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dreaminginthedeepsouth · 8 months ago

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Nobody

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LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

August 2, 2024

Heather Cox Richardson

Aug 03, 2024

Today, Aaron C. Davis and Carol D. Leonnig of the Washington Post reported that there is reason to believe that when Trump’s 2016 campaign was running low on funds, Trump accepted a $10 million injection of cash from Egypt’s authoritarian leader Abdel Fatah al-Sisi. It is against the law to accept direct or indirect financial support from foreign nationals or foreign governments for a political campaign in the United States.

In early 2017, CIA officials told Justice Department officials that a confidential informant had told them of such a cash exchange, and those officials handed the matter off to Robert Mueller, the special counsel who was already looking at the links between the 2016 Trump campaign and Russian operatives. FBI agents noted that on September 16, Trump had met with Sisi when the Egyptian leader was at the U.N. General Assembly in New York City.

After the meeting, Trump broke with U.S. policy to praise Sisi, calling him a “fantastic guy.”

Trump’s campaign had been dogged with a lack of funds, and his advisers had begged him to put some of his own money into it. He refused until October 28, when he loaned the campaign $10 million.

An FBI investigation took years to get records, but Davis and Leonnig reported that in 2019 the FBI learned of a key withdrawal from an Egypt bank. In January 2017, five days before Trump took office, an organization linked to Egypt’s intelligence service asked a manager at a branch of the state-run National Bank of Egypt to “kindly withdraw” $9,998,000 in U.S. currency. The bundles of $100 bills filled two bags and weighed more than 200 pounds.

Once in office, Trump embraced Sisi and, in a reversal of U.S. policy, invited him to be one of his first guests at the White House. “I just want to let everybody know, in case there was any doubt, that we are very much behind President al-Sissi,” Trump said.

Mueller had gotten that far in pursuit of the connection between Trump and Sisi when he was winding down his investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election. He handed the Egypt investigation off to the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington, D C., where it appears then–attorney general William Barr killed it.

Today, Brian Schwartz of CNBC reported that Elon Musk and other tech executives are putting their money behind a social media ad campaign for Trump and Vance, and are creating targeted ads in swing states by collecting information about voters under false pretenses. According to Schwartz, their America PAC, or political action committee, says it helps viewers register to vote. And, indeed, the ads direct would-be voters in nonswing states to voter registration sites.

But people responding to the ad in swing states are not sent to registration sites. Instead, they are presented with “a highly detailed personal information form [and] prompted to enter their address, cellphone number and age,” handing over “priceless personal data to a political operation” that can then create ads aimed at that person’s demographic and target them personally in door-to-door campaigns. After getting the information, the site simply says, “Thank you,” without directing the viewer toward a registration site.

Forbes estimates Musk’s wealth at more than $235 billion.

In June the Trump Organization announced a $500 million deal with Saudi real estate developer Dar Global to build a Trump International hotel in Oman.

In January 2011, when he was director of the FBI, Robert Mueller gave a speech to the Citizens Crime Commission of New York. He explained that globalization and modern technology had changed the nature of organized crime. Rather than being regional networks with a clear structure, he said, organized crime had become international, fluid, and sophisticated and had multibillion-dollar stakes. Its operators were cross-pollinating across countries, religions, and political affiliations, sharing only their greed. They did not care about ideology; they cared about money. They would do anything for a price.

These criminals “may be former members of nation-state governments, security services, or the military,” he said. “They are capitalists and entrepreneurs. But they are also master criminals who move easily between the licit and illicit worlds. And in some cases, these organizations are as forward-leaning as Fortune 500 companies.”

In order to corner international markets, Mueller explained, these criminal enterprises "may infiltrate our businesses. They may provide logistical support to hostile foreign powers. They may try to manipulate those at the highest levels of government. Indeed, these so-called 'iron triangles' of organized criminals, corrupt government officials, and business leaders pose a significant national security threat."

In a new book called Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World, journalist Anne Applebaum carries that story forward into the present, examining how today’s autocrats work together to undermine democracy. She says that “the language of the democratic world, meaning rights, laws, rule of law, justice, accountability, [and] transparency…[is] harmful to them,” especially as those are the words that their internal opposition uses. “And so they need to undermine the people who use it and, if they can, discredit it.”

Those people, Applebaum says, “believe they are owed power, they deserve power.” When they lose elections, they “come back in a second term and say, right, this time, I'm not going to make that mistake again, and…then change their electoral system, or…change the constitution, change the judicial system, in order to make sure that they never lose.”

Almost exactly a year ago, on August 1, 2023, a grand jury in Washington, D.C., indicted former president Donald J. Trump for conspiring to defraud the United States, conspiring to disenfranchise voters, and conspiring and attempting to obstruct an official proceeding. The charges stemmed from Trump’s attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election. A grand jury is made up of 23 ordinary citizens who weigh evidence of criminal activity and produce an indictment if 12 or more of them vote in favor.

The grand jury indicted Trump for “conspiracy to defraud the United States by using dishonesty, fraud, and deceit to impair, obstruct, and defeat the lawful federal government function by which the results of the presidential election are collected, counted, and certified by the government”; “conspiracy to corruptly obstruct and impede the January 6 congressional proceeding at which the collected results of the presidential election are counted and certified”; and “conspiracy against the right to vote and to have one’s vote counted.”

“Each of these conspiracies,” the indictment reads, “targeted a bedrock function of the United States federal government: the nation’s process of collecting, counting, and certifying the results of the presidential election.” “This federal government function…is foundational to the United States’ democratic process, and until 2021, had operated in a peaceful and orderly manner for more than 130 years.”

The case of the United States of America v. Donald J. Trump was randomly assigned to Judge Tanya S. Chutkan, who was appointed by President Obama in 2014 and confirmed 95–0 in the Senate. Trump pleaded not guilty on August 3, after which his lawyers repeatedly delayed their pretrial motions until, on December 7, Trump asked the Washington, D.C., Circuit Court of Appeals to decide whether he was immune from prosecution. Chutkan had to put off her initial trial date of March 4, 2024, and said she would not reschedule until the court decided the question of Trump’s immunity.

In February the appeals court decided he was not immune. Trump appealed to the Supreme Court, which waited until July 1, 2024, to decide that Trump enjoys broad immunity from prosecution for crimes committed as part of his official acts. Today the Washington, D.C., Circuit Court of Appeals sent the case back to Chutkan, almost exactly a year after it was first brought.

