The Impeachment of President Donald J Trump

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Re: The Impeachment of President Donald J Trump

Postby Heaven Swan » Tue Mar 28, 2017 9:07 am

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"When IT reigns, I’m poor.” Mario
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Re: The Impeachment of President Donald J Trump

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue Mar 28, 2017 9:11 am

^^^^^ :D

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Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: The Impeachment of President Donald J Trump

Postby cptmarginal » Tue Mar 28, 2017 9:47 am

JackRiddler wrote:It should be noted as always that Clinton did win, as one might expect of the second most obviously sociopathic and hated candidate in modern history running against the most sociopathic and hated and candidate, who is a doddering fool to boot (though very good at playing his own crowd). The Dead Hand of 1787 decided otherwise.

She likely also won the close states where Republican machines suppressed the vote, but chose not to help the Greens as the recounts were overwhelmed.


Yes, I keep saying this to people too. The current state of discourse is such that questioning the fundamental mechanics of the voting process has become verboten. People simply do not want to hear it, and can't help themselves from wildly conflating this very specific accusation with a range of outrageous viewpoints. The strategy of distraction and disinformation, the recent spectacle of Republicans outright accusing Democrats of electoral fraud in Michigan, has now become textbook for them. It's just like the Donald accusing Hillary of underage sex trafficking. Brazenly topsy-turvy, or else it wouldn't work.

And of course even without the help of the corrupt antiquated machines right at each polling station, they still had Crosscheck.

Crosscheck in action:
Trump victory margin in Michigan: 13,107
Michigan Crosscheck purge list: 449,922

Trump victory margin in Arizona: 85,257
Arizona Crosscheck purge list: 270,824

Trump victory margin in North Carolina: 177,008
North Carolina Crosscheck purge list: 589,393
The new way of thinking is precisely delineated by what it is not.
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Re: The Impeachment of President Donald J Trump

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue Mar 28, 2017 11:10 am

Peter Alexander‏Verified account @PeterAlexander 15m15 minutes ago
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BREAKING: House Intel's top Democrat Adam Schiff now demanding Sally Yates "be permitted to testify freely and openly."




Scott Wilson‏Verified account @PostScottWilson 1h1 hour ago
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Trump admin sought to block Sally Yates from testifying to Congress on Russia. Scoop by @DevlinBarrett @adamentous https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/na ... eb4d47ce20


Yates = Flynn = WH Council = trump



Russia probe in turmoil as top Dem calls for Nunes’ recusal


Michael Isikoff
Chief Investigative Correspondent
Yahoo NewsMarch 27, 2017

Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., chairman of the House intelligence committee, briefs reporters at the U.S. Capitol on March 24, 2017. (Photo: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters)
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The House intelligence committee investigation into Russian interference in last year’s election was thrown into new turmoil Monday night, after the ranking Democrat on the panel called on the Republican chairman, Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., to “recuse himself from any further involvement.”

The call by Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., came after Nunes acknowledged he had gone to the White House grounds to receive classified information from an unidentified source about U.S. intelligence community surveillance that, he says, had swept up conversations involving Trump transition officials. That information — which Trump has claimed partially vindicates his tweets charging that former President Barack Obama had “wiretapped” him — was never shared with others on the panel, Democrats charge.

Schiff said his call for Nunes to step aside was not made “lightly,” because the two have worked well together for years.

“But in much the same way that the attorney general was forced to recuse himself from the Russia investigation after failing to inform the Senate of his meetings with Russian officials, I believe the public cannot have the necessary confidence that matters involving the president’s campaign or transition team can be objectively investigated or overseen by the chairman,” Schiff said in his statement.

The Schiff statement came as panel staffers speculated on the possible identity of Nunes’ White House source, focusing on Michael Ellis, a lawyer who worked for Nunes on the intelligence panel and who was recently hired to work on national security matters at the White House counsel’s office. A White House official and spokesman for Nunes declined to comment on whether Ellis was involved in providing information to Nunes, as did a spokesman for Schiff. White House press secretary Sean Spicer insisted that White House officials were not aware of Nunes’ secret trip to meet his source and referred all questions to Nunes’ office.

Democrats have been furious that Nunes has yet to describe precisely the classified intelligence he has seen. Nor has he shared any documents with others on the House intelligence panel. Nunes, for his part, defended his previously undisclosed trip to the White House grounds, telling CNN’s Wolf Blitzer that he had to view the classified documents in an executive branch location because the intelligence community had not yet provided them to Congress.

“The Congress has not been given this information, these documents, and that’s the problem,” Nunes said. “This is executive branch.”

Last week, Nunes announced the postponement of a public hearing scheduled for Tuesday at which former CIA Director John Brennan and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper had been due to testify. Instead, Nunes said, FBI Director James Comey and NSA director Mike Rogers would be called back in closed session to explain the new material that he says shows Trump transition officials, and possibly even the president himself, were captured during U.S. surveillance of foreign targets.

But late Monday, the committee confirmed that that session too had been postponed, and will be rescheduled. Comey and Rogers were said to be unavailable.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/russia-probe ... 53160.html
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: The Impeachment of President Donald J Trump

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue Mar 28, 2017 11:33 am

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Michael Isikoff‏Verified account @Isikoff 4h4 hours ago
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The witness list grows: Deripaska, Russian oligarch and one time Manafort business partner, offers to testify pic.twitter.com/qGqH33g5fg
24 replies 181 retweets 177 likes



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Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: The Impeachment of President Donald J Trump

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue Mar 28, 2017 7:08 pm

Right Turn Opinion
Now we know why Trump panicked about Russia probe
By Jennifer Rubin March 28 at 10:56 AM

Trump administration tried to block Sally Yates's congressional testimony Play Video2:29
The Trump administration sought to stop former acting attorney general Sally Yates from testifying before the House Intelligence Committee about links between the Trump campaign and Russian officials. (Video: Jenny Starrs/Photo: Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
You know things are looking grim for President Trump when he starts tweeting about Hillary Clinton again. Monday evening he sounded trapped and wounded: “Why isn’t the House Intelligence Committee looking into the Bill & Hillary deal that allowed big Uranium to go to Russia, Russian speech.” Well, perhaps it is because she is not president, did not hold back her tax returns, did not constantly cheer for Vladimir Putin, did not hire a host of pro-Putin flunkies and did not have aides who lied about contact with Russian officials.

Trump’s tweet certainly appears to be an attempt to deflect attention and to shift discussion away from the newest revelation about the Trump Russia scandal. The Post reports:

The Trump administration sought to block former acting attorney general Sally Yates from testifying to Congress in the House investigation of links between Russian officials and Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, The Washington Post has learned, a position that is likely to further anger Democrats who have accused Republicans of trying to damage the inquiry.

According to letters The Post reviewed, the Justice Department notified Yates earlier this month that the administration considers a great deal of her possible testimony to be barred from discussion in a congressional hearing because the topics are covered by the presidential communication privilege.

That will strike many as a ham-handed attempt to interfere with the investigation. Moreover, it makes the decision House Intelligence Committee Chairman Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) (who remains under fire for his bizarre secret trip to the White House to view alleged information from some unidentified source, which he still has not revealed to other members of the committee) made to cancel an open hearing look once again like water-carrying for the White House.

Rep. Nunes apologizes for handling of Trump surveillance claim Play Video1:11
House Intelligence Committee Chair Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) apologized to colleagues, March 23, after facing backlash for going to the White House before consulting them about what he said was fresh intelligence about surveillance of the president. (Reuters)
Nunes’s fondness for the cameras and determination to throw up dust on behalf of the president has already sparked calls from Democrats, including Minority Leader Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), House Minority Leader Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and ranking member on the House Intelligence Committee Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), for Nunes to recuse himself. “We’ve reached the point, after the events of this week, where it would be very difficult to maintain the credibility of the investigation if the chairman did not recuse himself from matters involving either the Trump campaign or the Trump transition team of which he was a member,” Schiff said.

Appearing on CBS this morning Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) joined the chorus of voices lambasting Nunes:

NORAH O’DONNELL: Let me ask you about what Chairman Nunes has done. Do you think it was appropriate that he went to go view these so-called intelligence reports on White House grounds?

SENATOR JOHN MCCAIN: Well, I think there needs to be a lot of explaining to do. I’ve been around for quite a while and I’ve never heard of any such thing. And– obviously– in a committee like an intelligence committee, you’ve got to have bipartisanship, otherwise the committee loses– credibility.

And so– l– there’s so much out there that needs to be explained by the chairman. And– look– if– this is a very serious issue. It all started with Russian interference– attempt to change the outcome of our election. And so, it’s turning into a centipede like these things have a tendency of doing. And another shoe seems to drop every few days.

NORAH O’DONNELL: And I know that’s why you have called for a select committee, an independent committee, because of the seriousness of these allegations. Should Chairman Nunes reveal his source?

SENATOR JOHN MCCAIN: Well, absolutely. I can’t imagine why not. And I also believe that the entire committee should be engaged. The reason why the armed services committee– honestly does, is successful is we work in a bipartisan fashion. Senator Burr and Senator Warner on our intelligence committee are in the Senate, work closely together. They may have differences, but– you’ve got to have a bipartisan approach to an issue such as this if you want to be credible. . . .

There is more engagement– with– with false information. There is– a lot more associated with Russian attempts to affect America. Our election, but there’s also a lot of other Russian activities going on. For example, right now, they’re attempting to affect the outcome in France.

Stopping just short of demanding Nunes recuse himself, McCain’s open criticism of Nunes nevertheless opens the door for more pressure on Nunes from the GOP. Republicans may be reading polling showing Trump’s approval dropping and support for an independent commission rising. (In the latest Quinnipiac poll voters favor an independent inquest by a 66 to 29 percent margin.) Frankly, if Republicans in Congress want to demonstrate independence from a failing president and avoid constant questions about the issue they’d be smart to offload the entire matter to an independent commission or select committee. Nunes has made his own position — and Republicans’ support for him — increasingly difficult to maintain.

UPDATE: As he often does, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) gets off the best line regarding Nunes: “The problem that he’s created is he’s gone off on a lark by himself, sort of an Inspector Clouseau investigation here.” Indeed.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ri ... cd75e36045
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: The Impeachment of President Donald J Trump

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue Mar 28, 2017 9:32 pm

Scott Dworkin‏Verified account @funder 6m6 minutes ago
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Here's a list of the 10 arrests made by FBI today. Ronald Giallanzo, Nephew of reputed mobster Vincent Asaro is a key arrest #trumprussia

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Scott Dworkin‏Verified account @funder 18m18 minutes ago
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Lawsuit says Felix Sater partnered w/Bonanno-Gambino-Colombo crime families all linked to Trump & arrests today

#trumprussia #russiagate
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Scott Dworkin‏Verified account @funder 31m31 minutes ago
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Long story short: 10 mafia members were arrested by FBI today that have ties to Trump, Russian mob & Felix Sater #trumprussia #russiagate pic.twitter.com/xHD8WZiIAI


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Scott Dworkin Retweeted
Scott Dworkin‏Verified account @funder 1h1 hour ago
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Russian mob related felon/fmr Trump Adv Felix Sater was convicted of racketeering w/members of same crime family #trumprussia #russiagate
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Scott Dworkin‏Verified account @funder 1h1 hour ago
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It seems like it's related to these ten FBI arrests today. One of them is the nephew of Trump's old mafia partners

#trumprussia #russiagate


Scott Dworkin‏Verified account @funder 2h2 hours ago
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"Something big is about to break on Trump & Russia" Sr Dem on the hill

Will keep all posted and try to dig in. #trumprussia #russiagate
93 replies 473 retweets 790 likes
Reply 93 Retweet 473
Like 790
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: The Impeachment of President Donald J Trump

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu Mar 30, 2017 9:53 am

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HOW EX-SPY CHRISTOPHER STEELE COMPILED HIS EXPLOSIVE TRUMP-RUSSIA DOSSIER
The man behind the infamous dossier that raises the possibility that Donald Trump may be vulnerable to Kremlin blackmail is Russia expert Christopher Steele, formerly of M.I.6. Here’s the story of his investigation.
BY HOWARD BLUM
MARCH 30, 2017 5:00 AM

I SPY Christopher Steele, author of the controversial dossier on Donald Trump.
Photo Illustration by Sean McCabe; Photographs From Ispice/Alamy (Stamp), By Victoria Jones/PA Images/Getty Images (Steele), © A. Savin/Pictures From History/The Image Works (Former K.G.B. Building).
There’s a row of Victorian terraced houses on a side street in London’s Belgravia district, each projecting a dowdy respectability with its stone front steps leading to a pair of alabaster pillars and then a glossy black door. And at 9–11 Grosvenor Gardens there is a small, rectangular brass plate adjacent to the formidable door. Its dark letters discreetly announce: ORBIS BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE, LTD.

By design, the company’s title was not very forthcoming. Orbis, of course, is Latin for “circle” and, by common parlance, “the world.” But “intelligence”—that was more problematic. Just what sort of international business information was the company dealing in? Advertising? Accounting? Management consulting?

For a select well-heeled set scattered across the globe, no further explanation was necessary. Orbis was a player in a burgeoning industry that linked refugees from the worlds of espionage and journalism to the decision-makers who ran the flat-earth multi-national corporations and who also, from time to convenient time, dabbled in politics. In their previous lives, the founding partners of Orbis, trained and nurtured by the Secret Intelligence Service, had been in the shadowy business of finding out secrets in the name of national interest. Now they performed more or less the same mission, only they had transferred their allegiance to the self-interests of the well-paying customers who hired them.

And so, on a warm day last June, Christopher Steele, ex-Cambridge Union president, ex-M.I.6 Moscow field agent, ex-head of M.I.6’s Russia desk, ex-adviser to British Special Forces on capture-or-kill ops in Afghanistan, and a 52-year-old father with four children, a new wife, three cats, and a sprawling brick-and-wood suburban palace in Surrey, received in his second-floor office at Orbis a transatlantic call from an old client.

“It started off as a fairly general inquiry,” Steele would recall in an anonymous interview with Mother Jones, his identity at the time still a carefully guarded secret. But over the next seven incredible months, as the retired spy hunted about in an old adversary’s territory, he found himself following a trail marked by, as he then put it, “hair-raising” concerns. The allegations of financial, cyber, and sexual shenanigans would lead to a chilling destination: the Kremlin had not only, he’d boldly assert in his report, “been cultivating, supporting, and assisting” Donald Trump for years but also had compromised the tycoon “sufficiently to be able to blackmail him.”

And in the aftermath of the publication of these explosive findings—as nothing less than the legitimacy of the 2016 U.S. presidential election was impugned; as congressional hearings and F.B.I. investigations were announced; as a bombastic president-elect continued to let loose with indignant tirades about “fake news”; as internal-security agents of the F.S.B., the main Russian espionage agency, were said to have burst into a meeting of intelligence officers, placed a bag over the head of the deputy director of its cyber-activities, and marched him off; as the body of a politically well-connected former F.S.B. general was reportedly found in his black Lexus—Christopher Steele had gone to ground.

A CALL TO LONDON

But in the beginning was the telephone call.

