Your Once and Final Supreme Double Impeachee

[Dr Sardonicus]

Q: So... what is Hunter Biden supposed to have done wrong when he was on the board of directors at Burisma?

A: Who cares? We doan need no stinkin' accusations of any actual wrongdoing, let alone any evidence. The company Burisma and its owner were under investigation for some pretty blatant corrupt practices. Whence, ipso facto, ex post facto, ex officio, etcetera etcetera etcetera, Hunter Biden, by dint of his having accepted an easy payday as a member of the board of directors, must have done something wrong, right?

Hunter Biden was hired to the board of a company that, along with its owner, was under investigation. The owner had skedaddled, and has made himself hard to find ever since. The company hired Hunter Biden and others to try to burnish its reputation. God knows its reputation needs burnishing. So they offered 50 grand a month to folks whose mere presence on the board of directors might make the company look good. If he had turned the job down, the same people who are screaming about his having accepted the position, would probably be questioning his sanity for turning down such easy money.)

Q: Why -- why in the world -- was Joe Biden, as VP, point man for Ukrainian diplomacy at the time?

A: This is what is known as a Damn Good Question. The mere fact that his son was on the board of directors of a major Ukrainian company, was enough to have people talking about a conflict of interest. Besides -- why the VP? Why not the Secretary of State? (This question would be even better if there had been even a hint of a whisper of a suggestion at the time that either Biden was even suspected of wrongdoing.)

Q: If Prosecutor-General Shokin had actually been investigating either of the Bidens at the time that Joe Biden was carrying the Admin's water to get him out, he could have made, or threatened to make things very, very ugly. Why didn't he? (He could, for example, have leaked or threatened to leak, the fact that his office was investigating one or both of the Bidens to the media, or, say, Mitch McConnell.)

A: Thoughtcrime!

Q: Why did the Ukrainians hesitate as long as they did to fire Shokin?

A: I can only guess. My guess is, he had dirt on the folks who were in a position to fire him. It's a tried and true technique for achieving job security.

[ewmayer]

The Ukrainegate "Whisteblower" Isn't a Real Whistleblower | Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone

Impeachment, Brought to You by the CIA | Rob Urie, CounterPunch

Unasked Questions about US-Ukrainian Relations | Stephen Cohen, The Nation

[kladner]

From 9/27/19:
https://consortiumnews.com/2019/09/2...whistleblower/
The word “whistleblower” has been trending in news headlines lately, but not for the reasons that any sane person might hope for.

“Read the whistleblower complaint regarding President Trump’s communications with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky,” says The Washington Post. “Trump responds to hearing on whistleblower complaint,” says MSNBC. “Trump-Ukraine scandal: what did the whistleblower say and how serious is it?,” writes The Guardian. “Whistleblower complaint says White House tried to ‘lock down’ Ukraine call records” announces CBS. “Whistleblower’s complaint is a devastating report from a savvy official,” declares CNN.

So who is this “savvy official”? Who is this courageous whistleblower who boldly shone the light of truth upon the mechanisms of power in the interests of the common man? Who is this brave, selfless individual who set off an impeachment inquiry by taking a stand and revealing that the U.S. president made a phone call in July urging Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky to help investigate corruption allegations against Joe Biden and his son?

Well believe it or not, according to The New York Times this brave, noble whistleblower who the mainstream media are currently championing is an officer for the Central Intelligence Agency.

“The whistle-blower who revealed that President Trump sought foreign help for his re-election and that the White House sought to cover it up is a CIA officer who was detailed to work at the White House at one point, according to three people familiar with his identity,” The New York Times reports. “The man has since returned to the CIA, the people said. Little else is known about him.”

So there you have it. A mysterious stranger from the lying, torturing, propagandizing, drug trafficking, assassinating, coup-staging, warmongering, psychopathic CIA was working in the White House, heroically provided the political/media class with politically powerful information out of the goodness of his heart, and then vanished off into the Langley sunset. Clearly there is nothing suspicious about this story at all.

