monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

"Why do I care what is going on in the conflict between Ukraine and Russia? I'm serious. Why shouldn't I root for Russia? Which by the way I am."

Trump Tells Allies He Wants Absolved War Criminals to Campaign for Him

Did I say sloppy journalism? Should I have said supermarket tabloid journalism. An example of a newspaper that has turned into ****

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How Trump Survives

The lesson of past impeachments might be that it takes disasters, not just scandals, to remove a president from office.

Here is a provocation that might just be true: The most important moment in the impeachment battle thus far did not take place in the halls of the Capitol or even in the bars and cafes of the republic of Ukraine, but in Ankara on Oct. 17, when President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey met with Mike Pence and agreed to a cease-fire in northern Syria, thus limiting the scope of the moral and strategic debacle created by Donald Trump’s betrayal of the Kurds.

I’m not suggesting that the American public, in all its wisdom, cares more about the doughty Kurds or the lines of political control in Syria than it does about abuses of presidential power. But I am suggesting that part of the country relies on general heuristics rather than the specific details of presidential misconduct to determine when it might support something like impeachment. In which case any strategy congressional Democrats pursue or any defense served up by Jim Jordan or Lindsey Graham matters less to Trump’s fate than the answers to two basic questions: Is the economy O.K.? Is the world falling apart?

This supposition is based on an admittedly thin historical record. We have exactly two impeachment case studies in the modern era, Bill Clinton and Richard Nixon, which involved very different fact patterns and unspooled in very different ways.

The differences are grist for competing partisan interpretations: Liberals can argue that Clinton survived the process and Nixon didn’t because Clinton’s crimes were minor things and Nixon’s met the “high crimes” bar, while conservatives can argue that Clinton survived and Nixon didn’t because Republicans were more honorable in 1974 and Democrats more partisan in 1998.

But the simplest explanation is that Nixon didn’t survive because his second term featured a series of economic shocks — summarized on Twitter by the political theorist Jacob Levy as “an oil crisis, a stock market crash, stagflation and recession” — while Clinton’s second term was the most recent peak of American power, pride and optimism. In a given impeachment debate, under this theory, neither the nature of the crimes nor the state of the political parties matter as much as whether an embattled president is seen as presiding over stability or crisis, over good times or potential ruin.

To the extent that this reductive theory is true — and clearly it’s at least somewhat true — we shouldn’t be surprised at Trump’s survival, and we shouldn’t assume that it can be explained only by polarization or hyper-partisanship, Fox News or fake news, or for that matter by the “that’s how you get Trump” progressive overreach that I tend to critique.

Of course it matters that Trump’s party is craven and debased; of course it matters that the Democrats have swung to an ideological extreme. But maybe it matters more to Trump’s not good but stable — amazingly stable — approval ratings that he is presiding over a period of general stability, at home and abroad, which would have to fall apart for the supermajority that turned on Nixon to finally turn on him.

The idea that the Trump era is stable probably seems unpersuasive to people who follow the D.C. carnival obsessively; the idea that it is more stable than the later Obama years may seem like a joke. But one reason Trump managed to get elected was that the waning years of Barack Obama’s second term felt chaotic and dangerous across multiple fronts — with the rise of the Islamic State, the Russian seizure of Crimea and the Ukrainian quasi-war, a modest increase in crime and a series of terrorist attacks domestically, and a version of the child migrant crisis that has recurred under Trump.

This environment has created constituencies that get less attention than the “with the president even if he shoots someone on Fifth Avenue” sort of Trump voter, but probably matter more to how impeachment plays out. These are voters who dislike Trump but give him some grudging credit for the solid economy and the absence of new foreign wars, voters who don’t support his policies but don’t share the educated-liberal revulsion at his style, and voters whose reluctant support is contingent on Trumpian chaos seeming confined to Washington.

It’s possible to persuade these lukewarm voters to turn on him; you can see it begin to happen in the polling data when his party pursues unpopular policies (the Obamacare repeal push) or when his personal chaos seems to produce a real political breakdown (the government shutdown) or when his bigotry seems linked to some real-world horror (as with Charlottesville). But when a feeling of stability returns, when there isn’t a cascade toward economic debacle, foreign-policy catastrophe or late-1960s civil strife, these voters drift back toward mixed feelings, lukewarm support, dislike leavened by skepticism about removing Trump via impeachment rather than the 2020 vote.

