1. Laurence H. Tribe: Donald Trump Is America's Anti-President

After just one week of public impeachment hearings, Donald Trump has unmistakably emerged as America's anti-president, the very model of the charlatan George Washington warned might be overtaken by "the insidious wiles of foreign influence."

More than unpresidential, Trump represents the exemplar of what Alexander Hamilton darkly envisioned when he described the danger that a demagogue might one day assume the presidency and require removal through the awesome power of impeachment. Such a demagogue, Hamilton prophesied, would be "a man unprincipled in private life[,] desperate in his fortune, bold in his temper...despotic in his ordinary demeanor." Such a man, Hamilton wrote, would one day "mount the hobby horse of popularity—to join in the cry of danger to liberty—to take every opportunity of embarrassing the General Government & bringing it under suspicion—to flatter and fall in with all the non sense of the zealots of the day" with the object of "throw[ing] things into confusion that he may 'ride the storm and direct the whirlwind.'" Such a man, we should all be able to see now, is Donald J. Trump. https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-americas-anti-president-opinion-1472384

2. Philip Bump: The other knife Gordon Sondland stuck in Trump’s back

President Trump’s defense of his interactions with Ukraine hinges on the idea that he was fervently concerned about corruption in that country, so much so that he prioritized corruption investigations during his call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on July 25.

That argument is undermined by nearly all available evidence. Trump seldom talks about corruption as president — at least in the context of foreign countries — and never raised corruption during the Zelensky call. The investigations he requested then were predicated not on corruption but, instead, on pet theories promoted by his attorney Rudolph W. Giuliani: that something was fishy with a server in the 2016 campaign interference; and that former vice president Joe Biden had maybe done something untoward. In neither case is there evidence that the Trump-Giuliani concerns were warranted.

If Trump’s requests to Zelensky weren’t about corruption but, instead, about his own political gain, Trump is in trouble. It’s illegal to solicit aid from a foreign actor to benefit a campaign, which a Ukrainian probe into Biden in particular likely would be. Moreover, efforts to withhold a White House meeting until Zelensky launched new investigations — as E.U. Ambassador Gordon Sondland testified Wednesday had happened — or to withhold security assistance with the same aim might be an explicit use of presidential power for personal benefit. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/11/20/other-knife-gordon-sondland-stuck-trumps-back/

3. Susan B. Glasser: The Spectacular Failure of the Trump Wranglers Kurt Volker and many others tried to manage the President.

On Tuesday, nearly seven hours into the marathon third day of public impeachment hearings, Kurt Volker tried to explain to the House Intelligence Committee what it was like to carry out the nearly impossible task of wrangling U.S. policy toward Ukraine during the Presidency of Donald Trump. Volker, a veteran Republican diplomat who had been serving, since 2017, as Trump’s Special Representative to Ukraine, said that he realized last spring that he had a “problem,” and that it was Trump himself.

When Volker took the job, he testified, “I believed I could steer U.S. policy in the right direction,” an ambitious statement given that Trump had already been publicly skeptical of Ukraine and supportive of its adversary Russia. Still, Volker insisted that he thought he could maintain the long-standing U.S. policy of supporting Ukraine, a bipartisan priority ever since Russia illegally annexed Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula, in 2014, and launched a proxy civil war in the country’s east. “If a problem arose, I knew that it was my job to try to fix it,” Volker said. In May, he learned that there was, in fact, a “significant problem”: the attitude of the President toward Ukraine. Trump, as Volker heard firsthand in an Oval Office meeting that month, believed that Ukraine was corrupt, “out to get” him, and harbored an animus going back to the 2016 election; he even embraced a discredited conspiracy theory that Ukraine, not Russia, had intervened in the U.S Presidential race. As a result, Trump was deeply skeptical toward the Administration’s own policy of supporting Ukraine and had no desire to meet with the country’s reformist new President, Volodymyr Zelensky. Volker believed that Trump was being fed misinformation about Ukraine by his private lawyer, Rudy Giuliani. “I found myself faced with a choice: to be aware of a problem and to ignore it or to accept that it was my responsibility to try to fix it,” Volker testified. “I tried to fix it.”

