Thread: President Donald Trump

Originally Posted by RPETER65

Seems like your getting the cart ahead of the horse.

Does'nt it.

The effort by President Trump to pressure the government of Ukraine to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden and his son had its origins in an earlier endeavor to obtain information that might provide a pretext and political cover for the president to pardon his former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, according to previously undisclosed records. These records indicate that attorneys representing Trump and Manafort respectively had at least nine conversations relating to this effort, beginning in the early days of the Trump administration, and lasting until as recently as May of this year. Through these deliberations carried on by his attorneys, Manafort exhorted the White House to press Ukrainian officials to investigate and discredit individuals, both in the US and in Ukraine, who he believed had published damning information about his political consulting work in the Ukraine. A person who participated in the joint defense agreement between President Trump and others under investigation by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, including Manafort, allowed me to review extensive handwritten notes that memorialized conversations relating to Manafort and Ukraine between Manafort’s and Trump’s legal teams, including Trump’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani.

These new disclosures emerge as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced on Tuesday that the House would open a formal impeachment inquiry into President Trump’s conduct. What prompted her actions were the new allegations that surfaced last week that Trump had pressured Ukraine’s newly elected president, Volodymyr Zelensky, to investigate Trump’s potential 2020 campaign rival, Biden, and his son Hunter, placing a freeze on a quarter of a billion dollars in military assistance to Ukraine as leverage. The impeachment inquiry will also examine whether President Trump obstructed justice by attempting to curtail investigations by the FBI and the special counsel into Russia’s covert interference in the 2016 presidential election in Trump’s favor.

New information in this story suggests that these two, seemingly unrelated scandals, in which the House will judge whether the president’s conduct in each case constituted extra-legal and extra-constitutional abuses of presidential power, are in fact inextricably linked: the Ukrainian initiative appears to have begun in service of formulating a rationale by which the president could pardon Manafort, as part of an effort to undermine the special counsel’s investigation.

From 2004 to 2014, Manafort had advised President Viktor Yanukovych, who advocated that his country sever ties with the United States and other Western nations, and align itself more closely with Vladimir Putin’s Russia. After Yanukovych fled the country in disgrace in 2014, a ledger was recovered from the burned-out ruins of his Party of Regions. Its records showed that Yanukovych and his political allies had made some $12.7 million in secret cash payments to Manafort. The disclosure led directly to Manafort’s resignation in August 2016 as chairman of the Trump presidential campaign.

The records I have reviewed also indicate that on at least three occasions, Rudy Giuliani was in communication with Manafort’s legal team to discuss how the White House was pushing a narrative that the Democratic National Committee, Democratic donors, and Ukrainian government officials had “colluded” to defeat Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential bid. (This story has since been debunked as baseless, though that has not prevented Trump, Giuliani, and other surrogates in conservative media from repeatedly pushing the story.)

In particular, the records show that Manafort’s camp provided Giuliani with information designed to smear two people: one was a Ukrainian journalist and political activist named Serhiy Leshchenko, whom Manafort believed, correctly, of helping to uncover Manafort’s secret payments from Yanukovych; another was Alexandra Chalupa, a Ukrainian-American political consultant and US citizen, whom Manafort suspected, mistakenly in this case, was also behind the exposé. The records also show that Giuliani and attorneys for Manafort exchanged information about the then US ambassador to the Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, who Giuliani believed had attempted to undercut his covert Ukrainian diplomacy and fact-finding; the records are unclear as to whether it was Giuliani or Manafort’s attorney who first initiated their discussion about her.

After his arrest in 2017, Manafort continued to encourage President Trump and his lawyers to engage in this effort when they joined Manafort in a joint legal defense agreement. Attorneys are allowed to enter into such agreements in order share information and coordinate legal, public relations, and political strategies—in this case regarding the investigations of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, including that of the special counsel. Federal courts have long ruled that joint defense agreements are legal to protect the due process rights of those under investigation, as long as they are not used by potential defendants to coordinate providing cover stories or false information to prosecutors.

