Category: Politics

Interesting side issue: “Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii, who is running for the Democratic presidential nomination, voted ‘present’ for both articles.”

President Donald Trump’s border wall is facing a surprising new legal hurdle down in Texas: an obscure legislative provision crafted by House Republicans in 2014 when the GOP was targeting then-President Barack Obama’s budget powers.

The amendment, carried forward into current law, has resurfaced with a vengeance in El Paso, Texas. U.S District Court Judge David Briones has been quoting back its words in a series of rulings against Trump’s decision to take $3.6 billion from military construction projects to expedite his wall.

As first adopted, the Republican language specifically prohibited Obama from taking any step to “eliminate or reduce funding for any program, project, or activity as proposed in the President’s budget request” until it’s cleared with Congress.

The triggering event was a relatively narrow dispute in 2013 over funding for space exploration. But when they were enacted in Jan. 2014, the restrictions applied government-wide. And a year later, under full Republican control, Congress added the word “increase” alongside “eliminate or reduce” funding.

What goes around, in other words, comes around.

The House gave him no choice. They stripped away his right to vote, so he needed to resign in order to get that vote back onto his party’s side.

That means that the first two congressmen to endorse Donald Trump have now both pled guilty to felonies. The charges against them have been known since the summer of 2018, but they were both re-elected in November of that year!

“The impeachment inquiry has found that President Trump, personally and acting through agents within and outside of the U.S. government, solicited the interference of a foreign government, Ukraine, to benefit his reelection.”

The House Intelligence Committee voted 13-9 to adopt the impeachment report. which will now go to the Judiciary Committee.

If you have been following the story closely, you won’t find much new about Trump in the report, although it does a nice job of outlining the timeline.

However …

Here are some things you may not know:

The committee hit the jackpot by subpoenaing phone records from AT&T and Verizon. The evidence showed that Devin Nunes spoke several times to Rudy Giuliani earlier this year, around the same time that Giuliani was publicly attacking Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch. The records also show that in April, Nunes spoke to Giuliani’s recently-indicted henchman, Lev Parnas, whose lawyer has claimed he was explicitly tasked by Trump to investigate the Bidens’ activities in Ukraine. Nunes never disclosed his calls with Giuliani or Parnas, although he obviously realized that both of them figure prominently in the impeachment proceedings and therefore that any dealings with them could be perceived as a conflict of interest.

(Here is the WaPo’s take on the call records.)

As Dick Tuck once famously said, “The people have spoken, the bastards.”

“My campaign for president simply doesn’t have the financial resources we need to continue.”

Don’t worry, you’ll get used to it. You’ll have to because it will follow you for your entire life. Because you did lie. You deliberately stated a falsehood, and you did so maliciously, for the purpose of hurting an individual. People will forgive white lies, pretty lies and fish stories, but they are not likely to forget or forgive a false statement deliberately intended to ruin a man’s reputation.

On May 10, 2017, Sanders told reporters that “countless” FBI agents had told the White House that they had lost confidence in James Comey, who had been fired as FBI director the day before by President Donald Trump. She later had to admit under oath that her assertion had no basis of any kind and was a total fabrication.

(A lie.)

She chose to characterize it as a “slip of the tongue,” a statement which, ironically enough, was actually …

(another lie!)

A slip of the tongue is something that you say by accident when you intended to say something else. Obviously, she had said exactly what she intended to.

All he had to say was “no,” and explain where he and his lackeys actually were on that European trip. That would be the end of the discussion. Instead, he just babbled on, and the questioner dropped the thread.

So … nothing suspicious about that!

BARTIROMO: Were you in Vienna w/Shokin?

NUNES: Because there is criminal activity here, I'm not going to sit here & try to compete against the media

B: To be clear, you're telling me CNN committed criminal activity?

N: It's very likely, or they're an accessory to it, right? pic.twitter.com/epHJN0V7gK

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) November 24, 2019

As I noted the other day, he’s already misplayed his hand if he really wants to sue. A defamation lawsuit would require him to show that the news outlets acted with malice and a reckless disregard for the truth. If he asked them politely to retract the story, or clarify it, based on factual evidence showing he could not have met with Shokin as alleged, and if they then refused to print a retraction or clarification, he would then have a case to establish malice and disregard of the truth. By failing to follow that path, he has already blown his suit. This suggests that he can’t actually dispute the claim.

Another aspect of the case is that CNN and The Daily Beast did not claim that Nunes was there in Vienna. They simply reported what Lev Parnas said through his lawyer. So even if Nunes never met with Shokin in Vienna, he probably has no valid libel case against outlets accurately reporting a newsworthy claim by an important principal in the Ukrainian scandal.