[Dr Sardonicus]

I guess that, since so far everything about the complaint has checked out factually, the only recourse is ad hominem attacks on the source. Just imagine how this would have worked back in the day when Tricky Dick was president, if only more had been discovered about a famous traitor source: "The Washington Post's source `Deep Throat' is clearly working with the [evidence-fabricating, politically repressive, yadda yadda yadda] FBI."

Deep Throat's identity wasn't learned until much later, of course, but the basic approach these days falls under the heading, "I've seen this movie before."

Back then, it was VP Spiro Agnew who was point man in bashing the media. After J. Edgar Hoover died, acting FBI head L. Patrick Gray, Nixon's choice to succeed Hoover, had to quit when it was learned he had burned a bunch of incriminating documents from Howard Hunt's WH safe.

Meanwhile, back in the here and now, it turns out that (as my old friend Huda Thunkit predicted) Il Duce was projecting when he said he was talking about corruption WRT ol' Joe & Son. The CIC's buddies in DC have been trying to get their friends installed on the Board of Directors of Naftogaz, with an eye to steering big contracts to other friends, as described here.

Money makes the world go 'round...

[kladner]

I don't think it is really "ad hominem" when the Agency is involved. Also, given the source of the complaint, many "facts" could be made to comply with the official story.

[Dr Sardonicus]

Originally Posted by kladner

I don't think it is really "ad hominem" when the Agency is involved. Also, given the source of the complaint, many "facts" could be made to comply with the official story.

Sure it is. It's attacking the person, rather than the merits of what that person is saying. In this case, it's compounded by the fact that you don't even know the person's identity, and the mode of attack is guilt by association -- "He works for the CIA, therefore he must be lying."

Despite the fact that, so far, everything known about the complaint has checked out. Including Il Duce himself admitting -- nay, proclaiming -- that he did what the complaint says he did -- tried to coerce (by withholding hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid) the head of state of a foreign power (the president of Ukraine) into ordering an investigation of a domestic political rival who may be running against him in the 2020 election.

As I have said before, a classic plot device in stories about good versus evil is that the good guys will always try to garner support by arguing the justice of their cause, while that bad guys will simply make threats to coerce support, or at least acquiescence. There's little choice when one's demands lack legitimacy.

Of course, in the stories, moral suasion is successful. In real life, it often isn't, and then other means come to the fore. Our country fought a bloody civil war due to the failure of moral suasion on the issue of slavery.

As I have also said before, I consider Joe Biden to be a poor candidate. I wish to heck he hadn't decided to run, but that ship has sailed.

[ewmayer]

o Democrats Impeach Joe Biden, Fiddle as the Planet Burns - Rob Urie, CounterPunch.org

o We're in a permanent coup | Matt Taibbi, Substack.com: Americans might soon wish they just waited to vote their way out of the Trump era.
[See full article for embedded links, which are numerous]

My discomfort in the last few years, first with Russiagate and now with Ukrainegate and impeachment, stems from the belief that the people pushing hardest for Trump’s early removal are more dangerous than Trump. Many Americans don’t see this because they’re not used to waking up in a country where you’re not sure who the president will be by nightfall. They don’t understand that this predicament is worse than having a bad president.

The Trump presidency is the first to reveal a full-blown schism between the intelligence community and the White House. Senior figures in the CIA, NSA, FBI and other agencies made an open break from their would-be boss before Trump’s inauguration, commencing a public war of leaks that has not stopped.
...
Leaks from the intelligence community most often pertain to foreign policy. The leak of the January, 2017 “meeting” between the four chiefs and Trump – which without question damaged both the presidency and America’s standing abroad – was an unprecedented act of insubordination.

It was also a bold new foray into domestic politics by intelligence agencies that in recent decades began asserting all sorts of frightening new authority. They were kidnapping foreigners, assassinating by drone, conducting paramilitary operations without congressional notice, building an international archipelago of secret prisons, and engaging in mass warrantless surveillance of Americans. We found out in a court case just last week how extensive the illegal domestic surveillance has been, with the FBI engaging in tens of thousands of warrantless searches involving American emails and phone numbers under the guise of combating foreign subversion.

