Impeachment - THE BACKLASH

[MASTERBAKER]

Donald Trump Jr. mocks decorated war veteran Alexander Vindman after his firing, saying Vindman 'may still be able to take the defense minister position in the Ukraine'
Sonam Sheth

3 hours ago

Lt. Colonel Alexander Vindman, director for European Affairs at the National Security Council, testifies before a House Intelligence Committee hearing Reuters/Jonathan Ernst

• Donald Trump Jr. mocked Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman on Friday after the he was abruptly fired and escorted from the White House.
• "On the bright side, he may still be able to take the defense minister position in the Ukraine that he was offered a few times," Trump Jr. tweeted.
• Vindman is a decorated war veteran and a refugee who served as the top Ukraine expert on the National Security Council and was a key impeachment witness against President Donald Trump.
• Vindman was subjected to a flurry of racist attacks from Republicans during the impeachment hearings. Among other things, they suggested that the Ukrainian government's offer to Vindman to serve as defense minister suggested he had dual loyalty to the country.
• Vindman swatted those attacks down, replying, "I'm an American. I came here when I was a toddler, and I immediately dismissed these offers."
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

President Donald Trump's eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., took to Twitter to mock Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, the former top Ukraine expert on the National Security Council, after Vindman was abruptly fired and escorted from the White House on Friday.
"On the bright side, he may still be able to take the defense minister position in the Ukraine that he was offered a few times," Trump Jr. tweeted.

Donald Trump Jr.

✔@DonaldJTrumpJr
https://twitter.com/DonaldJTrumpJr/status/1225912031930462208

On the bright side, he may still be able to take the defense minister position in the Ukraine that he was offered a few times. https://twitter.com/alx/status/1225885423421009925 …
ALX @alx

BREAKING: Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman has been escorted out of the White House by security and has been told his services are no longer needed.

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Vindman was fired after the White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham signaled on Thursday that the president wanted people to "pay" for the way he was treated during the House of Representatives' impeachment inquiry last year and subsequent trial in the Senate.
Vindman, a decorated war veteran and Purple Heart recipient, was one of over a dozen witnesses to testify about his knowledge of the president's dealings with Ukraine.
During the impeachment hearings, Republican lawmakers and the right-wing media machine lobbed racist attacks on Vindman by questioning his patriotism and suggesting he had dual loyalty to Ukraine.

Vindman and his family are immigrants who fled the Soviet Union four decades ago and arrived in the US as refugees.
Steve Castor, the Republican counsel questioned Vindman at one point during the hearings about how the Ukrainian government repeatedly asked him to serve as defense minister.
Vindman replied that he found the offers "comical."
"I'm an American," Vindman said. "I came here when I was a toddler, and I immediately dismissed these offers."

Vindman was a crucial fact witness in the impeachment inquiry.
He directly listened in on a July 25 phone call that Trump had with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, during which Trump repeatedly pressured Zelensky to launch politically motivated investigations targeting his rivals. Vindman testified that he was "concerned" by the call and found it "inappropriate" for Trump to "demand" that a foreign power investigate his political opponent based on dubious and unfounded evidence.
He also testified that he immediately reported what he'd heard to the NSC's top lawyer, John Eisenberg, and that Eisenberg told him not to tell anyone else about what he'd heard.
The Purple Heart recipient was fired without warning on and was escorted out of the White House by security. His twin brother, Yevgeny, was also dismissed.
"Today, Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman was escorted out of the White House where he has dutifully served his country and his President. He does so having spoken publicly once, and only pursuant to a subpoena from the United States Congress," Vindman's attorney, David Pressman, said in a statement to Insider.

"There is no question in the mind of any American why this man's job is over, why this country now has one less soldier serving it at the White House," Pressman said. "LTC Vindman was asked to leave for telling the truth. His honor, his commitment to right, frightened the powerful."
In a separate statement to Insider addressing Yevgeny Vindman's firing Pressman said: "Lieutenant Colonel Yevgeny Vindman, a senior lawyer and ethics official at the National Security Council, and a decorated Iraq war veteran, was escorted off of the grounds of the White House, suddenly and with no explanation, despite over two decades of loyal service to this country. He is deeply disappointed that he will not be able to continue his service at the White House."

 

[MASTERBAKER]

 

[QueEx]

GOP senators tried to stop Sondland's dismissal


Multiple Republican senators tried to prevent President Trump from dismissing U.S. Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland, sources confirmed to The New York Times and CNN.

