Mega-Thread: Impeachment Proceedings & Inquiry of Trump

[cubby]

There is a part of me that wonders if him getting snubbed at Cummings memorial is making that turtle feel he took his politics too far. Him not attempting to defend trump at all is weird.

He might also be realizing the count right now is at six for sources confirming quid pro quo. If it was one or two, perhaps. But this is six, including a decorated military officer and Trump's own Ambassador.

[Muajin76]

Trump: I officially support the HK protests
Dems/Republicans: IMPEACH HIM!
Trump:HK people are my favorite people. Good people those HK people.
*2020*
Trump: Guess i'm outta a job.

I wonder if this would be a sure fire way to get him out of office.

[Canpinter]

Ok this is dumb of me to ask, but if trump is somehow successfully removed, does that actually stop him from running in 2020?

[Muajin76]

Ok this is dumb of me to ask, but if trump is somehow successfully removed, does that actually stop him from running in 2020?

Some have debated he might face prison time or some type of charge IF he's kicked out. I'm really hoping he faces some jail time, but that's just me. I would think this would prohibit him from running as a 2020 presidential candidate. Also yea, if he's kicked out he's disqualified.

[Orbitus]

Ok this is dumb of me to ask, but if trump is somehow successfully removed, does that actually stop him from running in 2020?

I believe in the Constitution it disqualifies him from office, and holding office ever again.

[cubby]

Yes. It disqualifies him immediately. He also can’t be someone’s VP.

Actually, the Constitution is unclear on that. From what I've read so far, the Impeachment immediately removes him from office. However, a separate declaration to say that he cannot run for office again must also be passed.

But again, that piece of it is murky.

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Some have debated he might face prison time or some type of charge IF he's kicked out. I'm really hoping he faces some jail time, but that's just me. I would think this would prohibit him from running as a 2020 presidential candidate. Also yea, if he's kicked out he's disqualified.

If removed from office, he would immediately eschew the protections of the Executive office, and be "eligible" for prosecution. Pence can pardon him, but only of federal crimes, and the pardon still requires a confession.

[Breccia]

Ok this is dumb of me to ask, but if trump is somehow successfully removed, does that actually stop him from running in 2020?

Not if he resigns, but, resigning then re-running is pointless even by Trump standards. @Vegas82 is right about the rest.

[Muajin76]

Actually, the Constitution is unclear on that. From what I've read so far, the Impeachment immediately removes him from office. However, a separate declaration to say that he cannot run for office again must also be passed.

But again, that piece of it is murky.

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If removed from office, he would immediately eschew the protections of the Executive office, and be "eligible" for prosecution. Pence can pardon him, but only of federal crimes, and the pardon still requires a confession.

He wouldn't be protected from digging up all that possible juicy stuff on him either. Any wrongful doings would be exposed and no longer immune to anything. We can all hope that is what could happen! I really hope Pence doesn't step in and put his neck on the line, but you never know.

[kaelleria]

“Vindman...told House impeachment investigators on Tuesday that the White House transcript of a July call between President Trump and Ukraine’s president omitted crucial words and phrases, and that his attempts to restore them failed...”

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/29/u...gtype=Homepage

The "transcript" we saw was the sanitized version.

[Dontrike]

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/29/u...gtype=Homepage

The "transcript" we saw was the sanitized version.

Well yeah, we knew that. Funny thing is that the sanitized version still didn't make it look good for Trump.

[Orbitus]

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/29/u...gtype=Homepage

The "transcript" we saw was the sanitized version.

So, the notes of the transcript, which is already damning for Trump, is worse than we thought? Not really surprising. Even though, there is enough in it to sink him now, the fact that it is worse, isn't surprising.

[nonameelf]

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/29/u...gtype=Homepage

The "transcript" we saw was the sanitized version.

I'm pretty sure every knew that it wasn't the full transcript already.

Except people like:

Oh, so it is all just a lie, formulated by the White House to cover Trump? And you accuse me of peddling conspiracy theories

How's that egg feel on your face, by the way?

[Edge-]

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/29/u...gtype=Homepage

The "transcript" we saw was the sanitized version.