Which is why, to return to the initial hypothesis, it mattered that the impeachment debate began at the same time that Trump was stumbling badly on foreign policy with Turkey and the Kurds; it gave some of these voters (and the swing-state Republican senators who represent them) a feeling that maybe this time everything was going to fall apart at once, that Trump’s incompetence would blow up the Middle East at the same time that his scandals multiplied.

Then the pattern in polling since — the dip in his approval rating giving way to a tiny upswing, support for impeachment peaking and then declining just a bit — might not reflect some dramatic failure by Democrats to make the case or some dramatic success for the Trumpian defense. Instead, it might just reflect the fact that the situation in Syria seems to have temporarily stabilized, the economy is fine and there are voters who will support removing a president when the world seems to be falling apart, but if it’s not, then not.

This reality doesn’t make a case against impeaching Trump when his conduct is basically asking for it; an impeachment process can be morally correct even if it’s unlikely to succeed. Nor does it prove that impeachment will hurt the Democrats in 2020; it might be that keeping a focus on Trump’s misdeeds and corruptions is a better use of Democratic energy than fighting over which not-necessarily-popular progressive agenda item their presidential nominee should be pressured to support.

Rather, it just makes a case for a certain modesty in all analysis, whether it’s a critique of some Adam Schiff stratagem today or a condemnation of Susan Collins (or, perhaps, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema) for not voting to remove the president tomorrow. It might just be the case that in our system it takes a clear cascade of disasters to pre-emptively remove a president, even a manifestly corrupt one. And though the likelihood of such a disaster the longer Trump remains in office is one reason to wish for his removal, even his fiercest critics should prefer stability, and the necessity of defeating him at the ballot box, to the Something Worse that might expedite his fall.

WASHINGTON — John R. Bolton, the former national security adviser to President Trump who resisted efforts to pressure Ukraine for help against domestic political rivals, dashed any expectation on Tuesday that he would testify soon in the House impeachment investigation in response to a court ruling involving a onetime colleague.

Charles J. Cooper, a lawyer who represents Mr. Bolton, said that a court decision on Monday ordering another former White House official to appear before Congress under subpoena did not apply to Mr. Bolton because of the nature of his job. Mr. Cooper said Mr. Bolton would therefore wait for another judge to rule in a separate case that could take weeks more to litigate.

When Rudolph W. Giuliani went to Madrid in August to meet with a top aide to the Ukrainian president and press for political investigations sought by President Trump, he made the trip at the behest of a previously unidentified client with very different interests.

While in Spain, Giuliani stayed at a historic estate belonging to Venezuelan energy executive Alejandro Betancourt López, who had hired Trump’s personal attorney to help him contend with an investigation by the Justice Department into alleged money laundering and bribery, according to people familiar with the situation.

A month later, Giuliani was one of several lawyers representing Betancourt in Washington. The lawyers met with the chief of the Justice Department’s criminal division and other government attorneys to argue that the wealthy Venezuelan should not face criminal charges as part of a $1.2 billion money-laundering case filed in Florida last year, said the people, who, like others in this report, spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the ongoing investigation.

The criminal complaint alleges that top officials of the Venezuelan state-owned oil company, elite business leaders and bankers conspired to steal money from the company and then launder it through Miami real estate purchases and other investment schemes.

Betancourt is not one of the eight men charged in the case, a group that includes his cousin. But a person familiar with the matter said that he is referred to in the criminal complaint as a uncharged co-conspirator, as previously reported by the Miami Herald.

Giuliani’s representation of Betancourt — which has not been previously disclosed — is a striking example of how Trump’s lawyer has continued to offer his services to foreign clients with interests before the U.S. government while working on behalf of the president. And it shows how Giuliani — who says he was serving as Trump’s attorney pro bono — has used his work for paying clients to help underwrite his efforts to find political ammunition in Ukraine to benefit the president.

In response to questions about his relationship with Betancourt, Giuliani wrote in a text, “This is attorney client privilege so I will withstand whatever malicious lies or spin you put on it.”