Trump’s dangling of pardons to Manafort and others who might provide damaging testimony against the president to law enforcement agents, such as his former personal attorney Michael Cohen, have been widely reported, both by news media outlets and in the Mueller Report. According to the participant in the joint defense agreement discussions, Manafort was distressed at the uncertainty about whether President Trump would pardon him. There was no formal understanding that Trump would do so, because this would instantly have raised the specter of whether such a pardon might constitute an obstruction of justice.

Instead, Manafort and those around him took the very public efforts by Giuliani to press Ukraine to investigate Manafort’s accusers as a favorable signal that the president might still pardon him after the 2020 presidential election. Trump is famously transactional, and Manafort feared that the president might be leading him on, according to the person who was party to the joint defense agreement communications. Giuliani’s constant touting of the Ukraine issue proved “reassuring” to Manafort, albeit to “a limited degree,” according to this person.

If Giuliani’s own account can be believed, it was while he was looking into the purported Ukrainian collusion to defeat Trump that he stumbled upon Hunter Biden’s business dealings in Ukraine. “The reality is I came about this by accident, investigating Ukrainian collusion with Democrats to affect the election,” Giuliani said in an interview with Fox Newson May 10.

Giuliani did not add that he was also pressing for Kiev to investigate Manafort’s enemies. As I first disclosed last year in an article for Vox, Manafort encouraged the president and his top aides in this effort from the first days of the administration in early 2017. In recent months, both Trump and Giuliani have intensified those efforts, pressuring Ukraine to investigate not only Leshchenko and Chalupa, but also other Ukrainian government officials, activists, and journalists—and specifically to look into any part they may have had in publishing details of Manafort’s illicit political consulting work in the Ukraine.

This past weekend, Trump acknowledged that he had also encouraged President Zelensky during a July 25 telephone call to have Ukraine’s law enforcement agencies investigate Hunter Biden’s business dealings. The White House has released a memorandum based on notes from officials, not a verbatim record. In it, Trump expressed concern to Zelensky that he was “surrounding [him]self with some of the same people,” an apparent reference to Leshchenko. Trump went on to disparage the Mueller Report, saying, “a lot of it started with Ukraine,” a seeming allusion to Manafort’s problems. And he urged the Ukrainian president to take calls from both his personal lawyer and Attorney General William Barr. Giuliani has admitted to repeatedly pressing the Manafort matter with Ukrainian officials.

The allegations that President Trump improperly pressured the head of state of a foreign government to improperly investigate the son of his potential Democratic opponent in the 2020 presidential race, and even withheld $250 million in military aid to that country, have become grounds for an impeachment inquiry. The new disclosures in this story underscore how this scheme originated in the long-running coordination between Trump, Giuliani, and Manafort to frustrate the Mueller investigation.

*

Giuliani’s smear campaign already met with some success. After Giuliani had to cancel a trip to Kiev earlier this year to meet with Zelensky to press the president’s agenda of having Ukraine investigate Trump’s political adversaries, Giuliani blamed Leshchenko for generating the publicity about it. In 2016, Leshchenko had held a press conference in Kiev to publicize the “black ledger” that forced Manafort’s resignation from Trump’s campaign.

On May 10, Giuliani lashed out at Leshchenko, characterizing him as one of several people around Zelensky who were “enemies of the president” and “enemies of the United States.” Without offering any evidence to substantiate this disparagement, Giuliani now claimed that the ledgers had been doctored or forged. He even alleged that Hillary Clinton or the Democratic National Committee were involved in the effort to bring the ledger to light. On Fox News this past Sunday, Giuliani added to his conspiracy theory the claim that George Soros was somehow involved in “Ukrainian collusion.”

Writing in The Washington Post on Saturday, Leshchenko—who had for a time been a member of the Ukrainian parliament—wrote that Giuliani’s accusations had “had a devastating effect on my political career.” “Giuliani’s smear,” he said, “cost me a job in the new administration.” Leshchenko had been an adviser on Zelensky’s team, but facing this onslaught from Trump’s attorney and his media allies, he had felt forced to withdraw in order to avoid creating problems for the Ukrainian president.

