Lazy Caturday Reads: Unleashed Trump Begins Purge

Good Morning!!

Have you heard? Good ol’ Susan Collins “says she opposes any retribution against impeachment witnesses.”

Sen. Susan Collins on Friday defended her decision to vote to acquit President Trump during his Senate impeachment trial this week, but she declined to respond to questions later in the day about the sudden ouster of two key impeachment witnesses who testified against the president.

In her first public appearance in Maine since the trial ended Wednesday, Collins spoke at a chiefs of police conference in South Portland before answering questions from the media in which she condemned the notion of retribution against witnesses who came forward and defended her voting record.

By the end of the day, the Trump administration had removed Army Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman and his twin brother, Lt. Col. Yevgeny Vindman, both of whom worked for the National Security Council in the White House. Later Friday, European Union Ambassador Gordon Sondland announced that he was being recalled to Washington. Sondland and Alexander Vindman testified during the House impeachment hearings against Trump.

“I think it’s important to understand that when you’re in an impeachment trial, you consider the evidence that is before you,” Collins, a Republican, said after an event in South Portland. “You don’t try to make predictions. You consider the evidence that’s before you. In this case, the evidence did not meet the high bar that’s established by the Constitution for immediate removal of the president from office. So that was the basis for my decision.”

She then added: “I obviously am not in favor of any kind of retribution against anyone who came forward with evidence.”

Poor Susan. How was she supposed to know that Trump would act like Trump? Read more at the Portland Press Herald link above.

From The Washington Post:

Trump’s push to remove Sondland and Vindman — and to exact punishment on other figures involved in the nearly five-month impeachment process — underscored how his fixation with settling scores is outweighing any effort to move on to less divisive issues in the wake of his acquittal.

Vindman’s twin brother, Lt. Col. Yevgeny Vindman, was also removed from his job at the National Security Council, where he worked as a lawyer, and was escorted off the grounds Friday afternoon.

The firings of Sondland and Alexander Vindman amounted to a post-impeachment bloodletting of key figures who complied with congressional subpoenas and testified in a process that Trump sought to delegitimize as a “hoax” and a “witch hunt.”

“I’m not happy with him,” Trump said earlier Friday when asked about Vindman’s future. “You think I’m supposed to be happy with him? I’m not.”

There was little resistance from within the Republican Party to the idea of punishing Vindman, a Purple Heart recipient and Ukraine expert, after The Washington Post reported Thursday night that he could soon be removed from his White House job. Some GOP lawmakers egged the president on — a sign of how much Trump has asserted his influence on the party.

And get this: Trump wants to fire the inspector general who accepted the whistleblower complaint about the Ukraine call along with purging the NSC.

The president and his advisers have also discussed removing Michael Atkinson, the inspector general of the intelligence community, though no final decision has been made, officials said. Trump has expressed frustration that Atkinson allowed a whistleblower report documenting Trump’s alleged misconduct toward Ukraine to be transmitted to Congress.

Some advisers have also counseled the president to remove Victoria Coates, the deputy national security adviser, who has told others in the White House that she fears her job is in jeopardy.

Trump has regularly asked aides to continue slashing the size of the NSC, and national security adviser Robert C. O’Brien has said he plans to do so, telling NPR in an interview last month that the policy staff, which he put at about 180 people when he took over in September, was bloated.

By the end of February, O’Brien said, he hoped to have cut it by a third. A senior administration official said there will be widespread departures at the NSC in the next week.

At NBC News, Sharon Pettypiece writes that Trump appears to be planning to avenge himself on House Democrats.

President Donald Trump said Friday that his impeachment should be invalidated, and he gave an ominous warning when asked how he’ll pay back those responsible, saying, “You’ll see.”

“Should they expunge the impeachment in the House? They should because it was a hoax,” Trump told reporters at the White House before departing on Marine One.

When asked about his press secretary’s comments that the president was suggesting in his remarks Thursday on impeachment that his Democratic political opponents “should be held accountable,” Trump said, “Well, you’ll see. I mean, we’ll see what happens.”

Trump showed little sign of wanting to mend fences with the Democrats, saying they suffer from “Trump derangement syndrome” and that there is “a lot of evil on that side.” When asked how he was going to unify the country following his divisive impeachment, Trump said he would do it by “great success.”

David Rothkopf at The Daily Beast: Friday Night Massacre’s Just the Beginning for Acquitted Trump. On the firings of the Vindland brothers and Sondland, Rothkopf writes:

Their firings and forced departures from their jobs are, by any definition, retaliation against witnesses in the case against the president. That’s a crime. But of course, that crime will never be enforced because the U.S. government agency responsible for enforcing such laws, the Department of Justice, has been taken over by an attorney general who has perjured himself before Congress, violated his oath and placed the protection of the president ahead of the interests of the American people to whom he owes his highest duty. This week, just after the Senate’s “total acquittal,” Barr issued a memo saying that no further investigations into any presidential or vice-presidential candidate or his staff could be issued without his express approval.