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

#WAPO #bribery #Letters From An American #Heather Cox Richardson #corrupt SCOTUS #Chutkan #certification of the presidential election #voting rights #disenfranchising voters #organized crime

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4bttnra · 2 months ago

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Heather Cox Richardson

February 14, 2025 (Friday)

On this day, I always like to tell the story of Theodore Roosevelt’s terrible 1884 Valentine’s Day and how it led to the Progressive Era. But things are happening too fast these days to leave a gap in the record, so you’ll have to look back at last year—or forward to next—for that story. For this year, here goes:

The administration’s order to drop federal charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams in exchange for his cooperation with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has sparked a crisis in the Trump administration’s Department of Justice, led by President Trump’s own appointees.

Yesterday that crisis led to multiple resignations from the department as acting U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York Danielle Sassoon resigned rather than drop the corruption charges. When the acting deputy attorney general of the Department of Justice, Emil Bove III, tried to do an end run around the Southern District of New York by taking the case to the Public Integrity Section in the Criminal Division of the Department of Justice in Washington, D.C., and getting lawyer there to dismiss the case, at least five of them resigned as well.

This crisis is really over whether the Department of Justice will defend the rule of law or declare loyalty to Trump alone. And the crisis is growing.

Bove claims that administration officials did not make an arrangement with Adams to dismiss charges in exchange for his political support. But this morning, Adams and Trump’s “border czar” Tom Homan undermined that assertion when they appeared together on the Fox News Channel. "If he doesn’t come through,” Homan said of Adams, "I'll be back in New York City and we won't be sitting on the couch. I'll be in his office, up his butt saying, 'Where the hell is the agreement we came to?'”

Today, Hagan Scotten, the acting assistant U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, resigned in a blistering letter to Bove, calling his justification for dropping the charges against Adams “transparently pretextual.” “[N]o system of ordered liberty can allow the Government to use the carrot of dismissing charges, or the stick of threatening to bring them again, to induce an elected official to support its policy objectives,” he wrote.

Scotten was awarded two bronze stars as a troop commander in Iraq and clerked for Chief Justice John Roberts. He pointed out to Bove that “[t]here is a tradition in public service of resigning in a last-ditch effort to head off a serious mistake…. [A]ny assistant U.S. attorney would know that our laws and traditions do not allow using the prosecutorial power to influence other citizens, much less elected officials, in this way.”

He continued: “If no lawyer within earshot of the President is willing to give him that advice, then I expect you will eventually find someone who is enough of a fool, or enough of a coward, to file your motion [to dismiss the case]. But it was never going to be me. Please consider this my resignation.”

Also this morning, legal analyst Barb McQuade reported that “DOJ leadership has put all Public Integrity Section lawyers into a room with 1 hour to decide who will dismiss Adams indictment or else all will be fired.” “Sending them strength to stand by their oath, which is to support the Constitution, not the president’s political agenda,” she added. According to Jeremy Roebuck, Shayna Jacobs, Mark Berman, and Carol D. Leonnig of the Washington Post, one lawyer at the meeting said the discussion was “gut-wrenching” and “not anything any of us expected to see in America.”

At first, they all agreed to resign together, but then Edward Sullivan, a career federal prosecutor approaching retirement, said he would sign the motion to dismiss the case in a bid to save the jobs of his colleagues.

The crisis was reminiscent of the “Saturday Night Massacre” of October 20, 1973, when President Richard Nixon ordered Attorney General Elliot Richardson to fire special prosecutor Archibald Cox after Cox subpoenaed a number of the tapes Nixon had recorded in the Oval Office concerning the break-in to the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters in the Washington, D.C., Watergate complex. Richardson and his deputy, William Ruckelshaus, refused to execute Nixon’s order and resigned in protest; it was only the third man at the Justice Department, Solicitor General Robert Bork, who was willing to carry out the order firing Cox.

In that case, popular outrage at the resignations and firing forced Nixon to ask Bork—now acting attorney general—to appoint a new special prosecutor, Leon Jaworski, a Democrat who had voted for Nixon, on November 1. On November 17, Nixon assured the American people: “I am not a crook.”

The administration’s determination to impose its will on the United States is behind its insistence that Trump can rename the Gulf of Mexico and Alaska’s Denali, the highest peak in North America, by executive order. In 2017, Trump pushed hard to make Americans accept that the crowds at his inauguration were bigger than those at President Barack Obama’s, an immediately disprovable lie that seemed unimportant at the time but was key to establishing the primacy of Trump’s vision over reality, an acceptance that led, eventually, to the Big Lie that Trump had won the 2020 presidential election and now, apparently, to the lie that Elon Musk is cutting “waste and fraud” from the government when, in fact, he appears simply to be cutting programs he and Trump dislike.

Although tech companies and various media outlets have accepted Trump’s language, the Associated Press has continued to use the internationally accepted, historic name: the Gulf of Mexico. The Associated Press is a not-for-profit news cooperative founded in 1846 that produces and distributes news reports across the country and the world. White House deputy chief of staff Taylor Budowich today claimed that the AP’s use of “Gulf of Mexico” showed its “commitment to misinformation,” and announced that the AP would be barred from the Oval Office and Air Force One.

In the Senate, Alaska’s senators Lisa Murkowski and Dan Sullivan, both Republicans, are pushing back on Trump’s name change for Denali, sponsoring a bill to require the mountain to be designated “Denali” on maps, documents, and any official U.S. records.

Senate Armed Services Chair Roger Wicker (R-MS) pushed back today on Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s “rookie mistake” on Wednesday when he offered that the U.S. would not support Ukraine’s membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and that it was “unrealistic” for Ukraine to demand a return to its borders before Russia invaded in 2014, essentially offering to let Russia keep Crimea.

Wicker said he was “puzzled” and “disturbed” by Hegseth’s comments and added: “I don’t know who wrote the speech—it is the kind of thing Tucker Carlson could have written, and Carlson is a fool.” Joe Gould and Jamie Dettmer of Politico identified Carlson as a “pro-Putin broadcaster.”

“There are good guys and bad guys in this war, and the Russians are the bad guys,” Wicker said. “They invaded, contrary to almost every international law, and they should be defeated. And Ukraine is entitled to the promises that the world made to it.”

Hackers pushed back today on Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” website, launched earlier this week after Musk claimed that the group was posting its actions on the DOGE website. At the time, the website was essentially blank. Jason Koebler of 404 Media reported that the website was built out on Wednesday and Thursday. It appears not to be on government servers, is not secure, and pulls information from an open database that anyone could edit. Coders promptly added: “this is a joke of a .gov site” and “THESE ‘EXPERTS’ LEFT THEIR DATABASE OPEN-roro.” One coder told Koebler that the website “[f]eels like it was completely slapped together. Tons of errors and details leaked in the page source code.”