Sondland was told to resign by State Department officials Friday, but the lawmakers, reportedly including Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine), Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.), and Martha McSally (R-Ariz.), believed it would look bad for the White House and create political backlash because Sondland provided damaging testimony during the House's impeachment inquiry.

The senators also reportedly thought the firing was unnecessary because Sondland had already communicated with senior officials about leaving his post after the Senate impeachment trial concluded. Trump on Saturday also defended his decision to remove another impeachment witness, Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman, from the National Security Council.


Source: The New York Times, CNN

 

[QueEx]

POLITICS
Donald Trump, Jr. Gets Clowned For Channeling Johnnie Cochran's Famous O.J. Simpson Defense Regarding His Pappy's Impeachment Acquittal

Brooklyn Baldwin
February 8, 2020


Filed to:STUPID IS AS STUPID DOES




Donald Trump, Jr. compares his father’s fugazi impeachment acquittal to the trial of the century.Photo: Getty Images

Is this another messy AF case of cultural appropriation?

Or is it a dead-on comparison? (Pun intended.)
Whatever it is, can someone please get these people a copy of Social Media for Dummies?


In an asinine attempt to compare his father’s fugazi impeachment acquittal, Donald Trump, Jr. has brought up O.J. Simpson’s “Trial of the Century.”

In a post to his Instagram account, Little Junior shared a meme featuring Simpson’s late defense lawyer Johnnie Cochran, with a play on his infamous line, “If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit.”

“If you cant impeach rip up the speach,”​

​

glaring misspellingread the meme, replete with a glaring misspellingmisspelling.​

The meme was a reference to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s tearing up her copy of his pappy’s speech during Tuesday’s State of the Union address.

​

“Guess we know where Nancy got her terribly contrived plan,” he captioned the meme.

The post received nearly 100,000 likes since it published Thursday.

And all of it wasn’t a love fest.

Some of the folks who follow his nonsense went ham on that ass.

“Your daddy, buddy, is still impeached and will always be impeached,” one commenter wrote. “Acquittal can be tricky for even the most basic social studies student, but it’s nice to see that you’re catching up. Good job, buddy.


“Not to mention, OJ was acquitted but guilty AF…Nice comparison junior”—someone else added.

Another wrote: “You could have spelled speech correctly and your point would still be made....you not only weren’t funny but you confirmed you’re stupid


Little Junior’s social media stunting was summed up the best with a commenter who wrote: “when you try to meme and fail so hard lol”

Like father, like son.

The irony of it all is that many believe that O.J. Simpson did kill his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and restaurant waiter Ron Goldman on June 12, 1994.


Yes, compare your father to OJ Simpson.

Narrator: who was famously guilty yet was acquitted of crimes that (continue to) haunted him into poverty and a stint in prison.

Donald Trump, Jr. Gets Clowned For Channeling Johnnie Cochran's Famous O.J. Simpson Defense Regarding His Pappy's Impeachment Acquittal

Is this another messy AF case of cultural appropriation?

www.theroot.com

 

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The Backlash Continues . . .

CPAC chairman says he would fear for Mitt Romney’s ‘physical safety’ at conference

Feb. 10, 2020

Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) has faced a bitter GOP backlash after casting the lone Republican vote for President Trump’s impeachment. There have been angry tweets and calls for the party to expel the man it once nominated to lead the country.

On Sunday, one influential conservative went so far as to say he could not be sure of Romney’s safety at a major right-wing gathering, alarming some of the Utah senator’s defenders and — in some critics’ eyes — crossing a line from outrage to threat.

Matt Schlapp, chairman of the Conservative Political Action Conference, made the controversial comments Sunday as he explained why Romney would be excluded from this year’s four-day event. Schlapp announced last month via tweet that the senator was “formally NOT invited,” as Romney took heat for breaking from staunch Republican support of the president to call for witnesses in Trump’s impeachment trial.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/02/10/cpac-chair-mitt-romney-impeachment/

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[COINTELPRO]

 

[QueEx]

Prosecutors quit amid escalating Justice Dept. fight over Roger Stone’s prison term


All four career prosecutors handling the case against Roger Stone withdrew from the legal proceedings Tuesday — and one quit his job entirely — after the Justice Department signaled it planned to undercut their sentencing recommendation for President Trump’s longtime friend and confidant.

The sudden and dramatic moves came after prosecutors and their superiors had argued for days over the appropriate penalty for Stone, and exposed what some career Justice Department employees say is a continuing pattern of the historically independent law enforcement institution being bent to Trump’s political will.

Almost simultaneously, Trump decided to revoke the nomination to a top Treasury Department post of his former U.S. attorney in the District of Columbia, who had supervised the Stone case when it went to trial.