To say that he failed would, of course, be an understatement.  https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-trumps-washington/the-spectacular-failure-of-the-trump-wranglers

4. Peter Baker: A White House Now ‘Cannibalizing Itself’

As Lt. Col. Alexander S. Vindman sat in a stately chamber testifying on Tuesday, the White House posted on its official Twitter account a message denouncing his judgment. His fellow witness, Jennifer Williams, had barely left the room when the White House issued a statement challenging her credibility.

In President Trump’s Washington, where attacks on his enemies real or perceived have become so routine that they now often pass unnoticed, that might not seem all that remarkable — but for the fact that Colonel Vindman and Ms. Williams both still work for the very same White House that was publicly assailing them.

With the president’s allies joining in, the two aides found themselves condemned as nobodies, as plotting bureaucrats, as traitors within and, in Colonel Vindman’s case, as an immigrant with dual loyalties. Even for a president who rarely spares the rhetorical howitzer, that represents a new level of bombardment.

Mr. Trump has publicly disparaged cabinet secretaries, former aides and career officials working elsewhere in the government, but now he is taking aim at people still working for him inside the White House complex by name. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/19/us/politics/trump-alexander-vindman-jennifer-williams.html

5. Jonathan Chait: ’We Followed the President’s Orders’: Trump’s Scheme Was Directed by Trump

Gordon Sondland, the European Union ambassador, was a lynchpin of President Trump’s defense in the Ukraine scandal. Sondland had been a loyal functionary throughout, carrying out the president’s directives dutifully if reluctantly. Republicans publicly telegraphed their plan to pin the whole scheme on Sondland and portray him as having acted alone. Sondland’s initially foggy testimony seemed to indicate his pliability in the cover-up.

But his public testimony Wednesday has destroyed that plan. Sondland has confirmed what is obvious to everybody: The entire scheme was directed by Trump all along. “We followed the president’s orders,” he said. “Everyone was in the loop. It was no secret.”

Trump’s operation has been painfully clear since May, when Rudy Giuliani boasted about his plans to the New York Times, telling the world that he was acting on the president’s orders, and conceding that his actions were possibly “improper” though not, in his view, illegal. The investigation has largely consisted of connecting Trump and his henchmen to these boasts. Sondland testified today that, while he did not want to, he — along with Rick Perry and Kurt Volker — “worked with Mr. Rudy Giuliani on Ukraine matters at the express direction of the president of the United States.”

Sondland undercut the Republican defense that Trump somehow cared about corruption, testifying that Trump didn’t even care about Ukraine conducting the investigations he demanded. Trump merely demanded the announcement of the investigations, which he could tout as evidence of the apparent criminality of Joe Biden and the FBI. Sondland also destroyed the defense that Ukrainians were unaware that military aid had been held up, testifying, “Before the September 1 Warsaw meeting, the Ukrainians had become aware that the security funds had yet to be disbursed.” http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/11/sondland-trump-ukraine-impeachment-testimony-hearings-followed-orders.html

6. Bess Levin: Gordon Sondland Throws Trump, Giuliani Under The Bus (Backs Up, Does It Again)

When Republican lawmakers on the House Intelligence Committee sat down for Gordon Sondland’s testimony this morning, they likely breathed a sigh of relief. Finally, after days of hearings with traitorous government officials hell-bent on taking the president down with facts, they’d get to hear from the Trump donor turned E.U. ambassador, who would no doubt testify that this whole impeachment inquiry is a sham, and that Donald Trump is an innocent, noble man with an IQ of 390 and a body from the gods. We know they thought this because, mortifyingly, ranking member Devin Nunes’s opening remarks suggested he thought Sondland was in the GOP’s corner.

But as Sondland’s opening statement made evident, such was not the case! Noting that “a few critical points have been obscured by noise over the last few days,” Sondland made clear to the committee that he, Energy Secretary Rick Perry, and Ambassador Kurt Volker “did not want to work with Mr. [Rudy] Giuliani,” but did so “at the express direction of the president of the United States.” Sondland noted that to refuse would mean losing “an important opportunity to cement relations between the United States and Ukraine. So we followed the president’s orders.” He added that, at the time, he didn’t think Giuliani‘s role was improper, nor did he know that the ex-mayor was working with individuals now under indictment, but, in retrospect, knowing what he knows now, he “would not have acquiesced to [Giuliani’s] participation.”

