Dear dairy,

Well, it's funny (he says, audibly nauseous), but I was wrong. There's no guarantee that the Senate will call Bolton to testify. Here is the legal strategy that I suspect the GOP is in the process of carrying out:

1. Defer to Alan "Got A Massage At Epstein's Place But I Kept My Undies On, So I Couldn't Have Had Sex With The Masseuse, Who Was Old, Very Old, B.T.W." Dershowitz, who contended that the executive branch should be able to do anything it wants to secure an election victory. puking intensifies:

A key moment came when defense lawyer Alan Dershowitz suggested that a president acting in the public’s interest can’t be impeached. He then argued that a president may believe his own reelection is in the country’s best interest.

2. Later in the evening, another one of Trump's defense counsel argued that it's perfectly fine for an election candidate to accept information from a foreign country on a political opponent, as long as it's "credible" ("credible" as defined by whom???). The headline is that Democrats are outraged, not that this is perhaps a treasonous set of statements on the floor of the Senate, and imho is farrrrrrr more than ambiguous enough to earn an admonishing from the presiding Judge John Roberts. But it didn't! Why? Because we're thoroughly fucked.

--- YOU ARE HERE ---

3. Bolton or not (as of now, I'm actually thinking not), the Senate acquits Trump. A supermajority voting to convict is fantasy. Don't bother.

4. If the House tries to impeach Trump again for cheating in the election, probably for something about an order of magnitude worse than the Ukraine or Russia scandals, the GOP will cite Trump's impeachment defense lawyers' "arguments" as "precedent". Trump will be immunized against further impeachments even tangentially related to election meddling. Unless the actual constitution is changed regarding the impeachment conviction vote, this might give a minority GOP Senate the ability to shield Trump from removal even past the 2022 elections.

5. William Barr's incredibly expansive view of executive privilege completely immunizes Trump from the slightest bit of legal consequence, which somehow includes immunity for Rudy Giuliani as well.

6. Um, we're fucked. I think we covered that already.

It doesn't matter what new evidence the democrats churn up or disclose over the next 9 months. Trump & co. used Twitter accounts, a propped-up economy, an army of loyal fascists, and the court of public opinion to take over the United States government.

We're SUPERchina, bitchessss, WOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!

['X0Oo_am_Unitoinz'_e-hubski_bAdtimes_diary_oO0X'] post 8/?

previous

Have watched. Much schmoozing. Maybe the main theme is fossil fuel interests continually feeding Trump information that benefits their own businesses. Specifically, "compressed natural gas (CNG)" (omg so sophisticated, literally a Hank Hill propane tank).

You should listen to all of it. Headphones. It's at once extraordinarily ordinary, but also completely out of line with how the president of the U.S. should regulate the information he assimilates into his decision making processes. What's interesting is that after this recording, Lev Parnas, Giuliani, Rick Perry, and a few other stable geniuses made attempts to break into the Ukrainian natural gas market over the course of the next year. Truthfully, I'm all for having an American company mitigate Ukrainian energy dependence on Russia, but it sounds like this was all a setup to compromise the entire GOP, with POTUS as the focal pressure point. Consciously or not, the GOP have aligned themselves with mutually beneficial Russian messaging (slash election tampering), because they know that their voter base is a dwindling minority, and they'll do anything to stay in office. And I know how insane this all sounds, but it's genuinely how I think history will judge this moment.

Oh, and this is reportedly a video taken by Igor Fruman, not Parnas. Why it was on Parnas's iCloud is an interesting question. How Parnas could "forget" about this video, and then "find" it the same day that it's first reported on is another interesting question.

There is a massive intelligence war being fought right now. I'm so confused, mk. Mr. Mackey, mk, and drugs are bad, mk.