The cascade of controversy began Monday, when career prosecutors handling the case recommended that a judge sentence Stone — convicted in November of obstructing Congress and witness tampering — to between seven and nine years in federal prison.

Stone has been a friend and adviser to Trump since the 1980s and was a key figure in his 2016 campaign, working to discover damaging information on Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton. His was the last conviction secured by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III as part of the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. The president suggested angrily on Twitter that Stone deserved more-lenient treatment.

“This is a horrible and very unfair situation,” Trump wrote early Tuesday. ​

​

“The real crimes were on the other side, as nothing happens to them. ​

Cannot allow this miscarriage of justice!”​

Hours later, a senior Justice Department official told reporters that the agency’s leadership was “shocked” by the recommendation of a seven-to-nine-year sentence and would soon revise it.

“That recommendation is not what had been briefed to the department,” the official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive case. “The department finds the recommendation extreme and excessive and disproportionate to Stone’s offenses.”

One by one, the career prosecutors, two of whom had worked on Mueller’s investigation, filed notices in court of their intention to leave the case. Though none of the prosecutors gave a reason, their asking to do so was highly unusual and suggested they could not ethically affix their names to the government’s revised position.


SIMILAR, PRIOR CASE

Career Justice Department lawyers similarly moved in 2018 to withdraw from a case when the Trump administration decided it would not defend the Affordable Care Act against a challenge to its constitutionality. One of those lawyers resigned over the matter.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/justice-dept-to-reduce-sentencing-recommendation-for-trump-associate-roger-stone-official-says-after-president-calls-it-unfair/2020/02/11/ad81fd36-4cf0-11ea-bf44-f5043eb3918a_story.html

 

[QueEx]

Is the rule of law dead?

Trump's post-impeachment campaign to assert unlimited power

The rule of law is dead

Trump's post-impeachment campaign to assert unlimited power

theweek.com

We are watching the rule of law collapse in real time.

It is no surprise that President Trump on Tuesday meddled in the federal case against his friend Roger Stone — who is convicted of sabotaging an investigation against Trump himself — declaring that a nine-year sentencing recommendation by Department of Justice lawyers was "very unfair" and adding that he "cannot allow this miscarriage of justice!"

It is no surprise that the Department of Justice — led by Trump's unendingly faithful servant, Attorney General William Barr — responded to Trump's tweet by reversing itself, instead recommending that Stone serve only an "unspecified" amount of time in prison.


And it is no surprise that these events occurred in an atmosphere of Trumpian house cleaning. There were reports that Jessie Liu, a former prosecutor on the Stone case, had her nomination withdrawn for a job at the Treasury Department. The president on Tuesday also suggested that the military conduct an inquiry against Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, whose only apparent crime is telling Congress the truth about what he witnessed during the Ukraine scandal. At the same time, the White House reportedly planned to withdraw its nomination of Elaine McCusker to be the Pentagon's comptroller — because McCusker resisted the president's efforts to delay military aid to Ukraine, the act that started the scandal. Add Tuesday's events to those of last Friday, when Vindman and his brother were fired, along with Gordon Sondland, the ambassador to the EU, and America has experienced two "Saturday Night Massacres" within a week.


The message to the federal workforce is clear: Mess with the president or his friends, and your career will suffer. Trump is like a bizarro world version of Diogenes: Instead of a ceaseless search to find the last honest man, he instead is doing everything he can to expel all traces of integrity and honesty from American governance.


Right now, he is succeeding.


If there is one small bit of surprise and even consolation in Trump's post-impeachment campaign to assert unlimited power, it is that integrity still exists in corners of the executive branch: All four federal prosecutors working on Stone's case withdrew on Tuesday rather than serve the president's wishes. But such consolations — as with Sen. Mitt Romney's (R-Utah) vote to impeach the president — are also fleeting, because they ultimately mean so little. The president will get what he wants anyway.

There will be more of this kind of stuff. NBC on Tuesday night reported that Barr is personally consolidating control of federal legal matters of interest to the president. And Trump on Tuesday night publicly assailed the judge handling Stone's case. We are a very long way from the time when then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch recused herself from Hillary Clinton's email case after she chatted with Bill Clinton on an airport tarmac. The old wisdom was that the appearance of a conflict of interest is the same as an actual conflict. The new wisdom — if it can be called that — is to get away with as much as you possibly can.