Alexandra Chalupa has faced similar attacks, encouraged by Manafort via the joint defense agreement. Chalupa had worked part-time as a political consultant to the Democratic National Committee, and Manafort claimed that she, too, had been involved in bringing the black ledger to light. Her consultancy for the DNC had involved outreach to Ukrainian-American voters, not opposition research; and she had conducted her research on Manafort entirely on her own account. Although Chalupa mentioned what she was doing to colleagues at the DNC, they took no interest in her efforts, and in July 2016 she quit working for the DNC to focus on human rights advocacy. Although she did independently report on Manafort’s work in Ukraine, she played no part in exposing the black ledger.

President Trump and his surrogates, however, had their own motives for attacking Chalupa. After the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting with Russian officials was revealed, they used Chalupa’s work to argue that Democrats had engaged in much the same conduct: Chalupa’s outreach to Ukrainian officials, they said, was no different. As I wrote for the Daily in January: “This argument does not stand up to scrutiny but the White House’s efforts were designed to persuade some—especially among the president’s conservative base—to believe that a moral and legal equivalence applied.”

Acting in part on Manafort’s advice, on July 10, 2017, then White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders encouraged reporters to investigate how, she claimed, “the Democrat National Committee coordinated opposition research directly with the Ukrainian Embassy.” Two days later, Fox News’s Sean Hannity began efforts to repeatedly amplify the allegations evening after evening on his show. On July 24, Republicans on Capitol Hill, among them Senator Charles Grassley, of Iowa, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said it would investigate whether Chalupa’s activity constituted a violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act (there would be no such finding). On July 25, President Trump himself tweeted: “Ukrainian efforts to sabotage Trump campaign—‘quietly working to boost Clinton.’ So where is the investigation A.G.”

*

Manafort is currently serving a seven-and-a-half-year federal prison sentence of eight felony counts, including money-laundering, tax avoidance, and mortgage fraud. Following those convictions in August 2018, Manafort agreed to cooperate with the Mueller investigation. As part of a plea bargain in which he admitted to additional crimes of witness-tampering and money-laundering, Manafort was guaranteed leniency as long as he were to “fully, truthfully, completely and forthrightly” answer any questions about “any and all matters” the government wanted to ask about.

But Manafort’s cooperation was a ruse. Little more than three months later, in December, the special counsel stated in federal court that Manafort had broken his cooperation agreement by telling prosecutors and FBI agents “multiple discernible lies.” Even more unsettling were disclosures that an attorney for Manafort had been constantly briefing President Trump’s attorneys on what Manafort was being asked and what he was telling the special counsel. Manafort and his attorneys argued that this conduct was legal under his joint legal defense agreement with the president—although many seasoned prosecutors were appalled that this had been allowed to continue.

Harry Littman, a former United States Attorney for the Western District of Pennsylvania, noted at the time in The Washington Post that “the open pipeline between cooperator Manafort and suspect Trump may have been not only extraordinary but also criminal”

—potentially qualifying as crimes of obstruction and witness-tampering on both sides. Littman explained:

On Manafort’s and [his defense attorney’s] end, there is a circumstantial case for obstruction of justice. What purpose other than an attempt to “influence, obstruct, or impede” the investigation of the president can be discerned from Manafort’s service as a double agent? And on the Trump side, the communications emit a strong scent of illegal witness tampering (and possibly obstruction as well).

Littman also pointed out that Mueller had the right to compel attorneys for both the president and Manafort to testify about their discussions as part of an inquiry into whether they or their clients had obstructed justice. But Littman noted that “political considerations” might “possibly intercede.” Trump and his allies would criticize Mueller for overreach, he considered, and the then Acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker might not permit Mueller to serve subpoenas.

In the end, Mueller did not follow up. Nor have Democrats in the House, who had a similar legitimate right to independently investigate the matter. If they had, they would have discovered that as late as May of this year, Giuliani was in touch with Manafort’s attorneys to discuss how they could keep pushing the “Ukrainian collusion” narrative, as the records shown me demonstrate. In the absence of any branch of government holding them accountable, Trump and Giuliani faced no sanction for doing so. They had good reason, after all, to believe they were invincible.

https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2019/0...kraine-scheme/

How long will it take that the whole shtt will be thrown back onto Dems?

