He's survived this long with all of his shenanigans. I'll believe he's out when he's actually out. Then, I don't think he goes peacefully.

Another thing, by naming Barr in the Ukraine phone call it pulls him into this investigation and he should be forced to recuse himself.

Shoutout to the PredictIt bettors who were involved in the "Will Trump win the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize" market yesterday. (He went from 3% to 2%)

PredictIt

LOL. Trump just stated that unfortunately, Pelosi is no longer Speaker of House.

Oh nothing, just the president of the United States announcing that Nancy Pelosi is no longer Speaker of the House. pic.twitter.com/WnLkdPJ1Wg

— Brian Tyler Cohen (@briantylercohen) September 25, 2019

It really wasn't Biden getting the prosecutor fired. He was just the guy the Obama administration sent. Pretty much every western country and most people in Ukraine wanted that prosecutor to be fired.

The fact Trump called Shokin good and fair is comical. I'd say sick but I honestly don't think he was smart enough to know what Shokin had done.

Reading up on this Crowdstrike server stuff and it sure seems like Trump was looking for Ukraine to give him "proof" that the DNC hack was an inside job and not the fault of the Russians.

Can the Senate Decline to Try an Impeachment Case? - Lawfare

Interesting. Senate could just decide not to hear the trial even if the House impeaches

He’s such a clown. How can anyone listen to this guy and think he’s anything but a buffoon.

Yeah, but that would be stupid b/c it lets Dems paint them as obstructing in a very-easy-for-low-information-voters-to-understand way.

Much easier to put on a short trial designed to let the President put on his defense and the acquit him on a party-line vote.

Was this word salad scheduled already as a debrief from the conference?

Trump just sold out Pence and told the world to ask the VP about his conversations with the Ukrainian President.

Do you think Pence did a spit take hearing that?

Well, if Pence gets impeached as well, and Nancy is no longer the Speaker of the House, who will be president?

Chuck Grassley according to a quick google search.

Don't get me started on my objections to the spit take. It's probably the most trivial hill I'm willing to die upon. :)

And if you work for the Trump Administration and aren't prepared for the knife in the back, then you haven't been paying attention at all.

Kiefer Sutherland

Dirk Schwenk on Twitter: "Page 3 references CROWDSTRIKE. Which means Trump, Ghouliani and Barr were ALSO obstructing the prosecution of Roger Stone. BOOOOOOOOOOM @File511 @lauferlaw… https://t.co/RpDbKIWYIb"

Whaaat.. plausible?

This gets to Ben’s theory. Maybe part of the reason the GOP is less willing to move on from Trump to Pence is that they are afraid that Trump will take Pence down out of spite if they go after him.

+1 for the TV reference :)

Trump will throw everyone under the bus, which is part of why the GOP is still so in lockstep with him.

So just thinking out loud but Romney probably really wants to be president and has a f-load of money and if Trump’s gone he can probably run the best full press move at the nomination.

So that’s 1/20 votes needed. If we give him the other two republican Mormons(Lee, crapo) we only need 17 more votes right?

Yup, and take his diehard supporters with him which then torpedoes the R's nationally for the next few cycles. And he's absolutely not above pushing the nuclear button if the party apparatus was to turn on him for whatever reason - they are in the Trump boat until he goes away at this point.

This has to reflect somewhat badly on Biden as well, right? No matter what you think his motives were, he still lobbied Ukraine to fire the prosecutor looking into his son's company. Or do we think he's more likely to get a sympathy bump in the polls from it? I guess that wouldn't be surprising seeing as this is all a gross reality show based on news headlines these days anyway.

I sure hope this helps to torpedo Biden as well, but that's not based on anything other than my own wishful thinking. Like you say, simply keeping his name in headlines could just as easily turn out to be a positive when the dust settles, in today's fickle and chaotic climate. I would have to imagine that most of the more progressive candidates & voters are looking at this as a massive double win at the moment, though.

The problem I see or think about most I guess, is, who is there among Dem's that is honestly worth electing.

Warren? She's almost as hated as Hillary and less charismatic. This country is not going to elect a woman in this climate, its simply not ready yet.

Biden? Other than being Obama's bitch, what does he really offer? I've yet to see anything worthwhile from him.

Who else? I mean, dafuq are we supposed to vote for in 2020 "Anything but a Rep?"

Honestly, if a credible and non-senile third-party candidate emerged, I'd be down.

The front-runners for the Democratic nomination are all old farts. No more 70-year-olds. Don't care what their proposals are.

But absent that? Fuck yes. Punish the absolute shit out of the Republican Party for their weaselly submission to Trumpism in the name of power.

I want 'em in the wilderness for a generation. I don't mean a political generation, I mean an actual, "children are born, grown, and having children of their own" generation. Maybe that way the Republicans who replace these fucks will have some semblance of honor and we can start having an actual choice again.