Eric Creizman, an attorney for Giuliani, declined to comment.
Jon Sale, an attorney for Betancourt, said his client denies any wrongdoing. He declined to comment on Betancourt’s relationship with Giuliani.
A spokeswoman for the Justice Department declined to comment on the meeting. Justice Department officials were unaware of the Madrid meeting when Giuliani came to meet them, according to a senior Justice Department official, who said the topic of Ukraine did not come up in the discussion.

'The whole package'
Giuliani, a former New York mayor and top federal prosecutor in Manhattan, is now under scrutiny by the U.S. attorney’s office he once led, which has filed campaign finance charges against two of his associates, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman. Investigators are examining Giuliani’s consulting business as part of a broad probe in a raft of possible crimes, including wire fraud and foreign lobbying violations, according to people familiar with the matter.

Giuliani is also a key figure in the ongoing House impeachment inquiry into Trump, in which top government officials have testified that the president’s lawyer led a shadow effort to pressure Ukraine to announce investigations into Trump’s rivals in exchange for a White House meeting.

Trump had urged U.S. officials hoping to broker a good relationship between him and newly elected Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to work with Giuliani, according to congressional testimony.

On July 25, Trump asked Zelensky to pursue the investigations into Democrats. Days later, Giuliani headed to Madrid to meet with Andriy Yermak, a top aide to Zelensky, to cement the deal, according to Giuliani and congressional testimony.

Giuliani told The Washington Post in September that Yermak had offered to the come to the United States, but he suggested Spain. “I told him I was already going to be in Madrid for something else the first weekend in August, so why don’t we just meet there?” he said.

The purpose of the Aug. 2 sit-down: to spell out two specific cases Trump wanted Ukraine to pursue, Giuliani told The Post in September.

One was a probe of a Ukrainian gas tycoon who had former vice president Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden on his board. Another was a claim that Democrats colluded with Ukraine to release information on former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort during the 2016 election.

Yermak, according to Giuliani, indicated that the Ukrainians were open to pursuing the investigations. The aide reiterated the Ukrainians’ plea for a meeting with Trump, a summit that would be an important signal to Russia of Washington’s support for Ukraine.

“I talked to him about the whole package,” Giuliani said.
After the meeting, Yermak began circulating a draft of a statement the Ukrainians were considering issuing regarding their commitment to investigating corruption, according to text messages released as part of the House inquiry.

A private client

One of the main purposes of Giuliani’s travel to Spain was to meet with Betancourt, who has made a fortune in work for the Venezuelan government, according to people familiar with the trip.

Betancourt, a young member of Venezuela’s elite who attended Suffolk University in Boston, co-founded a company that was awarded $1.8 billion in government contracts to build power plants under Venezuela’s former socialist president Hugo Chávez, leading to allegations the company bilked the government, the Wall Street Journal has reported.

The company, Derwick Associates, has denied paying bribes to win its contracts and said the contracts reflected the high cost of doing business in the socialist country.

Sale, who is Betancourt’s lawyer, is a longtime friend of Giuliani’s who attended law school with the former New York mayor. He also briefly represented Giuliani as he responded to congressional inquiries regarding Ukraine, sending a letter to House committees explaining that Giuliani would not comply with a subpoena for documents.

Giuliani has defended his work for foreign clients, arguing that their identities and interests are “irrelevant” to his uncompensated efforts for Trump.“My other clients are paying me for the work I do for them. Nobody is paying me for a single thing I’m doing for Donald J. Trump,” he told The Post earlier this year.

He told the Daily Beast in October that he met Yermak in Madrid because he already planned to be in the Spanish capital for “business and vacation.”

He said it was an example of how the costs of his travel for Trump were covered by separate work he did for private clients.

“That particular trip has not been reimbursed but about three-fourths of it would be business and one-fourth would be personal,” he said. “The Trump part would be considered personal because I don’t get paid for representing the president.”

He told Reuters in September that his expenses “were paid by I assume one client. Since I took two days off I think I paid some of that personally as well.”

During the trip, Giuliani met with Yermak at a hotel in Madrid, according to people familiar with the trip.

But he — along with Parnas and Fruman — stayed at an expansive estate belonging to Betancourt on the grounds of an ancient castle once used by Spanish royalty, the people said.