Originally Posted by Klondyke

How long will it take that the whole shtt will be thrown back onto Dems?

Do you get reports on Putin's timetable comrade?

^Yee, the dangerous Mr. Putin just sitting back and having a good laugh...

However, back to the topic (not to be accused again of "irrelevancies" - not keeping strictly to the topic like my "friends"):

Perhaps a solution can be found. Similarly as solved by Clinton to avoid his impeachment: over night start a new war by bombarding... (any idea where to?)

Originally Posted by Klondyke

One whistleblower (and few more) who publicly disclosed enormous atrocities of the govt around the world - is damned, expected to be jailed for life (or executed)

for the second time, comrade....who is this whistleblower(s) you're referring to?

On a Friday in late July, Rudy Giuliani boarded a plane to Spain to meet with an adviser to the Ukrainian president about a plan to investigate Joe Biden.

The trip was described in a whistleblower’s complaint. Several former Giuliani colleagues said they believe it should appear in a future indictment.

Giuliani’s role in the scandal that has triggered an impeachment inquiry is still coming into focus. But several legal experts who used to work with the former U.S. attorney-turned New York City mayor-turned chief President Donald Trump defender told NBC News they believe his conduct likely broke the law.

"This is certainly not the Giuliani that I know," said Jeffrey Harris, who worked as Giuliani’s top assistant when he was at the Justice Department in the President Ronald Reagan administration. "I think the Giuliani that I know would prosecute the Giuliani of today."

Harris and the other former Justice Department lawyers said they believe Giuliani has potentially exposed himself to a range of offenses — from breaking federal election laws to bribery to extortion — through his efforts to assist the Ukrainians in probing Biden, Trump’s top political opponent.

NBC News reached out to seven former colleagues of Giuliani's. Of the six who offered comments on or off the record, none defended him.

At the heart of the whistleblower's complaint is the allegation that Trump abused his power by soliciting "interference from a foreign country" in the 2020 elections — with Giuliani acting as the president’s point person in the effort.

"There’s a whole apparatus of the United State government that’s set up to deal with foreign officials and Rudy Giuliani’s not one of them," said Harris, now a lawyer in private practice in Washington D.C.

"To the extent that you could look at this as using government resources for your benefit, there are a number of crimes that this conduct would answer to."

Giuliani’s trip to Spain came one day after Trump urged Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky to probe Biden and his son Hunter, according to the whistleblower's complaint.

The president has been pushing the claim that Biden helped to force out a Ukrainian prosecutor because the man was probing a gas company that employed Hunter Biden as a consultant. The prosecutor was ousted amid calls from top officials of several Western nations over concerns he wasn’t doing enough to root out deep-seated corruption.

In addition to his trip in Spain, the whistleblower's complaint says, Giuliani had other contacts with Ukrainian officials as part of the effort to dig up dirt on Biden. Giuliani met with Ukraine’s prosecutor general on at least two occasions — in New York in January and in Warsaw, Poland in February, according to the complaint.

Bruce Fein, who worked at the Justice Department with Giuliani in the early 1980s, said he believes Giuliani could be prosecuted for breaking federal election laws.

"He was soliciting a foreign government to help Trump’s 2020 campaign. That’s a problem," said Fein, a former special assistant to the assistant attorney general for the Office of Legal Counsel under President Richard Nixon and associate deputy attorney general under President Ronald Reagan.

"Federal election laws make it illegal to solicit anything of value from a foreign government or persons to influence the outcome of an election."

Fein said Giuliani could also have opened himself up to bribery charges in connection with the president allegedly withholding military funds in order to pressure the Ukraine to launch an investigation of the Bidens.
"If Giuliani was privy to that, he could be complicit with Trump in conspiring to solicit a bribe," Fein said.

Giuliani, who has said he’s been working as an unpaid attorney for Trump, has told NBC News that he went to Spain on his own dime on a trip he described as a mix of business and pleasure. Giuliani is not listed as receiving any money from the Trump campaign, according to FEC filings.

