1. Brian Stelter: The right-wing roots of impeachment

How did we get here? How did Trump wind up on the verge of impeachment? Well, his sources of information led him astray. He was misinformed by the shows and sites he was watching and reading.

To be clear: His choices, what Trump did with the information — the withholding of aid money, the alleged shakedown of the Ukrainian president, the claims that it was a "perfect" phone call — that's all his own doing. Trump is responsible for what he did. But what he was hearing from right-wing media was crucial. The conspiratorial bent of his favorite talk shows was critical.

Re: Ukraine and 2016: Sean Hannity and other Trump backers took tiny bits of true information from a January 2017 Politico story titled "Ukrainian efforts to sabotage Trump backfire" and blew it way out of proportion, to the point that some viewers thought Ukraine, not Russia, interfered in the 2016 election. Hannity leaned on the Politico story for months and months — in fact, he's still talking about it, as of Sunday -- so it's no wonder why Trump harbored a grudge against Ukraine.

Re: the Bidens and Burisma: Enter John Solomon, the right-wing columnist for The Hill who worked closely with Rudy Giuliani to light the fuse of the Ukraine scandal. Trump was watching when Solomon went on Hannity in March and described a Ukrainian effort to "try to influence the United States election in favor of Hillary Clinton." We know he was watching because he tweeted about the segment. Solomon rolled out an anti-Biden conspiracy theory... the feedback loop kept looping... and it ultimately ensnared Trump.

Re: the aid money for Ukraine, according to WaPo, Trump saw an article from the right-leaning Washington Examiner titled "Pentagon to send $250M in weapons to Ukraine" and started to ask Q's about the $$.

Here's the thing: The pro-Trump media bubble did not actually help Trump. To the contrary, it led him to the brink of impeachment. https://mailchi.mp/cnn/rs-dec-16-2019?e=68d83fdfcf

2.  Bess Levin: Trump Pens Deranged Six-Page Impeachment Letter, Mails It To Nancy Pelosi

Something you may have heard once or twice over the course of the last few months is that Donald Trump is facing impeachment on charges he abused the power of the presidency and obstructed Congress. Something you may also have picked up on is that he is not taking the whole thing very well, a shocking turn of events given that he typically takes slights, perceived or otherwise, in total stride. The president has raged against the impeachment inquiry as a politically motivated “witch hunt,” claimed on a near hourly basis that he’s the victim of “harassment,” called for Rep. Adam Schiff to be questioned for high treason, and suggested the U.S. execute the whistle-blower’s sources like “in the old days.”

Most recently he decided, the day before the House holds its momentous vote, to send a completely unhinged letter to Nancy Pelosi filled with dozens of falsehoods, characteristically deranged capitalization, insults, historic self-pity, and incredible claims like the one about how he’s been treated worse than “those accused in the Salem Witch Trials.” It’s the sort of document that itself makes the case that Trump is unfit for office, but which his staff, in all its infinite wisdom, apparently decided to let him put on White House letterhead and release for the world to see.

Anyway, as insane letters go, it gives Trump’s most insane letter to date—the one he wrote to Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan—a real run for its money. It loses points only for his failure to sign off by telling Nancy: “Don’t be a tough guy. Don’t be a fool! I will call you later.” But it’s definitely up there. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/12/donald-trump-nancy-pelosi-letter

3. Washington Post Editorial: While the president rages, the world melts

As President Trump spent another week rage-tweeting, the world continued to warm, and the consequences became ever-clearer — and more alarming.

A consortium of 89 scientists released in the journal Nature on Tuesday a study showing that Greenland’s enormous ice sheet is losing seven times as much ice now as a quarter-century ago. At times, climate deniers insist that the Earth’s ecosystems are so vast that humans could not affect them as drastically as scientists insist. So try to imagine the size of these shifts: Greenland has lost nearly 4 trillion tons of ice since 1992. Scientists fear Greenland has shed nearly 400 billion tons this year alone.

