Rudy Giuliani blasts 'bitter' Romney over response to Trump-Ukraine case

Want A Be Republican. (Fake)

Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani slammed Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, for what he called a weak response to the Ukraine phone call whistleblower's complaint against President Trump.
Giuliani said Thursday on "The Ingraham Angle" that Romney -- the 2012 Republican presidential nominee -- is still upset he lost his election, while Trump won his own White House bid -- as he rejected the former Massachusetts' governor's reaction to the Ukraine news.
On Sunday, Romney tweeted, "If the President asked or pressured Ukraine’s president to investigate his political rival, either directly or through his personal attorney, it would be troubling in the extreme. Critical for the facts to come out."
Giuliani dismissed Romney's concern.
"I don't know, maybe he is as confused about this as he was when [CNN debate moderator] Candy Crowley contradicted him and his campaign fell apart," Giuliani said.
At a 2012 debate with then-President Barack Obama in Hempstead, N.Y., Romney questioned whether Obama had called the Benghazi attack an "act of terror" rather than "spontaneous" violence that grew out of a protest against an anti-Islam video. Crowley then intervened: "He did in fact, sir ... call it an act of terror."
However, after the debate, Crowley conceded that Mitt Romney was "right" on the broader point -- that the administration for days insisted it was a spontaneous act.
"He was right in the main. I just think he picked the wrong word," she said at the time.
On "The Ingraham Angle," Giuliani continued in his reaction to Romney's tweet.

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"I wouldn't count on him. And he's bitter about Donald Trump."
"Look, Mitt, Trump did what you couldn't do. Trump has an ability to relate to people -- you don't," he said.

Ukrainian official appears to cast doubt on quid pro quo claim

An unnamed Ukrainian official said that Kiev was not made aware that the U.S. suspended security funds until a month after President Trump's call with his counterpart, Volodymyr Zelensky, which calls into question the whistleblower's account and Democrats' arguments that there was a quid pro quo for the aid.
READ THE COMPLAINT
The official told the New York Times that Zelensky's government was unaware about the aid issue up until a month after Trump's July 25 phone call where he discussed Joe Biden and his son Hunter.
The whistleblower complaint—citing U.S. officials—claimed that officials in Kiev were aware that the military aid could be in jeopardy in early August, but the whistleblower admitted to not knowing "how or when they learned of it."
Republicans may seize on the apparent timeline inconsistencies and claim that if a quid pro quo was in place for the roughly $391 million in frozen aid, Ukrainian officials would know about it.
Zelensky said earlier this week that he never felt pressured by Trump to investigate the Bidens. Trump insisted that he wanted to make sure the country was weeding out corruption before providing the funds.
Democrats insist that Trump was wrong to bring up a political opponent to a foreign leader, and even if he didn't explicitly make a demand, the innuendo was there. Democrats also took issue with the complaint's claim that Trump employed his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani in the matter.
The whistleblower's complaint named Giuliani and claimed diplomats were upset about by his role in pushing Kiev to open an investigation into the Bidens.
According to the whistleblower complaint, by mid-May, U.S. diplomat Kurt Volker sought to "contain the damage" from Giuliani's outreach to Ukraine.
But a July 19 text message conversation from Volker to Giuliani, provided to Fox News on Thursday, showed that Volker had in fact encouraged Giuliani to reach out to Ukraine -- even sending Giuliani a message reading, "connecting you here with Andrey Yermak, who is very close to President Zelensky."
Joseph Maguire, acting director of national intelligence, said Thursday that, "My only knowledge of what Mr. Giuliani does—I have to be honest with you—I get from the TV or the news media. I’m not aware of what he does for the president."
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi,  D-Calif., has started an official inquiry into whether the House should pursue impeachment proceedings, but Democrats have refused to hold a roll call vote to authorize the effort.
"Impeaching a President means nullifying the results of a presidential election, which is the core act of American democratic legitimacy," The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page wrote on Friday. "If Democrats are going to do this, they have an obligation to stand up and be counted in a way that the public can examine."
Trump noted that the whistleblower had no first-hand knowledge of alleged abuse.
“Who’s the person that gave the whistleblower the information? Because that’s close to a spy,” Trump said. “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.”
The Los Angeles Times obtained and released a recording of the president’s comments.
The Trump administration reportedly began placing transcripts of Trump's calls with several foreign leaders in a highly classified repository after leakers publicly divulged the contents of Trump's private calls with the leaders of Mexico and Australia in 2017.
The complaint stated that Trump made a “specific request that the Ukrainian leader locate and turn over servers used by the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and examined by the U.S. cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike" -- a request that does not appear in the declassified transcript of the call released by the Trump administration on Tuesday. Trump mentioned CrowdStrike, but did not demand the server.
Additionally, the complaint said Trump "suggested that Mr. Zelensky might want to keep" his current prosecutor general, a claim not supported by the transcript.
CBS News reported late Thursday that the whistleblower complaint further inaccurately claimed that a State Department official was on the call with Zelensky.
The memo was not a "verbatim transcript" but was based on "notes and recollections" of those memorializing the call.
Stephanie Grisham, the White House press secretary, said, “Nothing has changed with the release of this complaint.” The president “has nothing to hide."
The Associated Press contributed to this report

