taylor has a deeper voice, is more loquacious, and wears a more conservative suit and tie.
As chair, Adam Schiff opened the meeting. Thirty seconds in:
For the next ten minutes, Schiff gave his opening statement. Here's a sample paragraph:
The ranking Republican, Devin Nunes, devoted his opening statement to attacking the Democrats, concluding:
In his opening statement, George Kent placed his testimony in the context of American history going back to revolutionary times. Some excerpts:
For those who haven't been paying attention, Rudy Giuliani is one of those Americans.
Toward the end of William Taylor's opening statement, he disclosed a new and potentially important bit of evidence from 26 July, the day after Trump told Zelensky "I would like you to do us a favor, though."
Chair Adam Schiff began his 45 minutes of questioning by asking some questions about that:
Taylor's unnamed staff member has since been named and is expected to give a private deposition to the committee tomorrow (Friday).
After about ten minutes of questioning, Schiff turned the rest of his time over to Democratic counsel Daniel Goldman. Goldman began by asking Taylor to read a text message he sent to Ambassador Sondland on 9 September:
Goldman then asked Taylor to explain what he meant by "crazy" and to confirm what Taylor meant by "security assistance" and by "help with a political campaign".
After several questions that established the importance and value of that White House meeting:
After some more of that, Goldman asked Taylor to read the text message he had sent to Sondland a week earlier, on 1 September:
Sondland responded to that by texting "Call me." Goldman asked Taylor what he learned on the call, culminating in this summary:
And so on. Goldman's questioning consistently elicited answers that confirmed the Democrats' view of the evidence as outlined by Adam Schiff in Schiff's opening statement.
Eventually Goldman said "I want to spend just a little time reading the transcript as we've been encouraged to do." Here is the second of the four excerpts Goldman read from the White House's summary of Trump's telephone conversation with Zelensky on 25 July:
The following exchange is one of several in which it seemed to me that George Kent waited for a question he could answer with a simple statement of fact that would say everything that needed to be said.
Goldman's third excerpt from Trump's call:
Goldman's questioning:
Ranking Republican Devin Nunes began his 45-minute block as though he had slept through Goldman's questioning of Kent and Taylor:
Nunes didn't quite say the call was "perfect", but he was clearly following that script. After almost five minutes of that, his questioning began as follows:
In short, Nunes did a very good job of getting Ambassador Taylor to admit he didn't know as much about Fox News talking points as Nunes does.
Nunes yielded the balance of his 45 minutes to Republican counsel Steve Castor. Castor began by inviting Taylor to confirm Trump's state of mind on several questions:
Castor then asked an even sillier question that began with a long windup and ended by saying "You certainly can appreciate that President Trump was very concerned that some elements of the Ukrainian establishment were not in favor of him, did not support him, and were out to get him."
Before Kent or Taylor could respond to that statement, if indeed they had any intention of doing so, Adam Shiff interjected "I'll allow the question, but", giving Castor what turned out to be perhaps his best moment of the day:
That gave John Ratcliffe and Devin Nunes an opportunity to score points about how unfairly the Republicans were being treated by the chair of the committee. Following that digression, Castor resumed his ineffective line of questioning:
And so on. Instead of asking questions that Kent and Taylor could answer, Castor seemed to be offering sympathy and excuses for Trump's paranoia while inviting Taylor to join the pity party. Taylor wasn't playing along, not out of hostility but because he was confused by Castor's evident focus on non-questions involving matters outside Taylor's knowledge.
Castor eventually expressed amazement that neither Kent nor Taylor were on the 25 July call and neither were involved in the preparation for that call. Kent had to explain to Castor that this was entirely normal: NSC staff are responsible for that preparation, and while they can solicit information from the state department, which can draw on embassy expertise, "that's only background information."
In short, Castor appeared to be woefully unprepared for his national stage. When he finally got around to asking substantive questions, he didn't know what kind of answers to expect, and he was occasionally surprised by substantive answers that ran counter to the Republican narrative.
For example: After Castor had regained his balance by walking Kent through a review of corruption in Ukraine and by Burisma in particular:
And so on. Castor began asking similar questions of Ambassador Taylor, with similar results. The odd thing about this is that George Kent had raised the question about the possible appearance of impropriety when Hunter Biden joined the board of Burisma while his father was vice president. It looked to me as though Castor was trying to get Kent to say that, but was too incompetent to ask questions that would give Kent an opportunity to say that.