Indeed, Jennifer Bendery of HuffPost pointed out that one of the errors on the page is that it appears to have posted classified information about the size and staff of a U.S. intelligence agency. Security clearance lawyer Bradley Moss posted: “If you’re a clearance holder, stay away from the DOGE site. These ignorant virgins are going to find themselves prosecuted for violating the Espionage Act before all is said and done.”

Protesters today packed Christopher Park in New York City’s Greenwich Village near the Stonewall National Monument after the Trump administration erased “TQ+” from the LGBTQ+ on the monument’s website. The Stonewall Uprising of 1969, six days of conflict between police and LGBTQ+ protesters after police raided the Stonewall Inn, brought the longstanding efforts of LGBTQ+ activists for civil rights to popular attention, making Stonewall a symbol of LGBTQ+ rights.

Trans activists Marsha P. Johnson and Silvia Rivera were key figures in the Stonewall Uprising. Acknowledging their contribution, one protester held a sign that read, “NATIONAL PARK SERVICE: YOU CAN’T SPELL HISTORY WITHOUT A ‘T’”

Former Republican operative Stuart Stevens had a different take. He posted: “When I see the sexual orientation hate come out of the Republican party under the pretext of just being anti-Trans, I am very tempted to name the Republican operatives and elected officials who are closeted gays. It’s not a short list.”

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contemplatingoutlander · 2 years ago

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FBI resisted opening probe into Trump’s role in Jan. 6 for more than a year

In the DOJ’s investigation of Jan. 6, key Justice officials also quashed an early plan for a task force focused on people in Trump’s orbit

We KNEW the DOJ was avoiding investigating Trump for January 6th. According to this report by Carol D. Leonnig and Aaron C. Davis for The Washington Post, the DOJ dragged its collective feet in starting the Trump investigation--for over a year. It was not until the House Jan. 6th committee and others started to investigate Trump's involvement in the attempted coup, did the DOJ become embarrassed enough to start their own investigation.

In this regard, contrary to what certain Republicans claim, the DOJ was NOT AT ALL "weaponized" against Trump. Rather, they were trying to avoid investigating him.

Below are some excerpts from this report:

A Washington Post investigation found that more than a year would pass before prosecutors and FBI agents jointly embarked on a formal probe of actions directed from the White House to try to steal the election. Even then, the FBI stopped short of identifying the former president as a focus of that investigation. A wariness about appearing partisan, institutional caution, and clashes over how much evidence was sufficient to investigate the actions of Trump and those around him all contributed to the slow pace. Garland and the deputy attorney general, Lisa Monaco, charted a cautious course aimed at restoring public trust in the department while some prosecutors below them chafed, feeling top officials were shying away from looking at evidence of potential crimes by Trump and those close to him, The Post found.

[See more under the cut.]

[...] Whether a decision about Trump’s culpability for Jan. 6 could have come any earlier is unclear. The delays in examining that question began before Garland was even confirmed. Sherwin, senior Justice Department officials and Paul Abbate, the top deputy to FBI Director Christopher A. Wray, quashed a plan by prosecutors in the U.S. attorney’s office to directly investigate Trump associates for any links to the riot, deeming it premature, according to five individuals familiar with the decision. Instead, they insisted on a methodical approach — focusing first on rioters and going up the ladder. The strategy was embraced by Garland, Monaco and Wray. They remained committed to it even as evidence emerged of an organized, weeks-long effort by Trump and his advisers before Jan. 6 to pressure state leaders, Justice officials and Vice President Mike Pence to block the certification of Biden’s victory. In the weeks before Jan. 6, Trump supporters boasted publicly that they had submitted fake electors on his behalf, but the Justice Department declined to investigate the matter in February 2021, The Post found. The department did not actively probe the effort for nearly a year, and the FBI did not open an investigation of the electors scheme until April 2022, about 15 months after the attack. The Justice Department’s painstaking approach to investigating Trump can be traced to Garland’s desire to turn the page from missteps, bruising attacks and allegations of partisanship in the department’s recent investigations of both Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election and Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server. Inside Justice, however, some have complained that the attorney general’s determination to steer clear of any claims of political motive has chilled efforts to investigate the former president. “You couldn’t use the T word,” said one former Justice official briefed on prosecutors’ discussions. [...] “A decision was made early on to focus DOJ resources on the riot,” said one former Justice Department official familiar with the debates. “The notion of opening up on Trump and high-level political operatives was seen as fraught with peril. When Lisa and Garland came on board, they were fully onboard with that approach.” Some prosecutors even had the impression that Trump had become a taboo topic at Main Justice. Colleagues responsible for preparing briefing materials and updates for Garland and Monaco were warned to focus on foot soldiers and to avoid mentioning Trump or his close allies. [...] That fall and winter, a House committee pursuing its own investigation into Jan. 6 conducted interviews with top Trump administration officials. Privately, its chief investigator, Timothy Heaphy, a former U.S. attorney, had alerted prosecutors in the D.C. U.S. attorney’s office to a few details his team had uncovered about Trump’s pressure on Justice Department officials and Pence to block the election results, according to a person familiar with the exchanges. But eye-grabbing news accounts about the committee’s discoveries fueled public criticism that the Justice Department appeared to be lagging. [...] [Between January and February 2022 there was renewed interest in looking at the role of Trump and those close to him in the "fake elector" scheme.] One person directly familiar with the department’s new interest in the case said it felt as though the department was reacting to the House committee’s work as well as heightened media coverage and commentary. “Only after they were embarrassed did they start looking,” the person said.

This is a very long article and you will have to read the rest for yourself. But after reading this article, it now seems clear that if the Jan. 6th Committee and others had not begun to investigate Trump's involvement in the attempted coup, the DOJ would have never gotten involved.

#trump #merrick garland #department of justice #january 6th #delay in investigating trump #the washington post

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reading-writing-revolution · 8 months ago

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$10M cash withdrawal drove secret probe into whether Trump took money from Egypt - The Washington Post

https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2024/08/02/trump-campaign-egypt-investigation/

Trump can do the crime, so let's let him do the time.

August 2, 2024 (Friday)

After the meeting, Trump broke with U.S. policy to praise Sisi, calling him a “fantastic guy.”

Trump’s campaign had been dogged with a lack of funds, and his advisers had begged him to put some of his own money into it. He refused until October 28, when he loaned the campaign $10 million.