Between Barr and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Donald Trump has been given free rein to be his worst self. And Trump never disappoints those who expect the worst of him. In the past few days he used a prayer breakfast to attack his enemies and question their faith. He awarded a racist the Presidential Medal of Freedom in the middle of a rambling, vapid State of the Union that had more in common with a television game show than with anything the Capitol building had ever seen before him. He held a press event to celebrate the Senate vote that was by turns vituperative against his opponents and so deranged that you expected the men with the butterfly nets to burst into the East Room of the White House and escort Trump to a quiet place where there were no sharp objects.

As the week drew to a close, a chilling realization settled in on the nation. Our most corrupt, unfit, demented and malevolent president has been given more power than any other human being in our history. He has been told he is above the law, incapable of committing a crime. He has been told that Article II of the Constitution grants him unlimited powers. He has been told he does not have submit to the oversight of the Congress.

He is, in other words, free to be himself. And we all know who that is—except perhaps Senator Susan Collins and the other Senate suckers who expected that somehow our felon-in-chief had learned a lesson from this impeachment ordeal. Trump is a man who thinks the law is for little people, that the rich can buy their way out of any legal predicament. He thinks character and courage and duty, the traits displayed by Yovanovitch and the Vindmans, are for suckers.

There’s more, but it’s behind the paywall.

Yesterday afternoon, The Washington Post published an op-ed by Nancy Pelosi: McConnell and the GOP Senate are accomplices to Trump’s wrongdoing.

For more than 200 years, our republic has endured, not only because of the wisdom of our Founders and the brilliance of our Constitution, but because of the generations of patriotic Americans who have had the courage to risk their lives to defend it.

But, tragically, the American people have watched President Trump and Republicans in Congress dismantle the Constitution that we cherish.

The House impeachment managers, led by Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.), presented to the Senate and the public an incontrovertible truth that the president himself has admitted: President Trump abused the power of his office to pressure a foreign power to help him cheat in an American election. And when he was caught, the president launched an unprecedented coverup to block Congress from holding him accountable. The president’s actions undermined our national security, jeopardized the integrity of our elections and violated the Constitution.

The Democrats in the Senate under the leadership of Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) patriotically voted unanimously to honor the oath to support and defend the Constitution. They, along with Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), deserve our gratitude for their moral courage.

The president’s lawyers all but concede his misconduct. Their argument was only that Congress and the American people have no right to stop him from using his power to cheat in our elections. With their vote, Senate Republicans embraced this darkest vision of power: that if the president believes his reelection is good for the country, he can then use any means necessary to win, with no accountability or consequences.

Read the rest at the WaPo.

One more story before I sign off. The Washington Post: Meet the 71-year-old staging a one-man protest in his Trump-loving retirement community.

“When Trump won, it changed the whole ballgame for me,” McGinty told The Washington Post. “I thought to myself, ‘This was supposed to be a joke. What’s wrong with these people?’ ”

In the three years since then, the once-quiet political observer has transformed into the best-known Trump protester in The Villages, a sprawling, meticulously planned and maintained retirement community that lies about 45 miles northwest of Orlando. McGinty’s daily vigil with signs blasting the president as a “SEXUAL PREDATOR” (among other things) has drawn ire in the Trump-loving Florida town he has called home since 2016. It has also brought viral fame.

For his one-man protest against the president, McGinty has been berated as a baby killer and a “dumb a–,” decried in letters to the editor of a local news site and hit with an anonymous, handwritten threat — a sign that even a town that is described as Disney World for retirees and markets itself as “Florida’s Friendliest Hometown” is not immune to the divisiveness of this political era.

“There was always a divide, but we coexisted,” said Chris Stanley, president of The Villages Democratic Club. “There would be some good-natured back and forth, but your neighbors were your friends. You’d have dinner with the Republicans because it wasn’t a big deal. … These days, the division in the country shows up best in The Villages because now the Republicans, they won’t golf with you anymore, or you don’t want to golf with them.” [….]

These days, McGinty devotes about two hours a day to protesting, crashing rallies planned by the Villagers for Trump group and parking his golf cart in well-trafficked areas where people are most likely to see his signs: “TRUMP BIGOT AND RACIST,” “TRUMP IS A SEXUAL PREDATOR” and “TRUMP COMPULSIVE LIAR.” He said he rotates between about 30 posters carrying various anti-Trump sentiments. He sits in his cart reading while he puts them on display, enjoying the confrontations that follow.

Have a nice weekend, Sky Dancers! As always, this is an open thread.

Thursday Reads: Trump’s Defense Team Argues “He Can Do Anything He Wants.”

Mad King Donald

Good Morning!!