Analysis: After UN visit, Iran faces diminishing choices

UNITED NATIONS (AP) — Iran has long prided itself on its forceful defiance of the United States and Israel, a resistance that has defined the Shiite-led Islamic Republic for the 40 years since its revolution.

But the limits of Iran’s ability to go it alone were on display at the United Nations this week as it engaged in a flurry of diplomatic outreach amid increasingly crippling isolation by U.S. sanctions that are eating into its economy and its ability to sell its oil.

For months, the European nations that signed Iran’s nuclear accord have been trying — unsuccessfully — to find ways around U.S. sanctions that were imposed after President Donald Trump pulled the U.S. out of the agreement last year. Trump argues the deal, completed under the Obama administration, fell far short of the curbs needed to block Tehran’s regional ambitions.

Addressing world leaders Wednesday, Rouhani’s message pointed a clear way toward easing tensions and resuming negotiations: “Stop the sanctions.”

But before getting to that, he opened his speech by paying homage “to all the freedom-seekers of the world who do not bow to oppression and aggression.” He also slammed “U.S.- and Zionist-imposed plans” against the Palestinians. Such language characterizes Iran’s self-styled championing of Islamic causes worldwide.

Away from the podium this week, Iran has been engaging in nothing short of a public relations blitz with America’s biggest news outlets. Rouhani met with leaders of media organizations including The Associated Press and granted an interview to Fox News, where Trump and his Iran policies enjoy vehement support.

The Tehran government’s fraught history with the U.S. has essentially locked it out of the global financial system, making it difficult to find partners, allies and countries willing or even able to do business with it.

Rouhani accused the U.S. of engaging in “merciless economic terrorism” against his country, saying America had resorted to “international piracy by misusing the international banking system” to pressure Iran.

As Iran’s nuclear deal with world powers unravels under the weight of Trump’s “maximum pressure” campaign, previously unimaginable alliances are emerging between Gulf Arab states and Israel, united by what they see as a common threat.

Across the Middle East, Iran’s reach is consequential in Syria, Iraq and Yemen, where proxy wars have taken on a sectarian tone that pits Iran-supported Shiites against Saudi-backed Sunnis.

On the battlefields, Tehran’s rivals see it as a menacing and destabilizing force that has exploited failed uprisings, military interventions and chaos to expand its foothold in Arab states.

Iran counters that it was the U.S. that invaded Iraq and Saudi Arabia that invaded Yemen. In his U.N. speech, Rouhani pointed to Iran’s role in fighting Sunni Muslim extremist groups like the Islamic State and al-Qaida. He described Iran as a “pioneer of freedom-seeking movements in the region.”

Iran’s elite paramilitary force has led that charge, cementing Tehran’s footprint far beyond the country’s borders.

