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The official "let's impeach Trump" thread

And LOL on me investigating you. You know it's not going to happen, but if it did I think you could also admit that you will have had enough after three years.

Not if I continued to behave the way Trump does.
I have said it before and I'll say it again, the media treats Trump like crap. Worse than any president in history. But there is a reason for that.
It's because he acts so crappy and is the worst president in history.
He makes his bed, it's only right that he should have to lie in it. I believe in consequences for your actions.

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I'd get those wagers in the hands of a third party. Jazzyfresh is going to redefine the terms of the bet after Trump gets impeached.
That's a guarantee.
In fact I will bet you $1,000 that this happens if trump gets impeached.

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When I made the initial bet I would've said no dice 100% but I did hastly agree to impeached so I kind of pinned myself to an official impeachment. As I said I'll stand by my bet and I agree.

Even if he does get impeached I find it laughable that Ole Donny boy will still be filthy rich and living it up. The only thing we have then is an even more divided America. Personally I'd rather see the Democrats show some backbone and just beat the guy next year but I think it's quite obvious that impeachment is their only way. The party is worthless garbage right now. And lol if you think the Republican clowns are any better off.

As I've said if we're going to drain the swamp let's do it, but that includes people like the Bidens. It never will happen though as this isn't about overstepping boundaries, this is about a party that is so ashamed that they lost that they have given up their very ideals in their crazy bloodlust for Trump.

Clinton said it best, not accepting results is a direct threat to our democracy. I see shades of Marxism in the whole thing.
Does draining the swamp include people like the Trump's?

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I can't read the article as I'm not a WaPo subscriber. It does not surprise me that they would claim a close match because they are among the most liberally slanted papers. My recollection is that the whistleblower claimed that Trump brought up Biden 7 or 8 times. The transcript shows once. The whistleblower claimed that Trump tied the aid package to the Biden issue. The transcript does not support that. These things matter a lot, and I can only assume that is the reason that Schiff decided to add those sorts of things when he made up the version of the transcript that he read at the congressional hearing.

I'm sure the Post is not the only place that has posted a direct comparison of the two. But here's the start of the article for you:

[WHISTLEBLOWER] COMPLAINT: "Multiple White House officials with direct knowledge of the call informed me that, after an initial exchange of pleasantries, the President used the remainder of the call to advance his personal interests.”

TRANSCRIPT: Trump speaks in nine discrete segments.

  1. He congratulates Zelensky on winning the presidency.
  2. He says Ukraine is happy Zelensky won.
  3. He mentions how much aid the United States provides to Ukraine.
  4. He asks a favor: Investigate (baseless) rumors about Ukrainian involvement in an assessment of Russia’s hacking of the Democratic National Committee in 2016.
  5. He encourages working with his attorney Rudolph W. Giuliani and pushes for an investigation of former vice president Joe Biden and his son.
  6. He says he’ll have Giuliani and Attorney General William P. Barr call about the investigation.
  7. He invites Zelensky to the White House.
  8. He says he’ll see Zelensky at the White House or at an event in Poland (that he ended up not attending).
  9. He again offers his congratulations.
Except for the invitation to the White House — though even that is questionable — the whistleblower’s allegation is accurate.

COMPLAINT: “According to the White House officials who had direct knowledge of the call, the President pressured Mr. Zelenskyy to … initiate or continue an investigation into the activities of former Vice President Joseph Biden and his son, Hunter Biden. …" (A different transliteration of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s surname is used throughout the document.)

TRANSCRIPT: Trump says, "[T]here’s a lot of talk about Biden’s son, that Biden stopped the prosecution and a lot of people want to find out about that so whatever you can do with the Attorney General would be great. Biden went around bragging that he stopped the prosecution so if you can look into it … It sounds horrible to me.”

COMPLAINT: “ … 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 …"

TRANSCRIPT: Trump says, “I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine, they say Crowdstrike … I guess you have one of your wealthy people … The server, they say Ukraine has it. There are a lot of things that went on, the whole situation.” (Ellipses in the original.)
 
I am not aware of anything he has done that is impeachable. IMO the attempt to impeach him has been mostly politically driven.

Your head is buried in the sand, then. Here are some that seem the most egregious to me:

1) Blatant violation of the emoluments clause of the Constitution. I've been complaining about that since day 1. People curry favor with him by spending money on his properties (Trump tower New York, Mar-a-lago, the Scotland property, etc.). And his business holdings very well might be impacting his policy decisions (Trump towers in Turkey, for example).

2) Violating campaign finance laws. Need I remind you that he is literally an "unindicted co-conspirator" in the case that sentenced Michael Cohen to jail. Anyone else in the country would also have gone to jail for that. And he still might when he is out of office.