I imagined there would be some minor cleanup, but "crucial words and phrases"?

Hot damn...now I want to see the real transcript.

If that's the cleanest version they could come up with, and it was still enough to launch a serious impeachment inquiry and leave Republicans fumbling for a defense, then they're going to have a Sisyphean task ahead of them if the real transcript ever gets out.

[Breccia]

The "transcript" we saw was the sanitized version.

We all "knew" that. Now it's been said under oath.

I'm honestly surprised we haven't seen more of a move to get the actual transcript before. Nobody, not even the rabid fanbase, think Trump released an honest depiction.

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Funny story: Hannity.

Funny story with details: Hannity spent his hour today talking about how the transcript proved Trump was innocent. I somehow doubt he'll re-examine that.

[Paranoid Android]

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/29/u...gtype=Homepage

The "transcript" we saw was the sanitized version.

Umm, the doctored transcript enough was damning. I can't wait to see (hopefully) the real bad parts.

[Breccia]

Christopher Anderson, a former assistant to former special envoy for Ukraine Kurt Volker, will reportedly tell the House committees conducting the impeachment inquiry that Bolton warned that Giuliani was intertwined with the president’s decision-making on Ukraine.

It is looking more and more like Bolton will have to testify.

"However, he [Bolton] cautioned that Mr. Giuliani was a key voice with the President on Ukraine which could be an obstacle to increased White House engagement," Anderson will say in his prepared statement, which CNN obtained.

Anderson served between 2017 and 2019 before Catherine Croft, who is also scheduled to testify Wednesday, took over the position this summer, the network noted. She is expected to provide information on receiving calls from Giuliani allies seeking to influence policy and the meeting during which an “informal hold” was placed on Ukraine military aid, it added.

"The only reason given was that the order came at the direction of the President," she will reportedly say.

Yep, that's a Trump appointee, right there.

[Breccia]

Can we stop saying "transcript"? It isn't a transcript, no matter how many times Trump cries about it.

It literally says at the bottom "not a verbatim transcript of a discussion".

More importantly, since the official record was locked away, and this isn't even that, Trump is asking us to take him at his word. The same Trump who said he'd release his taxes, stay true to his wife (all three of them), run into a school shooting, pay workers what he owed them, pay banks what he owed them, balance the budget fairly quickly, claimed to the be healthiest person ever to run for office, said there were millions of illegal votes against him, says vaccines cause autism, says climate change is a Chinese hoax, said Obama was a Kenyan, would create better health coverage for more people for less money, would keep GDP 4/5/6%, didn't work with Russia, and dozens hundreds thousands I do plan to finish eventually ten thousand other lies in the last three years alone.

Add to that the hypocrisy of Trump supporters pointing to Biden and saying "that transaction that happened in broad daylight with half the world watching was corrupt, we need to root out the invisible evidence to find it!" while pointing at what Trump claims is a 5-minute transcript of a 30-minute call and saying "case closed".

[Cthulhu 2020]

Thank you for admitting at one point she was, glad she is doing the right thing and holding a vote.

Pelosi never was scared, she's been playing Trump like a fiddle, and everyone who's been screaming "HOLD THE VOTE" is the rest of the orchestra that Nancy was playing.

[Beefhammer]

Pelosi never was scared, she's been playing Trump like a fiddle, and everyone who's been screaming "HOLD THE VOTE" is the rest of the orchestra that Nancy was playing.

Oh is he one of those woke guys who, defends Trump but never admits to it, is worried about precedent while the people he doesn't support, but really does, shits all over it and sits idly by and says nothing?

[Skroe]

Todays News: Donald Trump is ensuring his demise in an unexpected, but EXTREMELY promising way.

You folks ready for an enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my-friend kind of moment?

I give you Ken Cuccinelli.

Ken Cuccinelli is an legitimately evil motherfucker. He's a reminder that any society can produce men with black souls who power must be utterly denied to. If the Crypto-fascists that make up the Trump Administration and his base had a (very fitting), Nazi-like uniform, Cuccinelli would sport it everywhere... even to little league games. If Trump's regimes threw up death camps, Cuccinelli would relish in designing them to inflict maximum horror.