Reached for comment on Friday night, Giuliani scoffed at the suggestion that he had broken the law.

"Bulls--t," Giuliani texted. "They don’t know what they are talking about. What crimes."

Giuliani followed up with a phone call in which he used colorful language to defend his actions and attack his former colleagues.

He said he could not have committed bribery because he didn’t offer the Ukrainians anything of value. "Are these guys lawyers or are they morons?" Giuliani said.

Giuliani also pushed back against the claims that he tried to pressure the Ukrainians or influence the upcoming presidential election.

"I did not threaten them. I didn’t tell them what to do," Giuliani told NBC News. "I recommended that it would be a good thing to complete the investigations."

He added: "I wasn’t going there to affect the 2020 elections. I was going there to clear my client. It’s totally absurd."

Giuliani does have his defenders from his time working for the Justice Department, including Joseph diGenova, a prominent Fox News contributor.

Daniel Richman, who worked under Giuliani in the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Manhattan in the late 1980s, said he needed to see more evidence before making a conclusive determination. But he agreed that an effort to assist in a plot to withhold funds from a foreign power in exchange for a personal or political favor could expose Giuliani to criminal charges.

"An effort to use congressionally allocated funds as a club to extract a personal benefit could easily fit within some combination of fraud, extortion, and perhaps bribery statutes," said Richman, now a professor at Columbia Law School.

Other former prosecutors who worked with Giuliani raised the issue of him seemingly conducting American foreign policy in apparent violation of the Logan Act, which bars private citizens from negotiating with a foreign government on behalf of the U.S.

But no one has been convicted under the law, which dates back to 1799, and a potential case would likely be complicated by the fact that Giuliani was authorized by the president, the ex-prosecutors said.

"I’m of the view that this is probably less criminal than it is outrageous," said a former prosecutor who requested anonymity because he didn’t want to be seen as publicly criticizing his one-time colleague.

Former federal prosecutor John Flannery, who worked with Giuliani in the mid-1970s, said he was taken aback by what he described as Giuliani’s flagrant abuse of the law.

"He’s put himself in a position of aiding and abetting, and perhaps initiating, an exchange of favors with a foreign government for an American political campaign at the behest of the candidate himself," Flannery said. "Neither of them deny it, and in fact they’re profusely, repeatedly, painfully, admitting to it."

Flannery said the Giuliani of today is nothing like the man he worked with some 40 years ago. "He’s a shadow of the best Rudy he was, and he's not the great lawyer I thought he’d be," said Flannery.

While many of the former prosecutors interviewed by NBC News expressed skepticism that the Justice Department would ever charge Giuliani, Flannery said he wasn’t so sure.

"Right now, it seems like we’re looking at a system where crimes we believed to have happened will not be prosecuted." Flannery said. "But history teaches us that can turn around as quickly as the impeachment inquiry did this week."

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/jus...rimes-n1059861

^
where's trump's former personal lawyer?

he's in jail.....for lying to protect trump.

rudy's a scumbag opportunist, but he's not stupid.....he knows what's coming for him. that's why he's been melting down on fox the last few days showing texts from volker.

This is interesting.

As an envoy, Volker was tasked with overseeing critical US support to Ukraine as it faces a separatist insurgency backed by Russia.

https://news.yahoo.com/us-envoy-ukra...c_src=yahooapp

Washington (AFP) - US special representative on Ukraine Kurt Volker resigned Friday after Congress ordered him to answer questions in an impeachment investigation on President Donald Trump, a source said.

A person familiar with the matter who requested anonymity confirmed Volker's resignation, which was first reported by the student newspaper at Arizona State University, where he directs an institute.

A whistleblower complaint released on Thursday said Volker met senior Ukrainian officials on how to "navigate" Trump's demands of President Volodymyr Zelensky.

The complaint accused Trump of pressuring Zelensky in a July 25 phone call to supply dirt on former US vice president Joe Biden, the favorite to represent Democrats against Trump in the 2020 presidential election.

