Cont: House Impeachment Inquiry - part 2

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Belz... said:
I did. If you refuse to understand what he's telling you, it's beyond my power to make you see it.

Also, nice moving of goalposts.



And instead of dealing with the problem at the source (you), you lash out at other posters instead.
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I posted the quotes, explained mine.

The rest is your problem.
 
Minoosh said:
It's significant to me partly because it's driving Trump insane(r). Not a very noble motive, but true.

But the other thing people miss is that not impeaching would set a terrible precedent, in the phone call case. While it's almost certain the Senate will not convict, that's beside the point. The House saw an impeachable offense and impeached. They did their part. Didn't McConnell criticize the impeachment as being "rushed"? Maybe he was right, so a couple of week's delay might be the responsible thing to do.

I also wonder if Mitch and Lindsey might have overplayed their hand a wee bit. Not all GOP senators are going to be eager to vote to proceed with a "trial" in which no witnesses testify and no evidence is considered. I'm pretty sure that voting for such rules would cost my GOP senator their job.
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They criticized it as being rushed, but only after they criticized it for taking too long.....They also criticized the process for being "in secret" and then, when it was opened to the public, for being " a public show." Also, for not having enough witnesses, while supporting Trump's move of not allowing witnesses.

In short, their criticisms don't matter because none of them are made in good faith.

I'm sure you know this, I just want it repeated so that maybe, just maybe, the Trump-leaning fence sitters can be informed.
 
Meadmaker said:
First things first. Whatever I heard last week about transcripts, I must have heard it wrong, or they were lying. (It was on talk radio. Lying is a definite possibility.) I don't know what was released or when.

However.....







So, there's something interesting going on here. I get the feeling that, somehow, I'm supposed to be indicated in the above. Maybe I'm wrong. It just seems that way. Let's go over what the subject of the most recent dispute is:

Which of the following is true?

1) Donald Trump asked President Zelensky to investigate Joe Biden

or

2) Donald Trump did not ask President Zelensky to investigate Joe Biden, but he just wanted Zelensky to "announce" that he was investigating Joe Biden, instead of actually investigating him.


That's the dispute. Which side of that dispute are you on? I'm on side 1.


If you are also on side 1, then congratulations on being on the correct side.;)

If you are on side 2, I guess I'd like to hear an explanation of your position, and whether you think that makes Trump look bad, especially if you think that somehow position 2 is a more severe crime than position 1.
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It's 2 and I can show why:

First, if the US wants help from another country in investigating someone, there are proper DOJ channels to request.
Second, that investigation would have a US counterpart to receive and review the results of the foreign investigation.
And third, you don't want to give the Target a heads-up that they are under scrutiny by, say, have your personal lawyer talk about it on TV - repeatedly.
Trump and everyone else knew that a proper investigation into the Bidens, should there be any 'there' there, would not have yielded results until after the 2020 election.
Do you, besides a gut feeling, have any reason to assume that you know better than Sondland what Trump wanted?
 
Meadmaker said:
They released it last week. You're behind the times.

Of course, I can't talk. I have to see if I can find something about the second conversation, whatever that was.
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We literally just went through this. The second conversation is the one that all this is about. The "we'd like you to do us a favour, though" one is the second conversation. The first one, of which there is a transcript has nothing whatsoever to do with the impeachment, other than being released by the White House as a (seemingly effective, judging by your posts) distraction/smoke screen.
 
varwoche said:
My answer is 1.5. That is, he asked that Biden be investigated, but would have been satisfied by an announcement. That's my sense of things, simply because the announcement probably would have sufficed.
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It's all semantics anyway, because we know that Trump was not the primary communicator between the White House and Ukraine. There were multiple people involved with communicating with Ukrainian officials, including Giuliani and Sondland himself.

This is what Sondland had to say on the matter:

SCHIFF: And in order to perform that official act [a meeting in the Oval Office], Donald Trump wanted these two investigations that would help his reelection campaign, correct?

SONDLAND: I can’t characterize why he wanted them. All I can tell you is this is what we heard from Mr. Giuliani.

SCHIFF: But he had to get those two investigations if that official act was going to take place, correct?

SONDLAND: He had to announce the investigations. He didn’t actually have to do them, as I understood it.
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And this:

GOLDMAN: Giuliani and President Trump didn’t actually care if they did them, right?

SONDLAND: I never heard, Mr. Goldman, anyone say that the investigations had to start or be completed. The only thing I heard from Mr. Giuliani or otherwise was that they had to be announced. ... President Trump presumably, communicated through Mr. Giuliani, wanted the Ukrainians on-record publicly that they were going to do those investigations.
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Whether or not the memo characterises Trump as literally saying the words "...but you don't actually have to do it, you just have to say it" is not the most important factor and pretending that it is is even more disingenuous than pretending that the censored and edited memo is a fully unredacted transcript, because it's ignoring the vast majority of what actually went on over several months and instead pretending that the phone call was the only event to occur.
 