3) Obstruction of justice. See the Mueller Report, volume 2, which details several episodes that almost certainly would have caused obstruction charges to be filed against anyone else in the country. Here's a summary of some of those items (from https://www.lawfareblog.com/so-you-want-impeach-president): "Even if one believes that firing FBI Director James Comey was a wholly legitimate move, the president didn’t stop there. He also attempted to dissuade witnesses, specifically Paul Manafort, Michael Flynn and Michael Cohen, from cooperating with federal authorities. He attempted to corruptly persuade Attorney General Jeff Sessions to limit the scope of the investigation and to reverse his decision to recuse himself from personal involvement in the face of conflicts. He attempted to limit the investigation by pressuring Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to fire the special counsel. And he endeavored to have White House Counsel Don McGahn create a false record regarding Trump’s actions with respect to efforts to fire Robert Mueller." One can add his statements about the whistleblower to those items.

4) Abuse of power, namely "his attempts to leverage the power of the presidency to cause investigation and prosecution of political opponents" (phrasing from lawfare). This includes involving Rudy Giuliani--who is NOT a US government employee but rather Trump's personal lawyer/campaign employee--in attempts to pressure foreign governments to dig up dirt on Hunter and Joe Biden. Giuliani literally admitted this on the air. And if, as you may be thinking, it's about exposing corruption in general, (a) why did the requests to investigate criminal activity not go through government channels? (b) why are the Bidens the ONLY individuals that Giuliani and Trump cared about? Where are any requests to invest any other potentially corrupt individuals?

5) More abuse of power, namely his withholding of the congressionally approved aid to Ukraine in order to pressure them, again about the Bidens. It is a crime to withhold funds like that. Again in the words of the lawfare article which states things better than I can, "[there was] “collusion” with a foreign power for purposes of electoral advantage, gross misuse of congressionally appropriated funds, and pressuring a foreign leader for reasons of personal gain rather than public concern."

6) Repeatedly and unabashedly lying to the public. While not illegal, this is still unpresidential and impeachable. It was in fact, one of the impeachment articles against Nixon. And the quantity of Trump's lies leave Nixon's lies in the dust.

7) Obstruction of Congress. Trump is telling government employees not to cooperate with the Houses's impeachment investigation, including directions telling people to ignore subpoenas. That's obstruction. Most recent example was the former Ukrainian ambassador, Marie Yovanovitch, who defied Trump's illegal order to testify on Friday, but there have been several others. The President's failure to cooperate with Congress was in fact one of the impeachment articles against Andrew Johnson--article 10 of that impeachment reads in part as follows (from https://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/common/briefing/Impeachment_Johnson.htm): "ARTICLE 10.That said Andrew Johnson, President of the United States, unmindful of the high duties of his high office and the dignity and proprieties thereof, and of the harmony and courtesies which ought to exist and be maintained between the executive and legislative branches of the Government of the United States, designing and intending to set aside the rightful authorities and powers of Congress, did attempt to bring into disgrace, ridicule, hatred, contempt and reproach, the Congress of the United States, and the several branches thereof, to impair and destroy the regard and respect of all the good people of the United States for the Congress and the legislative power thereof, which all officers of the government ought inviolably to preserve and maintain, and to excite the odium and resentment of all good people of the United States against Congress and the laws by it duly and constitutionally enacted"

I'm sure there's more that could be added to the list but I'll stop there. And I'll remind people of my sig quote: "There aren’t enough tax cuts and judges in the world to justify a president who stands on the stage with Vladimir Putin and sides against America’s intelligence community; who ignores, if not invites, foreign interference in our elections and normalizes unprecedented levels of corruption and incompetence; who abdicates moral leadership both at home and abroad; who lies and obstructs justice and then lies about obstructing justice."

And of course there's this list I made for post 3 of this thread--a myriad of items which include some of the above. Imo many of these are also impeachable, although not all of them are criminal (the racism, for example).
  • racism
  • sex crimes
  • concentration camps
  • corruption
  • traitor
  • obstruction of justice
  • attacks on rule of law
  • assault on freedom of the press
  • pathological lying
  • unfitness for office
  • incompetence
  • attacks on our most important allies and alliances
  • systematic destruction of our environment
  • violation of international treaties and agreements
  • embrace of our enemies
  • defense of murdering dictators
  • serial undermining of our national security
  • nepotism
  • attacks on our federal law enforcement and intelligence communities
  • fiscal recklessness
  • degradation of the office and of public discourse in America
  • support of Nazis and white supremacists
  • the dead in Puerto Rico and the at the border
  • turning the US government into a criminal conspiracy to empower and enrich the president and his supporters
  • weaponization of politics in America to attack the weak
 
OK, one more thing for @Joe Bagadonuts because you probably didn't see this post https://jazzfanz.com/threads/the-official-lets-impeach-trump-thread.113221/page-189#post-1828295 if you truly think Trump's behavior is not impeachable. It's from an op-ed by Dana Milbank published in the Washington Post.

