Tag Archives: Rudy Giuliani

Democracy, Donald Trump, Republicans

President Donald Trump is brazenly attempting to subvert a democratic election in plain sight

The President of the United States is trying to steal the 2020 election, which he lost decisively to Joe Biden. He is doing so in plain sight, while the leaders of the Republican party either egg him on, play along with the dishonest charade, or remain mute.

President Trump has invited the leaders of Michigan’s Republican-controlled state legislature to meet him in Washington on Friday, according to a person familiar with those plans, as the president and his allies continue an extraordinary campaign to overturn the results of an election he lost.

Trump’s campaign has suffered defeats in courtrooms across the country in its efforts to allege irregularities with the ballot-counting process, and has failed to muster any evidence of the widespread fraud that the president continues to claim tainted the 2020 election.

Trump lost Michigan by a wide margin: At present, he trails President-Elect Joe Biden in the state by 157,000 votes. Earlier this week, the state’s Republican Senate majority leader said an effort to have legislators throw out election results was “not going to happen.”

But the president now appears to be using the full weight of his office to challenge the election results, as he and his allies reach out personally to state and local officials in an intensifying effort to halt the certification of the vote in key battleground states.

In an incendiary news conference in Washington, Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former New York mayor who is now serving as Trump’s lead attorney, made baseless claims that Biden had orchestrated a national conspiracy to rig the vote.

Trump’s team appear to be increasingly focused on Michigan as a place where Republican officials — on the state’s Board of Canvassers and in the legislature — might be persuaded to overturn the results. — Tom Hamburger, Kayla Ruble, David A. Fahrenthold, and Josh Dawsey (“Trump invites Michigan Republican leaders to meet him at White House as he escalates attempts to overturn election results”). [Emphasis added.]

Rick Hasen, among the foremost authorities on election law, said this: “It’s easy to joke about this, and Rudy has become the butt of…jokes. On the other hand, this is deadly serious stuff. They’re talking about trying to disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of people, and take the election away from the winner and hand it to the loser.”

There are sixty-two days until the inauguration of Joe Biden. Donald Trump — whose public schedule has been virtually empty for the past two weeks — is virtually bunkered down in the White House. His attention is not on a raging coronavirus, which is infecting, hospitalizing, and killing an unprecedented number of Americans, but on how to disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of voters — mostly Black — so he can claim a victory that is not his.

And Republican leaders offer no objection. Professor Hasen has a message for them: “If you are in a position of power and you are wondering if now is the time to show some courage, the answer is unequivocally yes.”

While these efforts — of a flailing wannabe autocrat and his inept accomplices — appear to be playing out like a ridiculous farce, this is serious stuff. A presidential election and a peaceful transition of power in the United States of America are in the balance.

Even Trump’s critics, who have warned about the erosion of our democratic institutions, might have expected — after Biden’s substantial win seemed to put Trump beyond cheating distance — that by this time the leadership of the Republican Party would have pushed back against this reckless, lawless rampage.

But, these are the men and women who saw nothing in Trump’s shakedown of a foreign leader to warrant impeachment (or censure or even a slap on the wrist), the same folks who have watched as hundreds of thousands of Americans have died, as the White House shunned accountability, … and so on and so on and so on — for four years.

The leadership of the Republican Party is beneath contempt.

(Image: Rudy Giuliani’s theatre of the absurd press conference from The Guardian video.)

Donald Trump, Off the Rails

Memo that Justice Department suppressed places Bill Barr at center of Trump’s shakedown

Now I had a chance to review in detail the notes of the call between the President of the United States and the President of Ukraine, as well as the legal opinion drafted by the Department of Justice in an effort to prevent the whistleblower complaint from coming to our committee. And I have to say that I’m shocked by both.

The notes of the call reflect a conversation far more damning than I or many others had imagined. It is shocking at another level that the White House would release these notes and felt that somehow this would help the President’s case or cause. Because what those notes reflect is a classic mafia-like shakedown of a foreign leader.

They reflect a Ukrainian president who was desperate for U.S. support – for military support to help that country in a hot war with Putin’s Russia. A country that is still occupied by irregular Russian forces and in which people face a very dangerous and continuing and destabilizing action by their aggressive neighbor. And at the same time a President of the United States who, immediately after Ukraine’s president expresses the need for further weapons, tells the Ukraine president that he has a favor to ask.

The President communicates to his Ukrainian counterpart that the United States has done a lot for Ukraine. We’ve done an awful lot for Ukraine. More than the Europeans or anyone else has done for Ukraine. But there’s not much reciprocity here.

This is how a mafia boss talks. ‘What have you done for us? We’ve done so much for you. But there’s not much reciprocity. I have a favor I want to ask you.’

And what is that favor? Of course the favor is to investigate his political rival, to investigate the Bidens.