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varwoche said:
... but I'm pleased to answer your question anyway. That's how genial I am!

My answer is 1.5. That is, he asked that Biden be investigated, but would have been satisfied by an announcement. That's my sense of things, simply because the announcement probably would have sufficed.

But that said, if Biden is leading in the polls in Sept 2020, I can well imagine Trump going back to the well and demanding a damning outcome, never mind if the investigation ever occurred.
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This. Evidence- this is a tweet from Trump (from Captain Swoop's post in the "Trump Presidency" thread this morning)-

...
The Democrats will do anything to avoid a trial in the Senate in order to protect Sleepy Joe Biden, and expose the millions and millions of dollars that “Where’s” Hunter, & possibly Joe, were paid by companies and countries for doing NOTHING. Joe wants no part of this mess!
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Notice that, even absent the "investigation" Trump asked as "a favor" from Zelensky, he still has Hunter (and "possibly Joe") convicted of corruption. It's obvious to me that Trump never cared about any actual investigation that had the potential of clearing the Bidens of suspicion, it was only ever the suspicion he was after. And it's incredible to me that even people who should know better are somehow still falling for this game- the cloud he wanted thrown over Biden by Zelensky is still being cast by way of the (legitimate) Congressional inquiry into his trying to use Zelensky to get it.

This idea that we need some transcript of Trump saying specifically to Zelensky "I don't care if you actually do the investigation, just announce it, ok?" is just ridiculous, and kind of puts me in mind of The Big Dog's childish, hyper-literal defense of Trump not releasing his tax returns after saying he would ("he never said 'I promise'!"). The evidence is properly a body, not a single leg that can be cut out from under a conclusion; that simplistic single-leg approach is how CTists try to "gotcha!" their way out of reality.
 
Squeegee Beckenheim said:
We were talking about whether or not the Democrats should have been surprised by the Republicans' actions.
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Where are you getting this? I've never said they should have been surprised.

They may have been surprised about what a great excuse Mitch and Lindsey gave them to slow things down a bit.

At the time of their vote, did they even indicate when they were going to convey the Articles to the Senate?
 
Minoosh said:
At the time of their vote, did they even indicate when they were going to convey the Articles to the Senate?
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I guess we're all just idiots for assuming it was important and on some sort of time line since "OMG THIS IS AN ABSOLUTE MORAL IMPERATIVE THAT CAN'T WAIT!" was the entire reason they were doing it in the first place.

We really are at the "Democrats are just acting at random and people are making up reasons after the fact why" stage.
 
JoeMorgue said:
I guess we're all just idiots for assuming it was important and on some sort of time line since "OMG THIS IS AN ABSOLUTE MORAL IMPERATIVE THAT CAN'T WAIT!" was the entire reason they were doing it in the first place.
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They were doing it at least partly because Trump finally crossed a line they felt they couldn't ignore. Leadership didn't want to impeach him at all. But in the end a majority of the House decided that the abuse of power was so flagrant and corrupt that it had to be addressed. It was behavior that shouldn't be tolerated in any president. There had to be a consequence. So they held hearings and impeached him. The House has the power to draw the line, so it did.

We really are at the "Democrats are just acting at random and people are making up reasons after the fact why" stage.
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None of this seems random to me.

ETA: And why are you shouting at me? I'm not telling you that you're an idiot and I kind of resent being told that's what I'm saying.
 
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All that Trump really wanted was to start a rumor that Joe Biden was guilty of something, so that Trump could more easily win the election. He was never concerned with the fine details of the how and why.

Asking, "Well, what, specifically did he want?" is a useless exercise. Just make the other guy look bad and he'd be happy.
 
It does seem like this has been a lot of words wasted on something as simple as "poisoning the well."
 
I Am The Scum said:
All that Trump really wanted was to start a rumor that Joe Biden was guilty of something, so that Trump could more easily win the election. He was never concerned with the fine details of the how and why.

Asking, "Well, what, specifically did he want?" is a useless exercise. Just make the other guy look bad and he'd be happy.
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I think that's true.


(If anyone thinks that contradicts anything I said previously, that ought to be a signal that you aren't grasping something. The "something" isn't very important,though. It's pretty much a nit.)
 
Minoosh said:
Where are you getting this? I've never said they should have been surprised.

They may have been surprised about what a great excuse Mitch and Lindsey gave them to slow things down a bit.

At the time of their vote, did they even indicate when they were going to convey the Articles to the Senate?
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:thumbsup:
 
JoeMorgue said:
I guess we're all just idiots for assuming it was important and on some sort of time line since "OMG THIS IS AN ABSOLUTE MORAL IMPERATIVE THAT CAN'T WAIT!" was the entire reason they were doing it in the first place.

We really are at the "Democrats are just acting at random and people are making up reasons after the fact why" stage.
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I believe you tacked on the highlighted part.

What would the Democrats have waited for? The election?

Is it bothering people here that Pelosi is being strategic? I don't get the objections.
 
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