On Aug. 3, the day after his meeting with Yermak, Giuliani tweeted images of a Spanish village, writing, “South of Madrid are beautiful small towns and lovely countryside and very wonderful people.”
Joseph A. Bondy, an attorney for Parnas, declined to comment. Todd Blanche, a lawyer for Fruman, did not respond to a request for comment.

The Justice Department meeting

A month later, Giuliani joined a number of lawyers representing Betancourt at a meeting at Justice Department headquarters with Brian Benczkowski, the head of the criminal division, according to people familiar with the session.

At the time, federal prosecutors in Manhattan were pursing the case into Giuliani’s associates, Parnas and Fruman.

When the New York Times reported in October that Giuliani met with the criminal division chief about one of his clients, the Justice Department said Benczkowski was not aware of the New York case at the time.

“When Mr. Benczkowski and fraud section lawyers met with Mr. Giuliani, they were not aware of any investigation of Mr. Giuliani’s associates in the Southern District of New York and would not have met with him had they known,” Peter Carr, a department spokesman, said at the time.
The client who was the subject of the meeting has not been previously reported.

Giuliani has cast his efforts to dig up damaging information about Democrats in Ukraine as both a strategy to assist his client, Trump, but also motivated by a lifelong commitment to fighting corruption.

“I’ve been doing this for 50 years of my life. I’ve never had a complaint. I think people understand that I have a very, very great passion for corruption, and I’ve probably uncovered some of the biggest crimes and disrupted some of the biggest crime organization in our history,” he told conservative broadcaster Glenn Beck on Nov. 20.

However, his involvement with the Betancourt case puts him at odds with a long-running effort by federal prosecutors to crack down on corruption in Venezuela.

The United States has been aggressively pursuing bribery, embezzlement and money laundering cases against Venezuela’s elite, arguing the corruption has helped collapse the country’s economy and caused civil unrest.

Federal prosecutors in Miami have said in court filings that billions have been looted from Venezuela’s state-owned energy company, Petróleos de Venezuela S.A, or PDVSA, which has had particularly dire economic consequences.

Betancourt was not named in the July 2018 criminal complaint, but the case’s lead defendant, Francisco Convit Guruceaga, is his cousin and sat on the board of Betancourt’s company. Convit is considered a fugitive by the U.S. government, according to court records.

While Giuliani’s representation of Betancourt had not been previously disclosed, Venezuela has surfaced as a topic in the House impeachment inquiry.

In a closed-door deposition given to congressional investigators on Oct. 14, former National Security Council official Fiona Hill alluded to the possibility of a Venezuela tie to the ongoing Ukraine saga.

“I was told that by the directors working on the Western Hemisphere. I didn’t have a chance to look into this in any way. I was told that the same individuals who had been indicted had been interested at different points in energy investments in Venezuela and that this was quite well-known,” she said, referring to Parnas and Fruman, according to a transcript later released.

She did not detail the information she had been given, only that she had learned the two were “notorious in Florida” and involved with “strange things in Venezuela.”

“Well, I was extremely concerned that whatever it was that Mr. Giuliani was doing might not be legal, especially after, you know, people had raised with me these two gentlemen, Parnas and Fruman,” she said.

The House Intelligence Committee just finished hearing from a dozen witnesses, many of whom said President Trump’s allies were pushing unsubstantiated allegations about Joe Biden in Ukraine. Now, a Ukrainian American who worked with Trump attorney Rudolph W. Giuliani says he wants to testify that the top Republican on the committee was helping them dig up dirt on Biden, too.

That’s the allegation now facing Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.): that he was in on the very thing Congress has launched an impeachment inquiry into Trump over. Nunes has said stories reporting this are “demonstrably false."

Let’s review the allegation, the players, what Nunes has said about all this and what Democrats might do to look into it.

That Nunes and/or his staff met with Ukrainian officials whom witnesses have described as “corrupt.”

The allegation comes from Lev Parnas, a business associate of Giuliani’s. Through a lawyer, Parnas is saying he would be willing to testify under oath that Nunes was working with them to damage Biden before the 2020 election. Parnas has produced thousands of pages of documents and even video about his work with Giuliani in Ukraine. We don’t know what, if anything, these documents say about Nunes.