We’re through the looking glass now folks. Yesterday during Trump’s impeachment “trial,” Alan Dershowitz argued that Trump can do anything he wants if he thinks it’s in the national interest for him to win an election.

Buzzfeed News: Trump’s Team Argued Presidents Can Demand Quid Pro Quos to Get Reelected. Even Republicans Won’t Touch This Defense.

Trump lawyer Alan Dershowitz told senators that presidents cannot be impeached for using their powers of office to boost their own political fortunes, as long as they believe their reelection is best for the country. Even Republicans aren’t following him down that trail.

While responding to questions from senators Wednesday, Dershowitz argued that presidents cannot be impeached for demanding a quid pro quo to help get themselves reelected.

“Every public official I know believes that his election is in the public interest. And mostly you’re right,” he said. “Your election is in the public interest. And if a president does something which he believes will help him get elected in the public interest, that cannot be the kind of quid pro quo that results in impeachment.”

Dershowitz laid out three types of presidential motivations: public interest, political interest, and private financial interest. Acting for personal financial gain — such as withholding foreign aid unless you receive a million-dollar kickback — is clearly corrupt, argued Dershowitz.

“But a complex middle case is ‘I want to be elected. I think I’m a great president. I think I’m the greatest president that ever was, and if I’m not elected, the national interest will suffer greatly.’ That cannot be an impeachable offense,” he said.

The Washington Post Editorial Board responds to another defense of Trump–that he was just advancing U.S. policy in Ukraine: Republicans’ damaging new line of defense.

John Bolton has not yet testified or spoken anywhere in public about the Ukraine affair, but his unpublished manuscript is exerting a gravitational pull on the Senate trial of President Trump. The former national security adviser is reported to have written that Mr. Trump directly connected his freeze on military aid to Ukraine with his demand that the country’s president launch politicized investigations, including of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, the former vice president. The result is that some Republican senators who previously insisted that there was no evidence of such a quid pro quo have now retreated to a new line of defense: Maybe there was but, if so, there is nothing wrong with it.

The new response has the advantage of acknowledging the mounting evidence that Mr. Trump used congressionally appropriated aid to pressure Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to intervene in the 2020 election campaign. “We basically know what the facts are,” Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) told Fox News on Tuesday. Yet Mr. Cornyn and other GOP senators are now arguing that the behavior is not an abuse of power, merely a routine presidential act. “Presidents always leverage foreign aid,” said Mr. Cornyn.

That contention is as dangerous as it is wrong. Presidents do occasionally wield U.S. assistance to advance foreign policy ends. But Mr. Trump was manifestly seeking a personal gain. An investigation of Mr. Biden was not a goal of U.S. foreign policy. There was no domestic probe of his actions and no evidence that he was guilty of wrongdoing. On the contrary, the proof that the then-vice president was pursuing official U.S. policy when he intervened in Ukraine is overwhelming.

And on the Dershowitz argument that Trump can do anything he wants:

The implications of this position are frightening. If Republicans acquit Mr. Trump on the basis of Mr. Dershowitz’s arguments, they will be saying that presidents are entitled to use their official powers to force foreign governments to investigate any U.S. citizen they choose to target — even if there is no evidence of wrongdoing. Mr. Trump could induce Russia or Saudi Arabia or China to spy on Mr. Biden, or on any other of the many people subject to his offensive tweets. In exchange for any embarrassing information, the president might offer official favors, such as arms sales or a trade deal or the lifting of sanctions. Do Republicans really wish to ratify such presidential authority? Will they not object if the next Democratic president resorts to it?

At USA Today, historian and former Republican Tom Nichols addresses the “Trump was just pursuing U.S. foreign policy” argument: Trump is being impeached over an extortion scheme, not a ‘policy dispute.’

The “policy dispute” defense rests on the obvious truth that under Article II of the Constitution, the president of the United States has the right to set foreign policy. Subject to the restrictions of federal law, the Constitution and the power of the purse that is reserved for Congress in Article I, the president can choose to bring us closer to some countries, give the cold shoulder to others, and negotiate treaties and other international agreements as he or she chooses.

None of that is at issue in this impeachment. What Trump did was to state one policy in public — that is, the policy his subordinates and the executive departments of the United States were expected to follow — and then to run a second policy, a plot concocted in secret and executed by an unaccountable circle of conspirators.

This scheme (it is too misleading even to call it a “policy”) was a rogue operation against Ukraine’s new president, Volodymyr Zelensky, conducted by Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani and a squad of shady characters, none of whom were answerable to anyone but Trump himself. (One wonders how Sen. Lee’s constitutionalism squares with foreign operations being conducted by the likes of Giuliani and Lev Parnas, out of sight of pesky members of Congress and their annoying questions.)

Official U.S. policy was to help Ukraine resist Russia as a sign of our commitment to international order, the rule of law and the indivisible security of the Atlantic community and the world itself.