Also on Tuesday, the federal Arctic Report Card found that thawing permafrost may already be emitting massive amounts of greenhouse emissions into the atmosphere. As melting proceeds, microbes break down dead plants and animals previously trapped in the permafrost, releasing carbon dioxide and methane in the process. This is one of the perilous feedback loops that scientists feared, as warming promotes thawing permafrost and thawing permafrost promotes more warming. It is unclear how bad Arctic greenhouse gas releases will get, and how quickly — but this is more bad news. Even when humans finally stop pumping greenhouse emissions into the atmosphere, the legacy of humanity’s reshaping of the planet will manifest for decades and centuries.

Amid these discouraging developments, the European Union this past week formally adopted the goal of producing no net carbon dioxide emissions by 2050, a target scientists have counseled world leaders to meet. “Our goal is to reconcile our economy with our planet, and make it work for our people,” said European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. Imagine those words coming from Mr. Trump — or almost any Republican. Unfortunately, Americans have to look across an ocean for global leadership on one of the world’s most pressing issues. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/while-the-president-rages-the-world-melts/2019/12/14/bd297e6a-1de5-11ea-8d58-5ac3600967a1_story.html

4. Max Boot: The only principle Republicans have left is partisanship

I come before you, my friends, to defend Republicans against charges that they are unprincipled, two-faced hypocrites.

Pointy-headed coastal elitists, with all sorts of useless book learning that real Americans don’t need, have been arguing that when it comes to impeachment, the POT (that’s Party of Trump) is calling the kettle black. They accuse the Republicans of inconsistency and insincerity in ways that go far beyond a Republican member of Congress who was once arrested for drunk driving bringing up the fact that a crack pipe was once found in a car rented by Hunter Biden.

Here’s what the usual suspects — you know, the human scum, traitors and enemies of the people — are saying. They point out that Republicans fervently denounce the mythical Ukrainian interference in the 2016 election and then turn around and argue that President Trump has the right — nay, the obligation — to demand Ukrainian interference in the 2020 election.

Some lightweight, very low I.Q. individuals even have the audacity to point out that the Republicans who now think that compliance with House subpoenas is strictly optional once held Obama’s attorney general, Eric Holder, in contempt of Congress for failing to comply with House subpoenas. In 2012, then-Rep. Trey Gowdy (R.-S.C.) sternly said, “The notion that you could withhold information and documents from Congress no matter whether you’re the party in power or not in power is wrong.” This year, Gowdy is singing a different tune: “Congress as a coequal branch of government can ask for whatever they want to ask for,” the former congressman told Fox News. “Now it doesn’t mean you have to show up, and it doesn’t mean you have to talk, and it doesn’t mean you have to produce documents.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/12/15/only-principle-republicans-have-left-is-partisanship/

5. Eric Holder: William Barr is unfit to be attorney general

As a former U.S. attorney general, I am reluctant to publicly criticize my successors. I respect the office and understand just how tough the job can be.

But recently, Attorney General William P. Barr has made a series of public statements and taken actions that are so plainly ideological, so nakedly partisan and so deeply inappropriate for America’s chief law enforcement official that they demand a response from someone who held the same office.

It’s particularly ironic in light of the attorney general’s comments this week, in which he attacked the FBI and the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General — two vital components of his own department. Having spent the majority of my career in public service, I found it extraordinary to watch the nation’s chief law enforcement official claim — without offering any evidence — that the FBI acted in “bad faith” when it opened an inquiry into then-candidate Donald Trump’s campaign. As a former line prosecutor, U.S. attorney and judge, I found it alarming to hear Barr comment on an ongoing investigation, led by John Durham, the U.S. attorney in Connecticut, into the origins of the Russia probe. And as someone who spent six years in the office Barr now occupies, it was infuriating to watch him publicly undermine an independent inspector general report — based on an exhaustive review of the FBI’s conduct — using partisan talking points bearing no resemblance to the facts his own department has uncovered.