Trump began staking his title to absolute power in his first weeks in office. “The whole world will soon see, as we begin to take further actions, that the powers of the president to protect our country are very substantial and will not be questioned,” White House adviser Stephen Miller announced. He wasn’t kidding.

Trump soon stated that “I have the absolute right” to fire FBI Director James Comey. He subsequently proclaimed the “absolute right” to provide Russia with an ally’s highly classified intelligence; the “absolute right” to pardon himself; the “absolute right” to shut down the southern border; the “absolute right” to fire special counsel Robert Mueller; the “absolute right” to sign an executive order removing the Constitution’s birthright-citizenship provision; the “absolute right” to contrive a national emergency to deny Congress the power of the purse; the “absolute right” to order U.S. businesses out of China; the “absolute right” to release apparent spy-satellite imagery of Iran; and, most recently, the “absolute right” to ask other countries to furnish evidence that Joe Biden is corrupt.

Kellyanne Conway asserted Trump’s “absolute right” to give his son-in-law a security clearance over security professionals’ objections. White House counsel Pat Cipollone said current and former White House officials are “absolutely immune” from testifying before Congress. As others have noted, Trump has repeatedly said the Constitution’s Article II empowers him “to do whatever I want” and bestows on him “all of these rights at a level nobody has ever seen before.”

At a level nobody has ever seen. Now we see the corrupting effect of this claim of own absolute power:

Without troubling himself to engage in the usual consultations with lawmakers, allies and military leaders, he ordered a pullout of U.S. troops from northern Syria, setting off a Turkish invasion as well as fears of a massacre of our Kurdish allies and religious minorities (including some 50,000 Christians) and of a revival of Islamic State. He did it at the request of the repressive leader of Turkey, where Trump has boasted of his extensive business interests.

Trump declared “perfect” his phone call with the Ukrainian president, at a time when Trump was withholding military aid to that country, requesting a “favor” and asking for damaging information about Biden — a stark violation of campaign-finance law. He then publicly asked China for the same on the eve of trade talks.

He responded to the resulting impeachment inquiry in the House with a bizarre letter from Cipollone asserting, essentially, that Trump is exempt from all congressional oversight and won’t participate in this “unconstitutional inquiry” — even though the Constitution expressly gives the House “the sole Power of Impeachment.”
...
Maybe [Trump supporters] will finally realize that by supporting Trump as he claims absolute power, they are clearing the way for a successor who ignores Congress and inconvenient laws to, say, expand abortion rights, gay rights, gun control and restrictions on Christian schools. Maybe they will grasp that the democratic safeguards they are now letting Trump overrun won’t be there when a future leader claims an “absolute right” to assault what they hold dear.


If you find this to be acceptable behavior for Trump, then it logically must also be acceptable behavior for ANY FUTURE PRESIDENT. Do you really feel that way?

If you do not find this to be acceptable behavior, then it logically must be IMPEACHABLE behavior, because that is literally the only way to stop someone who seizes these "rights" for himself.
 
Hey just an FYI the constitution doesn't require a vote before an inquiry, and specifically states the House has sole authority to impeach the president, meaning they get to set the terms. All this crying about process is just that, a tantrum.

Why should an impeachment inquiry require a vote? So the president’s party can wield an inquiry vote (not an actual impeachment vote) against members in swing district?

It’s stupid to think that merely conducting an impeachment inquiry (oversight) should require a vote. And then the later actual impeachment requires a vote. Why should impeachment require the House to essentially vote for impeachment twice? Especially since inquiry is oversight and may not even amount to an impeachment vote. It’s stupid.

If trump wants his day in court, he’ll get it in the senate. That’s when the trial begins and his lawyers can cross examine whistleblowers (and other witnesses).

It appears that most of the garbage you’re refuting could best be solved if the poster or posters (I’m guess it’s jazzy again) spent just 10 mins looking impeachment up. Not sure why so many posters here are repeating easily debunked facts about impeachment. Some of you are still taking Donald’s lame arguments at face value. How stupid are you folks? It’s been 3 years and you’re still falling for his ****?

*shrugs shoulders*
 


Arg! Beat me to it!

What’s a non-corrupt quid pro quo?