For me at this point, it is pretty much anyone but Trump.

Yes. But then there's the fact that this map happened 10 years after Nixon resigned:



I am sure that, in 1974, something like this would have seemed like three generations off.

Things are different. And, like you say, Trump may fight against the GOP in a way that Nixon never would. But the GOP might be slightly more afraid of a post-Trump era than it needs to be.

I have no faith in our government to handle this the right way. Trump needs to go and I don't think that's going to happen.

:(

Feels like the hiding documents on a top secret server to avoid embarrassment, could be the Trump version of the Nixon tapes. What other politically embarrassing stuff was hidden there?

In the declassified appendix of the doc there is other mentions of things being hidden on this top secret server.

Somebody please put Nunes out to pasture as well.

Say wha? Is this based on any favorable/unfavorable numbers?

So the Republican angle is to play this as leaking of information is the real scandal here. Not the content. Laughable

I find it laughable that this all comes back to documents on a server. BUT HER EMAILZS!!

I find it amazing (but also not) that Reps like that hack Jim Jordan keep hammering the fact that the whistleblower got the info second or third hand when we all read the notes of the call yesterday and saw what he said.

And it matches. The stupidity is just too much

At this point I honestly think a full flush would be an improvement.
Seriously Id take a complete new Executive, Legislative and Judicial Branch comprised entirely of people with zero experience over what we currently have on BOTH sides of the aisle.

Not ready to elect a woman?

Let's not forget that Hilary won the popular vote by several million.

So you'd be comfortable with all if the power and leverage being simply handed over to lobbyists? Because any sort of defense and maneuvering would be absent when there are neophytes running the country.

I get that it sounds good as a wish, but I think the practicalities of it aren't really what you're wishing for.

I wonder if a lot of the public reaction will come down to how people view the different types of "interference" that foreign countries can have on our elections.

If you ask doctors whether all of those steak dinners that they have with drop-dead gorgeous 25 year old pharmaceutical reps affects their prescribing decisions, some huge percentage of them will say it does not.

But, unless pharmaceutical companies have decided to spend lots of money on steak dinners for no reason, it seems very likely that these things DO affect doctor's prescribing decision.

Now, it isn't that the doctors are consciously lying. They are instead self-deluded. Each doctor seems himself as a brilliant man of science who would not be swayed by flattery and steak dinners. But, as human beings, most of them are. They are being subtly manipulated, and they don't even know it.

So, if there is election interference of the sort of the President hiring Russian hackers to break into voting machines and change the numbers, then I think that most people would see that as horrible election interference.

However, if (as is much more likely the case) the interference is along the lines of "discredit my opponents;" "Run social media campaigns in favor of me and against my opponents;" "Coordinate with me to create distractions that will make me look good and my opponents look bad," then we might have something like the doctor problem outlined above.

Those are all examples of illegal foreign interference in our elections. And they all do work to make the elections less free and less fair. But in order for people to understand that, they have to be willing to admit to themselves that they can be manipulated by things like social media campaigns and advertising and false news stories. And most people don't want to admit that to themselves.

"I am a smart voter. I am choosing to vote based on who is the best candidate. I am too smart to be swayed by advertising." Everyone thinks that about themselves. And everyone is wrong. We are all swayed by advertising. That's why every company/brand in the world has a marketing department.

So, if it comes out that Trump totally 100% is getting foreign countries to manipulate our elections, but that manipulation is anything short of actual hacking of voting machines, we could see a big shrug from the voters.

I think for some people they think what is the difference between this and a PAC or some other organization running negative ads or trying to support a candidate.

There is the added aspect of Trump withholding desperately needed military aid that was bipartisanly approved by Congress to an ally if the country doesn't dig up or create dirt on Trump's leading political opponent. Basically, "help me tarnish my opponent or go fuck yourself and your shithole country".

To be fair, it might not have just been about Biden, Trump may also have needed to freeze that military aid to pay back Russia for helping him win the previous election.

538 has gone from lukewarm, at best, on impeachment to this is some pretty serious shit. Very, very early polling isn't looking very good for Trump on this either. 55% are in favor of impeachment if Trump did what he is accused of and only 25% against it according to YouGov.

“I want to know who’s the person, who’s the person who gave the whistle-blower the information? Because that’s close to a spy,” he continued. “You know what we used to do in the old days when we were smart? Right? The spies and treason, we used to handle it a little differently than we do now.”

Uh...

stable genius

True.

The report shows that the concern was more aligned, not necessarily withholding military aid, which is reported, that the Ukrainian President may not have even known, but the withholding of attention, namely a visit with the White House, that he wanted to show his strength in his country and his ties to the west. That is much easier to prove as a quid pro quo than the military aid, and while it may not seem like much, when you're dealing with the type of power discrepancy between the two countries, it's substantial.

Rudy to The Atlantic magazine