And it’s clear that the Ukraine president understands exactly what is expected of him. And is making every effort to mollify the President.  

What adds another layer of depravity to this conversation is the fact the President of the United States then invokes the Attorney General of the United States as well as his personal lawyer as emissaries. In the case of the Attorney General , as an official head of a U.S. department, the Department of Justice, that he says will be part and parcel of this.

Now I know that the Attorney General is denying involvement in this. But nonetheless you can see why the Department of Justice would want this transcript never to see the light of day. You can see why they have worked so hard to deprive our committee of the whistleblower complaint. And in fact the opinion by the justice department is startling in its own regard because in that opinion the Department of Justice advances the absurd claim that the Director of National Intelligence has no responsibility over efforts to prevent foreign interference in our elections.

Well, that will come as news – at least it should – to the Director of National Intelligence, who is charged, among other things, with detecting foreign interference in our elections and with reporting to Congress about foreign interference in our elections. But it is apparently the view of this justice department that the Director has no jurisdiction in this area. — Congressman Adam Schiff, Chairman of the House Select Committee on Intelligence

Democracy, Donald Trump, Off the Rails

Two responses to the memorandum on President Trump’s call with President Zelensky

“Just so you understand, it’s the greatest witch hunt in American history, probably history, but in American history. It’s a disgraceful thing. The letter was a great letter, meaning the letter revealing the call. That was done at the insistence of myself and other people that read it. It was a friendly letter. There was no pressure. The way you had that built up, that call that was going to be the call from hell. It turned out to be a nothing call other than a lot of people said, ‘I never knew you could be so nice.’” — Donald Trump

“The transcript of the call reads like a classic mob shakedown:
–        We do a lot for Ukraine
–        There’s not much reciprocity
–        I have a favor to ask
–        Investigate my opponent
–        My people will be in touch
Nice country you got there.
It would be a shame if something happened to her.” — Adam Schiff

Judge for yourself.

2020 General Election, Democracy, Donald Trump, Off the Rails

“We may very well have crossed the Rubicon here.” — Congressman Adam Schiff

(Click on the hyperlink immediately above for a video of the exchange.)

Congressman Schiff, Chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, has been in sync with Speaker of the House Pelosi in resisting the impeachment of President Trump. (As he says in the video clip, “There is no chance of our persuading the Senate — the Senate Republicans — in an impeachment trial. They have shown their willingness to carry the President’s baggage no matter how soiled its contents.”)

“But if the president is essentially withholding military aid at the same time that he is trying to browbeat a foreign leader into doing something illicit — that is, providing dirt on his opponent during a presidential campaign — then that may be the only remedy that is coequal to the evil that that conduct represents.”

If Trump (and Giuliani — and others in the Executive Branch) have done what has been alleged (and Trump and his personal attorney have come close to admitting it), then the President has used the powers of his office to undermine the upcoming election. That’s a fundamental assault on our democracy. (“This seems different in kind,” in Schiff’s words.)

I agree with Tom Nichols that “If this isn’t impeachable, nothing is,” though there were ample grounds for impeachment before this came to light. David Leonhardt provides an impressive checklist.

But the fundamental calculus of whether or not to impeach hasn’t changed.

I have resisted arguments for impeachment chiefly because there is no chance of persuading Senate Republicans to put the country and the Constitution above partisanship and the GOP. Impeachment by the House followed by acquittal in the Senate would fail to hold Trump accountable. The man will be booted from the White House, if at all, through defeat in November 2020. (As Adam Schiff has stated previously, “2020 is unquestionably the only way he gets removed from office.”)

November 2020 is critical. Doing whatever we can to defeat Trump is a moral imperative. The primary question is, as it has always been (since Senate Republicans will not do the right thing): Does impeachment make Trump’s defeat more or less likely?

Brian Beutler has written, “The only defensible case against impeaching a president like Trump is a prudential one.” An advocate for impeachment, Beutler is decidedly unconvinced by the prudential case.

But at this stage we have no reason to believe there are enough votes in the House to approve articles of impeachment. A failure in that chamber would spell disaster. If the latest transgressions by Trump, or further off the rails activities going forward, lead to unanimous, or near-unanimous agreement among House Democrats to impeach, that will shift the calculus. And Nancy Pelosi will shift accordingly.

It would still be a risk, since Senate Republicans have shown no signs of shifting, for the House to impeach. But with Democratic unity, it might be a risk worth taking. We’re hardly there yet. The public opposes impeachment. Many House Democrats, hardly unreasonably, are sensitive to the opinions of their constituents.

In the meantime, if Nichols, Leonhardt, Beutler, most of the Democratic candidates for president, and many other Americans are successful in their advocacy, an ample majority of House Democrats will find their way on board.

Whether or not that day comes, November 3, 2020 looms large.