In many defining ways, it was as if Glenn Simpson, a former investigative reporter, and Christopher Steele, a former intelligence operative, had been born under the same star. Simpson—like the onetime spy, according to those who know him—was the embodiment of the traits that defined his longtime occupation: tenacity, meticulousness, cynicism, an obsession with operational secrecy. Also like Steele, who had filed for retirement from the Secret Intelligence Service in 2009, when he realized an old Russian hand would not get a seat at the high table in the Age of Terror, Simpson, approaching middle age and in mid-career, had walked away from journalism at about the ame time after nearly 14 years doing political and financial investigations at The Wall Street Journal. And both men, suddenly footloose but guided by their training, talents, and character, had gravitated to similar businesses for the second acts of their careers.

In 2011, Glenn Simpson, along with two other former Journal reporters, launched Fusion GPS, in Washington, D.C. The firm’s activities, according to the terse, purposefully oblique statement on its Web site, centered on “premium research, strategic intelligence, and due diligence.”

In September 2015, as the Republican primary campaign was heating up, he was hired to compile an opposition-research dossier on Donald Trump. Who wrote the check? Simpson, always secretive, won’t reveal his client’s identity. However, according to a friend who had spoken with Simpson at the time, the funding came from a “Never Trump” Republican and not directly from the campaign war chests of any of Trump’s primary opponents.

But by mid-June 2016, despite all the revelations Simpson was digging up about the billionaire’s roller-coaster career, two previously unimaginable events suddenly affected both the urgency and the focus of his research. First, Trump had apparently locked up the nomination, and his client, more pragmatic than combative, was done throwing good money after bad. And second, there was a new cycle of disturbing news stories wafting around Trump as the wordy headline splashed across the front page of The Washington Post on June 17 heralded, INSIDE TRUMP’S FINANCIAL TIES TO RUSSIA AND HIS UNUSUAL FLATTERY OF VLADIMIR PUTIN.

Simpson, as fellow journalists remembered, smelled fresh red meat. And anyway, after all he had discovered, he’d grown deeply concerned by the prospect of a Trump presidency. So he found Democratic donors whose checks would keep his oppo research going strong. And he made a call to London, to a partner at Orbis he had worked with in the past, an ex-spy who knew where all the bodies were buried in Russia, and who, as the wags liked to joke, had even buried some of them.

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SOURCE CODE

‘Are there business ties in Russia?” That, Steele would offer to Mother Jones, was the bland initial thrust of his investigation after he was subcontracted by Fusion for a fee estimated by a source in the trade to be within the profession’s going rate: $12,000 to $15,000 a month, plus expenses.

Steele had known Russia as a young spy, arriving in Moscow as a 26-year-old with his new wife and thin diplomatic cover in 1990. For nearly three years as a secret agent in enemy territory, he lived through the waning days of perestroika and witnessed the tumultuous disintegration of the Soviet Union under Boris Yeltsin’s mercurial and often boozy leadership. The K.G.B. was onto him almost from the start: he inhabited the spy’s uncertain life, where at any moment the lurking menace could turn into genuine danger. Yet even at the tail end of his peripatetic career at the service, Russia, the battleground of his youth, was still in his blood and on his operational mind: from 2004 to 2009 he headed M.I.6’s Russia Station, the London deskman directing Her Majesty’s covert penetration of Putin’s resurgent motherland.

And so, as Steele threw himself into his new mission, he could count on an army of sources whose loyalty and information he had bought and paid for over the years. There was no safe way he could return to Russia to do the actual digging; the vengeful F.S.B. would be watching him closely. But no doubt he had a working relationship with knowledgeable contacts in London and elsewhere in the West, from angry émigrés to wheeling-and-dealing oligarchs always eager to curry favor with a man with ties to the Secret Service, to political dissidents with well-honed axes to grind. And, perhaps most promising of all, he had access to the networks of well-placed Joes—to use the jargon of his former profession—he’d directed from his desk at London Station, assets who had their eyes and ears on the ground in Russia.

How good were these sources? Consider what Steele would write in the memos he filed with Simpson: Source A—to use the careful nomenclature of his dossier—was “a senior Russian Foreign Ministry figure.” Source B was “a former top level intelligence officer still active in the Kremlin.” And both of these insiders, after “speaking to a trusted compatriot,” would claim that the Kremlin had spent years getting its hooks into Donald Trump.

Source E was “an ethnic Russian” and “close associate of Republican US presidential candidate Donald Trump.”

This individual proved to be a treasure trove of information. “Speaking in confidence to a compatriot,” the talkative Source E “admitted there was a well-developed conspiracy of cooperation between them [the Trump campaign] and the Russian leadership.” Then this: “The Russian regime had been behind the recent leak of embarrassing e-mail messages, emanating from the Democratic National Committee (DNC) to the WikiLeaks platform.” And finally: “In return the Trump team had agreed to sideline Russian intervention in Ukraine as a campaign issue and to raise US/NATO defense commitments in the Baltic and Eastern Europe to deflect attention away from Ukraine.”

Then there was Source D, “a close associate of Trump who had organized and managed his recent trips to Moscow,” and Source F, “a female staffer” at the Moscow Ritz-Carlton hotel, who was co-opted into the network by an Orbis “ethnic Russian operative” working hand in hand with the loquacious Trump insider, Source E.

These two sources told quite a lurid story, the now infamous “golden showers” allegation, which, according to the dossier, was corroborated by others in his alphabet list of assets. It was an evening’s entertainment, Steele, the old Russian hand, must have suspected, that had to have been produced by the ever helpful F.S.B. And since it was typical of Moscow Center’s handwriting to have the suite wired up for sound and video (the hotel’s Web site, with unintentional irony, boasts of its “cutting edge technological amenities”), Steele apparently began to suspect that locked in a Kremlin safe was a hell of a video, as well as photographs.

Steele’s growing file must have left his mind cluttered with new doubts, new suspicions. And now, as he continued his chase, a sense of alarm hovered about the former spy. If Steele’s sources were right, Putin had up his sleeve kompromat—Moscow Center’s gleeful word for compromising material—that would make the Access Hollywood exchange between Trump and Billy Bush seem, as Trump insisted, as banal as “locker-room talk.” Steele could only imagine how and when the Russians might try to use it.

THE GREATER GOOD

What should he do? Steele dutifully filed his first incendiary report with Fusion on June 20, but was this the end of his responsibilities? He knew that what he had unearthed, he’d say in his anonymous conversation with Mother Jones, “was something of huge significance, way above party politics.” Yet was it simply a vanity to think that a retired spy had to take it on his shoulders to save the world? And what about his contractual agreement with Simpson? Could the company sue, he no doubt wondered, if he disseminated information he’d collected on its dime?

In the end, Steele found the rationale that is every whistle-blower’s sustaining philosophy: the greater good trumps all other concerns. And so, even while he kept working his sources in the field and continued to shoot new memos to Simpson, he settled on a plan of covert action.

The F.B.I.’s Eurasian Joint Organized Crime Squad—“Move Over, Mafia,” the bureau’s P.R. machine crowed after the unit had been created—was a particularly gung-ho team with whom Steele had done some heady things in the past. And in the course of their successful collaboration, the hard-driving F.B.I. agents and the former frontline spy evolved into a chummy mutual-admiration society.

It was only natural, then, that when he began mulling whom to turn to, Steele thought about his tough-minded friends on the Eurasian squad. And fortuitously, he discovered, as his scheme took on a solid operational commitment, that one of the agents was now assigned to the bureau office in Rome. By early August, a copy of his first two memos were shared with the F.B.I.’s man in Rome.

“Shock and horror”—that, Steele would say in his anonymous interview, was the bureau’s reaction to the goodies he left on its doorstep. And it wanted copies of all his subsequent reports, the sooner the better.

His duty done, Steele waited with anxious anticipation for the official consequences.

FROM THE SHADOWS
There were none. Or at least not any public signs that the F.B.I. was tracking down the ripe leads he’d offered. And in the weeks that followed, as summer turned into fall and the election drew closer, Steele’s own sense of the mounting necessity of his mission must have intensified.

As his frustration grew, the mysterious trickle from WikiLeaks of the Democratic National Committee’s and John Podesta’s purloined e-mails were continuing in a deliberate, steadily ominous flow. He had little doubt the Kremlin was behind the hacking, and he had shared his evidence with the F.B.I., but as best he could tell, the bureau was focusing on solving the legalistic national-security puzzle surrounding Hillary Clinton’s e-mails. With so much hanging in the balance—the potential president of the United States possibly being under Russia’s thumb—why weren’t the authorities more concerned? He decided it was time for desperate measures.

“Someone like me stays in the shadows,” Steele would say, as if apologizing for what he did next. It was an action that went against all his training, all his professional instincts. Spies, after all, keep secrets; they don’t disclose them. And now that the F.B.I. had apparently let him down, there was another restraint tugging on his resolve: he didn’t know whom he could trust. It was as if he were back operating in the long shadow of the Kremlin, living by what the professionals call “Moscow Rules,” where security and vigilance are constant occupational obsessions. But when he considered what was at stake, he knew he had no choice. With Simpson now on board, in effect, as co-conspirator and a shrewd facilitator, Steele met with a reporter.

In early October, on a trip to New York, Steele sat down with David Corn, the 58-year-old Washington-bureau chief of Mother Jones. It was a prudent choice. Corn, who had measured out a career breaking big stories and who had won a George Polk Award in the process, could be imperious, a ruthless man in a ruthless profession, but he was also a man of his word. If he agreed to protect a source, his commitment was unshakable. Steele’s identity would be safe with him.

Related Video: Vladimir Putin’s Impact on the 2016 Election

Corn accepted the terms, listened, and then went to work. He began to investigate, trying to get a handle on Steele’s credibility from people in the intelligence community. And all the while the clock was ticking: the election was just a month away. On October 31, in what one of Corn’s colleagues would describe as “a Hail Mary pass,” he broke a judicious, expurgated version of the story—“A Veteran Spy Has Given the FBI Information Alleging a Russian Operation to Cultivate Donald Trump.”

But in the tidal wave of headlines and breaking news in the weeks before the election, the story got swamped. It was, after all, the silly season. First, the F.B.I. exonerated Hillary Clinton over possible charges involving an insecure e-mail server. Then, 11 days before the election, F.B.I. director James Comey said, in effect, not so fast. Perhaps, he announced gravely, there was a smoking gun on the computer belonging to, of all improbable individuals, disgraced former congressman Anthony Weiner. The press swarmed to the story. And attention was busily paid to the final jabs the two candidates were taking at each other. There were simply too many unsubstantiated claims in Corn’s story for other journalists to check out, and the fact that the primary source was an unnamed former spook, well, that didn’t make the reportorial challenges less daunting

In early November, Corn shared a bit of what he knew with Julian Borger, of The Guardian. And Simpson, during a sandwich lunch with Paul Wood in the BBC’s Washington radio studio, reached into his briefcase and handed over to the British journalist a redacted version of Steele’s initial report. It wasn’t long before, as The New York Times would write, the memos by the former spy “became one of Washington’s worst-kept secrets, as reporters . . . scrambled to confirm or disprove them.”

Then, on November 8, Donald Trump was elected president of the United States.

Within hours of the president-elect’s victory speech, Vladimir Putin went on Russian state television to offer his congratulations. And the Popular Front, a political movement founded by the Russian president, slyly tweeted, “They say that Putin once again beat all.”

MOSCOW RULES
On a bright autumn weekend in late November in Nova Scotia, about 300 deep thinkers—a collection of academics, government officials, corporate executives, and journalists from 70 countries—settled in for a couple of ruminative days at the annual Halifax International Security Forum. There were cocktail parties, elaborate dinners, a five-K run, a seemingly endless schedule of weighty discussion groups, and nearly constant feverish chatter about the new, improbable American president-elect.

It was at some point in this busy weekend that Senator John McCain and David J. Kramer, a former State Department official whose bailiwick was Russia and who now toils at Arizona State University’s Washington-based McCain Institute for International Leadership, found themselves huddling with Sir Andrew Wood, a former British ambassador to Russia.

Sir Andrew, 77, had served in Moscow for five years starting in 1995, a no-holds-barred time when Putin was aggressively consolidating power. And in London Station, the M.I.6 puppeteer pulling all the clandestine strings was Christopher Steele. Sir Andrew knew Steele well and liked what he knew. And the former diplomat, who always had a few tough words to say about Putin, had heard the rumors about Steele’s memo.

Had Sir Andrew arrived in Halifax on his own covert mission? Was it just an accident that his conversation with Senator McCain happened to meander its way to the findings in Steele’s memos? Or are there no accidents in international intrigue? Sir Andrew offered no comment to Vanity Fair. He did, however, tell the Independent newspaper, “The issue of Donald Trump and Russia was very much in the news and it was natural to talk about it.” And he added, “We spoke about how Mr. Trump may find himself in a position where there could be an attempt to blackmail him with kompromat.” Any further answers remain buried in the secret history of this affair. Neither McCain nor Kramer would comment on the specifics of the meeting; all that can be firmly established is that McCain and Kramer listened with a growing attentiveness to Sir Andrew’s summary of what was purportedly in these reports—and the two men came to realize they had to see them with their own eyes. Kramer, the good soldier, volunteered to retrieve them.

On an evening about a week later, using a ticket purchased with miles from his own account, Kramer flew out of Washington and landed early the next morning at Heathrow. Once on the ground, as per stern instructions, he operated on Moscow Rules. Told to meet a man loitering outside baggage claim holding a copy of the Financial Times, Kramer engaged in an exchange of word code. At last satisfied, Christopher Steele whisked him off in a Land Rover to the security of his house in Surrey.

They talked for hours. And Steele passed him his report. Was this the identical, somewhat sputtering 35-page memo that had already been making the rounds among reporters? Or, as some intelligence analysts believe, was it a longer, more expertly crafted and sourced document, the final work product of a well-trained M.I.6 senior deskman? Neither McCain nor Kramer would comment, but what is known is that Kramer flew back to Washington that same night, guarding his hard-won prize with his life.

On December 9, McCain sat in the office of F.B.I. director James Comey and, with no other aides present, handed him the typed pages that could bring about the downfall of a president. Afterward, the senator would issue a statement that amounted to little more than a hapless shrug, and a disingenuous one to boot: he had been “unable to make a judgment about their accuracy” and so he’d simply passed them on.

But there were consequences. In the waning days of the Obama administration, both the president and congressional leaders were briefed on the contents of the Steele memos. And in early January, at the end of an intelligence briefing at Trump Tower on Russia’s interference in the presidential election conducted by the nation’s top four intelligence officials, the president-elect was presented with a two-page summary of Steele’s allegations.

And with that mind-boggling moment as a news peg, the dominoes began to fall with resounding thuds. First, BuzzFeed, full of journalistic justifications, posted the entire 35-page report online. Then The Wall Street Journal outed Christopher Steele as the former British intelligence officer who had authored the Trump dossier. And next Steele, who in his previous life had directed the service’s inquiry into the death of Alexander Litvinenko, the former F.S.B. officer who was fatally poisoned by a dose of radioactive polonium-210, quickly gathered up his family, asked a neighbor to look after his three cats, and headed off as fast as he could to parts unknown—only to return nearly two months later to his office, refusing to say little more than that he was “pleased to be back.” His arrival was, in its guarded way, as mysterious as his disappearance.

WORLD OF DOUBTS

‘Walking back the cat” is how those in the trade refer to the process of trying to resolve the bottom-line question in any piece of intelligence: Is it true?