The Revolutionary Guard Corps, created after Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution in parallel to the country’s armed forces, is effectively a corps of soldiers charged with preserving and advancing the principles of the uprising that created modern Iran.

It answers only to the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and its power is not just theoretical but very real: The force directly oversees the country’s ballistic missile program.

It is the Guard Corps that has become a major sticking point in Iran’s relations, or lack thereof, with the United States under Donald Trump.

The Trump administration, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Israel say Iran used money from sanctions relief under the nuclear accord to increase the Revolutionary Guard’s budget.

Those nations say any new negotiations must include discussion about the Guard’s activities in the region and its missile program, and support for that notion seems to be gaining traction.

This week, Britain, France and Germany joined the U.S. and other allies in blaming Iran for an attack on Saudi oil sites earlier this month. The implication: That because missiles were involved in those attacks, so was the Guard.

Speaking at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York this week, a top Saudi diplomat described Iran as being “obsessed with trying to restore the Persian Empire and trying to take over the region.”

“Their constitution calls for the export of the revolution,” Adel al-Jubeir said. “They believe that every Shiite belongs to them. They don’t respect the sovereignty of nations.”

“Iran,” he said, “has to decide: Are you a revolution or are you a nation-state?”

As Rouhani departs a city that is effectively enemy territory and goes back home this week, he and Tehran’s clerical leadership must decide which of those paths to take: Will they merely confront, as the 1979 revolution did? Or, as nation-states do, will they sit down and talk as well?

___

Aya Batrawy covers the Persian Gulf for The Associated Press and has reported from the Middle East for the past 15 years.

Speaker Pelosi pushed against impeachment during Clinton presidency

A resurfaced video of Nancy Pelosi from the 90s shows her taking a very different stance on impeachment when its her own party at stake. The video went viral on social media following her announcement Tuesday, and shows the speaker passionately defending then-President Bill Clinton during his impeachment process.
Pelosi called the inquiry against Clinton a “politically motivated hack-job.” Critics argue this is hypocritical, citing the current impeachment push against President Trump. She accused then-House Republicans of being “paralyzed with hatred” of the president.

If you replace “Republicans” with “Democrats” and “Clinton” with “Trump”

Nancy Pelosi would sound a lot like Republicans do today
She could be a voice of reason if she weren’t blinded by hatred for @realDonaldTrump
Shameful! pic.twitter.com/nDrj9JGzbY
— Charlie Kirk (@charliekirk11) September 25, 2019

Republicans say Pelosi’s flip-flop shows the partisanship of the current impeachment process.

Nancy Pelosi should be embarrassed. The transcript debunks the Democrats’ false claims against President @realDonaldTrump and demonstrates that their call to impeach him is a total farce.

— Senator Thom Tillis (@SenThomTillis) September 25, 2019

Planned Parenthood Advised Hollywood Production Workers

The Director of Arts and Entertainment Engagement at Planned Parenthood told the Washington Post in an article published Monday that she regularly talks with many in Hollywood to steer the dialogue on topics such as abortion. In the article, Planned Parenthood’s Caren Spruch said she’s influenced more than 150 films since 2014 and is constantly contacted for advice on services that the non-profit provides.
Spruch claimed she pushes screenwriters to discuss abortion or encourages story lines on birth control and sexually transmitted infections. The abortion rights activist has her hand in shows like “Shrill” and “Jane the Virgin.” She has had so much of an influence that it has earned her the nickname “Planned Parenthood’s Woman in Hollywood.”
The nation’s largest abortion clinic might see Spruch’s role as relief from the series of shake-ups in the organization’s leadership over the past few months. Dr. Leana Wen served as Planned Parenthood’s president for less than a year before being ousted in July, in part, for refusing to push the organization’s laser-focus on abortion.

FILE – In this June 4, 2019, file photo, a Planned Parenthood clinic is photographed in St. Louis. (AP Photo/Jeff Roberson, File)

The clinic’s former president described her termination as “abrupt” on Tuesday at John Hopkins’ Bloomberg School of Public Health.