For impeachment it shouldn’t matter. You don’t solicit personal quid pro quos (what’s the plural form?). But I’ve never heard of a non-corrupt quid pro quo and this feels again like this admin is gaslighting us.
 
Look no further than the Steele dossier paid for by Hillary. Funny nobody gives a **** Hillary paid Steele, a foreign agent,, for dirt on Trump.

I don't know why this fallacy, that Steele was a "foreign agent" is still being stated as fact, when he was a private citizen. Foreign agents are in the employ of the intelligence services of their respective nation. Steele was not a foreign agent for Great Britain when he was hired.

From the link at the bottom of this comment:

"Here are the facts. First of all, the Clinton campaign did not hire Steele. He was hired originally by the Washington Free Beacon, a right-wing website that was anti-Trump at the time, which paid him through Fusion GPS. Later, during the general election, the Beacon was no longer interested in dirt on Trump, and Fusion GPS went to the Clinton campaign and the DNC and asked them to pay for Steele’s work. It is true that he was paid ultimately by the Clinton campaign, through the law firm Perkins Coie. Those payments were reported as required by law.

Two important points here. First of all, if the work was paid for, it is obviously not an in-kind contribution, which would indeed be illegal. But second—and know this, because it’s crucial—what the Clinton campaign and Steele did was entirely legal.

Campaigns can contract with foreign individuals and firms to do work. The allegation that this is wrong is completely baseless. And what makes this allegation surreal is: Guess who hired a foreign firm to do important data analysis in 2016? Donald Trump! Cambridge Analytica was British. If Clinton using Steele was a scandal, then so was Trump using Cambridge. The fact that Steele was doing oppo research, which admittedly can be made to sound seamy on propaganda television, is neither here nor there legally. Work for a campaign is work for a campaign.

And again, that work was legal. You know who said so? House Republicans! Yes—the House intel committee issued a report in March 2018, when the House was under GOP control, that included these words: “Under current federal election law, foreigners are prohibited from making contributions or donations in connection with any campaign in the United States. However, it is not illegal to contract with a foreign person or foreign entity for services, including conducting opposition research on a U.S. campaign, so long as the service was paid for at the market rate.” It is impossible that Cornyn, Graham, and everyone else who tries to make the Steele connection sound shady don’t know this.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/what-hillary-clinton-did-was-politics-what-trumps-doing-is-treason
 
I'm sure the Post is not the only place that has posted a direct comparison of the two. But here's the start of the article for you:

[WHISTLEBLOWER] COMPLAINT: "Multiple White House officials with direct knowledge of the call informed me that, after an initial exchange of pleasantries, the President used the remainder of the call to advance his personal interests.”

TRANSCRIPT: Trump speaks in nine discrete segments.

  1. He congratulates Zelensky on winning the presidency.
  2. He says Ukraine is happy Zelensky won.
  3. He mentions how much aid the United States provides to Ukraine.
  4. He asks a favor: Investigate (baseless) rumors about Ukrainian involvement in an assessment of Russia’s hacking of the Democratic National Committee in 2016.
  5. He encourages working with his attorney Rudolph W. Giuliani and pushes for an investigation of former vice president Joe Biden and his son.
  6. He says he’ll have Giuliani and Attorney General William P. Barr call about the investigation.
  7. He invites Zelensky to the White House.
  8. He says he’ll see Zelensky at the White House or at an event in Poland (that he ended up not attending).
  9. He again offers his congratulations.
Except for the invitation to the White House — though even that is questionable — the whistleblower’s allegation is accurate.

COMPLAINT: “According to the White House officials who had direct knowledge of the call, the President pressured Mr. Zelenskyy to … initiate or continue an investigation into the activities of former Vice President Joseph Biden and his son, Hunter Biden. …" (A different transliteration of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s surname is used throughout the document.)

TRANSCRIPT: Trump says, "[T]here’s a lot of talk about Biden’s son, that Biden stopped the prosecution and a lot of people want to find out about that so whatever you can do with the Attorney General would be great. Biden went around bragging that he stopped the prosecution so if you can look into it … It sounds horrible to me.”

COMPLAINT: “ … 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 …"

TRANSCRIPT: Trump says, “I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine, they say Crowdstrike … I guess you have one of your wealthy people … The server, they say Ukraine has it. There are a lot of things that went on, the whole situation.” (Ellipses in the original.)

I think it's disingenuous to say we should not be surprised that the Washington Post "claims" a close match because they are biased, when the Post is comparing exact, verbatim passages from both documents. To me "claims" implies a subjective judgement, that others might interpret otherwise. But the passages they compared showed a close match, which the reader should be able to clearly see.