Furthermore, Castor ended up asking questions that allowed Kent to shoot down Republican talking points:
Castor's performance was so poor that at least some Republicans are rumored to want to give the job of questioning witnesses in these public sessions to a different lawyer as the hearings proceed.
Each member of the committee was then given five minutes for questioning. Most of their questions were relatively uninteresting.
Dr Wenstrup (R) and several others made the point that Obama had not given lethal weaponry to the Ukrainians, whereas Trump had done so.
Jackie Speier (D) pointed out that the witnesses had given their notes and other documents to the State Department, but the State Department had not yet delivered any of those documents to the committee.
Jim Himes (D) asked George Kent to describe in some detail what a serious anti-corruption effort would look like, setting up this exchange:
Himes then quoted Senator Rand Paul's claim that "They're impeaching the President Trump for exactly the same thing that Joe Biden did" when Biden encouraged the Ukrainians to remove a corrupt prosecutor (Shokin), and asked Kent whether those were in fact the same things.
Perhaps the best sound bite of the entire proceeding came after Kent confirmed his support for extending Ambassador Yovanovitch:
Michael Turner (R) and others made the point that neither Kent nor Taylor had ever communicated directly with President Trump. That is likely to become one of the Republicans' major arguments, that all of the evidence is hearsay. It will be interesting to see how that argument fares against the phone call between Trump and Sondland that was overheard by Taylor's aide and of course the call between Trump and Zelensky whose summary was released by the White House in late September.
Republicans John Ratcliffe and Jim Jordan are loyalists in the mold of Devin Nunes, but somewhat more intelligent. Ratcliffe ended his time as follows:
Republicans weren't the only members of the committee who invited Kent and Taylor to express inappropriate opinions or to answer questions on matters of which they could have no knowledge. Joaquin Castro (D) made the same mistake, but recovered with this exchange:
Val Demings, a Democrat representing Florida's 10th Congressional District, and a former chief of police, made good use of her time.
Democrat Patrick Maloney started out folksy, but was effective as well:
Republican Chris Stewart, in the process of stumbling around and inviting the witnesses to agree with Republican talking points, finally came up with a real question:
Stewart's irony meter must have been broken. He then showed himself to be as unprepared as Castor:
Stewart was followed by Jim Jordan, the attack dog who recently joined the committee to give the Republicans more juice. Jordan pointed out that aid was ultimately released before the Ukrainians were aware that it had been suspended, so there could not possibly have been any quid quo pro. Ambassador Taylor pushed back on this by citing Sondland's "mistake", but Jordan's manner of questioning made it hard for Taylor to complete his statements until Jordan's time had expired.
Most of the other questioning was redundant with that cited above.
In return for the five and a half hours I spent watching that hearing, I learned at least three things.
Kyiv is pronounced "Keev" by Ukrainians, in conscious opposition to the Russian pronunciation of "Kiev" that many of us learned from Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition.
George Kent and William Taylor appeared to have been the most intelligent people in the room. Their scrupulous non-partisanship and commitment to facts distinguished them as well.
Although I am tempted to conclude that most of the least intelligent people in the room were Republicans, and I yield to that temptation with respect to Devin Nunes, I recognize that Republicans were working at a disadvantage. President Trump has asked them to argue that his phone call of 25 July was "perfect", as the rest of his behavior as president has been, and it's just not possible to make that argument without looking silly.
I watched the entire five and a half hours. (I did not watch the thirty anticlimactic minutes of the committee's proceedings after Kent and Taylor left the room.) It was a bit like watching a baseball game, only more so: there were perhaps thirty minutes that mattered. I'm about to summarize my selection of those minutes. A transcript of the entire shebang is available online, but that transcript gets some things out of order; having relied on that transcript for many of the quotations below, I am sure I will get some things out of order as well.
Imagine a less nerdy version of Colin Firth's character in "Kingsman: The Secret Service", without the glasses, with muted polka dots on his bow tie, with an American accent, and with considerably greater competence. That's George Kent.
William Taylor has a deeper voice, is more loquacious, and wears a more conservative suit and tie.
As chair, Adam Schiff opened the meeting. Thirty seconds in:
For the next ten minutes, Schiff gave his opening statement. Here's a sample paragraph:
The ranking Republican, Devin Nunes, devoted his opening statement to attacking the Democrats, concluding:
In his opening statement, George Kent placed his testimony in the context of American history going back to revolutionary times. Some excerpts:
For those who haven't been paying attention, Rudy Giuliani is one of those Americans.