“I wish I could tell a different story about how that experience went. I mean, I was at Planned Parenthood for less than one year. I would just say that I learned a lot in that time.”

— Dr. Leana Wen, former Planned Parenthood president

The doctor also mentioned in articles that Planned Parenthood wanted her to reduce her definition of women’s health care to only include abortion rights, which Wen took issue with.
The president’s firing and the organization’s role in Hollywood suggests how determined the abortion clinic is to push its pro-abortion message. However, the company still needs to first resolve its dispute with Wen after the doctor recently accused the pro-abortion clinic of withholding health care and pay benefits that were promised in her contract.

Whistleblower complaint has been declassified and contains no 'surprises,' GOP lawmaker says

Utah Republican Rep. Chris Stewart announced on Fox News' "The Ingraham Angle" and on social media late Wednesday that the explosive whistleblower complaint concerning President Trump's July call with Ukraine's leader has been declassified -- and Stewart said that it doesn't contain any damning information.
"I encourage you all to read it," Stewart tweeted. The complaint was not immediately available to the public, but was expected to be released Thursday morning.
"It's been declassified and it's been released," Stewart separately told anchor Laura Ingraham. "So it should be available for everyone to go and look at."
Stewart added that he has personally viewed the complaint, and was initially "anxious" before he took a look -- but now is "much more confident than I was this morning that this is going to go nowhere. ... there are just no surprises there."
He continued, "The entirety of it is focused on this one thing, and that's the transcript of one phone call, the transcript that was released this morning."
The major development came hours before Acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire was set to testify before Congress on Thursday. Fox News is told there was serious conversation among lawmakers as to how far Maguire could go in an open session at the hearing. One source tells Fox News the administration may have declassified the document so it could be discussed publicly during the hearing.
On Wednesday, Maguire flatly contradicted a report in The Washington Post, and asserted that he never considered resigning over the whistleblower matter or for any other reason.
A bipartisan select group of intelligence committee lawmakers in the House and Senate, who have been demanding details of the whistleblower's complaint, were granted access to the document in a secure and classified setting earlier Wednesday ahead of Maguire's testimony.
Earlier in the day, the White House released a declassified transcript of Trump's July call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, showing Trump sought a review of former Vice President Joe Biden's efforts to have Ukraine's former top prosecutor fired.
Joe Biden has acknowledged on camera that, when he was vice president, he successfully pressured Ukraine to fire that prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, who was investigating the natural gas firm Burisma Holdings — where Hunter Biden had a highly lucrative role on the board paying him tens of thousands of dollars per month, despite limited relevant expertise. Shokin himself had been widely accused of corruption, while critics charged that Hunter Biden might have been essentially selling access to his father, who had pushed Ukraine to increase its natural gas production.
Trump made the request on the call for Ukraine to look into the Bidens after Zelensky first mentioned Ukraine's corruption issues, and after Trump separately requested as a "favor" that Ukraine help investigate foreign interference in the 2016 elections, including the hack of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) server involving the data security company CrowdStrike.
Multiple news outlets -- including The New York Times, CNN, MSNBC, and The Washington Post -- inaccurately reported that the "favor" related specifically to investigating Biden.
READ THE FULL TRANSCRIPT OF THE TRUMP PHONE CALL
"I guarantee as the President of Ukraine that all the investigations will be done openly and candidly," Zelensky said in the transcript. That prompted Trump to remark, "Good, because I heard you had a prosecutor who was very good. ... he was shut down and that's really unfair. ... The other thing, there's a lot of talk about Biden's son, that Biden stopped the prosecution and a lot of people want to find out about that so whatever you can do with the Attorney General would be great. Biden went around bragging that he stopped the prosecution so if you ·can look into it ... It sounds horrible to me."