The American people deserve an attorney general who serves their interests, leads the Justice Department with integrity and can be entrusted to pursue the facts and the law, even — and especially — when they are politically inconvenient and inconsistent with the personal interests of the president who appointed him. William Barr has proved he is incapable of serving as such an attorney general. He is unfit to lead the Justice Department. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/eric-holder-william-barr-is-unfit-to-be-attorney-general/2019/12/11/99882092-1c55-11ea-87f7-f2e91143c60d_story.html

6. Jonathan Chait: Report: Trump’s Ukraine Extortion Scheme Was Financed by Russians

Trump is facing impeachment primarily for abusing his power for political gain, extorting a foreign country to discredit his political rivals. The secondary aspect of the plot is that the target of his extortion is hardly random. Ukraine is the victim of Russian aggression, and Russia’s continuing incursions into Ukrainian territory is the muscle that gave Trump’s threats leverage. Trump’s domestic interests are one intended beneficiary of his scheme. The other is Vladimir Putin.

Trump and his allies insist he has actually pursued a hawkish line in Ukraine. “Mr. Trump didn’t withhold military aid to Ukraine, and even if he had he would have merely been returning to Barack Obama’s policy of denying lethal aid,” argues a Wall Street Journal editorial. “No one has done more to limit Russia’s ability to engage in mischief than President Trump,” insists Representative Matt Gaetz in a Fox News segment retweeted by the president.

Meanwhile, federal prosecutors charged yesterday evening that Lev Parnas, an associate of President Trump who represented him in Ukraine, was wired $1 million from a Russian bank account weeks before his arrest. Which is to say, Trump’s Ukraine plot appears to have been financed by Russia.

Rudy has worked as Trump’s lawyer for “free,” but Parnas paid him half a million dollars for his work. If Parnas himself was being paid by Russian sources, this means the Russians were essentially subsidizing Trump, paying for the work themselves so he didn’t have to lay out a dime of his own money. http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/12/report-parnas-russia-ukraine-trump-impeachment-giuliani-money.html

7. Garrett Graff: Fox News Is Now a Threat to National Security

The idea that Fox News represents a literal threat to our national security, on par with Russia’s Internet Research Agency or China’s Ministry of State Security, may seem like a dramatic overstatement of its own—and I, a paid contributor to its competitor CNN, may appear a biased voice anyway—but this week has made clear that, as we get deeper into the impeachment process and as the 2020 election approaches, Fox News is prepared to destroy America’s democratic traditions if it will help its most important and most dedicated daily viewer.

The threat posed to our democracy by Fox News is multifaceted: First and most simply, it’s clearly advancing and giving voice to narratives and smears backed and imagined by our foreign adversaries. Second, its overheated and bombastic rhetoric is undermining America’s foundational ideals and the sense of fair play in politics. Third, its unique combination of lies and half-truths has built a virtual reality so complete that it leaves its viewers too misinformed to fulfill their most basic responsibilities as citizens to make informed choices about the direction of the country.

The network’s pantheon of Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, Laura In, Lou Dobbs, and the rotating couch-cast of Fox & Friends’ morning show dunces-by-choice together represent a level of ill-informed demagoguery that would make Father Coughlin and Huey Long wince.

More than simply embarrassing themselves by spouting obvious falsehoods, though, Fox News’ incendiary, fanatical rants serve to delegitimize to its viewers the very idea of a political opposition. Every Democrat is evil. Every person who disagrees with President Trump is an enemy of the state. Every career federal employee is a member of a deep state opposition.

Let’s hope that Fox News today, unlike in Orwell’s world, doesn’t manage to succeed in transforming our country from a functional democracy into an authoritarian cult. https://www.wired.com/story/fox-news-is-now-a-threat-to-national-security/

8. George T. Conway III: Donald Trump Made His Own Impeachment Inevitable

As I’ve explained at length in The Atlantic, Trump’s exceptional narcissism defines him, and it’s what makes him wholly unfit for his job. “The fundamental life goal” of an extreme narcissist, as one psychologist has put it, “is to promote the greatness of the self, for all to see.” And that’s Trump, to the point of absurdity, mendacity, even delusion: Calling reporters pretending to be “John Barron,” a fake PR man, to brag about his wealth and sexual exploits; lying about the size of his inauguration crowd; asserting that Robert Mueller’s report provided him with “complete and total exoneration” and found “no obstruction”; claiming that his July 25 call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was “pitch perfect” and that the whistle-blower “got the conversation almost completely wrong”—not to mention the thousands of other lies that have been cataloged over the course of his presidency. So narcissistic is Trump that he attempts not merely to con others, but to con himself, to assure himself of his greatness. Cruz again nailed it in 2016: Trump is a “pathological liar” who “doesn’t know the difference between truth and lies.” https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/12/house-vote-impeachment-was-inevitable/603835/