Toward the end of William Taylor's opening statement, he disclosed a new and potentially important bit of evidence from 26 July, the day after Trump told Zelensky "I would like you to do us a favor, though."
Chair Adam Schiff began his 45 minutes of questioning by asking some questions about that:
Taylor's unnamed staff member has since been named and is expected to give a private deposition to the committee tomorrow (Friday).
After about ten minutes of questioning, Schiff turned the rest of his time over to Democratic counsel Daniel Goldman. Goldman began by asking Taylor to read a text message he sent to Ambassador Sondland on 9 September:
Goldman then asked Taylor to explain what he meant by "crazy" and to confirm what Taylor meant by "security assistance" and by "help with a political campaign".
After several questions that established the importance and value of that White House meeting:
After some more of that, Goldman asked Taylor to read the text message he had sent to Sondland a week earlier, on 1 September:
Sondland responded to that by texting "Call me." Goldman asked Taylor what he learned on the call, culminating in this summary:
And so on. Goldman's questioning consistently elicited answers that confirmed the Democrats' view of the evidence as outlined by Adam Schiff in Schiff's opening statement.
Eventually Goldman said "I want to spend just a little time reading the transcript as we've been encouraged to do." Here is the second of the four excerpts Goldman read from the White House's summary of Trump's telephone conversation with Zelensky on 25 July:
Trump said:
The following exchange is one of several in which it seemed to me that George Kent waited for a question he could answer with a simple statement of fact that would say everything that needed to be said.
Goldman's third excerpt from Trump's call:
Goldman's questioning:
Ranking Republican Devin Nunes began his 45-minute block as though he had slept through Goldman's questioning of Kent and Taylor:
Nunes didn't quite say the call was "perfect", but he was clearly following that script. After almost five minutes of that, his questioning began as follows:
In short, Nunes did a very good job of getting Ambassador Taylor to admit he didn't know as much about Fox News talking points as Nunes does.
Nunes yielded the balance of his 45 minutes to Republican counsel Steve Castor. Castor began by inviting Taylor to confirm Trump's state of mind on several questions:
Castor then asked an even sillier question that began with a long windup and ended by saying "You certainly can appreciate that President Trump was very concerned that some elements of the Ukrainian establishment were not in favor of him, did not support him, and were out to get him."
Before Kent or Taylor could respond to that statement, if indeed they had any intention of doing so, Adam Shiff interjected "I'll allow the question, but", giving Castor what turned out to be perhaps his best moment of the day:
That gave John Ratcliffe and Devin Nunes an opportunity to score points about how unfairly the Republicans were being treated by the chair of the committee. Following that digression, Castor resumed his ineffective line of questioning:
And so on. Instead of asking questions that Kent and Taylor could answer, Castor seemed to be offering sympathy and excuses for Trump's paranoia while inviting Taylor to join the pity party. Taylor wasn't playing along, not out of hostility but because he was confused by Castor's evident focus on non-questions involving matters outside Taylor's knowledge.
Castor eventually expressed amazement that neither Kent nor Taylor were on the 25 July call and neither were involved in the preparation for that call. Kent had to explain to Castor that this was entirely normal: NSC staff are responsible for that preparation, and while they can solicit information from the state department, which can draw on embassy expertise, "that's only background information."
In short, Castor appeared to be woefully unprepared for his national stage. When he finally got around to asking substantive questions, he didn't know what kind of answers to expect, and he was occasionally surprised by substantive answers that ran counter to the Republican narrative.
For example: After Castor had regained his balance by walking Kent through a review of corruption in Ukraine and by Burisma in particular:
And so on. Castor began asking similar questions of Ambassador Taylor, with similar results. The odd thing about this is that George Kent had raised the question about the possible appearance of impropriety when Hunter Biden joined the board of Burisma while his father was vice president. It looked to me as though Castor was trying to get Kent to say that, but was too incompetent to ask questions that would give Kent an opportunity to say that.
Furthermore, Castor ended up asking questions that allowed Kent to shoot down Republican talking points:
Castor's performance was so poor that at least some Republicans are rumored to want to give the job of questioning witnesses in these public sessions to a different lawyer as the hearings proceed.
Each member of the committee was then given five minutes for questioning. Most of their questions were relatively uninteresting.
Dr Wenstrup (R) and several others made the point that Obama had not given lethal weaponry to the Ukrainians, whereas Trump had done so.
Jackie Speier (D) pointed out that the witnesses had given their notes and other documents to the State Department, but the State Department had not yet delivered any of those documents to the committee.
