Using the word “shakedown” in the title gives away my position on what I believe Mr. Trump did.  The president’s attempt to get a foreign leader to announce a corruption investigation into the son of his political rival is the only impeachable offense the fearful Democrats charged Mr. Trump with.   It was bad that Trump held up aid to Ukraine for at least two months, and released it only after the whistleblower’s complaint (submitted a month and a half earlier) finally brought the matter to the attention of our Checks and Balances.   It was two more weeks before the original whistleblower complaint was released, and Trump unaccountably released the “transcript” of the hidden July 25th perfect call.  Now they are impeaching Mr. Trump over that shakedown plan, which included acts within his powers, like dismissing an ambassador who stood in the way of the mischief of Trump’s personal lawyer and the other two amigos.

Limiting the impeachment to only that — and obstruction of the hated Congress (which nobody cares about) —  takes a lot of other important high crimes and misdemeanors off the table.   I suppose the theory is to err on the side of caution, make a clear and convincing case for the most open and egregious story or abuse of power for a corrupt purpose, easily understood, and have that stand in for the rest.  

I’d have preferred at least one more, for obstruction of justice.  Let him refute Mueller’s entire volume two, that would be good.   Limiting the impeachment to this single series of despicable act takes Don McGahn and the rest of the fact witnesses Mueller talked to, under oath, about the president’s seamless pattern of obstruction of justice, off the table.  It also sets the stage for Lindsay Graham to call Hunter Biden, Adam Schiff and Gerald Nadler as hostile witnesses in the Senate trial before McConnell allows an up or down straight majority party line vote to not remove the leader they all defer to, the man who controls the RNC purse strings.   Senate Republicans will have the final word, per the rules, on all procedural decisions during their impeachment trial.

That said, here is the timeline (facts) of how long the appropriated military aid to Ukraine was held up (at least from July 3 to September 11), when it was released (September 11) and why (treason by so-called “whistleblower”).

The source for this timeline is lying NBC.  All quotes are from the article linked here.

July 3, 2019:  A hold is placed on the almost $400,000,000 in bipartisan, mostly military, aid to Ukraine.   July 3 is when Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman learns of the aid being withheld.

July 10:  

A meeting at the White House with Ukrainian officials is cut short when Gordon Sondland, the U.S. ambassador to the European Union, says he has an agreement with the acting White House chief of staff that Ukraine’s president would get a meeting with Trump if Ukraine agreed to launch investigations.

Then-national security adviser John Bolton “stiffened” and ended the meeting, later telling colleague Fiona Hill to report it to the National Security Council’s lawyer, she testified.

“I am not part of whatever drug deal Sondland and (acting White House chief of staff Mick) Mulvaney are cooking up on this,” Hill said Bolton told her.

July 18:  White House Office of Management and Budget announces presidential order to hold up aid to Ukraine.

July 25:  Mr. Trump’s perfect call to Volodymyr Zelensky.

AUGUST: The questions

Catherine Croft, the special adviser for Ukraine at the State Department, says two Ukrainians reach out to her to ask about the status of the military assistance. She told lawmakers she couldn’t recall the exact dates, but believes the outreach took place before the Aug. 28 publication of a Politico article detailing the hold.

August 12, 2019:  Whistleblower complaint about withholding of aid to Ukraine and concerns about “perfect” July 25 phone call filed.  DOJ does not forward complaint to Congress, as required by law.  (It gets to Congress on September 25, 2019, weeks after House investigations begin.)

August 28: Politico publishes article on the withheld aid.

August 29:  acting US Ambassador to Ukraine begins getting desperate calls from Ukrainians about the withholding of aid.

SEPT. 9: The investigations begin

Three House committees launch a wide-ranging investigation into the allegations that Trump, his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, and possibly others, tried to pressure the Ukrainian government to help the president’s reelection campaign by digging up dirt on a political rival.

September 11: most of the appropriated aid to Ukraine is released.

September 25:  August 12 whistleblower complaint released to Congress.

December 13, 2019:  Democrats deliberately time their vote for Friday the Thirteenth to approve two baseless, partisan articles of impeachment against the president AG William Barr has repeatedly called innocent and totally justified to be enraged by the sneaky unscrupulousness of his many enemies.  

Thank you and have a very nice day.

The saddest part, I think, is how “alternative fact” turns everything to mud– no facts, no facts!!!  The resulting no-holds-barred mud wrestle and shit flinging contest makes all but the strongest of stomach turn away from an impeachment inquiry every American should be following closely.