And against the unsettling background of the early months of the Trump administration, the nation’s intelligence analysts—as well as eager journalists and just plain concerned citizens—have been grappling with whether or not the allegations in Steele’s report are accurate.

There are certainly items in the dossier that would leave any burrower shaking his head. The allegation that Michael Cohen, Trump’s lawyer, had traveled to Prague last August for a clandestine meet with Kremlin officials appears false, as Cohen insists he has never been to Prague. And the repeated misspelling of the name of Alfa Bank—the largest privately owned commercial bank in Russia—as “Alpha Bank” does little to reinforce the report’s unsubstantiated charges of the bank’s illicit cash payoffs.

But some things do tally. CNN has reported that U.S. intelligence intercepts of conversations between senior Russian officials and other Russian nationals occurred on the same day and from the same locations cited in the memos. And the Trump campaign engineered, as one early memo warned, a Republican platform that steadfastly refused to give lethal defensive weapons to troops in Ukraine fighting the Russian-led intervention.

A grim case can also be made that the Russians are taking the memos seriously. Oleg Erovinkin—a former F.S.B. general and a key aide to Igor Sechin, a former deputy prime minister who now heads Rosneft, the giant Russian oil company, and whose name is scattered with incriminating innuendo through several memos—was found dead in his car the day after Christmas. The F.S.B., according to Russian press reports, “launched a large-scale investigation,” but no official cause of death has been announced. Was this the price Erovinkin paid for having apparent similarities to Steele’s Source B, “a former top level intelligence officer still active in the Kremlin”? And, no less ominous, after both Steele and U.S. intelligence officials made their cases for the Kremlin’s involvement in the election hackings, the F.S.B. arrested two officers in the agency’s cyber-wing and one computer security expert, charging them with treason. Were these three the sources that Steele relied on?

Further supporting evidence of Steele’s claims can perhaps also be found in the press reports of ongoing federal investigations. Three members of the Trump election team were mentioned in the dossier for their alleged ties to Russian officials—Paul Manafort, the former campaign chairman; Carter Page, an early foreign-policy adviser; and Roger Stone, a longtime ad hoc adviser. All are under investigation, but no charges have been filed, and all three men have vehemently denied any wrongdoing. And according to The Washington Post, the F.B.I. in the weeks before the election grew so interested in the contents of the dossier that the bureau entered into a series of conversations with Steele to discuss hiring him to continue his research. Once the report became public, however, the discussions ended, and Steele was never compensated.

But ultimately, in any examination of the veracity of an intelligence report, professionals weigh the messenger as heavily as the news. Steele’s credentials were the real thing and, apparently, impressive enough to scare the hell out of James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, James Comey, John Brennan, the C.I.A. director, and Admiral Mike Rogers, the N.S.A. director. How else can one explain their collective decision to pass on the still-unverified dossier to the president and the president-elect?

Finally, but not least, there is Steele’s own tacit but still eloquent testimony. Retired spies don’t go to ground, taking their families with them, unless they have a damned good reason.

IN FROM THE COLD
Time to think is dangerous. And with the new president now ensconced in the White House, a man whose actions and reputation remain tangled up in a morass of disturbing speculations, the nation has, in effect, gone to ground, too. The concerns and questions escalate day after troubling day. With an intelligence community fighting its own secret war against a president who has time after time vilified it, the answers may soon be revealed. But for now all the nation can do is wait with tense anticipation for the congressional and intelligence-agency investigations to play out, for the high-stakes chase started by a lone ex-spy to move forward toward its conclusion and into history, for the clarity that will tell the American people it’s finally safe to come in from the cold.
http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/03/ ... her-steele
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Re: The Impeachment of President Donald J Trump

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu Mar 30, 2017 9:26 pm

Is the Trump White House Spying on the FBI?


MARCH 30, 2017

BARTON GELLMAN
SENIOR FELLOW
Today’s news about Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) and his two White House sources has serious implications for all three of them. The implications may be more serious for the ongoing investigation into the Trump campaign’s relationship with Russia. This is far more than a story of intelligence manipulation for political gain. I need to describe some background first, so I will save the most consequential question for last.

Nunes, the House Intelligence Committee chairman, has stoutly maintained that “whistleblowers” informed him of electronic surveillance that swept in President Trump and his associates during the course of eavesdropping operations against foreign intelligence targets—and moreover that their names were not properly masked in the reports. Those facts alone, without further detail, are almost certainly classified as top secret, sensitive compartmented information. So naturally Nunes told reporters as soon as he heard.

This week it emerged that Nunes had met his whistleblowers on the grounds of the White House. That meant he left 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, caught a ride to the Capitol, held a news conference, and only then drove back to the White House to deliver the ostensibly urgent news to President Trump. Today we learned definitively that the whole performance was a charade.

The intelligence chairman’s sources, according to the New York Times, were a pair of Trump appointees: Ezra Cohen-Watnick, a detailee from the Defense Intelligence Agency who is senior director for intelligence at the National Security Council, and Michael Ellis, an assistant White House counsel for national security affairs. They are not just any presidential appointees. National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster recently tried to fire Cohen-Watnick, a holdover selected by his predecessor, Michael Flynn, and Trump himself ordered McMaster to stand down. Ellis, the White House lawyer, used to work for Nunes on the intelligence committee.

If the Times report is accurate, there seem to be two significant breaches of the rules governing classified information. I stipulate that I am not an ideal messenger here, given my role in Ed Snowden’s NSA disclosures, and I also stipulate that news organizations are using classified leaks to track the Russia investigation. But journalists are not generally bound by secrecy regulations, and sometimes we cannot do our jobs without publishing classified facts. This case is different. Three named officials—two Trump appointees and arguably his leading defender on the Hill—appear to have engaged in precisely the behavior that the president describes as the true national security threat posed by the Russia debate. Secrecy regulations, including SF312, the Classified Information Nondisclosure Agreement, do not permit Ellis and Cohen-Watnick to distribute sensitive compartmented information through a back channel to Nunes. This is true, and their conduct no less an offense, even though Nunes holds clearances sufficient to receive the information through proper channels. The offense, which in some cases can be prosecuted as a felony, would apply even if the White House officials showed Nunes only “tearsheet” summaries of the surveillance reports. Based on what Nunes has said in public, they appear to have showed him the more sensitive verbatim transcripts. Those are always classified as TS/SI (special intelligence) or TS/COMINT (communications intelligence), which means that they could reveal sources and methods if disclosed. That is the first apparent breach of secrecy rules. The second, of course, is the impromptu Nunes news conference. There is no unclassified way to speak in public about the identity of a target or an “incidentally collected” communicant in a surveillance operation.

There is no unclassified way to speak in public about the identity of a target or an “incidentally collected” communicant in a surveillance operation.
Two more questions raised today look even more serious to me. One has to do with the main complaint that Nunes aired in his news conference. Even if Trump and his associates were swept lawfully into the eavesdropping operations, he said, their identities should have been masked in the intelligence reports. Under the intelligence community’s “minimization” rules, names of American citizens and green card holders are normally removed and replaced with some variation of “[MINIMIZED U.S. PERSON].” The rules allow for somewhat more specificity. Nunes said he could easily guess the names, even when minimized. That would be true, for example, if a report mentioned a “[MINIMIZED U.S. CAMPAIGN OFFICIAL]” who did business in Ukraine. That may look like a joke, but it’s not. I have seen references in NSA reports to “[MINIMIZED U.S. PRESIDENT].”

There are well-established procedures for the “customers” of an intelligence report to request that the names of Americans be unmasked entirely. The governing standard is supposed to be that the names are essential to understanding the meaning or significance of the report.

This brings me to the second question, which I see as the core disclosure of the Times story (even though the Times does not explicitly mention it). If Nunes saw reports that named Trump or his associates, as he said, the initiative for naming names did not come from the originating intelligence agency. That is not how the process works. The names could only have been unmasked if the customers—who seem in this case to have been Trump’s White House appointees—made that request themselves. If anyone breached the president’s privacy, the perpetrators were working down the hall from him. (Okay, probably in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building next door.) It is of course hypocritical, even deceptive, for Nunes to lay that blame at the feet of intelligence officials, but that is not the central concern either.

If events took place as just described, then what exactly were Trump’s appointees doing? I am not talking only about the political chore of ginning up (ostensible) support for the president’s baseless claims about illegal surveillance by President Obama. I mean this: why would a White House lawyer and the top White House intelligence adviser be requesting copies of these surveillance reports in the first place? Why would they go on to ask that the names be unmasked? There is no chance that the FBI would brief them about the substance or progress of its investigation into the Trump campaign’s connections to the Russian government. Were the president’s men using the surveillance assets of the U.S. government to track the FBI investigation from the outside?
https://tcf.org/content/commentary/trum ... pying-fbi/
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Re: The Impeachment of President Donald J Trump

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue Apr 04, 2017 8:16 am

Nearly half of Americans want to impeach Donald Trump
https://www.indy100.com/article/nearly- ... al-7661856


A giant 'Impeach Trump' banner was unfurled at the Nationals' season opener
April 3, 2017
Image
Baseball's Opening Day was filled with peanuts, Cracker Jack, and calls for impeachment.

Jason Charter @JasonRCharter
Had a fun day at the #Nationals #OpeningDay game. Trump was not there, but we still left him a message. #Resist #ImpeachTrump
4:14 PM - 3 Apr 2017

Had President Trump accepted the Washington Nationals' invitation to throw out the ceremonial first pitch on Monday, he would have spotted an enormous sign that read, "Impeach Trump #Resist." The banner was unfurled by members of Americans Take Action, a group that combines activism with pranks (these are the same people who handed out Russian flags with Trump's name on them at the Conservative Political Action Conference). "Had a fun day at the #Nationals #OpeningDay game," member Jason Charter tweeted. "Trump was not there, but we still left him a message."

For the Nationals, it was a fantastic day, despite Trump's decision not to throw the first pitch, thus ending a long-standing presidential tradition — the team beat the Marlins 4-2. Catherine Garcia
http://theweek.com/speedreads/690109/gi ... son-opener




TUESDAY, APR 4, 2017 07:57 AM CDT
U.S. cities take it to Trump: Cambridge latest town to pass resolution calling on Congress to impeach
Massachusetts town joins three others in California concerned about potential violations of the emoluments clause
MATTHEW ROZSA

President Donald Trump’s potential violations of the emoluments clause — which, if true, could constitute impeachable offenses — have inspired yet another city to consider a resolution urging Congress to act.

City councilors in Cambridge, MA passed a resolution on Monday to urge Congress to investigate Trump’s possible infringements of the emoluments clause of the U.S. Constitution, as well as whether those potential infringements constitute grounds for impeachment. The city council voted 7-1-1 in favor of the resolution.

The emoluments clause bars any president from accepting payments from foreign governments while in office. There are mounting concerns that Trump may be violating the emoluments clause because he has yet to divest himself from his global business empire. On Monday, ProPublica reported on changes to the structure of Trump’s trust, which explicitly allow the president to draw money from his businesses whenever he wants.

The resolution in Cambridge reads, “From the moment he took office, President Trump was in violation of the Foreign Emoluments Clause and the Domestic Emoluments Clause of the United States Constitution. These violations undermine the integrity of the Presidency, corruptly advance the personal wealth of the President, and violate the public trust.”


Cambridge residents speak up in support of city council resolution calling for Trump impeachment proceedings re: foreign emoluments clause. pic.twitter.com/5Y6pYVDyJR

— Evan Lips (@evanmlips) April 3, 2017

Cambridge joins a trio of California cities in the Bay Area — Alameda, Berkeley, and Richmond — that have passed similar resolutions asking the U.S. House of Representatives to direct its judiciary committee to investigate potential avenues of impeachment. Berkeley councilmember Sophie Hahn told a local news station that “we were one of the first cities to standup against apartheid—that’s a movement that took off and spread and that’s very important.”

Earlier this month, the small Vermont town of Charlotte passed an advisory resolution calling on Congress to investigate possible grounds for impeachment, citing Trump’s apparent violation of the emoluments clause.

A recent Public Policy Polling survey found that 44 percent of Americans would support impeaching Trump while 45 percent would oppose doing so. Eleven percent of the respondents said they were not sure.
http://www.salon.com/2017/04/04/u-s-cit ... peachment/


Donald Trump Latest Impeachment Betting Odds: Chances Of The President Resigning Before First Term Ends
BY BRUCE WRIGHT @BCTW ON 04/03/17 AT 7:00 AM

A combination of controversy, scandal and low polling numbers have prompted oddsmakers at a U.K. betting house to predict President Donald Trump would likely either be impeached or resign – or both – before the upstart politician’s first term in the White House officially comes to an end in 2020, according to a new report. The odds for an impeachment to happen were given a 4/5 chance of happening as of Friday, according to Inverse, a website that describes itself in part by asking “ What could happen next? ”

Ladbrokes, which has been accepting bets over Trump’s future in Washington, said in February that the fact that there was even a market for such wagers was indicative of the president’s fate.

“The money is showing no signs of slowing down and we’ve been forced to cut Trump’s impeachment odds accordingly. We’ve taken five times the amount of bets on him failing to see out his full term than on him doing so,” Ladbrokes spokesperson Jessica Bridge said at the time. “Ladbrokes didn’t even offer odds on Obama being impeached or resigning, which speaks volumes about the current President.”

The odds for dates when Trump would be “replaced” by were as follows: 7/2 for 2017; 9/2 for 2018; 8/1 for 2019; 16/1 for 2020; 7/4 for 2021; 33/1 for 2022; 40/1 for 2023; 50/1 for 2024; and 5/1 for 2025 or after that.

It was impossible to tell exactly what prompted the odds, but the wave of controversies that started with Trump’s candidacy in 2015 has followed him into the White House during a tenure that hasn’t even been three full months yet. Most Americans have disapproved of his actions while president aside from those he’s taken on the economy, according to a poll released late last week.

But it may be the alleged links to Russia – which have dogged Trump and his administration for months – that have contributed the most to speculation over how viable it was that the president would complete his first term. Arizona Sen. John McCain, who Trump mocked for being a prisoner of war in Vietnam, on Sunday called once again for a committee to transparently investigate the connection to Russia.

“The fact is that we know for a fact the Russians tried to change the outcome of our election, attacking the very fundamentals of democracy,” McCain told Martha Raddatz on ABC’s “This Week.” “We need to know how, we need to know why, and most of all we need to know what to do to prevent this kind of activity, which they continue to carry on in free nations around the world.”
http://www.ibtimes.com/donald-trump-lat ... rm-2519477
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
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Re: The Impeachment of President Donald J Trump

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu Apr 06, 2017 9:40 am

Donald Trump's War Crimes
Wednesday, April 05, 2017
By Marjorie Cohn, Truthout | News Analysis

A family who had fled their home in the in Mamun, a neighborhood in Mosul, Iraq, March 9, 2017. A US airstrike in Mosul, Iraq, killed more than 200 people, causing the largest loss of civilian life since the United States began bombing ISIS in Syria and Iraq in 2014. (Photo: Ivor Prickett / The New York Times)
A family who fled their home in Mamun, a neighborhood in Mosul, Iraq, March 9, 2017. A US airstrike in Mosul last month killed more than 200 people, causing the largest loss of civilian life since the United States began bombing ISIS in Syria and Iraq in 2014. (Photo: Ivor Prickett / The New York Times)

Just two and a half months into his presidency, Donald Trump has already distinguished himself as a war criminal. His administration is killing unusually large numbers of civilians, in violation of US and international law.

