Impeachment

[FromMyColdDeadHand]

Call me a pessimist, glass half-empty type, whatever.....not a damn thing will come of the IG report and NO ONE will go to prison.

I agree. The deep state is no longer very deep and the two tier justice system is out in the open for all to see because they no longer care (need?) to be hidden. They do exactly what they want and they know there is nothing the citizenry can or will do about it. Elect someone outside the machine? They'll just destroy him and everyone around him until no outsider will step into the ring again.

Electorally, that may be the best of both worlds. They undoubtably will find all kinds of funny business and underhanded stuff, but they will never put one of their own into the Gulag. Bu that just proves that Trump is right AND let's him say the swamp is still strong and we need another 4 years to keep draining it.

[chuckman]

This is a distraction operation guys. The IG report is about to drop with the names and details of the fake collusion effort. The Dems are trying to change the narrative and have to go all in or disappear.

Color me skeptical. For two, three years now, we keep hearing stories of a mythical report to be delivered that would not only exonerate POTUS but also get a lot of democrats into legal trouble. I am not thinking the IG is Moses and Trump/GOP is going to the Promise Land.

Personally I think the dems have just shot their load with this and it screws them (even more) for 2020. Nate Silver doesn't think so, and that makes me nervous.

[Biggy]

This will be another big nothing burger, Trump will win again in 2020, and he will have at least one more Supreme Court pick.
After that, I really don’t want to think about it.

[glocktogo]

We’re at the point where truth does not dictate the reality of what people want or how they act, but rather, what people want controls their actions completely and destroys/reshapes what “truth” is and dictates reality.

The world has moved on from sanity and has now truly become clown world.

Well you're certainly not going to get any help from the press with that! I knew this was going to come around and it has. Remember when I said the Ukrainian government found that releasing select excerpts of the black ledger was illegal?

May 29, 2016 NABU leaks select excerpts from a "black ledger" which was known to the FBI all the way back in 2014, detailing Manafort's dealings in Ukraine. (A Ukrainian court would later determine that said leak was "an illegal attempt to influence the U.S. election. A member of Ukraine’s parliament also released a recording of a NABU official saying the agency released the ledger to help Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.

Well this morning I'm reading an article on ABC/Yahoo where they quoted "a current advisor to Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskiy" saying that it was understood and I quote from the headlines: Ukrainians understood Biden probe was condition for Trump-Zelenskiy talks, says former Ukrainian adviser

Notice the discrepancy between current and former? Yeah, that's because ABC had to issue this correction:

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article incorrectly described Serhiy Leshchenko as a current advisor to Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskiy. Leshchenko advised Zelenskiy’s transition team following his election in April but has since been distanced by the administration. He is no longer advising Zelenskiy.

Well that's one way to put it. Another more correct way to put it would be to say that this "advisor" is in fact THE Ukrainian official who illegally released the aforementioned section of the black ledger. And exactly who did he release it to you might ask? Well that would be one Nellie Ohr of Fusion GPS, the wife of Bruce Ohr, the disgraced former associate deputy attorney general of the DoJ. Now I wonder why ABC didn't mention that? Could it be because ABC has deemed that Bruce Ohr has no real culpability in all this? I ask because ABC is quoted on none other than Bruce Ohr's Wikipedia page:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Ohr

According to a comprehensive review by ABC News, Ohr "had little impact on the FBI’s growing probe into Trump and his associates."

TL;DR ABC is trying to use the disgraced former Ukrainian official directly implicated in interference with the 2016 US election, as a credible source to say that Trump is asking Ukraine to interfere with the 2020 US election. Whenever they claim Trump is trying to do something illegal, it's because that's what they've been doing before. This is how deep you have to dig to find the truth.

Here are some links to go down that particular branch of the rabbit hole if you're bored:

https://clintonfoundationtimeline.co...iy-leshchenko/

https://dailycaller.com/2019/02/06/n...henko-ukraine/

I'm also going to quote this article in it's entirety, as I wouldn't be surprised to see it magically disappear from the earth at some point.

https://www.yahoo.com/gma/ukrainian....222600760.html

Ukrainians understood Biden probe was condition for Trump-Zelenskiy talks, says former Ukrainian adviser
PATRICK REEVELL and LUCIEN BRUGGEMAN
ABC NewsSeptember 25, 2019
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article incorrectly described Serhiy Leshchenko as a current advisor to Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskiy. Leshchenko advised Zelenskiy’s transition team following his election in April but has since been distanced by the administration. He is no longer advising Zelenskiy. " data-reactid="17">CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article incorrectly described Serhiy Leshchenko as a current advisor to Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskiy. Leshchenko advised Zelenskiy’s transition team following his election in April but has since been distanced by the administration. He is no longer advising Zelenskiy.

When Ukrainians voted to elect comedian Volodymyr Zelenskiy as their next president in the spring of 2019, the fledgling administration was eager to to have a meeting with Kyiv’s most important benefactor -- the United States, according to a former adviser to Zelenskiy.

But after weeks of discussions with American officials, Ukrainian officials came to understand there was a condition for any meeting with Trump, the former adviser said.

"Ukrainian officials were asking for a meeting with Trump for along time. As I remember, it was a clear fact that Trump wants to meet only if Biden case will be included,” said Serhiy Leshchenko, an anti-corruption advocate and former member of Ukraine's Parliament, who had been a former adviser to Zelenskiy but has recently been distanced from the administration. "This issue was raised many times. I know that Ukrainian officials understood."

Asked if it had been understood as a condition, Leshchenko said, "Yes."