I wish these were in the articles of impeachment, under the president’s ongoing campaign to undermine American’s faith in the essential fairness of our own democratic institutions, the Department Of Justice and Congress among them.  This is the final bit of Trump’s April 19th tweet storm after Barr confidently and incorrectly announced that Mueller’s report exonerated the innocent president:

“Very sick and dangerous people who have committed very serious crimes, perhaps even [capital offenses]”   These menaces are DOJ employees, these very sick and dangerous criminals, perhaps even traitors, people who, perhaps even need to be executed for their sick and very serious crimes. 

Note the display of the president’s high-minded due process concern for the presumption of innocence for these dangerous (if un-indicted) criminals he has already marked for punishment, perhaps even execution.

This is what the president told a reporter at the NATO summit last week when asked about the newly released House Intelligence Committee report on its impeachment inquiry:

[1]   the skinny on Viktor Yanukovych:

In February 2014, Ukraine appeared to be on the brink of civil war, as violent clashes between protesters and special police forces led to many deaths and injuries.^[12][13][14] On 21 February 2014, Yanukovych claimed that, after lengthy discussions, he had reached an agreement with the opposition.^[15] Later that day, however, he left the capital for Kharkiv, saying his car was shot at as he left Kyiv, and travelling next to Crimea, and eventually to exile in southern Russia.^[16]

On 22 February, the Ukrainian parliament voted to remove him from his post, on the grounds that he was unable to fulfill his duties.^[17] Parliament set 25 May as the date for the special election to select his replacement,^{[17][18][19][20]} and, two days later, issued a warrant for his arrest, accusing him of “mass killing of civilians.”^[21] After his departure, Yanukovych conducted several press conferences. In one of these, he declared himself to remain “the legitimate head of the Ukrainian state elected in a free vote by Ukrainian citizens”.^[22] On 18 June 2015, Yanukovych was officially deprived of the title of President of Ukraine by the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine.^[23] On 24 January 2019, he was sentenced in absentia to thirteen years’ imprisonment for high treason by a Ukrainian court.^[24]

Update:  This is what you do when you fuck up and say something that is factually wrong.  You acknowledge your mistake and correct it.   Novel idea, I know.  Here we go.

WHOOPS, this Republican claim about Clinton’s impeachment not starting until his second term is entirely true. I was wrong about the date, completely and clearly wrong.   He was elected to his second term in 1996.  The impeachment began well after that date, as the Republicans have been pointing out in support of their idea that Democrats are trying to nullify the will of the voters who put Trump in office. (see footnote 3)

It’s not that Republicans didn’t do everything possible to hobble, compromise and humiliate Clinton before impeaching him, it’s just that they didn’t have firm grounds for it yet during his first term.  The story line of how they got the Clinton perjury and obstruction charges gets a little complicated.

The Supreme Court didn’t allow Paula Jones’s sexual harassment lawsuit against sitting president Bill Clinton to go forward until 1997, during Clinton’s second term.  It was a unanimous Supreme Court decision, by the way.   Once that lawsuit was allowed to go forward the Jones lawyers were able to subpoena Monica Lewinsky.  Monica Lewinsky was grabbed by the FBI under Independent Counsel Ken Starr’s direction (they called the grab “Prom Night”) and threatened her with a long prison term for her perjury in an affidavit (denying having had sex of any kind with Clinton) she wrote in connection to her subpoena in the Paula Jones suit.  Kenneth Starr’s team got the goods on Lewinsky and her affair with Clinton from her confidant Linda Tripp, who gave them audio evidence of the affair and led them to the Blue Dress with Clinton’s DNA (in the form of his semen) on it.  

The impeachment was started in October 1998, during Clinton’s second term — well AFTER his reelection in 1996, after Starr’s team had secured Clinton’s perjury relating to Lewinsky also lying about it in the Jones case (thrown out of court, appealed and settled by Clinton prior to the appeal being heard with an $850,000 payment) [1].   Familiar conservative lawyers played key roles in the case. {2]

I don’t know what the hell I was thinking when I wrote this piece I posted the other day  — and apologies to Brian Lehrer, he was right as rain.  Take the following with a grain or two of salt– my facts are dead wrong in relation to WHEN the impeachment started, it wasn’t right before the 1998 presidential election, that’s for sure.   I’ve corrected the errors in the original, like so:

Republicans have taken to calling the Trump impeachment inquiry an unprincipled, anti-democratic Democratic end-run around the will of the People. [3] Let the American voters decide in 2020, they say.   They point out that when they were in power they didn’t start the impeachment against the hated liar and fornicator Bill “Slick Willie” Clinton until after his re-election.  I heard Brian Lehrer repeat this inaccurate statement the other day on his otherwise excellent Impeachment, a daily podcast (I need to drop Brian a line, he’d want to know).