9. Jonathan Chait: Hunter Biden Is the New Hillary Clinton Email Server

Biden, whose life was in a downward spiral, took a job with the Ukrainian energy company Burisma, which was transparently attempting to gain influence with Hunter’s father. The maneuver was unsuccessful for Burisma (which received no favorable treatment from the vice-president), fairly successful for Hunter (who received a hefty paycheck for minimal work), and has left a residue of low-grade sleaze that Joe Biden’s campaign has proven unable to scrape away. The dilemma this poses for Biden, and his party, is what — if anything — they can do about this problem.

Democrats have bitter experience with this sort of flaw. Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server as secretary of State is an eerily similar precursor. It was a small error borne of neglect — Clinton was a technophobe in search of an easy way to keep track of her work-related devices, and ignored proper security protocol for handling State Department email by using a private server. And Trump turned the small error into a gigantic scandal, accusing her of heinous crimes and ludicrously insisting she ought to be imprisoned over them.

Trump’s most blatant security breaches make the use of a private server look trivial. Trump has routinely used a cell phone to communicate and opened himself up to private espionage — like in the now-famous case in which he talked via cell phone to Gordon Sondland, who was in Kiev, in a call almost certainly intercepted by Russia. Most of Trump’s lax security protocol is both far more serious than Clinton’s snafu, and still not on anybody’s list of the 100 worst things Trump has done in office. For that reason, reporters obviously aren’t going to give it anywhere near Clinton-email levels of attention. Nobody who voted against Clinton because they thought her emails were a major scandal is going to realize Trump’s information-security record has been worse. http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/12/hunter-biden-is-the-new-hillary-clinton-email-server.html

10. NY Times Editorial Board: Impeach

IN THE END, the story told by the two articles of impeachment approved on Friday morning by the House Judiciary Committee is short, simple and damning: President Donald Trump abused the power of his office by strong-arming Ukraine, a vulnerable ally, holding up hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid until it agreed to help him influence the 2020 election by digging up dirt on a political rival.

When caught in the act, he rejected the very idea that a president could be required by Congress to explain and justify his actions, showing “unprecedented, categorical and indiscriminate defiance” in the face of multiple subpoenas. He made it impossible for Congress to carry out fully its constitutionally mandated oversight role, and, in doing so, he violated the separation of powers, a safeguard of the American republic.

To quote from the articles, “President Trump, by such conduct, has demonstrated that he will remain a threat to national security and the Constitution if allowed to remain in office, and has acted in a manner grossly incompatible with self-governance and the rule of law.”

By stonewalling as no previous president has, Donald Trump has left Congress with no choice but to press ahead to a Senate trial. The president insists he is innocent of any wrongdoing, yet he refuses to release any administration documents or allow any administration officials to testify — though, if his assertions are in fact true, those officials would presumably exonerate him. He refused to present any defense before the House whatsoever, asserting a form of monarchical immunity that Congress cannot let stand. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/12/14/opinion/sunday/trump-impeachment.html

11. William Saletan: Barr Is Trying to Erase the Truth

At first, Barr seemed to be an ordinary liar. But in recent months, he has displayed a fanatical streak that suggests he might sincerely believe his fictions. “People are saying that it’s President Trump that’s shredding our institutions. I really see no evidence of that,” Barr opined in May. The true threat, he argued, came from Americans “resisting a democratically elected president.” In October, Barr accused “so-called progressives” of a “campaign to destroy the traditional moral order.” Last month, he denounced these same “so-called progressives,” along with a “hyper-partisan media,” for waging “a scorched earth, no-holds-barred war of ‘Resistance’ against this Administration.”

This week, Barr pounced on a Justice Department report about the Russia investigation. The report, issued on Monday by the department’s inspector general, faulted the FBI’s surveillance of a marginal Trump adviser, Carter Page, but found no “documentary or testimonial evidence that political bias or improper motivation influenced the decisions” of investigators. A normal attorney general would have welcomed this vindication of his department. But Barr works for Trump, not for law enforcement. Instead of embracing the report, he’s disparaging it, smearing the FBI, and pretending that Trump has been exonerated.

