September 27, 2019

Huffpost: 9 Unanswered Questions In The Whistleblower Complaint - Puny Pence & LowBarr involvement

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-whistleblower-complaint-unanswered-questions_n_5d8d1bace4b0ac3cdda5ccd5

1. Which White House officials were in on the call?

2. Which White House officials ordered the call transcript to be locked down and improperly classified? Which officials carried out the order?

3. What did former Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats know, and when did he know it?

4. What was Attorney General William Barr’s involvement?

5. Did Ukrainian officials believe they needed to “play ball” with Trump?

6. Did U.S. officials believe Ukraine feared losing military aid?

7. Why did Mike Pence cancel his trip to Ukraine?

8. Why was U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch removed from office?

9. Did the White House improperly file other call transcripts with foreign leaders on the classified server?

Great article on these unanswered questions, lots of good info.

September 26, 2019

Jonathan Chait: The Ukraine Scandal Is Not One Phone Call. It's a Massive Plot.

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/09/ukraine-scandal-trump-phone-call-giuiliani-pence-barr-mulvaney-impeachment.html

On July 25, President Trump held a phone call in which he repeatedly leaned on Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate Joe Biden and Paul Manafort’s prosecutors. The episode is so blatantly inappropriate even Trump’s most fervent apologists are, with a few exceptions, having trouble defending it. What they are trying to do, instead, is define this phone call as the entire scandal. Trump emphasizes that he “didn’t specifically mention the explicit quid pro quo” of military aid in return for the investigation.

That is true, as far as it goes. The quid pro quo in the call, though perfectly apparent, is mostly implicit. But the real trick in Trump’s defense is framing the call as the entire scandal. The scandal is much more than that. The call is a snapshot, a moment in time in a months-long campaign that put American policy toward Ukraine at the disposal of Trump’s personal interests and reelection campaign...

The White House–issued summary of Trump’s phone call with Zelensky shows the American president pressing his counterpart to undertake the twin investigations. After Trump asks Zelensky to investigate Biden, and Zelensky makes accommodating noises in response, Trump promises to have Giuliani and Attorney General William Barr call him. Barr also was involved in preventing Congress from seeing the whistle-blower complaint, and the call summary shows that he had a personal interest in doing so. Add Barr to the list of impeachment witnesses.

There may be many others. Last night on Fox News, Giuliani held up a phone he said included messages with official authorization for his activities. “You know who I did it at the request of? The State Department,” he said. The scheme to shake down Ukraine was a massive plot, spreading through the government and corrupting multiple officials. Trump had a lot of accomplices.
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I watched Chris Hayes on MSNBC cover this last night. You can see he was so visibly shaken by the stark level of corruption in the details that came out of this redacted transcript he could hardly contain himself.