Forbes estimates Musk’s wealth at more than $235 billion.

In June the Trump Organization announced a $500 million deal with Saudi real estate developer Dar Global to build a Trump International hotel in Oman.

#fuck trump #crime

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misfitwashere · 8 months ago

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August 2, 2024

Heather Cox Richardson

Aug 03, 2024

After the meeting, Trump broke with U.S. policy to praise Sisi, calling him a “fantastic guy.”

Trump’s campaign had been dogged with a lack of funds, and his advisers had begged him to put some of his own money into it. He refused until October 28, when he loaned the campaign $10 million.

Forbes estimates Musk’s wealth at more than $235 billion.

In June the Trump Organization announced a $500 million deal with Saudi real estate developer Dar Global to build a Trump International hotel in Oman.

—

#heather cox richardson #letters from an american

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mongowheelie · 8 months ago

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Will Bunch delivers stark warning over report Bill Barr dropped Trump Egypt prove - Alternet.org

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t-jfh · 2 years ago

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How do you imprison an ex-president with lifetime Secret Service protection?

If Trump is convicted, his Secret Service protection may be an obstacle to his imprisonment.

All former US presidents, including Donald Trump, are provided Secret Service protection for life — technically this entitlement and protocol applies, even if Trump were to be convicted and sentenced to prison or home confinement.

By Spencer S. Hsu, Carol D. Leonnig and Tom Jackman

The Washington Post - August 4, 2023

https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2023/08/04/trump-criminal-cases-prison-secret-service/

This article originally appeared in The Washington Post August 4, 2023. It was republished in Australia by The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age - August 5, 2023:

YouTube video >> Please Explain Podcast - Inside Politics: Is Donald Trump going to jail? [Podcast (televised) 4 August 2023 / 18mins.+35secs.]:

From the newsrooms of The Age and SMH, Please Explain Podcast provides daily insight to the stories that drive the world.

youtube

On Tuesday 1 August 2023 in the Federal District Court in Washington DC, special counsel Jack Smith filed an indictment against former US president Donald Trump, for his role in the violent aftermath of the 2020 US election.

Trump faces four criminal charges related to alleged conspiracies to overturn the results of the 2020 election and obstruct the process of certification of those results on January 6 2021, the day of the violent Capitol riot.

If convicted, Trump could potentially go to jail for decades.

Please Explain Podcast host Jacqueline Maley talks with North America correspondent Farrah Tomazin and international editor Peter Hatcher on the latest charges against Donald Trump.

Try looking at the Trump legal saga without congratulating yourself.

How the Modern Meritocracy made Trump inevitable.

By David Brooks

This article originally appeared in The New York Times August 2, 2023. It was republished in Australia by The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age - August 7, 2023:

#Youtube #World politics #US politics #Donald Trump #Donald Trump faces Federal conspiracy charges #US Secret Service protection of ex-president Donald Trump #US special counsel Jack Smith #‘Please Explain Podcast’ host Jacqueline Maley #North America correspondent Farrah Tomazin #International news editor Peter Hatcher #Cartoon by Matt Golding #Democracy #Democracy vs. authoritarianism #Partisan politics in contemporary America #Class warfare & political polarisation in contemporary America #Culture wars in contemporary America

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pdougmc · 2 years ago

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#SecretService The Secret Service is investigating how a man entered the home of National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan about two weeks ago without being detected by agents guarding Sullivan’s house, according to three government officials. Sullivan confronted the individual and instructed him to leave. According to people briefed on the incident, there is no evidence that the intruder knew Sullivan or sought to harm him. No arrest was possible, as the intruder left the scene before the Secret Service was alerted. Carol D. Leonnig and Tyler Pager report for the Washington Post.

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nancydrewwouldnever · 2 years ago

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Book recommendations?! Say no more.

She Has Her Mother's Laugh: The Powers, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity - Carl Zimmer

I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life - Ed Yong

The Unfit Heiress: The Tragic Life and Scandalous Sterilization of Ann Cooper Hewitt - Audrey Clare Farley

Zero Fail: The Rise and Fall of the Secret Service - Carol D. Leonnig

Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-First Century

How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America - Clint Smith

Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland - Patrick Radden Keefe

Traveling Black: A Story of Race and Resistance - Mia Bay

On Violence - Hannah Arendt

There are just a few of the books I’ve read recently😊

LOL... remember that time Chris posted a sceenshot from Hannah Arendt?

#ask #book recs

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parcival2 · 4 years ago

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[The Washington Post] QAnon adherents discussed posing as National Guard to try to infiltrate inauguration, according to FBI intelligence briefing

QAnon adherents discussed posing as National Guard to try to infiltrate inauguration, according to FBI intelligence briefing

By Carol D. Leonnig and Matt Zapotosky

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dreaminginthedeepsouth · 2 months ago

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Mike Luckovich

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

February 14, 2025

Heather Cox Richardson

Feb 14, 2025

On this day, I always like to tell the story of Theodore Roosevelt’s terrible 1884 Valentine’s Day and how it led to the Progressive Era, but things are happening too fast these days to leave a gap in the record, so you’ll have to look back at last year—or forward to next—for that story. For this year, here goes:

This crisis is really over whether the Department of Justice will defend the rule of law or declare loyalty to Trump alone. And the crisis is growing.

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

#Letters From An American #heather cox richardson #LGBTQ #justice #National Park Service #Luckovich #authoritarianism #russia russia russia #DOJ #Southern District of NY

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klbmsw · 6 years ago

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“Trump’s calls with foreign leaders have long worried aides, leaving some ‘genuinely horrified’

By Carol D. Leonnig, Shane Harris and Josh Dawsey October 4, 2019 at 7:19 PM EDT nytimes.com

“In one of his first calls with a head of state, President Trump fawned over Russian President Vladimir Putin, telling the man who ordered interference in America’s 2016 election that he was a great leader and apologizing profusely for not calling him sooner.”

He pledged to Saudi officials in another call that he would help the monarchy enter the elite Group of Seven, an alliance of the world’s leading democratic economies.”

“He promised the president of Peru that he would deliver to his country a C-130 military cargo plane overnight, a logistical nightmare that set off a herculean scramble in the West Wing and Pentagon.”

“And in a later call with Putin, Trump asked the former KGB officer for his guidance in forging a friendship with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un — a fellow authoritarian hostile to the United States.”

“Starting long before revelations about Trump’s interactions with Ukraine’s president rocked Washington, Trump’s phone calls with foreign leaders were an anxiety-ridden set of events for his aides and members of the administration, according to former and current officials. They worried that Trump would make promises he shouldn’t keep, endorse policies the United States long opposed, commit a diplomatic blunder that jeopardized a critical alliance or simply pressure a counterpart for a personal favor.”