Jim Himes (D) asked George Kent to describe in some detail what a serious anti-corruption effort would look like, setting up this exchange:
Himes then quoted Senator Rand Paul's claim that "They're impeaching the President Trump for exactly the same thing that Joe Biden did" when Biden encouraged the Ukrainians to remove a corrupt prosecutor (Shokin), and asked Kent whether those were in fact the same things.
Perhaps the best sound bite of the entire proceeding came after Kent confirmed his support for extending Ambassador Yovanovitch:
Michael Turner (R) and others made the point that neither Kent nor Taylor had ever communicated directly with President Trump. That is likely to become one of the Republicans' major arguments, that all of the evidence is hearsay. It will be interesting to see how that argument fares against the phone call between Trump and Sondland that was overheard by Taylor's aide and of course the call between Trump and Zelensky whose summary was released by the White House in late September.
Republicans John Ratcliffe and Jim Jordan are loyalists in the mold of Devin Nunes, but somewhat more intelligent. Ratcliffe ended his time as follows:
Republicans weren't the only members of the committee who invited Kent and Taylor to express inappropriate opinions or to answer questions on matters of which they could have no knowledge. Joaquin Castro (D) made the same mistake, but recovered with this exchange:
Val Demings, a Democrat representing Florida's 10th Congressional District, and a former chief of police, made good use of her time.
Democrat Patrick Maloney started out folksy, but was effective as well:
Republican Chris Stewart, in the process of stumbling around and inviting the witnesses to agree with Republican talking points, finally came up with a real question:
Stewart's irony meter must have been broken. He then showed himself to be as unprepared as Castor:
Stewart was followed by Jim Jordan, the attack dog who recently joined the committee to give the Republicans more juice. Jordan pointed out that aid was ultimately released before the Ukrainians were aware that it had been suspended, so there could not possibly have been any quid quo pro. Ambassador Taylor pushed back on this by citing Sondland's "mistake", but Jordan's manner of questioning made it hard for Taylor to complete his statements until Jordan's time had expired.
Most of the other questioning was redundant with that cited above.
In return for the five and a half hours I spent watching that hearing, I learned at least three things.
Kyiv is pronounced "Keev" by Ukrainians, in conscious opposition to the Russian pronunciation of "Kiev" that many of us learned from Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition.
George Kent and William Taylor appeared to have been the most intelligent people in the room. Their scrupulous non-partisanship and commitment to facts distinguished them as well.
Although I am tempted to conclude that most of the least intelligent people in the room were Republicans, and I yield to that temptation with respect to Devin Nunes, I recognize that Republicans were working at a disadvantage. President Trump has asked them to argue that his phone call of 25 July was "perfect", as the rest of his behavior as president has been, and it's just not possible to make that argument without looking silly.
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So the Republicans have landed on
"He didn't do it, but it's not big deal because everyone does, but it was a big deal when the other side did it, no it doesn't matter that the other side didn't do, wash, rinse, repeat."
"He didn't do it, but it's not big deal because everyone does, but it was a big deal when the other side did it, no it doesn't matter that the other side didn't do, wash, rinse, repeat."
Bogative
Illuminator
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smartcooky
Penultimate Amazing
Perhaps I am misunderstanding something here.
Are you saying that I am undertaking "a huge leap of wild speculation with no even shoddy evidence" in saying that this is what the CT claims, or are you agreeing with me that the the CT is a "a huge leap of wild speculation with no even shoddy evidence"?
plague311
Great minds think...
Bummer, he should have had his boss keep him in the loop a bit more since we have a massive stockpile of evidence that they actually were linked. It must be tough that this guy is so out of touch with the goings on of his own country.
smartcooky
Penultimate Amazing
I'd be a little kinder than that plague311
Of course he is gong to say that. Like every other intelligent person on the planet, he has seen how petty and vindictive Trump is when people disagree with him. He wants to make sure nothing gets in the way of the desperately needed aid and military support Ukraine needs.
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Stacyhs
Penultimate Amazing
Wow! I had not heard that. If true, it's disgusting and Jordan is even more of a POS than I already thought.
smartcooky
Penultimate Amazing
[off topic]
Yup.
Not wanting to get off topic here, but just Google "Jim Jordan knew about sexual abuse"
Deserves a thread of it own.
Stacyhs
Penultimate Amazing
W.D. Clinger, thank you for that lengthy and very informative post.
autumn1971
Illuminator
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