Then he dropped the bomb that Republicans will have difficulty spinning on Fox News, though they’ll no doubt rise to the occasion:

...as I testified previously, Mr. Giuliani’s requests were a quid pro quo for arranging a White House visit for President Zelensky. Mr. Giuliani demanded that Ukraine make a public statement announcing investigations of the 2016 election/DNC server and Burisma. Mr. Giuliani was expressing the desires of the president of the United States, and we knew that these investigations were important to the president.

In sum, per Sondland, not only was there a quid pro quo, but it came at the behest of the president, blowing up the GOP’s arguments that nothing of the sort occurred and that Trump was just an innocent pawn. (In reference to his revised testimony delivered privately to lawmakers earlier this month, Sondland said his lawyer had made “multiple requests to the State Department and the White House” for his “phone records, State Department emails, and other State Department documents,” all of which were denied.) https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/11/gordon-sondland-public-testimony

7. Jonathan Chait: Impeachment and the Stone Verdict Show Trump Is Surrounded by Criminals

In all probability, the parade of charges is probably not over. Trump’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, is reportedly being investigated for a number of alleged federal crimes, including bribing foreign officials, conspiracy, violating federal campaign-finance laws, and failing to register as a foreign agent. The Wall Street Journal reports today that federal prosecutors are investigating whether Giuliani personally stood to profit from a natural-gas shakedown run by his partners, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman.

Parnas and Fruman, two figures linked to the Russian mob who have been arrested, were helping Giuliani run his off-the-books diplomatic work in Ukraine. The benefit to Trump, who was not paying Giuliani anything, was getting muscle on the ground who would get the Ukrainians to understand a message regular diplomats had been too squeamish to convey directly: that Trump wanted investigations of his enemies. But at the same time they were doing this work for Trump, they were allegedly working to get themselves a taste of the proceeds from the shakedown. Parnas and Fruman were pushing Ukraine to give them some natural-gas importing business as a kind of payoff, and using their connection to Trump as clout.

If Rudy himself was involved in the gas shakedown, as the Journal story suggests, it would be an even deeper form of corruption. Trump’s lawyer and personal representative would have sent gangsters to extort Ukraine for Trump’s political gain and his own profit. The false accusations Trump has hurled against Biden are pale versions of the very real crimes Trump’s cronies have tried to carry out.

American politics has rarely been a pristine affair. Trump exploited widespread cynicism to indict the entire political Establishment in hyperbolic terms as wholly corrupt, presenting himself as a reformer from the outside. Surely nobody expected him to fulfill this promise literally. Yet the full scale of his betrayal is staggering. Trump will probably not become the first president to be impeached and removed from office, but he will go down in history as the most criminal president in American history. http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/11/impeachment-roger-stone-guilty-yovanovitch-giuliani-trump-ukraine.html

8. Fred Hiatt: While Trump stands by, the world’s tyrants are trying to make the world safe for dictatorship

A strange reversal is taking place across the world.

America — or at least, America’s president — is no longer trying to make the world safe for democracy. But dictators are working hard to make the world safe for dictatorship.

The United States is retreating, almost apologizing for ever having thought about promoting democracy. Everyone from Rand Paul to Bernie Sanders and many in between agrees we should stay home and mind our business.

But the result is not a world in which every country is free to go its own way.

Instead, the world’s tyrants — while still complaining about color revolutions and U.S. interference — roam far and wide, promoting their ideologies and their corporations, bullying and buying and burrowing and shooting their way to influence. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/while-trump-stands-by-the-worlds-tyrants-are-trying-to-make-the-world-safe-for-dictatorship/2019/11/17/9d455780-07ca-11ea-818c-fcc65139e8c2_story.html

9. Jonathan Chait: Trump’s Retribution Against the Washington Post Owner Is His Gravest Abuse of Power

The saga of President Trump’s reprisals against Amazon has lurked on the margin of the news, largely overshadowed by the Ukraine scandal. Late Thursday night, Amazon revealed it had filed a protest in federal court of a Pentagon decision to deny it a $10 billion cloud-computing contract, the most recent piecemeal iteration of a saga that attracted precious little media attention even before the Ukraine scandal obscured it.