“There was a constant undercurrent in the Trump administration of [senior staff] who were genuinely horrified by the things they saw that were happening on these calls,” said one former White House official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the private conversations. “Phone calls that were embarrassing, huge mistakes he made, months and months of work that were upended by one impulsive tweet.”

“But Trump’s July 25 call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky went beyond whether the leader of the free world had committed a faux pas, and into grave concerns, he had engaged in a possible crime or impeachable offense. The release last week of a whistleblower complaint alleging Trump pressured Ukraine to investigate his political rivals as well as the release of a rough transcript of the July call led to House Democrats launching an impeachment inquiry against Trump.”

“The Ukraine controversy has put a renewed focus on Trump’s unorthodox way of interacting with fellow world leaders in diplomatic calls. Critics, including some former administration officials, contend that Trump’s behavior on calls with foreign leaders has at times created unneeded tensions with allies and sent troubling signals to adversaries or authoritarians that the United States supports or at least does not care about human rights or their aggressive behavior elsewhere in the world.”

“Joel Willett, a former intelligence officer who worked at the National Security Council from 2014 to 2015, said he was concerned both by the descriptions of a president winging it, and the realization that the president’s behavior disturbs and frightens career civil servants.”

“What a burden it must be to be stuck between your position of trust in the White House and another obligation you may feel to the American people to say something,” he said. The White House did not respond to a request for comment Thursday or Friday.”

“Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), a Trump ally, said the president speaks his mind and diverges from other presidents who follow protocol. Graham said he saw nothing distressing in the president’s July 25 call with Zelensky and said he expected it to be worse, partially given his own experience with Trump on the phone.”

“If you take half of my phone calls with him, it wouldn’t read as cleanly and nicely,” he said, adding that the president sounded like a “normal person.”

“This story is based on interviews with 12 former or current officials with knowledge of the president’s foreign calls. These officials had direct involvement in the calls, were briefed on them or read the transcripts afterward. All spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the president’s private conversations with world leaders.”

“The first call Trump made that set off alarm bells came less than two weeks after his inauguration. On Jan. 28, Trump called Putin for what should have been a routine formality: accepting a foreign leader’s congratulations. Former White House officials described Trump as “obsequious” and “fawning,” but said he also rambled off into different topics without any clear point, while Putin appeared to stick to formal talking points for a first official exchange.”

“He was like, ‘Oh my gosh, my people didn’t tell me you wanted to talk to me,’ ” said one person with direct knowledge of the call.”

“Trump has been consistently cozy with authoritarian leaders, sparking anxiety among aides about the solicitous tones he struck with Chinese President Xi Jinping, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Putin.”

“We couldn’t figure out early on why he was being so nice to Russia,” one former senior administration official said. H.R. McMaster, the president’s then-national security adviser, launched an internal campaign to get Trump to be more skeptical of the Russians. Officials expressed surprise in both of his early Putin calls at why he was so friendly.”

“In another call, in April 2017, Trump told Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, who had overseen a brutal campaign that has resulted in the extrajudicial killings of thousands of suspected drug dealers, that he was doing an “unbelievable job on the drug problem.”

“Trump’s personal goals seeped into calls. He pestered Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe for help in recommending him for a Nobel Prize, according to an official familiar with the call. “People who could do things for him — he was nice too,” said one former security official. “Leaders with trade deficits, strong female leaders, members of NATO — those tended to go badly.”

“Aides bristled at the dismissive way he sometimes addressed longtime U.S. allies, especially women. In a summer 2018 call with Prime Minister Theresa May, Trump harangued the British leader about her country’s contribution to NATO. He then disputed her intelligence community’s conclusion that Putin’s government had orchestrated the attempted murder and poisoning of a former Russian spy on British soil.”

“Trump was totally bought into the idea there was credible doubt about the poisoning,” said one person briefed on the call. “A solid 10 minutes of the conversation is spent with May saying it’s highly likely and him saying he’s not sure.”

“Trump would sometimes make commitments to foreign leaders that flew in the face of U.S. policy and international agreements, as when he told a Saudi royal that he would support their country’s entry into the G-7.”

“The G-7 is supposed to be the allies with whom we share the most common values and the deepest commitment to upholding the rules-based order,” the former official said.”

“Russia was kicked out of the group in 2014 for violating international law when it invaded Ukraine and annexed Crimea. Trump has publicly advocated for Russia to be allowed back in. Saudi Arabia, which oppresses women and has a record of human rights abuses, wasn’t a fit candidate for membership, the former official said.”

“Saudi Arabia was not admitted to the group. Calls with foreign leaders have often been highly orchestrated events in past administrations.”

“When I was at the White House, there was a very deliberative process of the president absorbing information from people who had deep substantive knowledge of the countries and relationships with these leaders. Preparation for these calls was taken very seriously,” Willett said. “It appears to be freestyle and ad-libbed now.”

“Trump has rejected much of the protocol and preparation associated with foreign calls, even as his national security team tried to establish goals for each conversation.”

“Instead, Trump often sought to use calls as a way to befriend whoever he was talking to, one current senior administration official said, defending the president. “So he might say something that sounds terrible to the outside, but in his mind, he’s trying to build a relationship with that person and sees flattery as the way to do it.”

“The president resisted long briefings before calls or reading in preparation, several former officials said. McMaster, who preferred providing the president with the information he could use to make decisions, resigned himself to giving Trump small notecards with bulleted highlights and talking points.”

“You had two to three minutes max,” said one former senior administration official. “And then he was still usually going to say whatever he wanted to say.”

“As a result, staff fretted that Trump came across ill-informed in some calls, and even oafish. In a conversation with China’s Xi, Trump repeated numerous times how much he liked a kind of chocolate cake, one former official said. The president publicly described the dessert the two had in April 2017 when Trump and Xi met at the president’s Mar-a-Lago resort as “the most beautiful piece of chocolate cake you have ever seen.”

“Trump preferred to make calls from the residence, which frustrated some NSC staff and West Wing aides who wanted to be on hand to give the president real-time advice. If he held the call in the Oval Office, aides would gather around the desk and pass him notes to try to keep the calls on point. On a few occasions, then-Chief of Staff John F. Kelly muted the call to try to get the president back on track, two officials said.”