History is history and, although it is easily enough forgotten and ignored,  you can look up the dates that certain things happened and read certain undisputed details of public events.   You can make a confident declaration about some verifiable event in the past and simply be — inaccurate.  (AS I WAS IN THIS POST, AS TO THE TIMING OF CLINTON’S IMPEACHMENT)   It’s very easy to verify things like dates using the phone in your pocket 24/7– if you’ve got the time (or if you think for as long as it takes to recall that presidential elections occur every four years, 00, 04, 08, 16 etc.) . Just the facts, ma’am (though no longer in support of my original idea):

The impeachment of Bill Clinton was initiated on October 8, 1998, when the United States House of Representatives voted to commence impeachment proceedings against Bill Clinton, the 42nd president of the United States, for “high crimes and misdemeanors“. The specific charges against Clinton were lying under oath and obstruction of justice. The charges stemmed from a sexual harassment lawsuit filed against Clinton by Paula Jones and from Clinton’s testimony denying that he had engaged in a sexual relationship with White House intern Monica Lewinsky.  The catalyst for the president’s impeachment was the Starr Report, a September 1998 report prepared by Independent Counsel Ken Starr for theHouse Judiciary Committee.^[1] 

You can look it up, or just read the summary here.  One month before the 1998 presidential election [WTF?  the election  was two years earlier, the date is always a multiple of four– ed.], Newt and the boys started taking America back.   Talk about your October surprises.

Just sayin’…

[1]   Wikipedia:

Jones’s suit was dismissed as lacking legal merit prior to Clinton’s impeachment and the exposure of the Lewinsky affair. But in August 1998 Clinton’s relationship with Lewinsky, and compelling evidence that he had lied about it under oath in the Jones suit, was brought to light. At that point Jones appealed the ruling, and her appeal gained traction following Clinton’s admission to having an affair with Monica Lewinsky in August 1998.^[1]

On appeal, Clinton agreed to an out-of-court settlement, paying Jones and her lawyers $850,000 to drop the suit; a substantial portion of the settlement was expected to pay Jones’s legal fees.^[2] Clinton’s lawyer said that the President made the settlement only so he could end the lawsuit for good and move on with his life.^[3] Jones and her lawyers have said the payment is evidence of Clinton’s guilt.

[2]  Wikipedia:

[Ann] Coulter first became a public figure shortly before becoming an unpaid legal adviser for the attorneys representing Paula Jones in her sexual harassment suit against President Bill Clinton. Coulter’s friend George Conway had been asked to assist Jones’ attorneys, and shortly afterward Coulter, who wrote a column about the Paula Jones case for Human Events, was also asked to help, and she began writing legal briefs for the case.

Coulter later stated that she would come to mistrust the motives of Jones’ head lawyer, Joseph Cammaratta, who by August or September 1997 was advising Jones that her case was weak and to settle, if a favorable settlement could be negotiated.^[21][137] From the outset, Jones had sought an apology from Clinton at least as eagerly as she sought a settlement.^[138] However, in a later interview Coulter recounted that she herself had believed that the case was strong, that Jones was telling the truth, that Clinton should be held publicly accountable for his misconduct, and that a settlement would give the impression that Jones was merely interested in extorting money from the President.^[21]

[3]  Leave aside that the will of the People was to elect the almost equally unpopular Hillary Clinton, by about a 3,000,000 vote margin.  Trump won the Electoral College, fair and square, by about 78,000 votes in three brilliantly played key states.

A young multi-billionaire’s unfettered right to get even richer vs. sensible protections for a fair and honest election.

Facebook has stated, unequivocally,  that political campaigns have an absolute right to lie on Facebook, as much and as long as their budgets allow.   Facebook will continue to deliver personally targeted ads that are completely false, sent to influence the demographic most vulnerable to provocative lies that support their feelings of fear, anger and helplessness  — “low information voters” — who get their news from places like Facebook.   There is no law against it and Facebook claims no responsibility for the damage its massive opinion machine has already done to democracy.  Its policy will continue on into 2020, come what may.