Mueller, the FBI, and the press found considerable evidence that Trump and his campaign sought to collaborate with Russia to win the election. They also found that Trump obstructed the investigation. The only reason Trump remains unindicted is that Barr declared the evidence insufficient. Now Barr is saying the evidence never existed. If he’s not delusional, he’s a liar.  https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/12/barr-doj-ig-russia-report-erase-truth.html

12. Aaron Blake: One America News’s Ukraine-Rudy Giuliani exposé is a stunning piece of propaganda

President Trump has pointed Republicans who believe Fox News is too fair and balanced in the direction of a relatively new cable news destination: One America News Network.

And to see the channel’s supposed exposés on former vice president Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden, and Ukraine, you begin to understand why.

The reports are a mélange of innuendo, slanted language, Trumpian talking points and dramatic music, without any real pretense. It’s the kind of thing that would completely look at home if it were on low-budget state TV. A sampling from the closing segment of its investigation this week:

“Democrat impeachment led by failed and frustrated screenwriter turned Hollywood congressman Adam Schiff has turned into full-blown and public investigation of an international scandal involving not Donald J. Trump, but the Bidens, the Democratic Party and our U.S. State Department.”

“an impeachment hoax that amounts to a coup”

“Some will call it treason.”

The Russia investigation moved to “target innocent people to indulge the FBI’s personal hatred for President Trump” — as it shows images of George Papadopoulos and Michael Flynn, both of whom pleaded guilty to lying to investigators.

A reference to the “real whistleblowers — whistleblowers not huddling in Adam Schiff’s basement” (there is no evidence the Ukraine whistleblower worked with Schiff personally)

Calling Hunter Biden the “drug addict son” of Joe Biden

For more on the rather remarkable presentation of this investigation, watch this unbelievable video. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/12/16/one-america-newss-ukraine-rudy-giuliani-expose-is-stunning-piece-propaganda/

13. David Ignatius: Rudy Inc.

As the Ukraine investigation moves toward a House floor vote on articles of impeachment, the most intriguing personality may be the man who arguably set this bizarre chain of events in motion — Rudolph W. Giuliani, President’s Trump’s personal lawyer and global fixer.

Giuliani occupies a unique perch: He’s the president’s advocate, but he is snared in probes of his own actions, including reported federal grand jury subpoenas requesting information about Giuliani and his consulting firm, Giuliani Partners. He’s the man who seeks to protect Trump but sometimes seems to be digging the president deeper in a hole with his own public actions and comments.

Consequential moments such as a presidential impeachment sometimes begin with small, almost random events. That seems true of Giuliani’s entanglement with Ukraine. He had legal clients and contacts there he thought could help him and the president; month by month, Trump followed Giuliani toward the vortex of what will likely be the third impeachment of a commander in chief in American history. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/12/16/rudy-inc/

14. Laurence H. Tribe: Don’t let Mitch McConnell conduct a Potemkin impeachment trial

For some time now, I have been emphasizing the duty to impeach this president for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress regardless of what the Senate might end up doing. Now that President Trump’s impeachment is inevitable, and now that failing to formally impeach him would invite foreign intervention in the 2020 election and set a dangerous precedent, another option seems vital to consider: voting for articles of impeachment but holding off for the time being on transmitting them to the Senate.

This option needs to be taken seriously now that Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has announced his intention to conduct not a real trial but a whitewash, letting the president and his legal team call the shots.

Such an approach could have both tactical and substantive benefits. As a tactical matter, it could strengthen Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer’s (D-N.Y.) hand in bargaining over trial rules with McConnell because of McConnell’s and Trump’s urgent desire to get this whole business behind them. On a substantive level, it would be justified to withhold going forward with a Senate trial. Under the current circumstances, such a proceeding would fail to render a meaningful verdict of acquittal. It would also fail to inform the public, which has the right to know the truth about the conduct of its president. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/dont-let-mitch-mcconnell-conduct-a-potemkin-impeachment-trial/2019/12/16/71a81b30-202f-11ea-a153-dce4b94e4249_story.html