The transcript did not demonstrate that Trump leveraged military aid to Ukraine to obtain a "promise" on a Biden investigation, as a widely cited report in The Washington Post had claimed.
Meanwhile, lawyers for the whistleblower – a member of the intelligence community – confirmed to Fox News on Wednesday that the whistleblower wanted to testify before Congress and was waiting on possible guidance from Maguire.
The lawyers also confirmed to Fox News they had worked with a nonprofit to establish a GoFundMe page seeking to raise an initial $100,000 for the whistleblower's legal defense.
The whirlwind turn of events came as President Trump has continued his efforts to turn the tables on Democrats.
At a press conference in New York on Wednesday, Trump specifically called attention to a little-discussed CNN report from May, which described how Democratic Sens. Robert Menendez, Dick Durbin, and Patrick Leahy pushed Ukraine’s top prosecutor not to close four investigations perceived as critical to then-Special Counsel Robert Mueller's Russia probe -- and, by Democrats' current logic, seemingly implied that their support for U.S. aid to Ukraine was at stake.
"The Democrats have done what they're accusing me of doing," Trump said.
The Democratic senators wrote in a letter to Ukraine's leader at the time: "In four short years, Ukraine has made significant progress in building [democratic] institutions despite ongoing military, economic, and political pressure from Moscow. We have supported [the] capacity-building process and are disappointed that some in Kyiv appear to have cast aside these [democratic] principles to avoid the ire of President Trump."
The senators called for the top prosecutor to “reverse course and halt any efforts to impede cooperation with this important investigation.”
The Post's Marc Thiessen initially flagged the letter on Tuesday, calling it evidence of a "double standard" among Democrats.
"Senator Chris Murphy literally threatened the president of Ukraine that if he doesn't do things right, they won't have Democrat support in Congress," Trump added.
That was a reference to the Connecticut Democrat's comments at a bipartisan meeting in Kiev earlier this month when Murphy called U.S. aid the “most important asset” of Ukraine -- then issued a warning.
"I told Zelensky that he should not insert himself or his government into American politics," Murphy said, according to The Hill. "I cautioned him that complying with the demands of the President's campaign representatives to investigate a political rival of the President would gravely damage the U.S.-Ukraine relationship. There are few things that Republicans and Democrats agree on in Washington these days, and support for Ukraine is one of them."
Responding to Trump's statements, Murphy said that "in the meeting Republican Senator Ron Johnson and I had with President Zelensky three weeks ago, I made it clear to him that Ukraine should not become involved in the 2020 election and that his government should communicate with the State Department, not the president's campaign. I still believe this to be true."
Trump's comments came shortly after he wrapped up a joint media appearance with Zelensky -- who flatly told reporters that he did not feel "pushed" to investigate Joe Biden.
“We had a great phone call,” Zelensky said earlier, as he sat across from Trump. “It was normal.”
In colorful language, Trump told reporters that the evidence clearly showed Democrats were disingenuously attacking him for political gain.
"We have the greatest economy we've ever had," the president said. "When you see little [House Intelligence Committee Chair] Adam Schiff go out and lie and lie and stand at the mic, smart guy by the way. ... Then he goes into a room with [House Judiciary Committee Chair Jerry] Nadler, and they must laugh their asses off."
Not all Democrats in the House have been on board with the impeachment inquiry announced Tuesday by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif. 2020 presidential candidate Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, D-Hawaii, said Wednesday that the Ukraine transcript did not present a "compelling" reason to impeach the president.
Taking the fight to the Democrats over the scores of Democrats who do support an impeachment inquiry could pay dividends for Republicans ahead of next year's elections. The National Republican Congressional Committee indicated Wednesday that its fundraising was up 608 percent after Democrats' impeachment push.