It’s true, of course, that there is no general law against lying, unless you lie under oath before a body that can punish you for perjury.   There are libel laws that allow people falsely accused of damaging things to take their accusers to court and get public vindication and restitution from the person/entity who slandered them.   In a specific circumstance, where deliberate falsehood can be proved to a jury, that’s a law against lying for personal profit, if that lie is detrimental to the reputation of a competitor or critic (and causes monetary harm), but it’s far from a law against lying for profit.   There are regulations on the advertising industry that prevent outright lying — the wiggle room in these regulations providing a fertile field for creative geniuses of the advertiser’s art to do interpretative dance in.  

As a general principle, as the life-long actions of our current born wealthy president demonstrate, as the dazzling self-made wealth of young Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook demonstrates, lying to become richer or more powerful is no vice.   Pettifoggers refer to this kind of transactional lying as “puffery”, a form of extreme manipulative exaggeration that is arguably not actual “lying” lying.   Mr. Trump has used this legal term to describe some of the more egregious lying he does from time to time.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg dances around lying, and openly allowing “political” lies to take wing on his supremely influential opinion-sharing web platform, speaking of his true aims as advancing “freedom of speech” and being in the proud democratic tradition of men like Martin Luther King and Frederick Douglass.   Zuckerberg knows that his right to unlimited additional billions of dollars (and bear in mind, at age 35 Mark only has a little over $70,000,000,000) depends on nobody regulating his massively lucrative and influential, worldwide business.

Lies are indispensable to ambitious people with shady things to hide.   We had a recent president, George W. Bush, whose father was wealthy and influential and, though he supported the American war in Viet Nam, used his connections to get his boy, George, into an elite National Guard fighter pilot unit that would keep him out of combat.   The young man was a heavy drinker, also fond of cocaine, and so he didn’t make it back to base for a mandatory medical exam that would have found cocaine in his system.  He went AWOL, as one does under such circumstances, and never completed his elite unit National Guard service.    His father took care of this for him — it was only many years later, once he was the 43rd president of the United States, that enterprising reporters dug up the story.  Dubya never denied it outright, he didn’t have to — the documents the first network report was based on turned out to be forgeries!   The lying liberal media!   Heads rolled, including the head of the longtime CBS anchorman who broke the story, the underlying truth of which was never disputed.  It is more likely than not that the forgeries of actual records (long ago destroyed) were provided to the lying press by Karl Rove, the amoral genius behind Bush’s presidential victory.

When Dubya ran for reelection, against a man who had served with distinction in Viet Nam, his campaign got busy smearing his opponent, John Kerry, a decorated soldier (who had volunteered for combat service) with a false narrative.   They hired a team to claim that Dubya’s opponent had served disgracefully in Viet Nam– the truth was, according to these veterans (who claimed to have been on the river patrols with him), that he’d been no hero, he’d been a coward and a liar.   The slandered John Kerry, took the high road, instead of confronting Bush about the lies and challenging him to publicly compare his shady military record with Kerry’s record of decorated combat service.   Kerry lost the presidential election of 2004, based, in part, on the ferocity of the lying attack by the “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth” or whatever the hit squad of political assassins called itself.   Kerry also lost because he was perceived as being less of a “man” than Dubya because the wealthy “elitist” Kerry didn’t defend himself against the scurrilous attack on his good character by agents of “man of the people” (and fellow Yale Skull and Bone-ser) Dubya.

Fast forward a few years and we have a compulsive liar in the White House.   He literally can’t help himself.   It is his reflex to lie, because he needs to constantly convince others, and himself, presumably, that he is the greatest in whatever the topic under discussion is.   He knows more about military strategy than the generals, disputes the findings of American intelligence services, refutes the veracity of reporting that shows statements he makes on live TV, brags about his unlimited powers under Article Two of a constitution he has certainly never read and professes expertise in many other things things he knows nothing about.  

One thing he does know, probably better than anybody in public life, if you have powerful forces and a ton of money behind you and you lie continually, audaciously and forcefully, you can get away with almost anything — as he has so far.

I won’t say that people who believe Trump’s continual lies are necessarily stupid, though some undoubtedly are.   It is the rage and powerlessness so many of us feel in an in-your-face unfair America that Trump exploits with his most incendiary lies, like one seen by five million people on Facebook recently:  Joe Biden gave the Ukrainians a billion dollars to cover up the corruption involved in Hunter Biden’s lucrative job in Ukraine.   It may not be true, it may be demonstrably false, in fact, but, goddamn it, Biden is a smiling sack of shit! (I may agree with this [1], though it doesn’t convince me that he managed to raise a billion dollars to pay off corrupt Ukrainians to protect his son’s name and his own political career — the claim itself is absurd).   