Killing Civilians in Record Numbers

The Trump administration began to kill civilians over inaugural weekend, with two drone strikes in Yemen that claimed 10 lives. One drone struck three people on a motorcycle. The other hit seven people riding in a car. Neither Trump nor Defense Secretary James Mattis admits to having approved the strikes. It is not clear who authorized them.

One week after his inauguration, Trump bemoaned the death of a US Navy Seal in a botched raid he personally ordered in southern Yemen. Trump made no mention of the 30 people, including at least 10 women and children, killed by the US bombers. The attack badly damaged a health facility, a school and a mosque.

To read more stories like this, visit Human Rights and Global Wrongs.

Over the past month, the US-led coalition has killed an inordinate number of civilians.

"Almost 1,000 non-combatant deaths have already been alleged from coalition actions across Iraq and Syria in March -- a record claim," according to Airwars, a non-governmental organization (NGO) that monitors civilian casualties from airstrikes in the Middle East. "These reported casualty levels are comparable with some of the worst periods of Russian activity in Syria."

Airwars says that US aircraft have inflicted most of the casualties in the coalition strikes.

Indeed, so many civilians have died from coalition airstrikes since Trump took office, Airwars is reducing its work on "alleged Russian actions in Syria -- so as best to focus our limited resources on continuing to properly monitor and assess reported casualties from the US and its allies."

During the last part of March alone:

-- US drones bombed a mosque in Aleppo, Syria, claiming at least 47 civilian lives.

-- US aircraft bombed homes, a school and a hospital in Tabqah, Syria, killing 20 civilians.

-- A US-led coalition airstrike on a school that was housing 50 families displaced by the fighting near Raqqa, Syria, killed at least 33 civilians.

-- A US airstrike in Mosul, Iraq, killed more than 200 people, causing the largest loss of civilian life since the United States began bombing ISIS in Syria and Iraq in 2014. The attack was approved somewhere in the Middle East, according to US defense officials, probably by a one-star general or a team working under her or him.

Abu Ayman, who lives in Mosul, told Reuters he saw several flattened houses and severed limbs scattered around. "I ran to my next-door neighbor's house and with others we managed to rescue three people, but at least 27 others in the same house were killed, including women and children of relatives who fled from other districts," he said. "We pulled some out of the rubble, using hammers and shovels to remove debris. We couldn't do anything to help others as they were completely buried under the collapsed roof."

Another Mosul resident said, "Now it feels like the coalition is killing more people than ISIS."

Chris Woods, director of Airwars, told the Washington Post, "Casualty numbers from western Mosul are absolutely shocking. In Syria it's a car here, a family there. It happens every day."

The coalition forces' use of white phosphorous, a chemical weapon that burns to the bone, has been documented in Mosul. And the US Central Command has confirmed that it has used depleted uranium, arguably a war crime, against ISIS in Syria.

Coalition Airstrikes Violate US Law

The Trump administration, like its two immediate predecessors, justifies the use of armed drones and other forms of targeted killing with reference to the Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) that Congress passed just days after the September 11, 2001, attacks. In the AUMF, Congress authorized the president to use force against groups and countries that had supported the terrorist strikes. But Congress rejected the Bush administration's request for open-ended military authority "to deter and preempt any future acts of terrorism or aggression against the United States." Deterrence and preemption are exactly what Trump is purportedly trying to accomplish by sending robots to kill "suspected militants" or those who happen to be present in an area where suspicious activity has taken place.

In 2013, the Obama administration promulgated a Presidential Policy Guidance for targeted killing "outside areas of active hostilities."

The guidance allows the targeting of a person who poses a "continuing, imminent threat" not just to "U.S. persons" but also to "another country's persons." A 2011 Department of Justice white paper, leaked in 2013, said a US citizen could be killed even when there is no "clear evidence that a specific attack on U.S. persons and interests will take place in the immediate future." This makes a mockery of the "imminent threat" requirement. There is presumably an even lower bar for noncitizens.

In addition, the guidance requires "near certainty that an identified HVT [high-value target] or other lawful terrorist target" is present before using lethal force against him. Yet, like the Obama administration, the Trump regime probably mounts "signature strikes" that don't necessarily target individuals, but rather all males of military age present in an area of suspicious activity.

And the guidance says there must be "near certainty that non-combatants [civilians] will not be injured or killed." Given the large number of civilian casualties from drone strikes and other targeted killings, the Trump administration does not appear to be complying with this requirement.

Now, the Pentagon is proposing to expand "the battlefield" beyond Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria, so that other designated countries won't be considered "outside areas of active hostilities." The threshold for protecting civilians would thus be lowered from "near certainty" that civilians won't be injured or killed to a "reasonable certainty." This will invariably result in even more civilian casualties.

Trump has designated three areas in Yemen, and will soon designate Somalia, "areas of active hostilities," or "temporary battlefields."

Moreover, the National Security Council is contemplating whether to rescind the Obama guidance altogether, eliminating the "continuing and imminent threat" requirement. It's possible that it could modify the "near certainty" standard to apply only to women and children, but not to men of military age.

Trump has granted broad power to the CIA to conduct lethal drone attacks. Obama had largely limited that power to the Defense Department's Joint Special Operations Command. The CIA, unlike the Pentagon, doesn't have to report how many people it kills during a strike.

In mid-March, 37 former government officials and national security experts from across the political spectrum sent a letter to Defense Secretary James Mattis, warning the administration to proceed cautiously when reviewing the targeted killing guidance. The letter said, "Even small numbers of unintentional civilian deaths or injuries ... can cause significant setbacks."

Regardless of the guidance, however, the coalition is still constrained by international humanitarian law.

Coalition Airstrikes Violate International Law

"Self-defense," under Article 51 of the United Nations Charter, is a narrow exception to the Charter's prohibition of the use of force. Countries may engage in individual or collective self-defense only in the face of an armed attack. To the extent the United States claims the right to kill suspected terrorists or their allies before they act, there must exist "a necessity of self-defense, instant, overwhelming, leaving no choice of means, and no moment for deliberation," under the well-established Caroline Case. Trump's targeted killings do not meet this standard.

Drone attacks off the battlefield violate well-established principles of international law. Targeted or political assassinations -- sometimes known as extra-judicial executions -- run afoul of the Geneva Conventions, which include willful killing as a grave breach. Grave breaches of Geneva are punishable as war crimes under the US War Crimes Act.

The United States has ratified the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which states: "Every human being has the inherent right to life. This right shall be protected by law. No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his life." The Covenant also guarantees those accused of a crime the rights to be presumed innocent and to a fair trial by an impartial tribunal. Targeted killings abrogate these rights.

There is also a legal obligation to comply with the requirements of proportionality and distinction, two bedrock principles of international humanitarian law, as delineated in the First Protocol Additional to the Geneva Conventions.

Proportionality means an attack cannot be excessive in relation to the anticipated military advantage sought. The administration is using drones to take out convoys and is killing large numbers of civilians, compared with the number of "militants" it is targeting.

Distinction requires that the attack be directed only at a legitimate military target. The coalition has been targeting sites with no clear military purpose, including hospitals, schools, mosques and passenger ferries. And if the Trump administration is continuing Obama's policy of launching signature strikes, bombs are being dropped on unidentified people located in an area of "suspicious" activity.

The Rome Statute for the International Criminal Court defines the following as war crimes: willful killing; willfully causing great suffering or serious injury; intentional attacks against civilians or civilian objects; and intentionally launching unjustified attacks, knowing they will kill or injure civilians.

US-led coalition bombings of schools, hospitals, homes and mosques, resulting in high numbers of civilian casualties, constitute war crimes.

Mosul Eye, a monitoring organization, warned Iraqi troops that civilians were trapped in homes days before the US airstrike, even sending the coordinates. Amnesty International concluded that the US-led coalition should have known its airstrikes would cause many civilian casualties because the government had told people to remain in their homes.

Amnesty International said the coalition was not using sufficient precautions to avoid civilian casualties in Mosul, calling it a "flagrant violation" of international humanitarian law. "Disproportionate attacks and indiscriminate attacks violate international humanitarian law and can constitute war crimes," Amnesty International noted.

Trump Escalates in the Middle East

Meanwhile, the US military is planning to deploy an additional 1,000 troops to northern Syria. There are roughly 500 US Special Operations forces there already, as well as 200 Marines and 250 Rangers.

The administration reportedly plans to lift the troop caps of 5,000 in Iraq and 500 in Syria that were established by the Obama administration.

Trump is asking Congress to add $54 billion annually to the military budget for what he refers to as his "public safety and national security budget."

Disturbingly, Trump has not ruled out the use of nuclear weapons as he prosecutes his "war on terror." In an interview on MSNBC, he wondered, "Somebody hits us within ISIS [also known as Daesh], you wouldn't fight back with a nuke?"

And Trump made the troubling assertion that he would consider killing innocent families of suspected terrorists, declaring, "When you get these terrorists, you have to take out their families." Targeting civilians violates the Geneva Conventions.

The Trump administration will likely relax the rules of engagement for targeted killing, resulting in the deaths of increasingly large numbers of civilians, in violation of US and international law.

Under the doctrine of command responsibility, commanders -- all the way up the chain of command to the Commander-in-Chief -- can be liable for war crimes if they knew or should have known their subordinates would commit them and did nothing to stop or prevent them. Command responsibility is enshrined in Supreme Court case law and the US Army Field Manual.

Trump and other high officials in his administration should be held accountable for war crimes.

http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/4010 ... war-crimes
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: The Impeachment of President Donald J Trump

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue Apr 11, 2017 3:34 pm

GAO Takes Up Dem Lawmakers' Request To Probe Trump's Transition

Andrew Harrer
ByCAITLIN MACNEALPublishedAPRIL 11, 2017, 2:01 PM EDT
The Government Accountability Office plans to investigate any conflicts of interest issues with President Donald Trump's transition process, as well as whether his transition staff followed any available guidelines on communicating with foreign governments, the government watchdog confirmed in an April 5 letter to Democratic lawmakers.

GAO, Congress' investigative arm, was responding to a letter from Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD) that expressed concern about potential issues with Trump's transition team.

"We are concerned about reports of ‘disarray’ within a ‘chaotic’ transition, and ask that your review address several concerns, including conflicts of interest related to business holdings of Mr. Trump and his family; potential violations of protocol and security precautions related to Mr. Trump’s communications with foreign leaders," the Democratic lawmakers wrote in a November letter.

In the letter from the GAO, made public by Warren on Monday, the watchdog said it would "examine the 2017 presidential transition on the basis of your letter to the Comptroller General." GAO said that it would look at what laws and ethics rules guide the transition process as well as how taxpayer and private money was spent by the Trump transition team.

The watchdog plans to look at how the transition team used the services available to them from the Office of Government Ethics on conflicts of interest and financial disclosures, as well as review how the team used services available to guide it on communications with foreign governments, according to the letter The GAO also will compare the Trump transition team's use of resources to the practices of the Bush and Obama transition teams in 2001 and 2009.

In the letter, the GAO said that it would produce a report on its findings in June.

The office had already been looking into the costs and security related to Trump’s trips to his Florida resort Mar-A-Lago.

Read the full letter below:
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/g ... on-process
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: The Impeachment of President Donald J Trump

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri May 05, 2017 11:47 am

Members of Congress 'holding secret conversations about removing Donald Trump from office'
US President could be forced out if he is deemed to be mentally unfit for office

Ben Kentish @BenKentish Thursday 4 May 2017 11:46 BST18 comments

Experts say Donald Trump could cause a “constitutional crisis” if he chooses not to co-operate with congressional investigations into his alleged links with Russia Reuters
Members of the US Congress are holding “private conversations” about whether Donald Trump should be removed from office, reports suggest.

After a difficult first 100 days that have seen the US President mired in a string of scandals and mishaps, senators and congressmen are said to be considering whether he will last a full term.

The New Yorker this week published a lengthy analysis of the two ways the Republican could be removed from office: either through impeachment by Congress or via the 25th Amendment to the US Constitution, which allows for a president to be removed if he is considered to be mentally unfit.

Evan Osnos, the author of the article, said he had been told that members of Congress were already holding conversations on the issue.

“This is a conversation that people are having around the dinner table, it’s one people have at the office, members of Congress are talking about it in private and the question is very simple: is this a president who is able to do the job and is able to go the distance?” he told MSNBC’s The Last Word.

“This is a president who is beset by doubts of a completely different order of any president we’ve seen as long as we’ve been looking at this question.

“The truth is that there are people having an active conversation about whether or not he’ll last.”

Mr Osnos also claimed Mr Trump could cause a “constitutional crisis” if he chooses not to co-operate with congressional investigations into his alleged links with Russia – something he said some members of Congress expect to happen.

William Kristol, who worked as chief of staff to Vice President Dan Quayle under the presidency of George H W Bush, told the magazine there was a reasonable change of Mr Trump being removed.

“It’s somewhere in the big middle ground between a 1 per cent [chance] and 50”, he said. “It’s some per cent. It’s not nothing."

The 25th Amendment, added in 1967, allows a president to be removed if they are deemed to be “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office”. That judgement can be made either by the vice president and a majority of the Cabinet, or by a separate body, such as a panel of medical experts, appointed by Congress.

If the president objects, a two-thirds majority in both chambers of Congress is needed to remove him or her.

“I believe that invoking Section 4 of the 25th Amendment is no fantasy but an entirely plausible tool - not immediately, but well before 2020,” Laurence Tribe, a prominent US law professor who works at Harvard University, told The New Yorker.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world ... 16326.html



THE POLITICAL SCENE
MAY 8, 2017 ISSUE
HOW TRUMP COULD GET FIRED
The Constitution offers two main paths for removing a President from office. How feasible are they?
By Evan Osnos

The history of besieged Presidencies is, in the end, the history of hubris, of blindness to one’s faults, of deafness to warnings.

Hours after Donald Trump’s Inauguration, a post appeared on the official White House petitions page, demanding that he release his tax returns. In only a few days, it gathered more signatures than any previous White House petition. The success of the Women’s March had shown that themed protests could both mobilize huge numbers of people and hit a nerve with the President. On Easter weekend, roughly a hundred and twenty thousand people protested in two hundred cities, calling for him to release his tax returns and sell his businesses. On Capitol Hill, protesters chanted “Impeach Forty-five!” In West Palm Beach, a motorcade ferrying him from the Trump International Golf Club to Mar-a-Lago had to take a circuitous route to avoid demonstrators. The White House does all it can to keep the President away from protests, but the next day Trump tweeted, “Someone should look into who paid for the small organized rallies yesterday. The election is over!”

On Tax Day itself, Trump travelled to Kenosha, Wisconsin, where he would be among his supporters again, giving a speech at Snap-on, a manufacturer of high-end power tools and other gear. Wisconsin has emerged as one of Trump’s favorite states. He is the first Republican Presidential candidate to win there since 1984. He included the state in a post-election “thank-you tour.” Another visit was planned for shortly after the Inauguration, but it was cancelled once it became clear that it would attract protests.

By this point in George W. Bush’s term, Bush had travelled to twenty-three states and a foreign country. Trump has visited just nine states and has never stayed the night. He inhabits a closed world that one adviser recently described to me as “Fortress Trump.” Rarely venturing beyond the White House and Mar-a-Lago, he measures his fortunes through reports from friends, staff, and a feast of television coverage of himself. Media is Trump’s “drug of choice,” Sam Nunberg, an adviser on his campaign, told me recently. “He doesn’t drink. He doesn’t do drugs. His drug is himself.”