Not a word of this is hyperbole. People have many different opinions on immigration and minorities in this country, but Ken Cuccinelli's, long preceding Trump, has been one that dehumanizes people who are not, well, basically exactly like him. There are few public figures who are so extreme. He honestly may be the most extreme non-Trump official to hold a notable political office outside of Trump in the past 20 years. You can read more about him here.
https://www.ontheissues.org/Ken_Cuccinelli.htm
https://www.rightwingwatch.org/repor...the-tea-party/
https://www.washingtonian.com/2011/0...en-cuccinelli/
https://thehill.com/opinion/immigrat...ay-any-role-in


In addition to all these things, he is one additional thing: a mortal enemy to and of Senate Majority Leader, Senator Mitch McConnell.

Ken Cuccinelli is a fanatic. McConnell is a pragmatist and an opportunist. Cuccinelli is highly ideological... perhaps unparalleled. McConnell's core ideology is "power", but in terms of his legitimate personal positions, it's actually a very soft center-right. But he barely cares about that stuff. Power is what interests him.

A few years back Cuccinelli because President of the Senate Conservatives Fund, a political action committee with a long track record of working against incumbent Republican senators, challenging them from the party’s right flank. In other words, he tried to primary sitting Republican Senators.

He said this in 2017:

“Mitch McConnell has filled the Senate with people like Lisa Murkowski, John McCain, Shelley Moore Capito, Lamar Alexander, and Dean Heller who all promised the voters they would repeal Obamacare, but when the time came to do it they refused,” Cuccinelli wrote in an August 2017 fundraising message for the fund. “Instead of admitting his mistake, McConnell is blaming the President for having ‘excessive expectations’ even though he was the one who set those expectations with years of empty promises!”

You can imagine how McConnell took to that.

Recall our discussions in the Democratic Primary thread about how the Democratic Party needs "Manchins" because he can win in places like West Virginia, when a progressive Democrat could not. Few people are as functionally aligned with this philosophy (just for the Republican Party) as Mitch McConnell. He isn't looking for ideologous. He is looking for people who can win with relative ease in states that will net him a Senate Majority. That's why he doesn't care when someone like Susan Collins crosses him on Obamacare repeal - a topic he did not really care about - because she'll keep him in the majority and vote with him almost uniformly on a topic he does care about, conservative judges. In other words, he strongly believes in calibrating the candidate to the State, to win the state, rather than having an ideologically consistent caucus.

Cuccinelli is the Republican-side advocate of something that some progressives here have advocated for the Democratic side, which is a rigid adherence to a fundamentalist (of sorts) political position... one that is as far removed from the center as possible.

It gets worse for Cuccinelli's relationship with McConnell. Under Cuccinelli’s leadership, the Senate Conservatives Fund also endorsed Roy Moore for Senate in Alabama in a 2017 Republican primary runoff, over incumbent Senator Luther Strange. McConnell and Establishment Republicans strongly backed Strange, who was appointed to the seat vacated when Jeff Sessions became Attorney General. When Strange lost in the primary to Roy Moore, and then Roy Moore lost to Democrat Doug Jones, Cuccinelli's fundamentalism basically lead to McConnell having a smaller majority by 1 than he otherwise would have had.

But the worst act as actually in 2014. The Senate Conservatives Fund backed Matt Bevin (currently Governor) in a Senate primary in Kentucky against McConnell. Cuccinelli became head of the fund after McConnell beat Bevin, but doubled down on the position and used it as an example of what TO DO rather than what not to do.

McConnell in recent years has basically blacklisted Cuccinelli from anything involving the Senate. He has informed outside groups that if they have Cuccinelli working for them, he will not work with them. Furthermore in an attempt to defeat the SCF, he stated in 2018 and in 2020 that any group that attempts to primary his chosen list of Senators from the right, or any contracting group (like an ad-making firm) that assists such a group, will be blacklisted from all campaigns and coordination with the Senate Leadership Fund (his associated group). Permanently. The threat has stuck, and no Republican Senator is seeing a supported primary challenge.