“Tim O’Brien, a Trump biographer, and critic, said the calls fit Trump’s style as a business leader. “When he had to get on calls with investors on a publicly-traded company, they had to worry that he would break securities laws and lie about the company’s profits,” O’Brien said. “When he would go and meet with regulators with the casino control commission, his lawyers were always worried under oath, in a public setting, that he would say something that would be legally damaging.”

“Though calls with foreign leaders are routinely planned in advance, Trump a few times called Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and French President Emmanuel Macron unannounced as if they were friends, a former administration official said.”

“After some early summaries of Trump calls with the leaders of Mexico and Australia leaked to the press in 2017, the White House tightened restrictions on who could access the transcripts and kept better track of who had custody of copies. For example, Vice President Pence still received a courtesy copy of any foreign-leader call, but his staff now had to sign off when they transported it to his office and also sign off when they returned or destroyed the document.”

“Some former officials said that over time staff became used to the oddity of some calls even if they still found them troubling.”

“People had gotten really numb to him blurting out something he shouldn’t have,” one former national security staffer remarked.”

“But officials who had served in the White House through the end of 2018 were still shocked by the whistleblower complaint about the effort to “lockdown” records of Trump’s July 25 call. The complaint said White House officials ordered the transcript moved into a highly secure computer system, known as NICE, which is normally reserved only for information about the most sensitive code-word-level intelligence programs.”

“Unheard of,” said one former official who handled foreign calls. “That just blew me away.”

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avanneman · 7 years ago

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Carol D. Leonnig, John Wagner, and Ellen Nakashima, babes in the wood

Carol, John, and Ellen are reporters with the Washington Post. They have an article in today’s paper, “Trump lawyer says president knew Flynn had given FBI the same account he gave to vice president”, filling us in on what John Dowd, President Trump’s lawyer—or one of them, at least—has to say about the president’s latest tweet. The article included the following paragraph:

“Dowd confirmed Sunday that he had drafted the tweet for Trump and acknowledged that it was sloppily worded. He said it was inaccurate to say the president was told that Flynn had lied to the FBI. Dowd said Sunday that Trump knew only what acting attorney general Sally Yates had told the White House counsel: that Flynn’s accounts to the agents interviewing him were the same as those Flynn gave Pence, and “that the [Justice] Department was not accusing him of lying.”

Here is a reworking of that first sentence: “Dowd claimed Sunday that he had drafted the tweet for Trump and insisted that it was sloppily worded, so that what Dowd meant to have the president say was not as incriminating as what the tweet that he wrote himself actually said.”

How can Carol, John, and Ellen claim that Dowd “confirmed” to them that he had written the tweet? The only way they can know that he wrote it is if they watched him do it. Otherwise, they are simply relying on hearsay from people who have every reason to lie. "Confirm" does not mean "repeat". At least, it shouldn't.

Why, furthermore, do they say he “acknowledged” that it was sloppily worded? Can it be demonstrated in some objective manner that it’s “sloppily worded”? Did they say to him ‘Isn’t it true the tweet is sloppily worded’? I doubt it. Why do they let Dowd put words in their mouths? Maybe it’s impeccably worded. Maybe it just states (impeccably) a truth that Mr. Dowd doesn’t want it to state.

It’s true that my rewrite is rather “aggressive,” but here’s what C, J, & E could have written:

Dowd said on Sunday that he had drafted the tweet for Trump. He added that the tweet was unfortunately worded and should not have implied that the president had been told that Flynn lied to the FBI.

#Carol D. Leonnig #ohn Wagner #Ellen Nakashima #John Dowd #Donald Trump

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bountyofbeads · 6 years ago

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Whistleblower claimed Trump abused his office and that White House officials tried to cover it up

By Devlin Barrett, Carol D. Leonnig and Matt Zapotosky | Published September 26 at 2:46 PM ET | Washington Post | Posted September 26, 2019 4:21 PM ET

The whistleblower complaint at the heart of the burgeoning controversy over President Trump’s call with the Ukrainian president claims not only that Trump misused his office for personal gain and endangered national security but that unidentified White House officials tried to hide that conduct.

In forceful language, the unidentified whistleblower alleged that the commander in chief pushed his foreign counterpart to investigate former vice president Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden and that senior White House officials then tried to “lock down” records related to the matter.

The pressure, the whistleblower alleged, came in a phone call July 25 between Trump and President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, an exchange that turned so politically problematic that White House lawyers directed other officials to remove the electronic transcript of the conversation from the computer system where it was stored.

The transcript, the whistleblower alleged, was then loaded onto a separate system meant for classified information. And according to White House officials who informed the whistleblower, that was “not the first time” a transcript was put there due to concerns about politics rather than national security, the complaint alleged.

Trump, the whistleblower wrote, was “using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country in the 2020 U.S. election.”

The whistleblower’s assertions — made public Thursday after House Intelligence Committee Chairman Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.) released the person’s complaint — fueled an already intense political battle that this week led congressional Democrats to launch a formal inquiry into whether Trump should be impeached. Just minutes after Schiff tweeted a link to the document, lawmakers convened a hearing to question Trump’s acting director of national intelligence, Joseph Maguire, about the matter.

Democrats pressed Maguire on why he had not turned the complaint over to them sooner, as they say the law required, while Republicans attacked the reliability of the whistleblower’s information as unproven hearsay.

Trump echoed those attacks, writing on Twitter: “A whistleblower with second hand information? Another Fake News Story! See what was said on the very nice, no pressure, call. Another Witch Hunt!”

He later targeted congressional Democrats, asserting they were consumed by what he called his “perfect” call with Zelensky.

“They don’t want to talk about anything because they’re fixated on this,” Trump said.

The whistleblower’s complaint, dated Aug. 12, is just seven-pages long, though it also contains a two-page addendum, portions of which remain classified. It was directed to the heads of the House and Senate intelligence committees, spelling out what the whistleblower, who is a U.S. intelligence official, felt was an “urgent concern” based on information more than a half-dozen officials had shared.

The whistleblower alleged that Trump had solicited election interference that “includes, among other things, pressuring a foreign country to investigate one of the President’s main domestic political rivals.”

“The President’s personal lawyer, Mr. Rudolph W. Giuliani, is a central figure in this effort,” the whistleblower wrote. “Attorney General [William P.] Barr appears to be involved as well,” the complaint stated.

In their July phone call, Trump repeatedly pressed Zelensky to investigate the Bidens.

Joe Biden is seeking the Democratic nomination to run against Trump in 2020. His son served on the board of a Ukrainian gas company that came under scrutiny by authorities there.