Trump’s personal goal, however, was to hold Ukraine hostage and risk the lives of its people and soldiers until Zelensky would agree to stand in front of a television camera and lie for the benefit of one Donald J. Trump.

Click the link to read the rest.

Meanwhile, Lev Parnas dropped another bombshell on CNN last night, claiming that Lindsey Graham has been aware of the Ukraine conspiracy since 2018.

Raw Story: Lev Parnas directly implicates Lindsey Graham in Ukraine plot: ‘He was in the loop.’

Lev Parnas, a Ukraine-born businessman charged with campaign finance violations, told CNN’s “Anderson Cooper 360°” that Graham has a personal interest in keeping witness testimony out of President Donald Trump’s impeachment trial.

“Sen. Lindsey Graham I haven’t had any contact with, but because of my relationship with Rudy Giuliani, I have a lot of information about his dealings,” Parnas said. “It was, like, surreal to watch Lindsey Graham up there, sit there — he’s out there talking about all the stuff, that this is a sham, that this should go away.”

“At the end of the day,” Parnas added, “he was in the loop just like everybody else. He (had) a very good relationship with Rudy Giuliani, he was aware of what was going on going back to at least 2018, maybe even earlier. If you recall, he was the one Rudy Giuliani was supposed to bring Viktor Shokin to when the visa got denied, and I think he was even, if you check the records, involved in getting the request for the visa somehow.”

Parnas’ attorney Joseph Bondy released letters Wednesday signed by a Ukraine-born U.S. citizen Michael Guralnik to both Graham and Sigal Mandelker, then a top official at the U.S. Treasury Department pushing for sanctions against various Ukrainian political and business leaders.

A month or so later Giuliani tried to help Shokin, a former top prosecutor in Ukraine regarded as corrupt by the previous administration and U.S. allies, obtain a visa to meet with Graham in the U.S.

“Sen. Graham was involved even before I got involved with Mayor Giuliani, so he had to have been in the loop and had to have known what was going on,” Parnas said. “I was with Giuliani every day, that was what was happening.”

Time is running out for John Bolton to be a patriot. The White House is threatening to hold up publication of his book indefinitely.  CNN:

The White House has issued a formal threat to former national security adviser John Bolton to keep him from publishing his book, “The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir,” sources familiar with the matter tell CNN.

In a letter to Bolton’s lawyer, a top official at the National Security Council wrote the unpublished manuscript of Bolton’s book “appears to contain significant amounts of classified information” and couldn’t be published as written.

The letter, which is dated January 23, said some of the information was classified at the “top secret” level, meaning it “reasonably could be expected to cause exceptionally grave harm to the national security.”

“The manuscript may not be published or otherwise disclosed without the deletion of this classified information,” the letter read.

Exposing the coverup: January 28, 2020

Jennifer Rubin writes an open letter to Bolton: John Bolton, it’s now or never.

Dear John Bolton:

Before you were national security adviser, before you represented the United States at the United Nations, you were a lawyer — a pretty good one, as I understand. As a member of the bar, you must have been pained and shaken to hear President Trump’s attorney Alan Dershowitz argue for the proposition that anything a president thinks he needs to do to get reelected — bribe or extort a foreign country, even — cannot be impeachable. This defies and defiles our constitutional system, one in which even the president is not above the law. It’s a proposition that would have boiled your blood had President Bill Clinton or President Barack Obama advanced it.

And yet here we are. The president asserts that he is king, and the spineless Republicans (who smear and insult you and mouth Russian propaganda) are too cowardly to oppose him. Meanwhile, your First Amendment rights to publish your account are being trampled on by a vague, overly broad and baseless assertion that your manuscript contains “Top Secret” materials. (And yet the president, acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney and others have spoken to the contents of the same conversations you apparently will describe, thereby declassifying whatever they tried to classify.)

We have the perfect formula for tyranny: The executive claims unlimited power; his critics are muzzled. I do not think you spent decades in public life to allow this to play out before your eyes. What’s more, as you have surely realized in serving in this administration filled with toadies and careerists, you will, by acquiescing to White House demands, ensconce in power a president emotionally, temperamentally and intellectually unfit to serve, one who will now be convinced that he operates above and beyond any restraint on his power.

The moral and constitutional instincts that drove you to condemn the “drug deal” being cooked by Trump’s aides and to repeatedly tell your former employees to report their concerns to White House attorneys should now compel you to throw sand in the gears of a totalitarian-minded president.

Read the rest at the WaPo.

There will be an other day of questions in the Senate impeachment “trial” beginning at 1:00 this afternoon. A vote on witnesses will be held tomorrow. Bolton needs to speak up today.

Have a nice Thursday, Sky Dancers. We’re not living in a dictatorship just yet. This is an open thread.