Why does Facebook allow this kind of obvious tinfoil hat conspiracy theory slander, in a paid ad, on its immensely influential platform?   Zuckerberg was grilled about this before Congress recently.   He managed to avoid giving a single intelligent answer to any of the questions he was asked.   He has no answers because — Madam Congressman, I have no legal requirement to give an answer or even a reasonable rationale since, in fact, the law finds, I believe, that I am under no legal obligation, as CEO of the world’s most powerful influence machine, to do anything but tap dance here, under oath, until this very uncomfortable session is over.

Which is true.  American deference to billionaire owners of lucrative companies is well-known.   Regulation of any kind, the lobbyists for such people and entities have convinced Americans, is inherently “job killing”.  Those who propose to regulate industry for the public good, and tax fairly to raise money for programs that improve the lives of all citizens, are misguided at best.  “Tax and Spend” was a Reagan era mantra against any elected “liberal” official suggesting the government should tax wealthy people and corporations and use the money to fund things like research into how to avoid the climate catastrophe that is now upon us full-blown a few decades later.  “Welfare queens” driving around in Cadillacs and buying multiple mansions on the public dime were the real problem in America, according to the conservative view, not intergenerational poverty, not born multimillionaires like Charles and David Koch spending unlimited sums and using every means possible to shift public opinion to create mass support for protection of their abhorrent privilege.

People with shameful things to hide hate leakers, whistleblowers, rats.   A leaking rat secretly recorded Mark Zuckerberg recently as he candidly addressed his troops at Facebook and the CEO’s comments made it into public.  Part of the transcript was his response to what would happen to the company if someone like Elizabeth Warren, who expressly seeks to regulate gigantic, unaccountable companies like Facebook, becomes the Democratic presidential candidate and wins in 2020.  Zuck said they’d bring a lawsuit against the government to prevent any regulation of Facebook’s incredibly lucrative operation:

“Does that still suck for us?  Yeah, I mean, I don’t want to have a major lawsuit against our own government.  That’s not like the position you want to be in.  We care about our country and want to work with our government to do good things, but look, at the end of the day, if someone’s going to try to threaten something that existential, you go to the mat and you fight.”

What is the thing that is “that existential”?   Facebook’s CEO’s absolute God-given American right to make maximum profit by any means necessary.   There is no shame in America about a man who has thousands of times more money than he can ever spend if he lives to be a thousand years old from doing everything in his power to get more still.   It’s as American as, well, owning other humans to increase your wealth and wiping out people living on land you want for your own.

Like slavery and ‘ethnic cleansing’, the cult of American oligarchs’ (even self-made ones like young Mark Zuckerberg) right to unlimited, unlimitable wealth  has to become a relic of a more bestial time — or just stick a fork in any notion of truth, justice and the American way.  Trump’s election was largely achieved through his mastery of “Social Media” and his billionaire-backed campaign’s brilliance in securing 78,000 targeted votes in every district needed for their Electoral College victory.   Trump in 2020 is, literally, the end of any pretense of democracy in our divided experiment in republican self-rule. 

We learn that political advertising accounts for only a tiny fraction of Facebook’s robust profits.  That’s clearly not the reason Zuckberg won’t limit unscrupulous politicians’ right to pay to lie their asses off on his platform.   That type of lying politician is least likely to want to regulate Facebook, they love Facebook as much as Trump claimed to love Wikileaks when he was a candidate.  

The choice between a long, expensive court fight with a government headed by someone who wants to limit the ability of lying demagogues to use an unregulated, hugely influential public platform to come to power and having a lying demagogue in power who will ensure mutually beneficial business as usual?   You decide which of those sucks less for Free Speech Mark.

[1]  Though my first thought about Biden as a smiling sack of shit is his disgraceful lack of humility and character, decades after allowing Anita Hill to be publicly humiliated in confirmation hearings for Clarence “Long Dong” Thomas, when he called to offer a conditional, weak, politically motivated non-apology to Anita Hill for “what they did to you” and wishing he “could have done more”, which, of course, as chairman of the Judiciary Committee he had been utterly powerless to do.    Anita Hill was perfectly right to refuse his insulting “apology”.     Fuck him and the horse’s ass the falsely smiling face-lifted, hair-plugged fuck rode in on.