Yet the story here is almost certainly a massive scandal, probably more significant than the Ukraine scandal that spurred impeachment proceedings. Trump improperly used government policy to punish the owner of an independent newspaper as retribution for critical coverage. It resembles the Ukraine scandal because it is a flagrant abuse of power, and has been hiding in plain sight for months (as the Ukraine scandal did, until a whistle-blower report leaked in September). The scale of the abuse, though, is far more serious, because it is a concrete manifestation of Trump’s authoritarian ambitions. http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/11/trump-amazon-bezos-defense-cloud-washington-post-pentagon-scandal.html

10. Susan B. Glasser: Crazy for Trump: On the G.O.P. Plan to Keep Impeachment Partisan

The Republican playbook here is a time-honored one: delay, deny, obfuscate, and, if that fails, beg Americans to turn off the TV. In his opening statement, the House Intelligence chairman, Adam Schiff, had contended that there was not much debate over the facts. Throughout the long day, I did not hear much, if any. Although they are very different Presidents faced with very different accusations, this was the case with the impeachment of Bill Clinton, too—a proceeding that began in the House of Representatives almost twenty-one years ago to the day. In Clinton’s case, it was pretty clear all along that the President had had an affair with his former intern, Monica Lewinsky, and lied about it under oath. The issue was what, if anything, Congress should do about it.

In this case, Trump is accused of what appears to be a much more serious abuse of the power of his office to extort a foreign leader into acting in the President’s personal interest, rather than the national interest. “If this is not impeachable conduct, what is?” Schiff asked. Ultimately, this is what the debate will come down to, when the articles of impeachment are drawn up, and when the Senate has to deal with the President’s conduct in a trial. Trump appears to have done what he is accused of doing. The question is whether any Republicans will join Democrats in arguing that it is impeachable and warrants his removal from office. https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-trumps-washington/crazy-for-trump-on-the-gop-plan-to-keep-impeachment-partisan

11. Masha Gessen: The Two Irreconcilable Realities of the Impeachment Hearings

Two Americas began watching two very different sets of hearings on Wednesday. In one, President Donald Trump is guilty of abusing power in many ways and on many occasions, and one such occasion is being dissected and laid out in great detail on national television. In the other America and the other set of hearings, Democrats are out to get Trump at any cost, have latched onto a muddled and inconsequential incident, and are laying it out in great detail on national television in the hopes of convincing the public that the President has done something wrong. These two realities do not overlap.

Of course, these realities do not have equal validity—although, unlike other Trump-era conflicts, this argument is not primarily one between facts and lies. This is an argument about what political power means. In Reality One, political power is governed by values, norms, history, procedure, and law. In Reality Two, political power aims to be absolute—its limit is what the President can get away with. Neither side is explicitly stating its position in this argument. Schiff came close when he said, at the beginning of his opening statement, that the outcome of the hearings will “affect not only the future of this Presidency but the future of the Presidency itself, and what kind of conduct or misconduct the American people may come to expect from their Commander-in-Chief.” But then he turned to laying out the Ukraine case. The side of Reality One is acting as though this were a legal prosecution. The side of Reality Two is denying the prosecution’s legitimacy. The differences between these realities are less factual than they are moral and political (in the deep, rather than partisan, sense of the word “politics”). https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/the-two-irreconcilable-realities-of-the-impeachment-hearings

12. John Cassidy: The House Republicans’ Impeachment Defense Is Full of Holes

Despite the White House’s efforts to stonewall the impeachment committees, the over-all picture should be clear to anybody who isn’t willfully blind. The timetable of events, which the Democrats are sure to return to again and again during the hearings, is highly incriminating. So is the testimony of nonpartisan public servants, some of them Trump appointees, and the repeated public calls by Trump for someone to investigate the Bidens. In the words of John Bolton, the former national-security adviser, as relayed to the impeachment committees by a member of his staff, the Ukraine caper was “a drug deal”—one orchestrated by the President and some of his closest associates. https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/the-house-republicans-trump-impeachment-defense-is-full-of-holes

13. David Brooks: In Praise of Washington Insiders

All around the world voters are electing comedians, celebrities and outsider performers to high office. All around the world people are responding to demagogues who tell them that our problems are easy to solve if we just get rid of the bad people. Everywhere rule-breakers like Trump, Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Nicolás Maduro are in power and corruption is in the air.

People have messed-up theories of how you do social change. On the right many think that you need to elect some authoritarian strongman who will whip everybody into shape. On the left many put their faith in social movements, without explaining how social movements are going to write and pass legislation.

In reality, institutions are the only vehicles for legislative change. That’s because they are the way to wield power safely. They have rules and structures and norms precisely because power is so dangerous when it is wielded by a lone strongman or by a mob.