Trump’s Tax Day itinerary enabled him to avoid the exposure of a motorcade; instead, he flew on Marine One directly to Snap-on’s headquarters. Several hundred protesters were outside chanting and holding signs. But the event’s organizers had created a wall of tractor-trailers around the spot where Trump would land, blocking protesters from seeing Trump and him from seeing them.

Snap-on’s headquarters, a gleaming expanse of stainless steel, chrome, and enamel, provided a fine backdrop for muscular American manufacturing, though in fact the firm closed its Kenosha factory more than a decade ago. Nick Pinchuk, the C.E.O., led Trump past displays of Snap-on products, showing him a car hooked up to state-of-the-art diagnostic equipment (“It’s a different world!” Trump mused), and a table of Snap-on souvenirs, including small, colorful metal boxes that Pinchuk said some customers buy to hold ashes after a cremation. “That’s kind of depressing,” Trump said.

An auditorium was packed with local dignitaries and Snap-on employees. As “Hail to the Chief” played on the sound system, Trump stepped onto the stage. He stood in front of a sculpture of an American flag rippling in the wind, made from hundreds of Snap-on wrenches. Behind him was a banner: “buy american—hire american.” For a moment, the President, wearing a red tie, leaning on the lectern, looked as if he were back on the campaign trail. “These are great, great people,” he began. “And these are real workers. I love the workers.”

“We don’t have a level playing field,” he said. It was a treasured campaign line, to which he now added a vow of imminent progress: “You’re gonna have one very soon.” After Republicans abandoned their first effort to enact health-care reform, and courts blocked two executive orders designed to curb immigration from predominantly Muslim countries, he was determined to dispel any sense that his Administration had been weakened. “Our tax reform and tax plan is coming along very well,” he assured the crowd. “It’s going to be out very soon. We’re working on health care and we’re going to get that done, too.”

Trump’s approval rating is forty per cent—the lowest of any newly elected President since Gallup started measuring it. Even before Trump entered the White House, the F.B.I. and four congressional committees were investigating potential collusion between his associates and the Russian government. Since then, Trump’s daughter Ivanka and her husband, Jared Kushner, have become senior White House officials, prompting intense criticism over potential conflicts of interest involving their private businesses. Between October and March, the U.S. Office of Government Ethics received more than thirty-nine thousand public inquiries and complaints, an increase of five thousand per cent over the same period at the start of the Obama Administration. Nobody occupies the White House without criticism, but Trump is besieged by doubts of a different order, centering on the overt, specific, and, at times, bipartisan discussion of whether he will be engulfed by any one of myriad problems before he has completed even one term in office—and, if he is, how he might be removed.

When members of Congress returned to their home districts in March, outrage erupted at town-hall meetings, where constituents jeered Republican officials, chanting “Do your job!” and “Push back!” The former South Carolina governor Mark Sanford, who is now a Republican congressman, told me that he’d held eight town halls in his district. Trump won South Carolina by nearly fifteen points, so Sanford was surprised to hear people calling for him to be impeached. “I’d never heard that before in different public interactions with people in the wake of a new President being elected,” he told me. “Even when you heard it with the Tea Party crowd, with Obama, it was later in the game. It didn’t start out right away.”

Trump’s critics are actively exploring the path to impeachment or the invocation of the Twenty-fifth Amendment, which allows for the replacement of a President who is judged to be mentally unfit. During the past few months, I interviewed several dozen people about the prospects of cutting short Trump’s Presidency. I spoke to his friends and advisers; to lawmakers and attorneys who have conducted impeachments; to physicians and historians; and to current members of the Senate, the House, and the intelligence services. By any normal accounting, the chance of a Presidency ending ahead of schedule is remote. In two hundred and twenty-eight years, only one President has resigned; two have been impeached, though neither was ultimately removed from office; eight have died. But nothing about Trump is normal. Although some of my sources maintained that laws and politics protect the President to a degree that his critics underestimate, others argued that he has already set in motion a process of his undoing. All agree that Trump is unlike his predecessors in ways that intensify his political, legal, and personal risks. He is the first President with no prior experience in government or the military, the first to retain ownership of a business empire, and the oldest person ever to assume the Presidency.

For Trump’s allies, the depth of his unpopularity is an urgent cause for alarm. “You can’t govern this country with a forty-per-cent approval rate. You just can’t,” Stephen Moore, a senior economist at the Heritage Foundation, who advised Trump during the campaign, told me. “Nobody in either party is going to bend over backwards for Trump if over half the country doesn’t approve of him. That, to me, should be a big warning sign.”

Trump has embraced strategies that normally boost popularity, such as military action. In April, some pundits were quick to applaud him for launching a cruise-missile attack on a Syrian airbase, and for threatening to attack North Korea. In interviews, Trump marvelled at the forces at his disposal, like a man wandering into undiscovered rooms of his house. (“It’s so incredible. It’s brilliant.”) But the Syria attack only briefly reversed the slide in Trump’s popularity; it remained at historic lows.

It is not a good sign for a beleaguered President when his party gets dragged down, too. From January to April, the number of Americans who had a favorable view of the Republican Party dropped seven points, to forty per cent, according to the Pew Research Center. I asked Jerry Taylor, the president of the Niskanen Center, a libertarian think tank, if he had ever seen so much skepticism so early in a Presidency. “No, nobody has,” he said. “But we’ve never lived in a Third World banana republic. I don’t mean that gratuitously. I mean the reality is he is governing as if he is the President of a Third World country: power is held by family and incompetent loyalists whose main calling card is the fact that Donald Trump can trust them, not whether they have any expertise.” Very few Republicans in Congress have openly challenged Trump, but Taylor cautioned against interpreting that as committed support. “My guess is that there’s only between fifty and a hundred Republican members of the House that are truly enthusiastic about Donald Trump as President,” he said. “The balance sees him as somewhere between a deep and dangerous embarrassment and a threat to the Constitution.”

The Administration’s defiance of conventional standards of probity makes it acutely vulnerable to ethical scandal. The White House recently stopped releasing visitors’ logs, limiting the public’s ability to know who is meeting with the President and his staff. Trump has also issued secret waivers to ethics rules, so that political appointees can alter regulations that they previously lobbied to dismantle.

On the day that Trump spoke in Wisconsin, the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (crew), a prominent legal watchdog group, expanded a federal lawsuit that accuses Trump of violating the emoluments clause of the Constitution, a provision that restricts officeholders from receiving gifts and favors from foreign interests. The lawsuit cites the Trump International Hotel, half a mile from the White House, which foreign dignitaries have admitted frequenting as a way to curry favor with the President. (“Isn’t it rude to come to his city and say, ‘I am staying at your competitor’?” an Asian diplomat told the Washington Post in November.) The suit, first filed in January, in the Southern District of New York, is partly an effort to pry open the President’s business records. Two plaintiffs involved in the hotel-and-restaurant industry joined the current case, arguing that Trump’s businesses enjoy unfair advantages. “This isn’t about politics; I’m a registered Republican,” Jill Phaneuf, a plaintiff who books receptions and events for hotels, has said. “I joined this lawsuit because the President is taking business away from me.”

crew is best known for its role in exposing the ethics violations of Tom DeLay, the former House Majority Leader, who, in 2006, resigned under indictment; and of Jack Abramoff, a lobbyist who went to prison for corruption the same year. Richard Painter, the vice-chair of crew’s board, was formerly the chief ethics lawyer in George W. Bush’s White House. He said that the Bush Administration maintained a policy of forbidding senior officials from retaining business interests that conflicted with their responsibilities, as some in Trump’s White House have done. “We never had controversies over divestment,” Painter told me. “They’d ask, ‘What is Hank Paulson’ ”—who became Treasury Secretary in 2006—“ ‘going to do?’ ‘He’s going to sell his Goldman Sachs stuff.’ It was pretty cut and dried.”

Meanwhile, nine months after the F.B.I. started investigating Russian interference in the campaign, it continues to examine potential links between Trump’s associates and the Kremlin. Michael Flynn, who resigned as Trump’s national-security adviser after acknowledging that he lied about his contact with Russia’s Ambassador, is seeking immunity in exchange for speaking with federal investigators, raising the prospect that he could reveal other undisclosed contacts, or a broader conspiracy. Robert Kelner, Flynn’s lawyer, wrote in a statement, “General Flynn certainly has a story to tell, and he very much wants to tell it, should the circumstances permit.” The F.B.I. is also investigating Paul Manafort, Trump’s former campaign chairman, after it was reported that Manafort received millions of dollars in cash payments from pro-Kremlin groups in Ukraine; and Carter Page, a foreign-policy adviser to the Trump campaign until last September. The F.B.I. has described Page, in court filings, as having connections to Russian agents.

The White House maintains that it was unaware of any links to the Kremlin, and the details of the investigations are classified. But select members of Congress who oversee the intelligence agencies have access to the findings. Recently, one of them, Senator Mark Warner, of Virginia, the ranking Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, privately told friends that he puts the odds at two to one against Trump completing a full term. (Warner’s spokesperson said that the Senator was “not referring specifically to the Russia investigation, but rather the totality of challenges the President is currently facing.”)

In a gesture intended to convey transparency, Jared Kushner and Trump’s outside adviser Roger Stone have offered to speak to the Senate Intelligence Committee, but Newt Gingrich, a Trump campaign adviser who, when he was Speaker of the House, led the push for Bill Clinton’s impeachment, believes it is a risky maneuver. “Anybody who goes in front of a congressional hearing for something that is being investigated by the F.B.I. is in immediate danger of perjury in the most innocent way, and I think that’s really dangerous,” Gingrich told me. “None of these guys understand that this is a war, and, if the left can put them in jail, they’re going to put them in jail.”

It’s not clear how fully Trump apprehends the threats to his Presidency. Unlike previous Republican Administrations, Fortress Trump contains no party elder with the stature to check the President’s decisions. “There is no one around him who has the ability to restrain any of his impulses, on any issue ever, for any reason,” Steve Schmidt, a veteran Republican consultant, said, adding, “Where is the ‘What the fuck’ chorus?”

Trump’s insulation from unwelcome information appears to be growing as his challenges mount. His longtime friend Christopher Ruddy, the C.E.O. of Newsmax Media, talked with him recently at Mar-a-Lago and at the White House. “He tends to not like a lot of negative feedback,” Ruddy told me. Ruddy has noticed that some of Trump’s associates are unwilling to give him news that will upset him. “I don’t think he realizes how fully intimidating he is to many people, because he’s such a large guy and he’s so powerful,” Ruddy went on. “I already sense that a lot of people don’t want to give him bad news about things. I’ve already been approached by several people that’ll say, ‘He’s got to hear this. Could you tell him?’ ”

There has been considerable speculation about Trump’s physical and mental health, in part because few facts are known. During the campaign, his staff reported that he was six feet three inches tall and weighed two hundred and thirty-six pounds, which is considered overweight but not obese. His personal physician, Harold N. Bornstein, issued brief, celebratory statements—Trump’s lab-test results were “astonishingly excellent”—mentioning little more than a daily dose of aspirin and a statin. Trump himself says that he is “not a big sleeper” (“I like three hours, four hours”) and professes a fondness for steak and McDonald’s. Other than golf, he considers exercise misguided, arguing that a person, like a battery, is born with a finite amount of energy.

Secrecy about a President’s health has a rich history. “No one in the White House wants to emphasize the fact that the President might be too ill to carry out his responsibilities,” Robert E. Gilbert, a political scientist at Northeastern University who studies Presidential health, told me. “They want everyone to think that the President is able to surmount any problem, no matter how serious, because they are thinking of reëlection, and they are thinking of the judgment of history.” Although John F. Kennedy’s tan was often described as a sign of vigor, it was caused by Addison’s disease, an endocrine disorder, which Kennedy and his aides hid for decades, and which left him dependent on multiple medications.

Yet it is impossible to conceal the sheer physical strain of the Presidency. Studying the medical records of Presidents since Theodore Roosevelt, Michael Roizen, the chairman of the Cleveland Clinic’s Wellness Institute, has concluded that “unrequited stress”—the absence of peers and friends—takes the greatest toll. Kennedy, who liked to compare his critics to hecklers at a bullfight, quoted a poem by the matador Domingo Ortega: “Only one is there who knows / And he’s the man who fights the bull.” A 2015 study, led by Anupam Jena, of Harvard Medical School, analyzed the life expectancy of five hundred and forty politicians in seventeen countries. Jena found that the lives of elected leaders are, on average, 2.7 years shorter than those of the runners-up.

The Framers of the Constitution planned ahead for the death of Presidents—hence, Vice-Presidents—but they failed to address an unnerving prospect: a President who is alive and very sick. Had Kennedy survived being shot, and been left comatose, there would have been no legal way to allow others to assume his powers. To fend off that possibility, the Twenty-fifth Amendment was added to the Constitution in February, 1967. Under Section 4, a President can be removed if he is judged to be “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.” The assessment can be made either by the Vice-President and a majority of the Cabinet secretaries or by a congressionally appointed body, such as a panel of medical experts. If the President objects—a theoretical crisis that scholars call “contested removal”—Congress has three weeks to debate and decide the issue. A two-thirds majority in each chamber is required to remove the President. There is no appeal.

However, the definition of what would constitute an inability to discharge the duties of office was left deliberately vague. Senator Birch Bayh, of Indiana, and others who drafted the clause wanted to insure that the final decision was not left to doctors. The fate of a President, Bayh wrote later, is “really a political question” that should rest on the “professional judgment of the political circumstances existing at the time.” The Twenty-fifth Amendment could therefore be employed in the case of a President who is not incapacitated but is considered mentally impaired.

A study by psychiatrists at Duke University, published in the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, in 2006, made a striking assertion: about half the Presidents they studied had suffered a mental illness at one time or another. The researchers examined biographies and medical histories of thirty-seven Presidents, from Washington to Nixon, and found that forty-nine per cent met the criteria for a psychiatric disorder—mostly depression, anxiety, and substance abuse—at some point in their lives. Ten Presidents, or about one in four, had symptoms “evident during presidential office, which in most cases probably impaired job performance.”

Some of these illnesses had far-reaching historical consequences. Just before Franklin Pierce took office, in 1853, his son died in a train accident, and Pierce’s Presidency was marked by the “dead weight of hopeless sorrow,” according to his biographer Roy Franklin Nichols. Morose and often drunk, Pierce proved unable to defuse the tensions that precipitated the Civil War.

Years after the death of Lyndon B. Johnson, it emerged that, as the war in Vietnam intensified, he exhibited symptoms of profound paranoia, leading two of his assistants to secretly seek the advice of psychiatrists. Johnson imagined conspiracies involving the Times or the United Nations or élites whom he called “those Harvards.” He took to carrying, in his jacket pocket, faulty statistics that he recited about “victory” and troop commitments in Vietnam. “For a long time, Johnson succeeded,” one of the assistants wrote, “not in changing reality, but in deceiving much of the country and, perhaps, himself.”