Leshchenko is a respected anti-corruption campaigner who has sometimes been at the center of the saga in Ukraine involving Trump's demands that Biden be investigated. As a journalist and MP in 2016 he helped publish secret accounts logs showing allegedly illegal payments from the former president of Ukraine's political party and that included the name of Trump's then-campaign manger Paul Manafort. After the logs' existence were reported, Manafort stepped down as campaign manager. Recently, Giuliani has attacked him over his role in that incident and sought to suggest he helped set off the Russia investigation into Trump.

A well-known reformer, when Zelenskiy was elected in April, Leshchenko advised his team during the transition. But since at least May, the administration began distancing itself from him reportedly because of concerns about being seen as too close to him while he was attracting criticism from Giuliani.

Leshchenko on Thursday sought to back track his comments, telling ABC News that he did not know if officials had viewed discussing Biden as a precondition for a meeting and that he had meant it was just obvious that Trump had wanted to talk about it.

The Trump administration’s alleged insistence that the two leaders discuss a prospective investigation into Biden, one of the president’s political opponents, would cast his July 25 conversation with Zelenskiy in a new light.

During the call, a rough summary of which was released by the White House Wednesday, Trump repeatedly encouraged Zelenskiy to work with Attorney General William Barr and his personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, to probe Biden’s role in the dismissal of the country’s prosecutor general, Viktor Shokin, in 2016.

In an interview with ABC News in April 2019, Shokin said he believed Biden pressured the government to fire him because he was leading an investigation into Burisma, a Ukrainian oil and gas company where Biden’s son, Hunter, had a seat on the board of directors.

But the assertion that Biden acted to help his son has been undercut by widespread criticism of Shokin from several high-profile international leaders, including members of the European Union and International Monetary Fund, who said Biden's recommendation was well justified and that Shokin had been removed because of widely shared concerns he was obstructing efforts to root out entrenched corruption in his office and Ukraine’s judicial system.

During a bilateral meeting with Trump on Wednesday in New York, Zelenskiy reaffirmed that he has no interest in getting Ukraine involved in U.S. politics and denied that Trump had pressed him to investigate Biden.

"I'm sorry, but I don't want to be involved in ... elections of USA," Zelenskiy said. "No, you heard that we had, I think, a good phone call. It was normal, we spoke about many things, and you read it that nobody pushed it, nobody pushed me."

Fallout from the release of a transcript chronicling Trump’s July phone call with his Ukrainian counterpart has sparked partisan furor in the United States. But in Ukraine, according to Leschenko, the prospective investigation was part of an effort by a Ukrainian official to curry favor with the Americans.

Leshchenko himself has been attacked by Lutsenko and Giuliani, who have alleged he played a role in the origins of the Russia investigation into Trump that Giuliani has claimed were sown in Ukraine by Democrats and their allies there.

The attacks focus on Leshchenko's publishing parts of the secret accounts books, which belonged to the party of Ukraine's former president Viktor Yanukovych, who was toppled by mass protests in 2014. Giuliani and Lutsenko alleged that Leshchenko acted unlawfully in helping publish the parts of the ledgers involving Manafort, and while Lutsenko was still prosecutor general, a court in Kyiv in December convicted Leshchenko of illegally harming the interests of Ukraine. Leshchenko appealed that judgment, however, and in May a court in Kyiv cleared him of any wrongdoing and ordered he be paid compensation, he said.

The saga with Giuliani, Leshchenko said, had placed Ukraine in a very difficult position. The key thing now was for Zelenskiy’s administration to remain neutral and not appear to take sides either with the Democrats or Republicans, he said.

"The best way for Ukraine is to be neutral," he said. "Ukraine has done nothing wrong."

[SomeOtherGuy]

Looks like Adam Schiff invented his own version of the call and read that fiction to Congress... Trump is not pleased.

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/...ine-transcript

Need some time to verify if the accusations against Schiff are true, but this is a whole new level of outrage if they are.

[WillBrink]

Only real mistake Trump made there is typical of him, being a bull in a china shop and not being slick enough to play the game as it's always been played: normally underlings meet with instructions as what deal/quid pro quo is wanted, keeping it under the radar and give POTUS et al plausible deniability. He just came out and said it, and that's not done for obvious reasons, one of which is it gives your haters ammo. There should have been a fed investigation should have taken place when Biden and his worthless son were doing what they did, and that's as much an issue, if not more so, than Trump "suggesting" they should actually investigate it on their end for quid pro quo. No one does chit without strings, period.

Yes, Trump messed up by not playing the game as it's always been played, but again, when he gets a US Ambassador and his staff killed and no one pays any price for that, wake me up.

[Averageman]

This guy is disgusting and a liar.

[FromMyColdDeadHand]

All I know is that Trump needs to majorly troll Schiff when he talks to the Ukranians next- or even better, before he calls, ask Schiff for a transcript of the call before the call so TRump can know what to say.

[glocktogo]

Looks like Adam Schiff invented his own version of the call and read that fiction to Congress... Trump is not pleased.

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/...ine-transcript

Need some time to verify if the accusations against Schiff are true, but this is a whole new level of outrage if they are.

Schiff got called out on it by his GOP colleagues during the inquisition, er, "inquiry" yesterday. He tried to walk it back by saying it was "parody". Problem is he didn't make that clear at all, and his Dem colleagues kept trying time and again to put words into Action DNI McGuire's mouth and state "facts" not in evidence. It was pretty disgusting to watch.

[Todd.K]

Now we need a ‘translator’ to tell us what Trump is really saying...

Obviously. If Trump is known for anything it is his carefully chosen, lawyerly, coy, and politically slippery way of speaking...