"They must laugh their asses off."
— President Trump, referring to Democrats Jerry Nadler and Adam Schiff

And the Trump reelection campaign and GOP announced they had raised a combined $5 million in just 24 hours.
Trump on Wednesday also called for transparency "from Joe Biden and his son Hunter on the millions of dollars that have been quickly and easily taken out of Ukraine and China."
After Trump spoke, political scientist Ian Bremmer said the real scandal wasn't Biden's pressure to get rid of Ukraine's prosecutor, but Hunter Biden's lucrative business work in Ukraine.
Hunter Biden took a key position at Burisma shortly after Joe Biden visited Ukraine in 2014 and pushed officials there to greatly increase natural gas production. Hunter made tens of thousands of dollars a month but had no relevant credentials.
"Impossible to justify $50k/month for Hunter Biden serving on a Ukrainian energy board w zero expertise unless he promised to sell access," Bremmer wrote.
"That’s a problem for the Vice President, but completely unrelated to Biden urging Ukraine President to fire his Special Prosecutor," Bremmer continued. "[The prosecutor] was corrupt, refused to investigate anyone, and who Dems and GOP agreed needed to go."
Also during the day, the Justice Department – in a new letter from the Office of Legal Counsel obtained by Fox News –pushed back on the claim that the whistleblower brought out something of “urgent concern” that would have to be turned over to Congress.
The letter also said the intelligence community inspector general found “some indicia of an arguable political bias on the part of the complainant in favor of a rival political candidate,” but still said the allegations “appeared credible.” Fox News previously reported that, according to a source, the individual also did not have “firsthand knowledge” of the phone call.
Sources, meanwhile, said the original allegations spoke to a possible campaign finance violation, but the DOJ concluded that Trump’s request for an investigation did not qualify as a “thing of value” for his campaign – and therefore did not constitute a criminal violation.
Fox News’ Chad Pergram, Alex Pappas, Ed Henry, Jake Gibson, Catherine Herridge, Kevin Corke and Brooke Singman contributed to this report.

Pelosi Cartoons

Workers, car owners, dealers and GM feel pinch from strike

DETROIT (AP) — As the United Auto Workers’ strike against General Motors stretches into a second week, it’s not just the company and striking workers getting pinched.

With many replacement part warehouses shut down, dealers are beginning to run short of components to repair cars, trucks and SUVs. And companies that make auto parts are also starting to see work slow down. Dealer inventory of new vehicles is holding up but starting to get depleted on a few models.

Meanwhile, GM is losing millions of dollars and has been forced to close one Canadian factory and send workers home at another. The 49,000 striking workers are going to have to get by on $250 per week in strike pay.

This doesn’t even include the restaurants and other businesses around the more than 30 U.S. factories that have been closed due to the strike. And the longer the strike lasts, the worse it will get for everyone.

Here’s a look at the ripple effects of the strike as bargaining continues:

AUTO PARTS: The biggest impact so far seems to be the lack of availability of some replacement parts for GM vehicles. The strike has shut down a parts depot in Charlotte, North Carolina, where the Southeast region normally gets its replacements, said Ed Williamson, who owns several GM dealers in the Miami area.

Parts suppliers, especially smaller ones where GM is the main customer, are also starting to get hit, says Morningstar analyst David Whiston. Even bigger ones like Magna International, a Canadian company that makes components for many GM models, is reporting temporary layoffs at some of its U.S. and Canadian operations.

GM spokesman Jim Cain acknowledged there are some parts shortages, but says it is still shipping parts from depots staffed by management, dealers that stockpile parts for sale to other dealers, and outside companies that make parts for GM vehicles.

“Obviously it’s a difficult situation, and we are working to find other sources of parts around the country,” he said.

DEALER INVENTORY: GM had a hefty 77-day supply of vehicles at the end of August, but big SUVs were only at about 55 days, lower than the industry average of 61. With no shipments since Sept. 16, supplies are starting to drop.

Michelle Krebs, executive analyst for Autotrader, said dealers have told her that they’ll have ample supply for another week or so. Sales in September thus far have been slowing from August levels, so supplies aren’t being depleted that quickly, she said.

Williamson said he’s still got plenty of vehicles, including 80 to 90 days worth of big SUVs such as the Cadillac Escalade and GMC Yukon. But he’s running short of the Cadillac XT5 midsize SUV.