Only one Administration is known to have considered using the Twenty-fifth Amendment to remove a President. In 1987, at the age of seventy-six, Ronald Reagan was showing the strain of the Iran-Contra scandal. Aides observed that he was increasingly inattentive and inept. Howard H. Baker, Jr., a former senator who became Reagan’s chief of staff in February, 1987, found the White House in disarray. “He seemed to be despondent but not depressed,” Baker said later, of the President.

Baker assigned an aide named Jim Cannon to interview White House officials about the Administration’s dysfunction, and Cannon learned that Reagan was not reading even short documents. “They said he wouldn’t come over to work—all he wanted to do was watch movies and television at the residence,” Cannon recalled, in “Landslide,” a 1988 account of Reagan’s second term, by Jane Mayer and Doyle McManus. One night, Baker summoned a small group of aides to his home. One of them, Thomas Griscom, told me recently that Cannon, who died in 2011, “floats this idea that maybe we’d invoke the Constitution.” Baker was skeptical, but, the next day, he proposed a diagnostic process of sorts: they would observe the President’s behavior at lunch.

In the event, Reagan was funny and alert, and Baker considered the debate closed. “We finish the lunch and Senator Baker says, ‘You know, boys, I think we’ve all seen this President is fully capable of doing the job,’ ” Griscom said. They never raised the issue again. In 1993, four years after leaving office, Reagan received a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s. His White House physicians said that they saw no symptoms during his Presidency. In 2015, researchers at Arizona State University published a study in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease, in which they examined transcripts of news conferences in the course of Reagan’s Presidency and discovered changes in his speech that are linked to the onset of dementia. Reagan had taken to repeating words and using “thing” in the place of specific nouns, but they could not prove that, while he was in office, his judgment and decision-making were affected.

Mental-health professionals have largely kept out of politics since 1964, when the magazine Fact asked psychiatrists if they thought Barry Goldwater was psychologically fit to be President. More than a thousand said that he wasn’t, calling him “warped,” “impulsive,” and a “paranoid schizophrenic.” Goldwater sued for libel, successfully, and, in 1973, the American Psychiatric Association added to its code of ethics the so-called “Goldwater rule,” which forbade making a diagnosis without an in-person examination and without receiving permission to discuss the findings publicly. Professional associations for psychologists, social workers, and others followed suit. With regard to Trump, however, the rule has been broken repeatedly. More than fifty thousand mental-health professionals have signed a petition stating that Trump is “too seriously mentally ill to perform the duties of president and should be removed” under the Twenty-fifth Amendment.

Lance Dodes, a retired assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, believes that, in this instance, the Goldwater rule is outweighed by another ethical commitment: a “duty to warn” others when he assesses that a person might harm them. Dodes told me, “Trump is going to face challenges from people who are not going to bend to his will. If you have a President who takes it as a personal attack on him, which he does, and flies into a paranoid rage, that’s how you start a war.”

Like many of his colleagues, Dodes speculates that Trump fits the description of someone with malignant narcissism, which is characterized by grandiosity, a need for admiration, sadism, and a tendency toward unrealistic fantasies. On February 13th, in a letter to the Times, Dodes and thirty-four other mental-health professionals wrote, “We fear that too much is at stake to be silent any longer.” In response, Allen Frances, a professor emeritus at Duke University Medical College, who wrote the section on narcissistic personality disorder in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders—IV, sought to discourage the public diagnoses. Frances wrote, “He may be a world-class narcissist, but this doesn’t make him mentally ill, because he does not suffer from the distress and impairment required to diagnose mental disorder. . . . The antidote to a dystopic Trumpean dark age is political, not psychological.”

To some mental-health professionals, the debate over diagnoses and the Goldwater rule distracts from a larger point. “This issue is not whether Donald Trump is mentally ill but whether he’s dangerous,” James Gilligan, a professor of psychiatry at New York University, told attendees at a recent public meeting at Yale School of Medicine on the topic of Trump’s mental health. “He publicly boasts of violence and has threatened violence. He has urged followers to beat up protesters. He approves of torture. He has boasted of his ability to commit and get away with sexual assault,” Gilligan said.

Bruce Blair, a research scholar at the Program on Science and Global Security, at Princeton, told me that if Trump were an officer in the Air Force, with any connection to nuclear weapons, he would need to pass the Personnel Reliability Program, which includes thirty-seven questions about financial history, emotional volatility, and physical health. (Question No. 28: Do you often lose your temper?) “There’s no doubt in my mind that Trump would never pass muster,” Blair, who was a ballistic-missile launch-control officer in the Army, told me. “Any of us that had our hands anywhere near nuclear weapons had to pass the system. If you were having any arguments, or were in financial trouble, that was a problem. For all we know, Trump is on the brink of that, but the President is exempt from everything.”

In the months since Trump took office, several members of Congress have cited concern about his mental health as a reason to change the law. In early April, Representative Jamie Raskin, a Maryland Democrat and a professor of constitutional law at American University, and twenty co-sponsors introduced a bill that would expand the authority of medical personnel and former senior officials to assess the mental fitness of a President. The bill has no chance of coming up for a vote anytime soon, but its sponsors believe that they have a constitutional duty to convene a body to assess Trump’s health. Representative Earl Blumenauer, of Oregon, introduced a similar bill, which would also give former Presidents and Vice-Presidents a voice in evaluating a President’s mental stability. Of Trump, he said, “The serial repetition of proven falsehoods—Is this an act? Is this a tactic? Is he just wired weird? It raises the question in my mind about the nature of Presidential disability.”

Over the years, the use, or misuse, of the Twenty-fifth Amendment has been irresistible to novelists and screenwriters, but political observers dismiss the idea. Jeff Greenfield, of CNN, has described the notion that Trump could be ousted on the basis of mental health as a “liberal fantasy.” Not everyone agrees. Laurence Tribe, a professor of constitutional law at Harvard, told me, “I believe that invoking Section 4 of the Twenty-fifth Amendment is no fantasy but an entirely plausible tool—not immediately, but well before 2020.” In Tribe’s interpretation, the standard of the amendment is not “a medical or otherwise technical one but is one resting on a commonsense understanding of what it means for a President to be ‘unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office’—an inability that can obviously be manifested by gross and pathological inattention or indifference to, or failure to understand, the limits of those powers or the mandatory nature of those duties.”

As an example of “pathological inattention,” Tribe noted that, on April 11th, days after North Korea launched a missile, Trump described an aircraft carrier, the U.S.S. Carl Vinson, as part of an “armada” advancing on North Korea, even though the ship was sailing away from North Korea at the time. Moreover, Tribe said, Trump’s language borders on incapacity. Asked recently why he reversed a pledge to brand China a currency manipulator, Trump said, of President Xi Jinping, “No. 1, he’s not, since my time. You know, very specific formula. You would think it’s like generalities, it’s not. They have—they’ve actually—their currency’s gone up. So it’s a very, very specific formula.”

Lawrence C. Mohr, who became a White House physician in 1987 and remained in the job until 1993, came to believe that Presidential disability must be understood to encompass “very subtle manifestations” that might impair the President’s capacity to do the job. A President should be evaluated for “alertness, cognitive function, judgment, appropriate behavior, the ability to choose among options and the ability to communicate clearly,” Mohr told a researcher in 2010. “If any of these are impaired, it is my opinion that the powers of the President should be transferred to the Vice-President until the impairment resolves.”

In practice, however, unless the President were unconscious, the public could see the use of the amendment as a constitutional coup. Measuring deterioration over time would be difficult in Trump’s case, given that his “judgment” and “ability to communicate clearly” were, in the view of many Americans, impaired before he took office. For those reasons, Robert Gilbert, the Presidential-health specialist, told me, “If the statements get too strange, then the Vice-President might be able to do something. But if the President is just being himself—talking in the same way that he talked during the campaign—then the Vice-President and the Cabinet would find it very difficult.”

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The power of impeachment is a more promising tool for curtailing a defective Presidency. The Framers considered the ability to eject an executive so critical that they enshrined it in the Constitution even before they had agreed on the details of the office itself. On June 2, 1787, while the delegates to the Constitutional Convention, in Philadelphia, were still arguing whether the Presidency should consist of a committee or a single person, they adopted, without debate, the right to impeach for “malpractice or neglect of duty.” They gave the House of Representatives the power to impeach a President for “treason, bribery or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors” by a simple majority vote, and they gave the Senate the power to convict or dismiss the charges, setting a high bar for conviction, with a two-thirds majority.

But what would “high Crimes and Misdemeanors” mean in practice? In 1970, during an unsuccessful effort to impeach the Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, Representative Gerald Ford argued that an impeachable offense was “whatever a majority of the House of Representatives considers it to be at a given moment in history.” That was an overstatement—the President was never intended to serve at the pleasure of Congress—but it contained an essential truth: impeachment is possible even without a specific violation of the U.S. Criminal Code. When Alexander Hamilton wrote of “high Crimes,” he was referring to the violation of “public trust,” by abusing power, breaching ethics, or undermining the Constitution.

The first test came with the impeachment of Andrew Johnson, in 1868. Johnson, who became President after Lincoln’s assassination, was a combative Tennessean, sympathetic to the Southern states, and was uncomfortable in Washington, which he disparaged as “twelve square miles bordered by reality.” He mocked the legislative branch as “a body called, or which assumes to be, the Congress,” and vetoed the Civil Rights Bill of 1866, which was intended to confer citizenship on freed slaves. Congress was incensed; Senator Carl Schurz, of Missouri, compared Johnson to “a wounded and anger-crazed boar.” Eventually, the President engineered a showdown with Congress, by deliberately breaking a law against firing a Cabinet secretary without Senate consent. As a result, the House moved to impeach him, accusing him of “denying” the work of another branch of government and “preventing the execution” of laws passed by Congress. Johnson was acquitted in the Senate by one vote.

David O. Stewart, the author of “Impeached,” a history of the case, told me that it established a crucial point: impeachment is not a judicial proceeding but a tool of political accountability. “Because of the unique powers of the executive, we are depending on a single person to be wise and sane,” Stewart said. “If, in fact, there are enough people who no longer think those are both true, impeachment is designed to deal with that.” For this reason, actual evidence of misconduct may not be the most important criterion in determining which Presidents get impeached. “The most important thing is political popularity,” Michael J. Gerhardt, a professor of constitutional law at the University of North Carolina, told me. “A popular President is unlikely to be threatened with impeachment. Second is your relationship with your party—how strongly are they connected to you? Third is your relationship with Congress, and fourth is the nature of whatever the misconduct may be.”

By far the most valuable lessons about impeachment come from Richard Nixon. In 1974, Nixon resigned shortly before he could be impeached, but his misjudgments—political, psychological, and legal—have illuminated the risks to Presidents ever since. In 1972, Nixon’s White House oversaw the bugging of the Democratic National Committee offices at the Watergate complex and the ensuing coverup. That was illegal and unethical, but it did not guarantee Nixon’s downfall, which came about because of two critical mistakes.

First, when the scandal emerged, the President underestimated the threat. “There were any number of steps that could have made it go away,” Evan Thomas, the author of “Being Nixon,” told me. “They could have cleaned house and fired people.” But Nixon assumed that his supporters would never believe the accusations. “He was ahead by thirty-four points in the polls in August, 1972,” Thomas went on. “He could have taken his clothes off and run around the White House front yard and he was going to win reëlection.”

As the scandal ground on, Nixon made his second mistake: he flouted the authority of a coequal branch of government. In October, 1973, Nixon refused to obey a federal appellate-court ruling that ordered him to turn over tapes of conversations in the Oval Office, and he forced out the investigation’s special prosecutor, Archibald Cox. For nine months, Nixon continued to resist—in effect threatening the basic constitutional system—until, in July, 1974, the Supreme Court ruled that he had to comply. By then, the damage was done, and the House Judiciary Committee launched impeachment hearings. By thwarting other branches, Nixon weakened his support in Congress and convinced the country that he had something to hide. Until that point, much of the public had not focussed on the slow, complex investigation, but interviews at the time show that Nixon’s stonewalling made people pay attention, and he never recovered. “Well, everything has added up to his incompetence over the last few months, and I don’t think the American people should stand for it any longer,” a woman interviewed in New York by the Associated Press said. “In fact, I just signed an impeach petition.”

By August, many of his top aides had been indicted, and polls showed that fifty-seven per cent of the public believed that Nixon should be removed from office. On August 6th, after a tape recording surfaced which captured him orchestrating the coverup, he was abandoned by Republicans who had previously derided the Watergate scandal as a witch hunt. Senator Barry Goldwater, of Arizona, told colleagues, “Nixon should get his ass out of the White House—today!” On August 9th, Nixon sent a letter to Secretary of State Henry Kissinger: “Dear Mr. Secretary, I hereby resign the Office of President of the United States. Sincerely, Richard Nixon.”

A quarter century later, the Bill Clinton impeachment yielded two related lessons—one about the path into crisis, and one about the path out of it. The first lesson was that investigations beget investigations. In January, 1994, when a special prosecutor started looking into Bill and Hillary Clinton’s investments in Whitewater, a failed Arkansas real-estate deal, there was no way to anticipate that it would conclude, nearly five years later, with Clinton’s impeachment for trying to cover up an affair with Monica Lewinsky, a twenty-two-year-old White House intern. Many raged against the conduct of that inquiry, accusing Kenneth Starr, the independent counsel, of abusing his powers, but the outcome demonstrated that a White House under investigation is in danger of spiralling into crisis.

The second lesson of the Clinton impeachment comes from the strategy adopted by his legal team. Learning from Nixon’s fate, the lawyers realized that congressional Democrats would abandon Clinton if they concluded that he had lost the trust of the public. Gregory Craig, one of the lawyers who directed Clinton’s defense, told me recently, “The fundamental point is that it’s a political process.” He and his team spent less energy on disputing the details of evidence than on maintaining support from fellow-Democrats and from the public. They painted Clinton as the victim of a partisan quest to exploit an offense—covering up an affair—that was not on the scale of abuse that the Framers had in mind. “To be honest, we pursued a strategy that embraced polarization,” Craig recalled. “I gave a statement to the press that said this is the most unfair process since the Inquisition in Spain. Some arcane historical reference came out of my mouth. I said, ‘It’s like they’ve tied up President Clinton, put him in a closet in the middle of the night and turned off the lights, and they’re whipping him.’ ”

The strategy succeeded. By the time the House impeached Clinton, on December 19, 1998, his approval rating had risen to more than seventy per cent—his highest level ever. “It’s a vindictive party that just went out to get him,” a man at an American Legion post in San Diego told a reporter, in December, just before the House voted to impeach. When the case reached the Senate, Clinton’s lawyers capitalized on his popularity and presented his misdeeds in the broader context of his Presidency. In closing arguments, Charles Ruff, the White House counsel, asked, “Would it put at risk the liberties of the people to retain the President in office?” The Senate acquitted Clinton on all charges.

Were Trump to face impeachment, his lawyers would likely try to present him as a victim of a partisan feud, but his unpopularity would be a liability; Republicans in Congress would have little reason to defend him. Nonetheless, the Clinton impeachment may contain an even larger warning for Democrats in pursuit of Trump. “It’s pretty important to be seen in sorrow rather than anger,” Stewart, the historian of impeachment, said. “Don’t emerge red in tooth and claw. That’s not merely tactical—it’s good for the country, because you should only pursue impeachment if you really have to.”