Committees in the Democratic-led House of Representatives ordered Volker to appear next Thursday to answer questions.

In a letter released Friday, the lawmakers pointed to a tweet by Rudy Giuliani, Trump's personal lawyer, in which he showed a screenshot of a conversation in which Volker spoke of connecting him with a top adviser to Zelensky.

"The failure of any of these Department employees to appear for their scheduled depositions shall constitute evidence of obstruction of the House's impeachment inquiry," said the letter to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

Volker is a veteran diplomat involved in Europe who was appointed US ambassador to NATO under former president George W. Bush.

He left the diplomatic service to become a consultant and in 2012 was named executive director of Arizona State University's McCain Institute, a center focused on national security named after senator John McCain.

The Trump administration in 2017 appointed Volker to take charge of US policy on Ukraine, in an unusual arrangement in which he was essentially a volunteer for the State Department while maintaining his university duties.

The State Press, the student-run publication at Arizona State University, quoted a university spokesperson as saying that Volker had quit his Ukraine position.

The Arizona Republic also quoted the university's president, Michael Crow, as confirming that Volker would stay at the institute but leave the State Department.

The State Department did not answer requests for comment.

As an envoy, Volker was tasked with overseeing critical US support to Ukraine as it faces a separatist insurgency backed by Russia.

More than 13,000 people have died since fighting broke out in 2014, when Russia also annexed the Crimean peninsula from Ukraine.

Democrats are looking into whether Trump used a delay in a $400 million aid package for Ukraine as leverage to press for action on Biden.

voker is now free to testify before house committees and give interviews to the media.....there's surely a fair amount of hand wringing going on at foggy bottom tonight.

You have to remember trumpanzees couldn't find Russia on a map, let alone Ukraine.

They won't give a fuck, even if the evidence is incontrovertible, as long as the Senate votes against impeachment "because they let Clinton off" or some such "owning libtards" bollocks.

They're as thick as shit, trumpanzees.

There'll be a body before long. Guaranteed.

Why it has taken so long?

Pelosi: Russia Had A Hand In Ukraine-Trump Controversy

<strong>

Intel Community Secretly Gutted Requirement Of First-Hand Whistleblower Knowledge

Federal records show that the intelligence community secretly revised the formal whistleblower complaint form in August 2019 to eliminate the requirement of direct, first-hand knowledge of wrongdoing.
SEPTEMBER 27, 2019

Between May 2018 and August 2019, the intelligence community secretly eliminated a requirement that whistleblowers provide direct, first-hand knowledge of alleged wrongdoings. This raises questions about the intelligence community’s behavior regarding the August submission of a whistleblower complaint against President Donald Trump. The new complaint document no longer requires potential whistleblowers who wish to have their concerns expedited to Congress to have direct, first-hand knowledge of the alleged wrongdoing that they are reporting.

The brand new version of the whistleblower complaint form, which was not made public until after the transcript of Trump’s July 25 phone call with the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky and the complaint addressed to Congress were made public, eliminates the first-hand knowledge requirement and allows employees to file whistleblower complaints even if they have zero direct knowledge of underlying evidence and only “heard about [wrongdoing] from others.”

https://thefederalist.com/2019/09/27...wer-knowledge/

^

Nice biased fake news site you quoted there comrade. The federalist is pure right wing trash propaganda.

^Perhaps The Federalist quotes Fake documents? Issued by DNI?

The internal properties of the newly revised “Disclosure of Urgent Concern” form, which the intelligence community inspector general (ICIG) requires to be submitted under the Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act (ICWPA), show that the document was uploaded on September 24, 2019, at 4:25 p.m., just days before the anti-Trump complaint was declassified and released to the public. The markings on the document state that it was revised in August 2019, but no specific date of revision is disclosed.

https://www.dni.gov/files/ICIG/Docum...ure%20Form.pdf

Originally Posted by harrybarracuda

The dems always miss the boat.

This 'I need a favour though ' comment should be all over the place.

More and more intriguing.