These have both been posted in separate comments earlier in this thread, but one can do one's own comparison:

The readout of the phone call:

https://www.politico.com/story/2019/09/25/trump-ukraine-phone-call-transcript-text-pdf-1510770

The whistleblower report:

https://d3i6fh83elv35t.cloudfront.net/static/2019/09/20190812_-_whistleblower_complaint_unclass.pdf
 
OK, one more thing for @Joe Bagadonuts because you probably didn't see this post https://jazzfanz.com/threads/the-official-lets-impeach-trump-thread.113221/page-189#post-1828295 if you truly think Trump's behavior is not impeachable. It's from an op-ed by Dana Milbank published in the Washington Post.

Trump began staking his title to absolute power in his first weeks in office. “The whole world will soon see, as we begin to take further actions, that the powers of the president to protect our country are very substantial and will not be questioned,” White House adviser Stephen Miller announced. He wasn’t kidding.

Trump soon stated that “I have the absolute right” to fire FBI Director James Comey. He subsequently proclaimed the “absolute right” to provide Russia with an ally’s highly classified intelligence; the “absolute right” to pardon himself; the “absolute right” to shut down the southern border; the “absolute right” to fire special counsel Robert Mueller; the “absolute right” to sign an executive order removing the Constitution’s birthright-citizenship provision; the “absolute right” to contrive a national emergency to deny Congress the power of the purse; the “absolute right” to order U.S. businesses out of China; the “absolute right” to release apparent spy-satellite imagery of Iran; and, most recently, the “absolute right” to ask other countries to furnish evidence that Joe Biden is corrupt.

Kellyanne Conway asserted Trump’s “absolute right” to give his son-in-law a security clearance over security professionals’ objections. White House counsel Pat Cipollone said current and former White House officials are “absolutely immune” from testifying before Congress. As others have noted, Trump has repeatedly said the Constitution’s Article II empowers him “to do whatever I want” and bestows on him “all of these rights at a level nobody has ever seen before.”

At a level nobody has ever seen. Now we see the corrupting effect of this claim of own absolute power:

Without troubling himself to engage in the usual consultations with lawmakers, allies and military leaders, he ordered a pullout of U.S. troops from northern Syria, setting off a Turkish invasion as well as fears of a massacre of our Kurdish allies and religious minorities (including some 50,000 Christians) and of a revival of Islamic State. He did it at the request of the repressive leader of Turkey, where Trump has boasted of his extensive business interests.

Trump declared “perfect” his phone call with the Ukrainian president, at a time when Trump was withholding military aid to that country, requesting a “favor” and asking for damaging information about Biden — a stark violation of campaign-finance law. He then publicly asked China for the same on the eve of trade talks.

He responded to the resulting impeachment inquiry in the House with a bizarre letter from Cipollone asserting, essentially, that Trump is exempt from all congressional oversight and won’t participate in this “unconstitutional inquiry” — even though the Constitution expressly gives the House “the sole Power of Impeachment.”
...
Maybe [Trump supporters] will finally realize that by supporting Trump as he claims absolute power, they are clearing the way for a successor who ignores Congress and inconvenient laws to, say, expand abortion rights, gay rights, gun control and restrictions on Christian schools. Maybe they will grasp that the democratic safeguards they are now letting Trump overrun won’t be there when a future leader claims an “absolute right” to assault what they hold dear.


If you find this to be acceptable behavior for Trump, then it logically must also be acceptable behavior for ANY FUTURE PRESIDENT. Do you really feel that way?

If you do not find this to be acceptable behavior, then it logically must be IMPEACHABLE behavior, because that is literally the only way to stop someone who seizes these "rights" for himself.

Several times, I've heard Trump supporters/apologists tell us not to take comments like this too seriously. Trump himself has sometimes stated following controversial statements that he was only joking. But he's hard at work fighting the Constitutionally granted right of oversight of the Executive branch by the Legislative branch. It's clear he regards the Constitution as something that does not apply to him. Ultimately, the Judicial branch will need to educate him that he is not above the law, and that Congress is a co-equal branch of our federal government:



 
Several times, I've heard Trump supporters/apologists tell us not to take comments like this too seriously. Trump himself has sometimes stated following controversial statements that he was only joking. But he's hard at work fighting the Constitutionally granted right of oversight of the Executive branch by the Legislative branch. It's clear he regards the Constitution as something that does not apply to him. Ultimately, the Judicial branch will need to educate him that he is not above the law, and that Congress is a co-equal branch of our federal government:





That’s what I’m afraid of. Gorsuch and Kav owe Trump big time. I can see the SC ruling in the executive’s favor. Kav even warned us about it:

“You sowed the wind and the country will reap the whirlwind.”
 
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