Not long ago, the topic of impeaching Trump occupied a spot on the fringe of Democratic priorities somewhere around the California secessionist movement. “If you’d have asked me around Election Day, I would have said it’s not realistic,” Robert B. Reich, Clinton’s Secretary of Labor, told me in April. “But I’m frankly amazed at the degree of activism among Democrats and the degree of resolution. I’ve not seen anything like this since the anti-Vietnam movement. ” In April, Reich, who is now a professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, released an animated short, mapping out the path to impeachment, and it became an unlikely viral hit, attracting 3.5 million views on YouTube in the first twenty-four hours.

Because the Republican leadership in the House of Representatives will almost certainly not initiate the ouster of a Republican President, the first step in any realistic path to impeachment is for Democrats to gain control of the House. The next opportunity is the 2018 midterm elections. Republicans have been relatively confident, in part because their redistricting in 2010 tilted the congressional map in their favor. But Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a Republican economist and the president of the right-leaning American Action Forum, believes that the chances of control shifting to the Democrats is greater than many people in either party realize. “After a party takes the House, the Senate, and the White House, they typically lose thirty-five seats in the House in the next midterm,” he told me. “Republicans now hold the House by twenty-three seats, so, as a going proposition, they’re in trouble. They need to do really, really well.”

Unfortunately for the congressional G.O.P., unpopular Presidents sow midterm fiascos. Since 1946, whenever a President has had an approval rating above fifty per cent, his party has lost an average of fourteen seats in the midterms, according to Gallup; whenever the rating has been below fifty per cent, the average loss soars to thirty-six seats. Steve Schmidt, the Republican consultant, is concerned that, in 2018, the Party faces a convergence of vulnerabilities akin to those which pertained during the 2006 midterms, whose outcome George W. Bush characterized as “a thumping.” Schmidt told me, “The last time Republicans lost control of the House of Representatives, it was on a mix of competency—Iraq and Katrina—and corruption in government, with the Tom DeLay Congress.” The Trump Administration has a comparable “basic competency issue,” he said. “The constant lying, the lack of credible statements from the White House, from the President on down to the spokesperson, the amateurishness of the threats to the members of Congress, the ultimatums, the talk of ‘enemy lists’ and retribution.”

Tom Davis, who twice led Republican congressional-election efforts during fourteen years as a representative from Virginia, believes that his former colleagues are overly complacent. “These guys need a wake-up call. They’re just living in la-la land,” he said. He pointed out that regardless of the final outcome of an attempt to impeach—the two-thirds majority in the Senate remains a high bar to clear—Democratic control of the House would immediately make Trump more vulnerable to investigations. “If the gavels change hands, it’s a different world. No. 1, all of his public records, they will go through those with a fine-tooth comb—income taxes, business dealings. At that point, it’s not just talk—they subpoena it. It gets ugly real fast. He has so far had a pass on all this business stuff, and I don’t know what’s there, but I’ve got to imagine that it’s not pretty in this environment.”

If Democrats retake the House, the Judiciary Committee could establish a subcommittee to investigate potential abuses and identify specific grounds for impeachment. The various investigations of Trump already in process will come into play. In addition to allegations of business conflicts and potential Russian collusion, Trump is facing dozens of civil proceedings. In a case in federal court, he is accused of urging violence at a campaign rally in Louisville, Kentucky, in March, 2016, where he yelled, referring to a protester, “Get ’em out of here.” In a New York state court, he is facing a suit brought by Summer Zervos, a former contestant on “The Apprentice,” who alleges that he sexually assaulted her in 2007. The constitutional question of whether a President could be impeached for offenses committed before he took office is unsettled, but, as Clinton’s case showed, civil proceedings contain risks whenever a President testifies under oath.

Many scholars believe that the most plausible bases for a Trump impeachment are corruption and abuse of power. Noah Feldman, a Harvard Law School professor who specializes in constitutional studies, argues that, even without evidence of an indictable crime, the Administration’s pattern of seemingly trivial uses of public office for private gain “can add up to an impeachable offense.” Last week, after the State Department took down an official Web page that showcased Trump’s private, for-profit club, Mar-a-Lago, Feldman told me, “A systematic pattern shown through data points would count as grounds for impeachment.” He said that economic analysis of the former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s self-enrichment proves the concept. “Berlusconi is said to have gained at most one per cent per business transaction from his Presidency, but that added up to more than a billion euros,” Feldman said.

Allan J. Lichtman is an American University historian who has correctly forecast every Presidential election since 1984 (including Trump’s victory). In April, he published “The Case for Impeachment,” in which he predicted that Trump will not serve a full term, because of a “Nixonian” pattern of trespassing beyond constitutional boundaries. He cited an incident in late January, during the legal battle over Trump’s first executive order on immigration. James L. Robart, the U.S. district judge who blocked the order, rejected the White House’s claim that the court could not review the President’s decision, ruling that the executive must “comport with our country’s laws, and more importantly, our Constitution.” Trump’s response was a further violation of democratic norms: he disparaged Robart as a “so-called judge” and said that he should be held responsible for future terrorist acts on Americans. “If something happens blame him and court system. People pouring in. Bad!” Trump tweeted.

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Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat who is on the Judiciary Committee, believes that the Administration’s actions denigrating or denying the power of equal branches of government portend a “constitutional crisis” akin to Nixon’s refusal to accept the appellate-court judgment regarding the White House tapes. Last week, lawmakers from both parties announced that White House officials had refused a request from an oversight committee to turn over internal documents related to the hiring and resignation of Michael Flynn. In a letter to the House oversight committee, Marc T. Short, the White House director of legislative affairs, said that the Administration is withholding documents because they “are likely to contain classified, sensitive and/or confidential information.” Blumenthal told me, “I foresee a point that there will be subpoenas or some kind of compulsory disclosure issued against the President or the Administration by one of the investigative bodies—the F.B.I. or the Intelligence Committee or an independent commission, if there is one—and, at that point, there may be the sort of confrontation that we haven’t really seen in the same way since United States versus Nixon.”

Trump campaigned as a dealmaker who could woo disparate Republicans. Though there was no natural Trumpist wing of the Party, he was expected to ally with the three dozen conservative members of the Freedom Caucus, who tended to admire his anti-establishment populism. But the relationship descended into acrimony almost immediately. After the caucus objected to part of Trump’s effort to repeal and replace Obamacare, leading to the collapse of the bill, Trump publicly threatened to target its members in next year’s elections. “The Freedom Caucus will hurt the entire Republican agenda if they don’t get on the team, & fast,” he tweeted. “We must fight them, & Dems, in 2018!”

He went after individual members as well. At one point, he threatened to support a primary challenger against Mark Sanford, the South Carolina congressman. I asked Sanford if he regarded the threat as a bargaining tactic. “I think it was genuine,” he said. “It certainly wasn’t said in a way that suggested a bluff and then a wink and a nod.” Sanford said, of the level of support for Trump among Republicans in Congress, “In general, the mood of the conference is that we’re in the same boat together.” But he added a caveat: “This has to fundamentally be a game of addition, not just subtraction. I’m not sure the Administration has fully grasped that concept yet. You’re probably not adding to the list of permanent allies and friends.” He went on, “I think that there’s a degree of immunity that has come with the way that he has broken all of the past molds. But I would also argue that there’s a half-life to that.”

Trump is not faring much better with moderate Republicans. At a meeting in March, Charlie Dent, a seven-term centrist congressman from Pennsylvania, expressed misgivings about the health-care plan, and Trump lashed out. “He said something to the effect that I was destroying the Republican Party,” Dent told me. “And that the tax reform is going to fail because of me, and I’d be blamed for it.” In targeting Dent, Trump found an unlikely antagonist. Dent co-chairs an alliance of fifty-four moderate Republicans so resolutely undogmatic that they call themselves simply “the Tuesday Group.” Dent said that he remains ready to back Trump “when the President is on the right track,” but he left no doubt that he would break when his conscience requires it. “We have to serve as a check. I mean, that’s kind of our one power. We should accept that.”

William Kristol, the editor-at-large of The Weekly Standard, one of the most prominent conservative critics of Trump, told me that the Administration’s failure to get any bills passed was stirring frustration. “Most Republicans, I would say, wanted him to succeed and were bending over backwards to give him a chance,” Kristol said. “I think there was pretty widespread disappointment. You kind of knew what you were getting in terms of some of the wackiness and also some of the actual issues that people might not agree with him on—trade, immigration—but I think that just the level of chaos, the lack of discipline, was beginning to freak members of Congress out a little bit.”

Trump has been meeting with congressional Republicans in small groups. By and large, they have found him more approachable than they expected, but much less informed. “Several have been a little bit amazed by the lack of policy knowledge,” Kristol said. “God knows Presidents don’t need to know the details of health-care bills and tax bills, and I certainly don’t, either—that’s what you have aides for. But not even having a basic level of understanding? I think that has rattled people a little bit.” He added, “Reagan may not have had a subtle grasp of everything, but he read the briefing books and he knew the arguments, basically. And Trump is not even at that level.”

When I asked Kristol about the chances of impeachment, he paused to consider the odds. Then he said, “It’s somewhere in the big middle ground between a one-per-cent chance and fifty. It’s some per cent. It’s not nothing.”

The history of besieged Presidencies is, in the end, a history of hubris—of blindness to one’s faults, of deafness to the warnings, of seclusion from uncomfortable realities. The secret of power is not that it corrupts; that is well known. “What is never said,” Robert Caro writes, in “Master of the Senate,” about Lyndon Johnson, “is that power reveals.” Trump, after a lifetime in a family business, with no public obligations and no board of directors to please, has found himself abruptly exposed to evaluation, and his reactions have been volcanic. Setting a more successful course for the Presidency will depend, in part, on whether he fully accepts that critics who identify his shortcomings are capable of curtailing his power. When James P. Pfiffner, a political scientist at George Mason University, compared the White House crises that confronted Nixon, Reagan, and Clinton, he identified a perilous strain of confidence. In each case, Pfiffner found, the President could not “admit to himself that he had done anything wrong.” Nixon convinced himself that his enemies were doing the same things he was; Reagan dismissed the trading of arms for hostages as the cost of establishing relations with Iran; Clinton insisted that he was technically telling the truth. In Pfiffner’s view, “Each of these sets of rationalizations allowed the Presidents to choose the path that would end up damaging them more than an initial admission would have.”

Law and history make clear that Trump’s most urgent risk is not getting ousted; it is getting hobbled by unpopularity and distrust. He is only the fifth U.S. President who failed to win the popular vote. Except George W. Bush, none of the others managed to win a second term. Less dramatic than the possibility of impeachment or removal via the Twenty-fifth Amendment is the distinct possibility that Trump will simply limp through a single term, incapacitated by opposition.

William Antholis, a political scientist who directs the Miller Center, at the University of Virginia, told me that, thus far, the President that Trump most reminds him of is not Nixon or Clinton but Jimmy Carter, another outsider who vowed to remake Washington. Carter is Trump’s moral and stylistic opposite, but, Antholis said, “he couldn’t find a way to work with his own party, and Trump’s whole message was pugnacious. It was ‘I alone can fix this.’ ” Like Trump, Carter had majorities in both chambers, but he alienated Congress, and, after four years, he left the White House without achieving his ambitions on welfare, tax reform, and energy independence.

Oscillating between the America of Kenosha and the America of Mar-a-Lago, Trump is neither fully a revolutionary nor an establishmentarian. He is ideologically indebted to both Patrick Buchanan and Goldman Sachs. He is what the political scientist Stephen Skowronek calls a “disjunctive” President, one “who reigns over the end of his party’s own orthodoxy.” Trump knows that Reaganite ideology is no longer politically viable, but he has yet to create a new conservatism beyond white-nationalist nostalgia. For the moment, all he can think to do is rekindle the embers of the campaign, to bathe, once more, in the stage light. It lifts him up. But what of the public? Does he understand that all citizens will have a hand in his fate?

When Trump’s speech in Kenosha was over, he walked across the stage to sign an executive order. “Get ready, everybody,” he said. “This is a big one.” Since taking office, he had issued twenty-four executive orders, and the signings had become a favorite way of displaying his power. The scope of this order was modest—it merely established studies of visas and imports—but he described it as “historic.”

He uncapped a pen and, just before he signed the order, he said, “Who should I give the pen to? The big question, right?” There was nervous laughter, and he called some local and visiting politicians up to the stage to stand beside him while he signed. Then he said, “This is a tremendous honor for me,” and tried his joke again: “The only question is, who gets the pen?” He held up the signed order to the cameras, as always, pivoting left, then right, and grinned broadly.

He stepped down from the stage and walked along the front row of the audience, shaking hands, before his Secret Service detail escorted him toward Marine One. He was going straight back to Washington. The audience, kept in place until he was safely extricated, milled about awkwardly. The theatrical atmosphere dissipated, leaving behind the remainder of an ordinary Tuesday at work.

I approached a woman who introduced herself as Donna Wollmuth. She was sixty-eight years old, and she worked in Snap-on’s warehouse, packing boxes for shipment. I asked her what she thought of Trump’s comments. “I believe in it,” she said. “And I believe in America. I want the jobs back here.”

At first, I wondered if she was merely repeating Trump’s slogans, but it became clear that she had thought hard about his message. Her story was of the kind that has become a stock explanation for Trump’s rise. For twenty-three years, she operated a sewing machine, making briefs and sportswear at Jockey. When the plant closed, in 1993, and production moved offshore, she found a job at the Chicago Lock factory (“Five years later, they closed”) and then one at Air Flow Technology, making industrial filters. After fourteen years there, she was earning almost seventeen dollars an hour, but in 2015 she was laid off. “I lost my job there because they hired somebody that they could pay seven dollars less. It was a lot of immigrants there. Let’s put it that way. I’m sure you know what I mean.” She didn’t like the way it sounded, but she wanted me to understand. “I’m just so stuck on this immigration thing. I really am, because I’ve lived through it, giving benefits and everything to people that aren’t here legally.”

Wollmuth had almost always voted for Democrats, but she had come to believe that her family—she has seven grandchildren and stepgrandchildren—faced a dark future. When Trump entered the race, Wollmuth was turned off by his antics. “He’s gotta learn to keep his mouth shut,” she said, but his pledge to reënergize American manufacturing was too specific and attractive to ignore. She took a chance on Trump, as did many of her neighbors. After going for Obama by large margins in the previous two elections, Kenosha County sided with Trump, by just two hundred and fifty-five votes out of more than seventy-one thousand cast.

That is a fragile buffer. In late April, Trump promoted the results of a Washington Post/ABC News poll showing that only two per cent of those who voted for him regretted doing so. When I asked Wollmuth if she had any regrets, she made it clear that it was the wrong question. “I don’t want to be disappointed, and I hope he’s really trying,” she said. “I’d like to believe that. I’d like to see it happen. I’ve got mixed emotions with him so far.”

Walking out of Snap-on’s headquarters, through the chanting crowd, I wondered whether Trump could see the protesters from his chopper. He knows the unpredictable potential of a crowd. I remembered something that Sam Nunberg, the Trump campaign adviser, had told me about Trump’s fixation on crowds. “I said to him once, ‘I understand it’s the biggest. Who gives a shit? Who cares at this point? What we care about is votes,’ ” Nunberg said. “And he says, ‘No. It’s got to be.’ Some of it was he was seriously concerned about the country. He also wanted to see where this went and what it was. The crowds and energy showed him it was a movement.” ♦
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Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: The Impeachment of President Donald J Trump

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue May 16, 2017 6:09 pm

This Isn’t Smoke. It’s Fire.