Trump's Ukraine call sparks new questions over intelligence chief's firing
The president removed Dan Coats days after his conversation with Zelenskiy and insisted that Coats’s deputy not get the job


Three days after his now infamous phone conversation with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy, Donald Trump abruptly fired his director of national intelligence in favour of an inexperienced political loyalist.

According to a New York Times report, the White House learned within days that the unorthodox call on 25 July with Zelenskiy had raised red flags among intelligence professionals and was likely to trigger an official complaint.

That timeline has raised new questions over the timing of the Trump’s dismissal by tweet of the director of national intelligence (DNI), Dan Coats, on 28 July and his insistence that the deputy DNI, Sue Gordon, a career intelligence professional, did not step into the role, even in an acting capacity.

Instead, Trump tried to install a Republican congressman, John Ratcliffe, who had minimal national security credentials but had been a fierce defender of the president in Congress. Trump had to drop the nomination after it emerged that Ratcliffe had exaggerated his national security credentials in his biography, wrongly claiming he had conducted prosecutions in terrorist financing cases.

Despite the collapse of the Ratcliffe nomination, Gordon was forced out. She was reported to have been holding a meeting on election security on 8 August when Coats interrupted to convince her that she would have to resign.


In a terse handwritten note to the president, Gordon said: “I offer this letter as an act of respect and patriotism, not preference. You should have your team.”

The Office of the DNI (ODNI) and its inspector general has the authority to receive whistleblower complaints from across all US intelligence agencies and determine whether they should be referred to Congress.
We all knew Coats’ departure was coming because he had clashed with the president on several issues. What was weird was the president’s forcefulness in not wanting Sue Gordon to take over as acting director,” said Katrina Mulligan, a former official who worked in the ODNI, the national security council, and the justice department.

“I was hearing at the time that Sue was getting actively excluded from things by the president that she would ordinarily have taken part in, and she was being made to feel uncomfortable,” said Mulligan, now managing director for national security and international policy at the Center for American Progress.


“And then the president tried to install someone who was clearly unqualified,” she added. “Now the timeline of the whistleblower in the White House raises a lot of questions about the Sue Gordon piece of this.”

John McLaughlin, the former acting CIA director, said the fact that Ratcliffe’s nomination was dropped and the job of acting DNI ultimately went to an intelligence professional, Robert Maguire, was a sign that the intelligence community was so far resisting political pressure from the White House.

Maguire faced tough questioning in Congress this week about his initial refusal, on justice department guidance, to refer the whistleblower complaint to Congress.

“On politicisation, my sense is that the community is holding the line against it although undoubtedly dealing with more or less constant pressure,” McLaughlin said. “I felt kind of bad for the acting DNI, an honourable man with impeccable service to the nation. I believe he made some honest errors in judgment rather than yielding to political pressure. Throwing him into this job in these circumstances on such short notice is a little like assigning me on a navy Seal mission.”

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/...firing-ukraine

It's obvious he knew what he'd done and was trying to cover his ass.

Originally Posted by Humbert

He will be impeached but not removed from office. It will be a humiliating stain on his so-called presidency though and he can't bear the thought of such an historic rebuke.



All this nonsense about firing up his base. They are already fired up and he will play the same dirty game impeachment or not.

Not it talking about his base,it’s about conservative folks who are pretty much tired of the constant attempt of removal of a duly elected president.

Originally Posted by RPETER65

Not it talking about his base,it’s about conservative folks who are pretty much tired of the constant attempt of removal of a duly elected president.

Wasn't Nixon a duly elected president?

Originally Posted by RPETER65

Not it talking about his base,it’s about conservative folks who are pretty much tired of the constant attempt of removal of a duly elected president.

Is that like Christian folks who don’t care that he’s a liar, womanizer, and makes greed and avarice a virtue cos he’s white?

Originally Posted by Cujo

It's obvious he knew what he'd done and was trying to cover his ass.

what is more worrying though is why the NSA/CIA spying on the POTUS on a continuous basis, without control or supervision by the people or an institution like Congress,

while doing their own blackmail games and leaking info to fit their internal agenda

a dangerous organization, the US is a true dictatorship Soviet Union style,