People have lost faith in institutions for some very good reasons, and the need to reform them is urgent. But the disenchantment is overblown and self-destructive. We don’t pay enough attention to all the planes that take off and land safely. We underestimate the value of experience. As Heclo writes in “On Thinking Institutionally,” “It is when you deal with someone who does not perform in a ‘professional’ manner that you learn to appreciate those who do.”

Watching Taylor and Kent, I had a feeling of going back in time. Why did it feel so strange? It was because I was looking at people who are not self-centered. They’ve dedicated themselves to the organization that formed them, and which they serve. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/14/opinion/taylor-kent-impeachment-hearings.html

14. David Greenberg: Trump’s Trying to Get Away With Something Even Nixon Couldn’t

One of the great puzzles in the impeachment hearings against Donald Trump is why so many administration officials are getting away with defying congressional demands to testify. So far, on the president’s instructions, Defense Secretary Mike Esper, Energy Secretary Rick Perry, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney have refused House subpoenas; Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s attorney, has vowed to do the same. Two other former officials, former National Security Adviser John Bolton and his aide Charles Kupperman — both called to testify before Congress — have asked U.S. District Judge Richard J. Leon to decide between the two branches’ claims, with a hearing set for the distressingly distant date of December 10.

United States v. Nixon remains a landmark Supreme Court case. It reaffirmed, above all, that the president is not above the law — as the cliché of the day had it. But, more specifically, it put the kibosh on the kind of blanket claims of executive privilege that Eisenhower had invented and that Nixon had enlisted for his own self-preservation.

Now Donald Trump is trying to resurrect that doctrine. We are already seeing its weakness, as several lower-level administration officials have shown their courageous willingness to defy the president and come before Congress in open hearings to reveal what they know.

Now it’s time for the judiciary to push back against the White House, too. A court ruling that executive privilege cannot prevent vital testimony in a case of allegedly impeachable behavior would go a long way not only toward helping Congress get to the bottom of the Ukraine scandal, but also in limiting once again the dangerously amorphous and expandable concept of executive privilege. https://gen.medium.com/trumps-trying-to-get-away-with-something-even-nixon-couldn-t-135ecf924417

15.  Bess Levin: Is Rudy Giuliani Totally Screwed?

Last Saturday, Rudy Giuliani was spotted dining out at a Manhattan hotspot and loudly gabbing about his plans to start a podcast, like a man without a care in the world. And in fairness, it’s possible that, thanks to the brain decay the ex-mayor has clearly suffered, he thinks he has nothing to worry about. Other people in his position, though, would likely be more than a bit concerned about their future, given that, based on a new report, the president’s lawyer is now the subject of three different investigations.

According to Bloomberg, Giuliani is being investigated by federal prosecutors for potential campaign-finance violations and failure to register as a foreign agent, as “part of an active investigation into his financial dealings, according to three U.S. officials.” (Giuliani, his lawyers, and the White House did not respond to Bloomberg’s requests for comment.) The probe could also reportedly include possible charges for conspiracy or violating laws against bribing foreign officials.

Incidentally, that probe is on top of a counterintelligence investigation as well as a criminal investigation into Giuliani’s business relationship with Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, the two men who’ve been charged with conspiracy, falsification of records, and lying to the FEC about their political donations. (Parnas and Fruman have both pleaded not guilty.) Giuliani’s work with Parnas was reportedly related to a company called Fraud Guarantee, though in addition, Parnas and Fruman are said to have introduced Giuliani to “several current and former senior Ukrainian prosecutors to discuss” Joe Biden, and in July, Parnas accompanied Giuliani to a breakfast meeting with Kurt Volker, then the U.S. special representative for Ukraine, where Giuliani allegedly mentioned that he was looking into Biden and 2016 election interference, according to the Wall Street Journal. In the indictment of Parnas and Fruman, prosecutors claimed that Parnas sought the assistance of a U.S. congressman in “causing the U.S. Government to remove or recall the then-U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine.” That ambassador, Marie Yovanovitch, was subsequently removed from her post after Giuliani told Donald Trump that she was undermining him and obstructing efforts to investigate Biden. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/11/rudy-giuliani-ukraine-investigations

16.  Abigail Tracy: “This Is The Way Gangsters Operate”: A Hero Is Born As Yovanovitch Gives Voice To Widespread Rage At State

The diplomatic rank and file believe Mike has allowed Trump to pollute the State Department with politics. Marie Yovanovitch made their case. “I think people are feeling huge pride in Masha,” says a former ambassador.