GM IN CANADA AND MEXICO: Citi analyst Itay Michalei estimates GM is losing $100 million in profits per day. The strike has already caused GM to lay off 1,850 workers and shut down its assembly plant in Oshawa, Ontario, near Toronto. Another 730 were laid off from an engine plant in St. Catherine’s, Ontario, according Unifor, the Canadian auto workers union.

Thus far, GM says no Mexican plants have been shut down, nor has a factory in Ontario that builds the Chevrolet Equinox compact SUV.

UAW WORKERS: Striking workers received their last GM paycheck this past Friday and now will have to rely on $250 per week in union strike pay that starts this Friday. When they’re on the job, most workers get about $30 per hour in wages, or roughly $1,200 per week. Whiston estimates that the work stoppage will cost the UAW’s roughly $750 million strike fund about $31.5 million per week in strike pay and health care costs.

Media’s Ukraine reporting pressures Pelosi into finally backing impeachment

With Nancy Pelosi finally bowing to Democratic pressure and launching a formal impeachment inquiry, many in the media may be getting their wish.
After all, many pundits, especially on the left, longed for the same outcome during the Russia investigation, only to be bitterly disappointed.
But the Ukraine uproar has a far simpler story line than the complicated Russia probe. And it proved a tipping point for the House speaker, who has long believed that impeachment could boomerang on the Democrats without ultimately ousting Trump, who she sees as highly vulnerable in 2020. But with 175 of her members, including some moderates, hopping on the impeachment bandwagon, Pelosi could no longer stem the tide.
In a flag-bedecked speech, Pelosi said Trump’s actions on Ukraine “have seriously violated the Constitution,” that he “must be held accountable,” and announcing an “official” investigation by a half-dozen committees.
As strange as it sounds, Pelosi’s reluctant move could in some ways help Trump, because it shifts the terms of debate.
Trump’s preferred mode of defense is to go on offense—whether it’s against Crooked Hillary, Mueller’s angry Democrats or Sleepy Joe’s alleged transgressions. It’s all about demonizing the other side, just as the left does to Trump.
Especially after his planned release today of a transcript of his July call with Ukraine’s leader, the president and his allies can argue that even if he went too far in bringing up Joe Biden with a foreign leader, it does not warrant the drastic remedy of impeachment.
He’s already called it “witch hunt garbage,” and will undoubtedly cast it as one perpetrated by his enemies in the opposition party, the press and the Deep State. He can energize his supporters, who will see their hero in danger of being forced from office. And the resulting fireworks will not only obliterate any semblance of a Democratic agenda, it will overshadow what Biden, Bernie, Elizabeth and the rest are doing on the trail.
Trump asked, not unreasonably, how Pelosi could take this step without even having seen the details of the phone call.
Outside the hothouse of the media and political world, I don’t sense that Ukraine has quite reached the level of a political earthquake. And that, for the moment, has the president’s critics baffled.
I believe the media coverage is a key factor, as I’ll explain in a moment.
But first, there’s no doubt that the Washington Post moved the ball with a report that Trump told his acting chief of staff “to hold back almost $400 million in military aid for Ukraine at least a week before a phone call in which Trump is said to have pressured the Ukrainian president to investigate the son of former vice president Joe Biden, according to three senior administration officials.”
The piece says that OMB officials relayed Trump’s order to State and the Pentagon, and were ordered to give members of Congress no explanation beyond that the delay was part of an “interagency process.”
The story also quoted Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy as saying that Ukrainian President Zelensky told him during a visit this month that the aid was cut off as a “consequence” of his unwillingness to launch a probe of the Bidens. (The money has since been released.)
The president did not deny the story but shifted his explanation, saying he held up the money because he wanted Europe to pay more for Ukraine’s defense. He also scoffed at the notion of impeachment before his speech at the U.N., telling reporters: “What Joe Biden did for his son, that’s something they should be looking at.”
The New York Times’ Peter Baker reported yesterday morning that Trump now seems to be saying, as the headline puts it, “So What If I Did?”