Hunter Biden was not accused of any wrongdoing in the investigation. As vice president, Joe Biden pressured Ukraine to fire its top prosecutor, who Biden and other Western officials said was not sufficiently pursuing corruption cases. At the time, the Ukrainians’ investigation was dormant, according to former Ukrainian and U.S. officials.

In the call with Zelensky, Trump offered Barr’s help while dangling a possible visit to the White House, according to a rough transcript of the call released by the White House on Wednesday.

A spokeswoman for Barr has said that he did not know about the phone call until the whistleblower issue was raised and that he had not spoken with Trump about assisting Ukraine with an investigation of Biden or his son.

Alarmed by the conversation between Trump and Zelensky, and related interactions between Giuliani and other Ukrainian officials, the whistleblower submitted the complaint to the inspector general for the U.S. intelligence agencies.

While the whistleblower’s primary concern is the president’s phone call with Zelensky, it is clear from the document released Thursday that its author also was troubled by what appeared then to be a four-month pattern of election season misconduct involving the president, his lawyer and White House aides who sought to keep the whole thing quiet.

“I am also concerned that these actions pose risks to U.S. national security and undermine the U.S. government’s efforts to deter and counter foreign interference in U.S. elections,” the person wrote.

According to the complaint, the whistleblower was not alone in harboring concerns.

“The White House officials who told me this information were deeply disturbed by what had transpired in the phone call,” the whistleblower wrote. “They told me there was already a ‘discussion ongoing’ with White House lawyers about how to treat the call because of the likelihood, in the officials’ retelling, that they had witnessed the President abuse his office for personal gain.”

About a dozen White House officials listened in on the call, which is common when heads of state speak directly. The complaint identifies State Department official T. Ulrich Brechbuhl as one of the officials who listened to the call. Since May, Brechbuhl has worked as a counselor to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo — a high-level position reporting directly to the secretary.

The State Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The alarm was so great, the whistleblower alleged, that White House officials sought to limit access to the written record of the call.

“In the days following the phone call, I learned from multiple U.S. officials that senior White House officials had intervened to ‘lock down’ all records of the phone call, especially the word-for-word transcript of the call that was produced — as is customary — by the White House Situation Room,” the whistleblower alleged. “This set of actions underscored to me that White House officials understood the gravity of what had transpired in the call.”

The whistleblower also said that they were told by unidentified White House officials that they had been directed by White House lawyers “to remove the electronic transcript from the computer system in which such transcripts are typically stored.” The whistleblower cryptically alleged that, according to other White House officials, this was “not the first time” a transcript was placed into a particular classified system “solely for the purpose of protecting politically sensitive — rather than national security sensitive — information.”

The whistleblower did not specify the other instances, at least in the unredacted portions of the complaint.

The White House Counsel’s Office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Larry Pfeiffer, a former senior director of the White House Situation Room in the Obama administration, said the computer system reserved for code-word-level intelligence information is used to retain the most sensitive compartmented intelligence matters, such as covert programs. It may also hold some diplomatically sensitive information — such as records of highly delicate negotiations and conversations, he said.

“It would never be used to protect or ‘lock down’ politically sensitive material or to protect the president or senior officials from embarrassment,” said Pfeiffer, now director of the Hayden Center for Intelligence, Policy and International Security at George Mason University. “I’m appalled at this clear abuse of the President’s power to manage and protect our most sensitive secrets. ”

The complaint also describes alleged actions by Giuliani that seemed designed to pressure the Ukraine government to go after Joe Biden.

The whistleblower learned from other U.S. officials that Giuliani’s visit to Madrid on Aug. 2 to meet with a Zelensky aide was “a direct followup” to Trump’s July 25 call to the Ukrainian president and request for an investigation of the Bidens, the complaint says. Giuliani also reached out to “a variety of other Zelenskyy advisers, including Chief of Staff Andriy Bohdan and Acting Chairman of the Security Service of Ukraine Ivan Bakanov,” according to the complaint.

Giuliani’s efforts complicated U.S. diplomats’ dealings with Ukraine, according to the complaint. After the Aug. 2 meeting, the whistleblower alleged, two ambassadors had to advise Ukrainian leaders on “how to ‘navigate’ the demands that the President had made of Mr. Zelensky.” Those ambassadors also talked to Giuliani to “contain the damage” to national security, the whistleblower wrote.

The whistleblower’s account is based on months of conversations with colleagues and concedes that, for most of the events described, the whistleblower was not a direct witness. The whistleblower wrote that the information was gathered “in the course of official interagency business. It is routine for U.S. officials with responsibility for a particular regional or functional portfolio to share such information with one another to inform policymaking and analysis.”

Although the whistleblower did not have direct knowledge of much of what was described in the complaint, the account lines up remarkably well with public reporting and the transcript of the Trump-Zelensky phone call — noting that Trump had pressed for both an investigation into Biden and help locating the computer server used by the Democratic National Committee that was hacked by Russia ahead of the 2016 U.S. election. The president seemed to believe the server was in Ukraine, according to the White House memo detailing the phone call.

The whistleblower complaint became the subject of a high-stakes back-and-forth among government agencies about how it should be handled. While the inspector general sought to alert Congress to the concern, lawyers at the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel concluded it should not be shared with Congress. The Justice Department decided it was not a proper whistleblower complaint because it involved the conduct of the president, who is not an employee of the intelligence agencies.

Instead, the complaint was relayed to the Justice Department’s Criminal Division in late August as a possible violation of campaign finance laws. After reviewing the matter for several weeks, Justice Department officials concluded the law had not been broken and closed the matter without opening a formal investigation.

In addition to raising a question about campaign finance laws, the whistleblower suggested that Trump and Giuliani might have engaged in a corrupt quid pro quo with Zelensky. The whistleblower alleged, for example, that Ukrainian leaders were led to believe that Zelensky would get a meeting or phone call with Trump only if they would “play ball” on the investigations sought by Giuliani.

The whistleblower also alleged that in May, Trump instructed Vice President Pence to cancel planned travel to Ukraine for Zelensky’s inauguration — sending Energy Secretary Rick Perry in his place — and that it was “made clear” to U.S. officials that Trump did not want to meet with Zelensky until he saw how Zelensky “chose to act” in office.

Pence’s office declined to comment.

Karoun Demirjian, Karen DeYoung, Ellen Nakashima, Ashley Parker and John Hudson contributed to this report.

5 key takeaways and allegations from the Trump whistleblower complaint

By Aaron Blake | Published

September 26 at 10:20 AM ET | Washington Post | Posted September 26, 2019 4:24 PM ET |

We now have the seven-page declassified whistleblower complaint alleging misdeeds by President Trump with regard to Ukraine.

