General Impeachment inquiry launched

Brutal new poll shows 3 in 10 Republicans support Trump impeachment push

 

A wise man once said, stop being an ass.

 

crossposted

 

New whistleblower memo:

 

My apologies on the wording.
It is from the first whisteblower and is meant to show they have a memorialized conversation from that time period, not some new bias with bad recollection.

 

I believe this new memo is from the same first whistleblower. It is a memo they wrote after talking to officials directly on the phone call.
The timeline and detail is of importance because credibility goes up if somebody has recorded things fresh. The original memo from this person says they talked to many people after this that all verified. But this is a time stamp from July.


The second whistleblower is unknown and it's not clear that #2 is the same white house official this person references. As such, if #2 has direct knowledge of the call it might not be the same source.

 

Since this exists, unless this new transcript comes up disagreeing, we must assume the trump released transcript is accurate. You can't hide a second transcript for long under these pretenses.

Doesn't change that the transcript was apparently unusually moved to a classified server.

 

Intention has been the reason nothing sticks to Trump. He has a halo of people that have gone down and "I didn't intend that" goes a long way on getting you out of quid pro quo. It also matters for the electorate.

If those around Trump have a list of reasons these topics were on the phone call, then Trump can point to his handlers as encouraging topics for unrelated and official reasons.

If the executive branch held up Congressional authorized funds, then acted not just independently as a branch but Trump independently from the rest of the white house, that builds intent on the President himself. If everyone around Trump was not involved in the decision making of this call and topics, you are left with Trump himself directing the holding of funds, asking a non-government employee (Rudy) to negotiate off the record dealing with Ukraine, to investigate Biden. The defense of corruption concerns as a policy fall flat at that point.

If this was truly about corruption, then there should be a white house apparatus in play. These memos increasingly show there was not. Quid pro quo case is being built.

The congressional funds and Rudy are huge problems. Wtf is the explanation on why Rudy, a non-government employee with no clearances being instructed to meet with Ukraine about this?

And don't forget, the bar for impeachment is intentionally NOT criminal. It is broad and ambiguous as a check against the executive doing things that run afoul of congress. Blocking congressional funds (the purse being congress' main power) with an executive shadow policy made for political gain is just about the exact thing impeachment was made. This is going to go poorly for Trump.

 

Did we talk about this?

White House says it will refuse to cooperate with impeachment inquiry

After that happened I read a bunch of legal scholars, for I am not even close to understanding American legal doctrine. Nixon's process apparently cemented that congress incredibly broad discretion in impeachment processes and that the Supreme court would absolutely come down on the side of congress here.
Beyond that, this seems to me to play poorly with the electorate. The guy will eventual go before Congress and now they will play up that he was originally blocked.