President Donald Trump meets Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in the Oval Office of the White House, Tuesday, May 16, 2017, in Washington. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
Evan Vucci/AP
By JOSH MARSHALL Published MAY 16, 2017 5:59 PM

With the latest revelation – that President Trump straight up asked James Comey to end the Flynn investigation – this is starting to feel like a prize fight where one boxer just took three straight punches to the head. It’s hard to know how much longer this can go on. But I suspect the answer is this: a lot longer.

We talk a lot about smoke and fire. But this isn’t smoke. This is the fire. It’s not clear to me what more we need to know. The only question is whether we decide to put it out or just let it keep burning. As I said above, I bet we’re going to let it burn for quite a while longer.

President Trump fired the FBI Director – by his own account because he was upset about the investigation into his and his associates ties to Russia. We now learn he straight out asked the FBI Director to end the investigation into Michael Flynn three months ago. Last week he decided in the spur of the moment to share highly classified information with the Russian Foreign Minister.

Each of these revelations are startling, shocking, albeit at this point simply not that surprising. There are all sorts of safeguards and norms we have created to prevent or limit a President’s ability to transform the law into an instrument of his or her own personal prerogative. It is actually better to say that we have set up all sorts of metaphoric fences around such an act or transformation to prevent someone in authority from even getting close to doing something like this – there are policies, taboos, norms, all there to keep a President or other executives from getting close.

Firing an FBI Director while such an investigation like this is afoot is something like that, a fence. In theory, the President has every right to fire an FBI Director. But doing so while such an investigation is underway has the look of trying to end the investigation. But in this case, asking Comey to end the probe itself doesn’t break one of the fences. It’s the thing itself. There’s no question of intent or misunderstandings. It’s the hand in the register. There’s just nothing more to know. It’s the thing itself.

The President isn’t just astonishing crooked. He’s amazingly stupid. Unsurprisingly Comey kept a record. All by the book. All recorded. If you didn’t see it yesterday, take a look at my post on how to understand who James Comey is.

How much longer? I’m pretty sure a lot longer.
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Articles of Impeachment for Donald J. Trump

A first draft of an impeachment bill for the president.

By Phillip Carter
Adam Schiff
Even if Republicans won’t act, Democrats, like House Intelligence Committee ranking member Adam Schiff (pictured April 6 at the Capitol), should make their intentions clear.
Joshua Roberts/Reuters

The framers of our Constitution likely never imagined a President like Donald J. Trump. And yet, they inserted impeachment provisions into the original text of the Constitution, some 230 years ago, to empower Congress to act in case a rube, tyrant, or criminal came to occupy the nation’s highest office.

It’s not crystal clear which Trump might be, but the president’s latest outrageous actions—the reported passing of highly classified intelligence to Russian diplomats in the Oval Office—should awake Republicans and Democrats in Congress to the dangers posed by Trump to the nation in case that wasn’t already obvious. His conduct now goes far beyond mere offense or incitement to constitute actual damage to U.S. national security, the very definition of “high crimes and misdemeanors” contemplated by the men who crafted the Constitution’s impeachment clauses. With this latest act, the time has come to commence the slow, deliberate process of demonstrating that Trump needs to be removed from office so he can harm the nation no more. A broad congressional inquiry should begin immediately, to inform drafters who will prepare articles of impeachment for consideration by the House and Senate. While Republican control of Congress means that such proceedings won’t occur anytime soon, it’s clear that they are warranted. We don’t yet know for certain what precisely such an investigation would yield, but there is enough public information already available to roughly map out what such articles of impeachment might—and probably should—look like.

The time has come for Congress to act, and for leaders on both sides of the aisle to put country before party and politics.
Historically, impeachment articles have focused on broad violations of constitutional duty and specific discrete acts like clashing with Congress over Reconstruction, commanding the Watergate break-in, or testimonial perjury. In Trump’s case, there is ample evidence for both the more general violations and the more specific abuses, much of them admitted by the president through his own indelicate tweets (including admissions Tuesday morning regarding the passing of classified information to the Russians).

So what might an impeachment bill against President Trump include?

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The Andrew Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Bill Clinton impeachment bills used common language to put their specific violations in context. Any Trump articles of impeachment should also include such language at the start of each article:

In his conduct while president of the United States, Donald J. Trump, in violation of his constitutional oath faithfully to execute the office of president of the United States and, to the best of his ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States, and in violation of his constitutional duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed, has engaged in conduct that resulted in misuse and abuse of his high office:

Beyond this preamble, the Trump impeachment bill might include, but not be limited to, the following articles:

Article 1: Compromising the integrity of the presidency through continuing violation of the Constitution’s Emoluments Clause. From his first day in office, Trump’s continuing stake in Trump Organization businesses has violated the clause of the Constitution proscribing federal officials from receiving foreign payments. The true and full extent of Trump’s conflicts of interest remains unknown. For his part, Trump has transferred day-to-day control over these interests to his adult children and the management of the Trump Organization. However, he remains the ultimate beneficiary for these businesses, so the fundamental conflict of interest remains. These foreign business ties violate both the letter and spirit of the Constitution’s Emoluments Clause, and arguably provide the clearest basis for impeachment based on the facts and law.

Article 2: Violation of his constitutional oath to faithfully execute the duties of his office by disregarding U.S. interests and pursuing the interests of a hostile foreign power, to wit, Russia. L’affaire Russia began during Trump’s campaign for the presidency, during which several top aides reportedly had contacts with Russia and its intelligence service. His campaign manager also had reportedly worked either directly or indirectly for the Kremlin. These contacts continued, famously, into the presidential transition, when the president’s chosen national security adviser, Michael Flynn, had his ill-fated contacts with Russia. Beyond these contacts, Trump has substantively acted in myriad ways that benefit Russia, including dangerous diplomacy that has reportedly frayed relationships with our allies and allegedly put allied intelligence assets at risk. By offering classified information to the Russians, it was reported that Trump risked the intelligence assets of a Middle Eastern ally that already warned American officials that it would stop sharing such information with America if that information was shared too widely. In risking that relationship, Trump has opened up the possibility for the loss of that information stream for combatting terrorism, and potentially put American lives at risk from the loss of intelligence that could inform officials about future attacks on Americans at home and abroad.

Article 3: Impairment and obstruction of inquiries by the Justice Department and Congress into the extent of the Trump administration’s conflicts of interests and Russia ties. The Trump administration has systematically impeded, avoided, or obstructed the machinery of justice to obscure its business relationships, its Russia ties, and the forces acting within the Trump White House to animate policy. The most egregious and visible examples have been Trump’s firings of Acting Attorney General Sally Yates and FBI Director James Comey. Each termination had what appeared to be a lawful pretext; subsequent statements or admissions have indicated each had more to do with obstructing justice than holding leaders accountable. Alongside these sackings, the Trump administration has also worked to starve Justice Department inquiries of resources and refocus investigators on suspected leaks instead of the White House’s own Russia intrigues. The Trump administration also interfered with congressional inquiries through attempting to block witnesses like Yates from appearing or selective leaking of classified information to House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes, compromising Nunes so badly he had to recuse himself from the matter.

Article 4: Undermining of the American judicial system through felonious intimidation of potential witnesses. In his desire to continue Comey’s public humiliation, and ensure Comey remained silent about Trump’s possible sins, the president threatened Comey on Twitter with disclosure of “tapes” of their conversations. This follows a pattern of Trump roughly treating witnesses and litigation adversaries that stretches back for decades before his presidency. Since taking office, Trump has also used the bully pulpit of his office to threaten intelligence officials for purported leaks and badger former Yates before her congressional testimony. In addition to falling beneath the dignity of the presidency, these verbal assaults also constitute obstruction of justice, prohibited by federal statutes on witness intimidation, retaliation against a witness, and obstruction of federal proceedings. These attacks don’t just harm the individuals who are targeted; they assault and undermine the rule of law. As such, they constitute further grounds for impeachment of Trump and his removal from the presidency.

Article 5: Undermining of his office and the Constitution through repeated assaults on the integrity of the federal judiciary and its officers. During the presidential campaign, Trump publicly attacked federal district Judge Gonzalo Curiel on the basis of his ethnicity, saying Curiel had been “extremely hostile to (Trump),” and that the judge had ruled against Trump because of his “Mexican heritage.” Since taking office, Trump has continued his unpresidential assaults on the federal judiciary, particularly after repeatedly losing court battles over his travel bans. At one point, he described a member of the bench as a “so-called judge,” undermining the premise of an independent judiciary. These statements also undermined both the dignity and power of the presidency, and threaten the rule of law by attacking the integrity of the federal judiciary.

Article 6: Demeaning the integrity of government and its public servants, particularly the military and intelligence agencies, in contravention of his constitutional duties to serve as chief executive and commander in chief of the armed forces. Trump swept into office with considerable disdain for the government and its military. Indeed, during his campaign, he insulted former prisoners of war, Purple Heart recipients, and Gold Star families; criticized the military for its performance in Iraq; and said today’s generals and admirals had been “reduced to rubble” during the Obama administration. Trump carried this disdain into the presidency, through his attacks on the “deep state” of military and intelligence officials that he believed to be obstructing his agenda. He also demeaned the military and its apolitical ethos through use of military fora and audiences as public spectacle—first to sign his immigration order in the Pentagon’s Hall of Heroes, and then to deliver rambling speeches at military and intelligence headquarters suggesting that pro-Trump elements in those agencies were grateful Trump had taken power. Trump has also continued to wage political war against his intelligence community, suggesting as recently as Tuesday morning that it was sabotaging his administration through leaking and other nefarious activities. In doing these things, Trump has undermined his constitutional office as president and commander in chief of the armed forces.

Article 7: Dereliction of his constitutional duty to faithfully execute the office of president by failing to timely appoint officers of the United States to administer the nation’s federal agencies. Shortly after taking office, Trump administration strategist Stephen Bannon articulated his plan for the “deconstruction of the administrative state.” During its first four months in office, the Trump administration’s neglect of governance illustrates how this strategy is to be executed: delay of political appointments, failure to reach budget agreements with Congress in a timely manner, and deliberate neglect of governance and government operations. These actions and failures risk the health, welfare, and security of the nation, and represent a dereliction of Trump’s constitutional duty to faithfully execute the office of the presidency.

Any one of the offenses above could constitute the basis for rigorous investigation of the Trump White House and its failures. Together, the totality of Trump’s malfeasance—once proven after a rigorous investigation—would likely make clear that he “warrants impeachment and trial, and removal from office and disqualification to hold and enjoy any office of honor, trust or profit under the United States,” to quote from the bill of impeachment passed against President Clinton.

The time has come for Congress to act and for leaders on both sides of the aisle to put country before party and politics. Speaker Paul Ryan and Majority Leader Mitch McConnell ought to, in cooperation with Democratic leaders, begin the sequence of events that would likely lead to impeachment and removal proceedings for Trump. Given that this is unlikely, Democrats should make clear of their intentions to do what is necessary under our Constitution should they win back control of the House of Representatives in 2018. This process should be as full, fair, and transparent as our Constitution requires. Anything less would demean and harm the country even more than Trump has already done.
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_ ... trump.html


MAY 17 2017 - 8:02AM

James Comey memo says Donald Trump asked him to end Michael Flynn probe

Michael S. Schmidt

Washington: US President Donald Trump asked the FBI director, James Comey, to shut down the federal investigation into Mr Trump's former national security adviser, Michael Flynn, in an Oval Office meeting in February, according to a memo that Mr Comey wrote shortly after the meeting.

"I hope you can let this go," the president told Mr Comey, according to the memo.

A spokesman for the FBI declined to comment.

Mr Comey created similar memos - including some that are classified - about every phone call and meeting he had with the president, the two people said. It is unclear whether Mr Comey told the Justice Department about the conversation or his memos.

Mr Trump fired Mr Comey last week.

Trump administration officials have provided multiple, conflicting accounts of the reasoning behind Mr Comey's dismissal. Mr Trump said in a television interview that one of the reasons was because he believed "this Russia thing" was a "made-up story."

The February 14 meeting took place just a day after Mr Flynn was forced out of his job after it was revealed he had lied to Vice President Mike Pence about the nature of phone conversations he had had with the Russian ambassador to the United States.

Despite the conversation between Mr Trump and Mr Comey, the investigation of Mr Flynn has proceeded. In Virginia, a federal grand jury has issued subpoenas in recent weeks for records related to Mr Flynn. Part of the Flynn investigation is centred on his financial ties to Russia and Turkey.

Mr Comey had been in the Oval Office that day with other senior national security officials for a terrorism threat briefing. When the meeting ended, Mr Trump told those present - including Mr Pence and Attorney General Jeff Sessions - to leave the room except for Mr Comey.

Alone in the Oval Office, Mr Trump began the discussion by condemning leaks to the news media, saying that Mr Comey should consider putting reporters in prison for publishing classified information, according to one of Mr Comey's associates.
http://www.smh.com.au/world/james-comey ... w6foj.html




Chaffetz Says He Wants To See Comey Memo: ‘I Have My Subpoena Pen Ready’

By ESME CRIBB Published MAY 16, 2017 7:05 PM
House Oversight Committee Chair Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) on Tuesday said that he is ready to issue a subpoena for a memo that fired FBI Director James Comey reportedly wrote documenting a request President Donald Trump made for him to shut down his bureau’s investigation into former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn.

Chaffetz tweeted that his panel “is going to get the Comey memo, if it exists.”

“I need to see it sooner rather than later,” he said. “I have my subpoena pen ready.”


In a letter to acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe later Tuesday evening, Chaffetz requested “all memoranda, notes, summaries, and recordings referring or relating to any communications” between Trump and Comey.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/j ... trump-memo
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: The Impeachment of President Donald J Trump

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue May 16, 2017 11:04 pm

republican donors are fleeing ......repubilcans scared now

two impeachable offenses in a week

ground is shifting


Getting Out of the Way
By JOSH MARSHALL Published MAY 16, 2017 9:50 PM
We’re getting more clarity on where Republicans are ending up after a bruising, punishing 36 hours. Republicans are now reportedly debating whether to push for an independent prosecutor or commission, two demands Democrats have made for weeks or months but which almost all Republicans have heretofore refused. They seem almost universally to be calling to see the Comey memos and hear from Comey himself as soon as possible. Wanting to hear more from Comey – either from his memos or his testimony is an obvious position for Republicans since it covers all the possible bases and leaves freedom to maneuver as the situation becomes more clear. They’re not condemning or defending. They just want to hear more. They can interpret that as condemnation or defense later, as more facts reveal themselves. The upshot of tonight, I think, is that Republicans collectively decided to get out of the way. They’re not attacking Trump. But they’re also no longer standing in the way or blocking more investigations. For now at least they seem to saying: you’re going to need to handle this on your own.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog


:P
John McCain: Trump Scandals ‘Reaching Watergate Size And Scale’




Caroline O.‏
@RVAwonk

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Caroline O. Retweeted Sandy Garossino
And on top of criminal probe, Comey was overseeing a counterespionage investigation. In the words of @MalcolmNance: "This is a spy hunt."
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
User avatar
seemslikeadream
 
Posts: 32090
Joined: Wed Apr 27, 2005 11:28 pm
Location: into the black
Blog: View Blog (83)

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