In contrast to the appearances of State Department officials William Taylor, whose deep baritone launched a thousand tweets about his radio career, and George Kent, with his flashy bow tie and matching pocket square, Marie Yovanovitch cut a subdued figure before the House Intelligence Committee on Friday. Testifying before lawmakers about her politicized ouster from her post as the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Yovanovitch was soft-spoken—if firm—throughout. Sedate though she was, however, diplomats mostly saw her as the week’s hero. “Masha’s testimony was a powerful moment in the impeachment drama,” Nicholas Burns, a former U.S. ambassador to NATO, told me Friday afternoon. “She was compelling and utterly persuasive in asking how the president permitted corrupt individuals to convince him to fire her. ‘How could our system fail like this?’ she was right to ask.”

More in sadness than in anger, she laid the failure to insulate her against the Trump administration’s politicization of diplomacy in Ukraine at the feet of her bosses at the State Department, starting with Mike Pompeo. “I remain disappointed that the department’s leadership and others have declined to acknowledge that the attacks against me and others are dangerously wrong. This is about far more than me or a couple of individuals. As Foreign Service professionals are being denigrated and undermined, the institution is also being degraded. This will soon cause real harm, if it hasn’t already,” she said in her opening statement. “The attacks are leading to a crisis in the State Department…This is not a time to undercut our diplomats. It is the responsibility of the department’s leaders to stand up for the institution and the individuals who make that institution the most effective diplomatic force in the world.” https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/11/ambassador-masha-yovanovitch-state-department-ukraine-impeachment-inquiry

17. Paul Waldman: Yovanovitch hearing confirms that Trump is running a thugocracy

As former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch testified about the successful smear campaign engineered against her by Trump allies and explained how intimidating it was to learn that Trump told the president of Ukraine that she was “bad news” and is “going to go through some things,” Trump decided she didn’t feel quite intimidated enough. So he tweeted this:

Everywhere Marie Yovanovitch went turned bad. She started off in Somalia, how did that go? Then fast forward to Ukraine, where the new Ukrainian President spoke unfavorably about her in my second phone call with him. It is a U.S. President’s absolute right to appoint ambassadors. — Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump

Whether this is technically witness tampering, it’s undeniably appalling. Even on Fox News, Ken Starr called Trump’s attack on Yovanovitch during her testimony “extraordinarily poor judgment.”

What it shows — as does all of the former ambassador’s testimony, along with lots of other evidence we have seen — is that Trump has been running a thugocracy, one in which the president talks and acts like a Mafioso and so do the people who have the greatest influence over him. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/11/15/yovanovitch-hearing-confirms-that-trump-is-running-thugocracy/

18. Greg Miller, Greg Jaffe and Paul Sonne: How a CIA analyst, alarmed by Trump’s shadow foreign policy, triggered an impeachment inquiry

The United States has embarked on an impeachment proceeding against a president for only the fourth time in its history. The voluminous testimony so far has revealed a government at war with itself over how to respond to Trump’s frequent conflation of the country’s interests with his own. After casting itself as a force against corruption, condemning politically driven prosecutions in other countries, the United States now appears to have sought to coerce such actions from a partner nation.

It is not clear whether any of this would have come to light were it not for the actions of a relatively junior CIA employee, who is now the target of almost daily attacks by Trump and right-wing efforts to make his identity widely public.

Dozens of senior officials — including the national security adviser, the secretary of state and the acting White House chief of staff — were either aware of or involved in the Ukraine scheme and failed to expose or stop it. More than a half-dozen lower-ranking officials made futile attempts to intervene.

Ultimately, it came down to a lone analyst, in a cubicle miles from the White House, drafting an unprecedented document in the detached manner he had learned in his CIA training. https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/how-a-cia-analyst-alarmed-by-trumps-shadow-foreign-policy-triggered-an-impeachment-inquiry/2019/11/15/042684a8-03c3-11ea-8292-c46ee8cb3dce_story.html

19. Sarah Jones: Stop Entering the Democratic Party Primary

Current Bain Capital employee and former Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick is probably going to enter the Democratic Party’s primary race. There is no good reason for him to do so. He is not going to win. The masses do not pine for him. But hubris is a ruthless master, and it is driving Patrick the way it is driving former New York City mayor and current billionaire Michael Bloomberg. Reportedly concerned about a weak Joe Biden and the prospect of higher taxes on his massive fortune, Bloomberg has filed paperwork to enter the primary too. This is, to put it modestly, insane.

