I forreal LOL'd when I read the headline.
- Worth noting: Text messages released this week between Trump administration officials and Andrey Yermak, a top aide to Zelensky, suggest that Trump's personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, was a primary advocate for arranging the call.
Surely Rick Perry's tendering of his resignation yesterday is coincidental? This is absolutely hilarious, I can't wait to watch these guys all rat each other out. Their alternate little realities don't allow for consistent testimonies.
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UPDATE: Want a preview of Trump telephone transcripts stored on the top secret server? Me too.
- 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.
Can you imagine the things that Trump and Putin have covered off the record? We don't need to, because Trump mysteriously parrots them. Here's an article from January of this year detailing an instance of historical revisionism by Trump that seems to oddly align with Russian propaganda surrounding the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Really, where else would he pick that up but from Putin, who probably uses relatively innocent lies like that as a litmus test to gauge the depths of Trump's gullibility.
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Learn to call out the subtly shitty journalism that normalizes Trumpisms. Example (from the new WaPo article with leaks of the telephone transcripts):
- 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.
How about you provide the most obvious instance of a serious legal infraction committed by Trump? How about you do it in every article? Here, let me help you. It's Title 52, §USC 30121: Contributions and donations by foreign nationals:
- It shall be unlawful for-
(1) a foreign national, directly or indirectly, to make-
(A) a contribution or donation of money or other thing of value, or to make an express or implied promise to make a contribution or donation, in connection with a Federal, State, or local election.
The chairwoman of the FEC agrees with my interpretation that Trump's actions are clearly illegal, and was prompted to issue a statement back in June, after Trump went on TV and plainly stated he'd accept dirt on a political opponent from a foreign government. I have linked to these things in prior write-ups, but if the information reaches at least one new person, I don't feel guilty about this particular form of re-posting. I rehash it better every time anyway.
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UPDATE #2: I didn't wanna say anything above, but my ears perked up when I read in the Axios article that Trump said Perry was involved with a Ukrainian effort related to "LNG". That's because 11 days-ish ago, I trudged through this long exposé written by an Eastern European anti-corruption organization, focusing on Rudy Giuliani's "business associates". Until today, I hadn't seen their names, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, appear in any mainstream news:
- At the center of the Naftogaz plan, according to three individuals familiar with the details, were three such businessmen: two Soviet-born Florida real estate entrepreneurs, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, and an oil magnate from Boca Raton, Florida, named Harry Sargeant III.
Parnas and Fruman have made hundreds of thousands of dollars in political donations to Republicans, including $325,000 to a Trump-allied political action committee in 2018. This helped the relatively unknown entrepreneurs gain access to top levels of the Republican Party — including meetings with Trump at the White House and Mar-a-Lago.
...
A second meeting during the trip, at a Kyiv hotel, included Ukrainian officials and energy sector people. There, Perry made clear that the Trump administration wanted to see the entire Naftogaz supervisory board replaced, according to a person who attended both meetings. ... Gordon D. Sondland, the U.S. ambassador to the European Union, and Kurt D. Volker, then the State Department’s special envoy to Ukraine, were also in the room, according to photographs reviewed by AP. The person, who spoke on condition of anonymity due to fear of retaliation, said he was floored by the American requests because the person had always viewed the U.S. government “as having a higher ethical standard.”
Biden's son got payed $50k per month because his last name was Biden. He shouldn't have done that. But I think this gaslighting attempt by Trump and Giuliani is about to backfire spectacularly. Apparently, we're just getting started on the Trump-Ukraine scandal. Hold onto yer butts.