Trump is generally corrupt, but his attempts to bend the Department of Justice to his will and self-interest are particularly troubling, and will probably do damage that lingers long after he leaves office. Justice — the rule of law — has always been a flawed and fragile concept in America, but it is also one of the foundations on which our democracy rests. "All men are created equal" is a statement of how we are to be treated by the law. Now the president orchestrates special treatment for himself and his cronies and urges punishment for his enemies. Increasingly, the Department of Justice seems willing to go along. In doing so, it loses whatever legitimacy and reputation for fairness it might have had. Right and wrong, legal and illegal are less important than they were a few years ago — what matters most is who has the power, and the will to use it.

This was foreseeable. Sen. Susan Collins' (R-Maine) limp protestations notwithstanding, we knew that Trump would use his unearned impeachment acquittal as license to disregard the last remaining restraints on his power. But it was easily predicted even before he became president that Trump was a creature of grievance, a man who would almost certainly abuse and misuse the powers of office in settling scores both real and imagined. This is who Trump is. He became president anyway.

"We told you so," is an insufficient response to this moment. American democracy hangs in the balance. ​

​

Can anything be done?​

​

Maybe not. ​

​

Maybe it is too late. ​

Trump was impeached for trying to cheat the election; it seems likely he will continue such attempts, in which case the 2020 election might already be lost. But Trump's opponents must keep trying anyway. They must keep voting, keep donating, keep protesting, keep writing against this president until all is finally lost. Romney showed his integrity last week. So did the federal prosecutors who quit the Stone case on Tuesday. Now the rest of us must do the same.​

The rule of law is dead

Trump's post-impeachment campaign to assert unlimited power

theweek.com

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[QueEx]

Prosecutors quit amid escalating Justice Dept. fight over Roger Stone’s prison term

Trump attacks Roger Stone juror
and Justice Department on Twitter


President Trump on Thursday criticized a juror in the Roger Stone case, accusing her of holding "significant bias" against his longtime adviser. Trump earlier this week slammed the sentencing recommendation for Stone, only for the Justice Department to change course.

Though the DOJ will apparently seek a lighter sentence for Stone, Trump said the forewoman on the jury was biased, and said the case was "not looking good for the 'Justice' Department." The forewoman, Tomeka Hart, had reportedly previously tweeted that Trump and his supporters were "racist," which Fox News commentators said could mean Stone is "entitled to a new trial."

Trump has also attacked the judge overseeing Stone's case.

All four prosecutors in the case quit after the Justice Department reversed its sentencing recommendation for Stone.

Source: Donald J. Trump

 

[MASTERBAKER]

BREAKING: SHAMELESS "Trump says he may END the practice of having national security and foreign service staff listen in on his calls with foreign leaders after a July call with the president of Ukraine triggered his impeachment in the House."
Trump floats halt to officials listening in on calls with foreign leaders
BY BRETT SAMUELS - 02/13/20 03:10 PM EST 360
0



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by

© Getty Images
President Trump said Thursday he may end the practice of having national security and foreign service staff listen in on his calls with foreign leaders after a July call with the president of Ukraine triggered his impeachment in the House.
Trump complained extensively about Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, a key witness in the House impeachment inquiry, during a radio interview with Geraldo Rivera, accusing him of being "insubordinate" by raising concerns about the president's conduct on the July 25 call.
"Why are so many people allowed to listen to your phone calls anyway?" Rivera asked.

"Well, that’s what they’ve done over the years," Trump said. "When you call a foreign leader people listen. I may end the practice entirely. I may end it entirely."
Top White House and national security officials typically listen in on presidential phone calls to keep everyone on the same page and create a record of the conversation.
Trump's call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky set off the impeachment inquiry after a whistleblower raised concerns that the president was pressuring Zelensky to investigate his political rivals while holding up hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid.
The president has repeatedly said he was aware other officials were listening to that conversation, which he has maintained was "perfect,” repeatedly telling people to “read the transcript.”
The House impeached Trump in December for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress, and the Senate acquitted him last week.
Vindman, a Purple Heart recipient detailed to the National Security Council at the time, reported to his superior that he was concerned about the political nature of Trump's call.
The White House last week forced out Vindman, and he was reassigned within the Pentagon.
"I’m not a fan of Vindman," Trump said Thursday.

 

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Adam Zyglis Copyright 2020 Cagle Cartoons

 

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More than 1,100 former prosecutors and other DOJ officials call on Attorney General Bill Barr to resign

More than 2,000 former prosecutors and other DOJ officials call on Attorney General Bill Barr to resign

More than 2,000 former Justice Department officials who served in Republican as well as Democratic administrations have signed a statement posted Sunday calling on Attorney General Bill Barr to resign.

www.cnn.com

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