The agencies’ new trick is inserting themselves into domestic politics using leaks and media pressure. The “intel chiefs” meeting was just the first in a series of similar stories, many following the pattern in which a document was created, passed from department from department, and leaked. A sample:

o February 14, 2017: “four current and former officials” tell the New York Times the Trump campaign had “repeated contacts” with Russian intelligence.

o March 1, 2017: “Justice Department officials” tell the Washington Post Attorney General Jeff Sessions “spoke twice with Russia’s ambassador” and did not disclose the contacts ahead of his confirmation hearing.

o March 18, 2017: “people familiar with the matter” tell the Wall Street Journal that former Trump National Security Adviser Michael Flynn failed to disclose a “contact” with a Russian at Cambridge University, an episode that “came to the notice of U.S. intelligence.”

o April 8, 2017, 2017: “law enforcement and other U.S. officials” tell the Washington Post the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court judge had ruled there was “probable cause” to believe former Trump aide Carter Page was an “agent of a foreign power.”

o April 13, 2017: a “source close to UK intelligence” tells Luke Harding at The Guardian that the British analog to the NSA, the GCHQ, passed knowledge of “suspicious interactions” between “figures connected to Trump and “known or suspected Russian agents” to Americans as part of a “routine exchange of information.”

o December 17, 2017: “four current and former American and foreign officials” tell the New York Times that during the 2016 campaign, an Australian diplomat named Alexander Downer told “American counterparts” that former Trump aide George Papadopoulos revealed “Russia had political dirt on Hillary Clinton.

o April 13, 2018: “two sources familiar with the matter” tell McClatchy that Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s office has evidence Trump lawyer Michael Cohen was in Prague in 2016, “confirming part of [Steele] dossier.”

o November 27, 2018: a “well-placed source” tells Harding at The Guardian that former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort met with Julian Assange at the Ecuadorian embassy in London.

o January 19, 2019: “former law enforcement officials and others familiar with the investigation” tell the New York Times the FBI opened an inquiry into the “explosive implications” of whether or not Donald Trump was working on behalf of the Russians.

To be sure, “people familiar with the matter” leaked a lot of true stories in the last few years, but many were clearly problematic even at the time of release. Moreover, all took place in the context of constant, hounding pressure from media figures, congressional allies like Democrats Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell, as well as ex-officials who could make use of their own personal public platforms in addition to being unnamed sources in straight news reports. They used commercial news platforms to argue that Trump had committed treason, needed to be removed from office, and preferably also indicted as soon as possible.

A shocking number of these voices were former intelligence officers who joined Clapper in becoming paid news contributors. Op-ed pages and news networks are packed now with ex-spooks editorializing about stories in which they had personal involvement: Michael Morell, Michael Hayden, Asha Rangappa, and Andrew McCabe among many others, including especially all four of the original “intel chiefs”: Clapper, Rogers, Comey, and MSNBC headliner John Brennan.
...
I don’t believe most Americans have thought through what a successful campaign to oust Donald Trump would look like. Most casual news consumers can only think of it in terms of Mike Pence becoming president. The real problem would be the precedent of a de facto intelligence community veto over elections, using the lunatic spookworld brand of politics that has dominated the last three years of anti-Trump agitation.

CIA/FBI-backed impeachment could also be a self-fulfilling prophecy. If Donald Trump thinks he’s going to be jailed upon leaving office, he’ll sooner or later figure out that his only real move is to start acting like the “dictator” MSNBC and CNN keep insisting he is. Why give up the White House and wait to be arrested, when he still has theoretical authority to send Special Forces troops rappelling through the windows of every last Russiagate/Ukrainegate leaker? That would be the endgame in a third world country, and it’s where we’re headed, unless someone calls off this craziness. Welcome to the Permanent Power Struggle.

[rogue]

In other words, the CIA, NSA, FBI, etc. have "hacked" our own elections more than the Russians.

[Dr Sardonicus]

I am adding to the discussion that arose with this post over in the 'All Your Data ❝Я❞ Belong To Us' Thread. It seems more appropriate in this thread, so that's where I'm posting it.