The clown car is full. It cannot accept any more passengers. Really, it was pushed beyond its capacity some time ago, but John Delaney simply will not get out of the vehicle. http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/11/the-case-for-quilty-democratic-candidate-for-president.html

20. Max Moran: Don’t Stop With Donald Trump, Democrats: Impeach Attorney General Bill Barr

It’s beyond redundant to say that Donald Trump must be impeached over the Ukraine scandal. The so-called transcript of his July phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelevsky released last week — really a collection of notes — was already damning evidence of the president manipulating foreign policy for his personal political goals. Then the actual whistleblower complaint reconfirmed and solidified the case. Trump’s White House counsel, Donald McGahn, even wrote a memo cautioning him that using law enforcement powers to target a political adversary would be illegal and clearly impeachable.

But if Democrats are going to uncover more information through aggressive hearings and ultimately impeach the president, they need to recognize their most powerful adversary: Attorney General William Barr.

Barr has not just failed in his duty to carry out and enforce the law as attorney general. He has also used the power of his office to go after Trump’s enemies. We now know that he has served as a leading “diplomat” for a sort of shadow “the president is the state” foreign policy, conducted with at least the United Kingdom, Italy, and Australia. Barr is a leader in a broad administration effort to demand that U.S. allies aide Trump in legitimizing, maintaining and strengthening his personal hold on power. https://www.thedailybeast.com/dont-stop-with-donald-trump-democrats-impeach-attorney-general-bill-barr

21. Julia Davis: Russia Loves the Impeachment Hearings Because GOP Is Parroting Kremlin Propaganda

As Russia’s state media watch impeachment proceedings against U.S. President Donald J. Trump they’re loving what they see. They don’t think the man they brag about getting elected is in much danger. They listen in delight as Republicans parrot conspiracy theories first launched by  Russians. And they gloat about the way Trump removed U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch, because they blame her for promoting democratic “color revolutions” that weakened Moscow’s hold on the former Soviet empire. Best of all, from the Kremlin’s point of view, they see Trump pushing Ukraine back into the Russian fold.

Russian experts and state media propagandists constantly reiterate that President Trump cannot and will not be impeached, because the Republicans are controlling the Senate. On 60 Minutes, Skabeeva mockingly told some sacrificial Ukrainian panelists: “We appointed Trump and you can’t unseat him.” 

Leading Russian state media outlets repeatedly publicize the name of the alleged whistleblower. State TV channel Rossiya-1 smeared Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch as a Soros-linked architect of post-Soviet color revolutions. The co-host of 60 Minutes, Evgeny Popov, warned Ukraine of the threat if faces if it does not cooperate with Trump’s demands: “If Trump gets re-elected, and you don’t investigate Biden... [Ukraine] won’t get anything from America. Not a thing.”

The Kremlin is eager to help Trump, in fact, because his presidency has proven to be exceedingly beneficial for the Kremlin—having brought chaos into American politics, undermined trust in democratic institutions, weakened transatlantic alliances, delivered Syria into the hands of Putin, Syria's Bashar al-Assad and Turkey's Recep Tayyip Erdogan, thereby elevating the international image of Russia as a global force to be reckoned with. https://www.thedailybeast.com/watching-impeachment-russian-media-delighted-trump-doesnt-give-a-s-t-about-ukraine

22. Ed Kilgore: Trump’s War-Crimes Pardons Invite the Mayhem He Loves

Morality and military discipline aside, Trump’s pardons violate the traditional understanding that humane treatment of civilians and POWs by the U.S. military has significant national-security value, as David Frum noted:

The armed forces of the United States do their utmost to fight lawfully and humanely not only because it is the right thing to do. They do their utmost because it is also the smart thing to do. Every war ends. The memories from that war persist for decades.

So will memories of these pardons. I’m sure Trump thinks they will strike fear into the hearts of America-hating Muslims everywhere, but they brand the United States as a nation that loves its outlaws, from the White House right on down through the ranks. http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/11/trumps-war-crimes-pardons-invite-the-mayhem-he-loves.html