On an even more personal level, McConnell has worked to frustrate Cuccinelli's career advancement. By now he should be a representative, governor or Senate candidate. Every time he tries to advance himself, McConnell frustrates him somehow. Until recently, Cuccinelli has been reduced to doing talking head jobs on CNN, saying his crazy crap. That's usually the destination for people cashing in on their careers in public service that were behind them. Cuccinelli, with no patron and powerful enemies, was not nearly there.

Which is of course, why Donald Trump and his racist administration, very simpatico with Cuccinelli named him as acting Director of the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) since June. Because of course he did. This was done after Trump floated his name to McConnell earlier in the year as a potential nominee for Secretary of Homeland Security. And McConnell said, in so many words, over his dead body. Privately he told others that if Trump nominated Cuccinelli, the nomination would never come up for a vote.

Senator Mitch "Turtleman" McConnell, really does not like this man. I can't think of another story of personal animus on this scale. But then again Ken Cuccinelli is one of a kind (in a bad way).

Well today, it gets hilarious.

https://thehill.com/policy/national-...-cuccinelli-as

The White House is eyeing Ken Cuccinelli to serve as acting Department of Homeland Security (DHS) secretary, The Wall Street Journal reported.

President Trump has told allies that he wants Cuccinelli, the acting director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, to take on DHS leadership, people familiar with the matter told the newspaper.


Cuccinelli is ineligible to be appointed DHS secretary, however, under a federal statute on governing vacancies.
The New York Times first reported that the Trump administration is hunting for a way to avoid the vacancies statute in order to appoint Cuccinelli.

A source familiar with the plan to bypass the statute told the Journal that the White House has requested help from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel to determine the legality of the plan.

To execute the White House's desired plan, the administration would need to appoint an official to the fourth highest position in the department. Then, the White House would appoint this person as acting secretary of DHS, according to the Times.
Normally, the line of succession requires the White House to nominate one of the top three leaders of the department, but all three of those positions are vacant.

This arrangement would avoid a confirmation struggle as some Republicans oppose Cuccinelli after he launched a campaign against incumbent GOP lawmakers.

Donald Trump, realizing that Cuccinelli by virtue of his position cannot simply be appointed to the Homeland Security Secretary position without an arcane, questionably legal manuever, and realizing that if he nominates Ken Cuccinelli, Mitch McConnell will never see it voted on, or relish in its defeat, has decided to take some extraordinary steps to go AROUND McConnell's obstruction of his desires.

You can you think of a bigger "Fuck You" to Mitch McConnell than Donald Trump advancing a guy to a Cabinet position that McConnell has worked diligently to hinder for years and who shares a mutual emnity with? And then doing so via an extraordinary appointment maneuver? I sure can't. This is Donald Trump telling Mitch McConnell "I don't give a shit about what you think".

To which I say, go Donald! Go!

Don't get me wrong. Cuccinelli would be a disaster of a Secretary of Homeland Security. He's a monster. And he will become an empowered monster. But we all know it is going to get worse before it gets better. And Trump has about a year left. Trump doing this will alienate Mitch McConnell faster and better than anything else. It will be the latest, greatest (but certainly not the first) "fuck you" to the man, in a way that will resonate personally... way more personally than the Government shutdown after Trump lied to his face. It will show McConnell in perhaps the ultimate form that Trump not only doesn't give a fuck about what McConnell wants, but that 4 more years of Trump would see Trump do LOTS of things like this and undermine McConnell's own power.

Turn Trump and McConnell against each other, and 40 Republican Senators appear to throw Donald Trump into a woodchipper. Because they like and are loyal to Mitch McConnell, and they loathe Trump by in large.

So here's hoping Trump takes this step in the next few weeks, because it'll apply pressure to Republican Senators - McConnell in particular - from a new direction. Think of impeachment as the hammer. Could this be part of the anvil? Because Cuccinelli being appointed foreshadows Senate Republicans being truly sidelined by a rogue President... and together it might just be enough for them to take action.