Below are some of the key takeaways and allegations in it.

1. The White House allegedly tried to bury the Trump-Zelensky call

The whistleblower said the White House went outside the normal process to prevent officials from reviewing the rough transcript of Trump’s July 25 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky — the same rough transcript the White House released Wednesday amid pressure.

The complaint says officials told the whistleblower that they were told to “lock down” all records of the phone call, especially the official word-for-word transcript.

“According to multiple White House officials I spoke with, the transcript of the President’s call with President Zelenskyy was placed into a computer system managed directly by the National Security Council (NSC) Directorate of Intelligence Programs,” the complaint says, noting that it’s an isolated computer system for “codeword-level intelligence information.”

The complaint says officials thought this was an abuse of the system because it was done “solely for the purpose of protecting politically sensitive—rather than national security sensitive—information.”

This, notably, would fly in the face of White House claims that its release of the phone call Wednesday was done for transparency reasons and that there was nothing wrong with the call. The call contains no apparent sensitive national security information, yet it was allegedly buried.

The whistleblower also said they were told that this was “not the first time” something was handled like this.

2. Trump allegedly dangled a meeting with Zelensky as a reward

There has been plenty of speculation about whether military aid was a potential quid pro quo Trump used to encourage Zelensky to open his chosen investigations, including one involving Joe and Hunter Biden.

The complaint doesn’t dwell upon that too much, saying it wasn’t clear that Ukraine was even aware that aid was being withheld. What it does say is that officials believed Trump dangled a meeting with Zelensky — something the Ukrainian leader badly wanted — as a reward to “play ball.”

“During this same time frame, multiple U.S. officials told me that the Ukrainian leadership was led to believe that a meeting between the President and President Zelenskyy would depend on whether Zelenskyy showed willingness to ‘play ball’ on the issues that had been publicly aired by [former Ukraine prosecutor general Yuri] Lutsenko and [Trump’s personal lawyer Rudolph W.] Giuliani.”

The whistleblower clarifies, though, that “I do not know who delivered this message to the Ukrainian leadership, or when.”

Separately, the whistleblower alleges that Trump also pulled back a planned visit to Ukraine by Vice President Pence for these purposes.

“I learned from U.S. officials that, on or around 14 May, the President instructed Vice President Pence to cancel his planned travel to Ukraine to attend President Zelenskyy’s inauguration on 20 May; Secretary of Energy Rick Perry led the delegation instead,” the complaint alleges. The whistleblower says it was " 'made clear’ to them that the President did not want to meet with Mr. Zelenskyy until he saw how Zelenskyy ‘chose to act’ in office."

The Washington Post has previously reported that Trump has resisted the idea of meeting with Zelensky. But on the July 25 phone call with him, after Zelensky suggests that he will pursue the investigations Trump wants, Trump indicates they will plan a meeting in Washington.

“Whenever you would like to come to the White House, feel free to call,” Trump says on the call. “Give us a date, and we’ll work that out.”

On Wednesday at the United Nations, Zelensky said in an apparently joking manner of the still-unscheduled meeting: “And I want to thank you for invitation to Washington. You invited me, but I think — I’m sorry. I’m sorry. But I think you forgot to tell me the date. But I think in the near future.”

3. Two ambassadors allegedly worked to contain the potential damage

The whistleblower describes two U.S. officials — Kurt Volker, the U.S. special representative for Ukraine negotiations, and Gordon Sondland, the U.S. ambassador to the European Union — trying to mitigate the potential damage caused by Trump’s efforts.

“Based on multiple readouts of the meetings recounted to me by various U.S. officials,” the whistleblower says, “Ambassadors Volker and Sondland reportedly provided advice to the Ukrainian leadership about how to ‘navigate’ the demands that the President had made of Mr. Zelenskyy.”

The whistleblower adds that they were told:

• that State Department officials, including Ambassadors Volker and Sondland, had spoken with Mr. Giuliani in an attempt to “contain the damage” to U.S. national security; and

• that Ambassadors Volker and Sondland during this time period met with members of the new Ukrainian administration and, in addition to discussing policy matters, sought to help Ukrainian leaders understand and respond to the differing messages they were receiving from official U.S. channels on the one hand, and from Mr. Giuliani on the other.

4. The whistleblower nailed the July 25 call

White House officials and Republicans in Congress are already attacking the credibility of the whistleblower, noting that almost all of the allegations rely on secondhand information from other U.S. officials.

But the whistleblower’s characterization of the July 25 Trump-Zelensky phone call is spot-on, according to what we saw in the rough transcript the White House released Wednesday.

The whistleblower wrote on Aug. 12, long before the call was released, that they were told Trump pressured Zelensky to:

• initiate or continue an investigation into the activities of former Vice President Joseph Biden and his son, Hunter Biden;

• assist in purportedly uncovering that allegations of Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election originated in Ukraine, with 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. cyber security firm Crowdstrike, which initially reported that Russian hackers had penetrated the DNC’s networks in 2016; and

• meet or speak with two people the President named explicitly as his personal envoys on these matters, Mr. Giuliani and Attorney General Barr, to whom the President referred multiple times in tandem.

The whistleblower also notes Trump lent his support to Ukraine’s former prosecutor general, which is also on the call. And they note that Trump mentioned only the two investigations, which is true.

That suggests they did their homework.

5. Many people around Trump are apparently troubled, and some are allegedly assisting in a coverup

Many of the things described above don’t take place unless, a) multiple people are involved in the alleged corruption, and b) multiple people are raising concerns.

The whistleblower said that “over the past four months, more than half a dozen U.S. officials have informed me of various facts related to this effort.”

They add that “in almost all cases, multiple officials recounted fact patterns that were consistent with one another. In addition, a variety of information consistent with these private accounts has been reported publicly.”

“Approximately a dozen” White House officials were listening to the Zelensky call, according to the complaint, and it describes a concerted effort to keep the rough transcript hidden. It also refers to efforts to communicate to Ukraine that meetings would be dependent upon Zelensky pursuing these investigations that would help Trump personally.

If there is something wrong here, lots of people were complicit. And by the same token, lots of people seemed to be concerned enough to talk about it and to try to work around the edges to contain the damage.

This means there are lots of potential witnesses here and lots of potential hearings ahead in House Democrats’ impeachment inquiry.

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misfitwashere · 2 months ago

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HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

FEB 15

This crisis is really over whether the Department of Justice will defend the rule of law or declare loyalty to Trump alone. And the crisis is growing.

—

#heather cox richardson #letters from an american

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