I'll be leaving for New York soon, but first I want to post a photo of the corrupt Republican president* and his corrupt personal lawyer.
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| AMERICAN CORRUPTION: GIULIANI AND TRUMP |
After last week's testimonies from career diplomats who chosen by and work or worked for Trump and who showed an allegiance to America and not a corrupt, venal POTUS, it's clear that Trump betrayed his oath of office in his illegal scheme to get Ukraine to interfere in the 2020 elections in order to benefit Trump.
If anyone were to write a script for a movie about a lying, cheating, mafia-boss type crooked POTUS, they would not be believed if they were to write what Trump and his henchmen have been doing.
But that's where we are.
The facts:
"Rudy Giuliani, who was behind the Ukraine operation, has said publicly that he was seeking investigations damaging to Mr. Trump’s political rival in his capacity as Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, and to advance Mr. Trump’s personal interests.
Multiple impeachment witnesses have testified that Mr. Trump did not care about systemic corruption in Ukraine, a longstanding focus of American foreign policy, including in the Trump administration.
On Thursday, David Holmes, a career diplomat working in the embassy in Kyiv, testified that Gordon Sondland, the ambassador to the European Union, agreed that Mr. Trump didn’t care about Ukraine and that he only cared about “big stuff,” like investigating the Bidens.
Then there’s the fact that, as noted in the Lawfare blog, Mr. Trump approved military aid to Ukraine in 2017 and 2018, even though Hunter Biden’s role as a director of the Ukrainian gas company Burisma was well-known at the time.
Mr. Trump and his Republican allies now say that it’s in the national interest to get to the bottom of how it could be that Hunter Biden was serving for five years, at great financial benefit to himself, on the Burisma board.
What's driving Trump's interest in Hunter Biden and Burisma is the fact that Joe Biden is a threat to Trump's re-election, and that has nothing to do with corruption.
It is Trump's and Giuliani's corruption that led to wanting to investigate the Bidens and Burisma at this time. Trump has all the levers of power in 2017 through the end of 2018, and he did not look into the Bidens and Burisma then."
From Lawfare blog:
"...while the definition of bribery under the Impeachment Clause is not reliant on federal statutory law, there, too, the solicitation and offering of a bribe is bribery. As a federal appeals court explained, the statute “is violated even though the official offered a bribe is not corrupted, or the object of the bribe could not be attained, or it could make no difference if after the act were done it turned out that there had been actually no occasion to seek to influence any official conduct.”
In other words, as many criminal law experts pointed out when Fox News commentator Laura Ingraham suggested that attempted bribery did not rise to the level of impeachability, the modern crime of bribery includes attempted bribery.
This is as it should be. If the [Wall Street]Journal’s argument were correct that the Impeachment Clause carves out efforts by a public official to obtain a bribe, the consequences would be absurd. Under the view of Trump’s defenders, it would apparently be fine for Trump to have asked Zelensky to wire $1 million in cash to Trump’s personal bank account in exchange for Trump releasing U.S. military aid so long as Trump was caught before the payment ever reached his account. That cannot possibly be either legal or acceptable behavior from a president—and yet that’s effectively what happened here."