Parents of killed teen reject Trump’s attempted introduction

WASHINGTON (AP) — The grieving parents of a British teenager who was killed in a car crash involving an American diplomat’s wife felt ambushed when President Donald Trump tried to get them to meet with the woman in front of the press, attorneys for the couple said Wednesday.

Charlotte Charles and Tim Dunn traveled to Washington on Tuesday seeking to have the woman’s diplomatic immunity lifted. Instead, Trump and national security adviser Robert O’Brien surprised the family by inviting Anne Sacoolas to the White House and suggesting Dunn’s parents meet with her in front of the White House press corps.

Attorney Mark Stephens told The Associated Press the couple had no idea Sacoolas would be in the building when they were there Tuesday and were stunned by the proposition. He said the couple wants to meet with Sacoolas at some point, but not in a surprise meeting staged for reporters.

“If there’s going to be a meeting like that, it should not involve a surprise, a jack-in-the-box, pop-out-of-a-circus-tent meeting seven weeks after the loss,” said Radd Seiger, a retired lawyer who is a neighbor of the family and accompanied them to the White House. “For this to happen, you would want some heavy-duty therapy and you want to meet in a neutral environment.”

Trump told reporters Wednesday that he thought the family had wanted to meet with Sacoolas, but that “they weren’t ready for it” Tuesday.
“It was very sad, to be honest,” he said of their conversation. “They lost their son.”

Trump said he had spoken with Sacoolas and that she had been waiting in a room just off the Oval Office when he made the offer to Dunn’s family.

“They weren’t ready for it,” Trump said. “But I did offer. I spoke with Boris. He asked me if I’d do that. And I did it,” Trump said, referring to British Prime Minister Boris Johnson. “Unfortunately, when we had everybody together, they decided not to meet. Perhaps they had lawyers involved by that time. I don’t know exactly.”

Pressed on why he thought that was something they would welcome, Trump said that, “based on what I saw they wanted to meet. But now they say they only want to meet if they’re in the U.K. And that’ll be up to them. But I did meet the family, and I expressed condolences on behalf of our country.”

Wow. Perhaps I'm just being disloyal hypersensitive, but to me this bespeaks an extreme lack of empathy. With a narcissist like Il Duce, this is not really surprising. The following quote notwithstanding, IMO not only does he not understand why the grieving family balked, he isn't capable of understanding. I don't know whether "Boris" shares Il Duce's befuddlement, or whether the WH arrangements were the sort of thing he had in mind, but I would imagine a lot of ordinary folks back in the UK are not real happy about the little surprise party the WH had planned.

Seiger said the family is still emotionally vulnerable and that they were taken aback. While Trump appeared to understand their reluctance, he said O’Brien continued to insist, even after they made clear that any meeting would have to happen back in Britain.

“Finally, I said ‘Mr. President, this meeting is not happening today. If it happens, it will be back in the U.K.’ That’s when O’Brien erupted, his face went all red, and I thought he was going to lunge at me,” Seiger recounted. “He was sitting about three feet away from Charlotte and said angrily, ‘She is never going back. Never.’”

[LaurV]

Yeah, deja vu (hint: google Teo Peter, contrary of what's said on wikipedia, that moron was so drunk it could not walk, how can you imagine you can "drink three beers" and there is no trace of alcohol in your blood in few hours? - he ran away, left the accident place without getting out of the car, and drove into the Embassy fenced yard, where he had to be carried to the building, so drunk he was, and next day(s?) he flew out of the country, where he could not be reached. He is still free).

[Dr Sardonicus]

Il Duce, having abruptly ordered US troops out of northern Syria, thereby abandoning the Syrian Kurds to the tender mercies of the Turks, and subsequently saying the Kurds, our allies against IS (if you want to make their heads explode, call them khawarij) are more of a terror threat than IS, has now sent two guys named Mike to tell Turkey's dictator president Erdogan to cease fire. I can see it now...

TWO GUYS NAMED MIKE: We hereby order you to cease fire!

Erdogan: You and what army?