CNN first reported Friday night that Parnas would be willing to testify that Nunes traveled to Vienna last year to meet with former Ukrainian prosecutor general Viktor Shokin. CNN looked at congressional travel records and noted that Nunes traveled to Europe around that time on a taxpayer-funded trip.

Shokin is the prosecutor Biden pressed Ukraine to remove in 2016 because he wasn’t doing adequate work to prosecute corruption. At the time, Biden was working on having Shokin removed, his son Hunter Biden served on the board of a Ukrainian energy company, Burisma, which had once been under investigation and which has a known history of corruption. There is no evidence that Hunter Biden acted illegally or that Joe Biden was acting to influence policy toward Burisma.

But it wasn’t just this one trip Nunes is alleged to have been involved in. Parnas’s lawyer said his client would testify that a Nunes aide talked over Skype with Ukrainian officials who have pushed theories about Democrats working in Ukraine during the 2016 election.

That comes from CNBC, which reported that Parnas would be willing to testify Nunes aide Derek Harvey wanted to travel to Ukraine for this but scrapped the trip after he realized he would have to report it to the top Democrat on the committee, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.). Instead, they talked over Skype, according to Parnas’s allegation.

Parnas’s attorney told The Washington Post that Harvey met with his client, Giuliani and their associates this spring at the Trump hotel in Washington to talk about Biden.
If these allegations are true, it would mean a powerful member of Congress who is deciding whether to impeach Trump over pressuring Ukraine attempted to help Trump by working to further his political goals in Ukraine.

What Nunes has said about this

Nunes has said stories reporting this are false but didn’t explicitly deny the allegations.

He described the reports as “fake” and “demonstrably false and scandalous stories,” and threatened to sue the Daily Beast and CNN, which led the way on reporting about this. (It would be a very heavy lift to win those lawsuits, given that Nunes is a public figure and would have to prove malicious intent.)
But he refused to answer a question about whether he did what he’s accused of doing.

Here’s Maria Bartiromo asking him Sunday on Fox News whether he met with Ukraine’s former prosecutor in Vienna last year, for any reason.

ARTIROMO: Bottom line, were you in Vienna with Shokin?

NUNES: Yes, so, look, Maria, I really want to answer all of these questions.
And I promise you I absolutely will come back on the show and answer these questions. But because there is criminal activity here -- we're working with the appropriate law enforcement agencies. We're going to file all this. Everyone's going to know the truth. Everybody's going to know all the facts.
But I think you can understand that I can’t compete by trying to debate this out with the public media when 90 percent of the media are totally corrupt.
Shokin denied that he met with Nunes.

Who’s making these allegations again?

Parnas is a Ukrainian American whose lawyer said he worked with Giuliani over the past year to try to find damaging information about Biden in Ukraine, with the goal of ousting then-Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch. Parnas and another associate, Igor Fruman, were recently indicted here in the United States on campaign finance charges related to removing Yovanovitch.

Yovanovitch testified that she thought their financial interests were threatened by her anti-corruption campaign in Ukraine.

Parnas has a motive for talking now: He has pleaded not guilty, and his lawyer told the New York Times that Parnas “reasonably believed Giuliani’s directions reflected the interests and wishes of the president” and that he is “remorseful for involving himself … in the president’s self-interested political plot.”

From there, it’s not a big leap to assume that Parnas could try to leverage his goodwill with Congress to the courts to get a lesser sentence.

What could happen to Nunes

Maybe nothing. It’s not clear that Parnas will get to talk to Congress about Nunes. Schiff hasn’t said whether he would reopen hearings to listen to the allegations. His committee has already started writing a report on what they found, and Democrats are on a tight timeline to finish their impeachment investigation before 2020.

Some Democrats in Congress are saying they want a bipartisan panel in the House to investigate what Nunes did, on the grounds that he was using taxpayer money for a political purpose. That’s possible. Though we should note an ethics investigation in 2017 looked at whether Nunes improperly gave Trump a heads-up on what the House Intelligence Committee was investigating, with classified documents. The committee cleared him of wrongdoing.

Right now, it remains Nunes’s word against that of an accused criminal.

Right now, it remains Nunes’s word against that of an accused criminal.

it wouldnt change the accused criminal would it?

I hope we will get to see any documents supporting his statements, but, I don't know if we will.