The piece calls this “an astonishing breach of the norms governing the American presidency…If anything, the president has grown even more defiant since Mr. Mueller found insufficient evidence to establish a criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia, almost as if having avoided charges, he is daring the establishment to come after him again. The man who once said he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan without consequence seems to be testing whether he can do the political equivalent.”
With more House Democrats coming out for impeachment—more than two-thirds of Nancy Pelosi’s caucus is now in that camp—the question of whether Ukraine is a dramatic tipping point looms large.
My sense is that there’s a fatigue factor for Trump scandals. And besides the president and Rudy Giuliani trying to shift the spotlight to the Bidens, as I wrote yesterday, the media coverage of the last few years is coloring the current climate.
Take the Bob Mueller probe. While I’ve always argued the Russia investigation was a legitimately big story that led to several high-level indictments, can anyone really dispute that the coverage was so histrionic as to be misleading? The constant drumbeat was so relentless and so negative that it seemed only a matter of time before Trump was run out of town. Every minor development was cranked up to 11.
And while the final report contained disturbing material, it also found no evidence that Trump actively cooperated with Russian operatives or hackers, and Mueller’s halting testimony was the final nail in the coffin.
When the media fixated for more than a week on Sharpie-gate—and yes, Trump fueled the coverage with daily blasts about his handling of the hurricane—it was another case of runaway hype.
The same was true in episode after episode: Porn stars! Michael Cohen! S-hole countries! Omarosa! Tax returns! Greenland! Go back where they came from! Rat-infested Baltimore!
Most of these controversies were very real, sometimes troubling, and yet trumpeted with a this-time-he’s-gone-too-far tone until each story faded. Trump’s constant pushback against the “fake news media,” and his attacks on Democrats and “witch hunt” investigators, added to the feeling that these were nothing more than partisan brawls.
In other words, journalists are suffering from boy-who-cried-wolf syndrome. Now that they have extremely serious allegations to pursue, the ensuing uproar sounds too much like so many other scandals and mini-scandals that, fairly or unfairly, didn’t move the needle.
There’s also an emerging theory, argued for some time by the Federalist’s Ben Domenech, that Trump wants to be impeached.
Ross Douthat, the conservative, anti-Trump New York Times columnist, expanded on this view yesterday:
“If the Democrats impeach him they will be doing something unpopular instead of something popular… the likely Democratic nominees are all more popular than Trump, and so anything that puts the Democrats on the wrong side of public opinion may look better, through Trump’s eyes, than the status quo…
“Trump is happy to pit his overt abuses of power against the soft corruption of his foes. This is an aspect of Trumpism that the president’s critics find particularly infuriating — the way he attacks his rivals for being corrupt swamp creatures while being so much more nakedly compromised himself.”
Whether or not you agree that he did something wrong, he excels at these dual-corruption debates, that it’s the other side that should face prison terms.
No president, not even Donald Trump, wants to be impeached. But if past journalistic excesses help convince the public that the Ukraine story is just more exaggeration, and if the press is viewed as a pro-impeachment movement, Trump will paint the media as helping the Democrats try to end his term.

Chief Justice Roberts says Supreme Court nonpartisan

Really??

U.S. Chief Justice John Roberts on Tuesday said that justices on the Supreme Court are not swayed by politics despite the current fraught political climate.
“When you live in a polarized political environment, people tend to see everything in those terms,” he told the audience at New York synagogue Temple Emanu-El Streicker, according to Reuters. “That’s not how we at the court function and the results in our cases do not suggest otherwise.”
The courts have been criticized by President Trump for rulings against some of his policies and Democrats have complained the Supreme Court is becoming too conservative.
“The Supreme Court is not well. And the people know it,” a brief written last August by a handful of Democratic senators said regarding a firearms case. Roberts rebuked Trump last November when he complained about a ruling from an “Obama judge," according to Reuters.
“A lot of criticism is based on a misperception of the court,” he said.
He pointed out that of the 19 5-4  Supreme Court decisions last term, seven were split along ideological lines, Reuters reported.
Roberts is considered to be a moderate conservative who was appointed by George W. Bush in 2005.