The Trump Presidency

So you’re saying that Kushner would have gotten a sweetheart deal to bail out his failed investment from a company backed by the Qatari government had he not been a WH official and the son-in-law of the POTUS?

Kushner probably just read the Art of the Deal and took his negotiating skills to a whole new level.
 
So, I think we can all agree that this transcript is nowhere near enough for the senate to actually confirm impeachment. So assuming that nothing else comes out, what does this inquiry mean for the election?
 
So you’re saying that Kushner would have gotten a sweetheart deal to bail out his failed investment from a company backed by the Qatari government had he not been a WH official and the son-in-law of the POTUS?

I dont know if he would have but lets not pretend that transactions dont happen like this around the world on a daily basis.

You are assigning this because you assume they are corrupt by default. It still doesnt come close to the obvious shady dealinh of getting a private sector job you have no busines getting at an absurd salary.

****...at least Kushner was in his line of business probably dealing with people he has a prior relationship with.
 
Yeah, um, I don’t have any illusions that Hunter Biden would have gotten a spot on the board of a Ukranian energy Company of his father weren’t the vice president. I just I think it’s similarly unlikely that the Kushner company would have been bailed out of an underwater investment by a fund backed by a government that Jared Kushner himself has been lobbying, had Kushner not been the son-in-law of the POTUS. And, fwiw, we’re talking about hundreds of thousands/millions versus hundreds of millions/billions here.
 
The backstory on Giuliani, Manafartov, Ukraine and the Chosen One.

https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2019/09/25/trump-giuliani-and-manafort-the-ukraine-scheme/

New information in this story suggests that these two, seemingly unrelated scandals, in which the House will judge whether the president’s conduct in each case constituted extra-legal and extra-constitutional abuses of presidential power, are in fact inextricably linked: the Ukrainian initiative appears to have begun in service of formulating a rationale by which the president could pardon Manafort, as part of an effort to undermine the special counsel’s investigation.

The records I have reviewed also indicate that on at least three occasions, Rudy Giuliani was in communication with Manafort’s legal team to discuss how the White House was pushing a narrative that the Democratic National Committee, Democratic donors, and Ukrainian government officials had “colluded” to defeat Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential bid. (This story has since been debunked as baseless, though that has not prevented Trump, Giuliani, and other surrogates in conservative media from repeatedly pushing the story.)

In particular, the records show that Manafort’s camp provided Giuliani with information designed to smear two people: one was a Ukrainian journalist and political activist named Serhiy Leshchenko, whom Manafort believed, correctly, of helping to uncover Manafort’s secret payments from Yanukovych; another was Alexandra Chalupa, a Ukrainian-American political consultant and US citizen, whom Manafort suspected, mistakenly in this case, was also behind the exposé. The records also show that Giuliani and attorneys for Manafort exchanged information about the then US ambassador to the Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, who Giuliani believed had attempted to undercut his covert Ukrainian diplomacy and fact-finding; the records are unclear as to whether it was Giuliani or Manafort’s attorney who first initiated their discussion about her.

If Giuliani’s own account can be believed, it was while he was looking into the purported Ukrainian collusion to defeat Trump that he stumbled upon Hunter Biden’s business dealings in Ukraine. “The reality is I came about this by accident, investigating Ukrainian collusion with Democrats to affect the election,” Giuliani said in an interview with Fox News on May 10.

Giuliani did not add that he was also pressing for Kiev to investigate Manafort’s enemies. As I first disclosed last year in an article for Vox, Manafort encouraged the president and his top aides in this effort from the first days of the administration in early 2017. In recent months, both Trump and Giuliani have intensified those efforts, pressuring Ukraine to investigate not only Leshchenko and Chalupa, but also other Ukrainian government officials, activists, and journalists—and specifically to look into any part they may have had in publishing details of Manafort’s illicit political consulting work in the Ukraine.
 
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And I love that the line that’s ostensibly defending Trump here is that “he wasn’t telling the Ukrainian president to investigate Hunter Biden, he was telling him to investigate a Russian conspiracy theory stemming from the 2016 election!”

Good stuff. Surprised he didn’t mention Seth Rich.
 
And I love that the line that’s ostensibly defending Trump here is that “he wasn’t telling the Ukrainian president to investigate Hunter Biden, he was telling him to investigate a Russian conspiracy theory stemming from the 2016 election!”

Good stuff. Surprised he didn’t mention Seth Rich.

The Seth Rich angle lives on!
 
Trump and Giuliani. Anyone who has lived in New York the past 30 years and been paying attention will understand the destructive dynamic at work here. As they have gotten older certain tendencies which were once quirks have come to the forefront of their personalities.
 
Nsacpi, mind if I ask what you do for a living?

by training i'm an economist

I have 2 businesses: one is focused on media research, the other on a niche product in the bond market

I also do a little teaching on the side
 
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Trump and Giuliani. Anyone who has lived in New York the past 30 years and been paying attention will understand the destructive dynamic at work here. As they have gotten older certain tendencies which were once quirks have come to the forefront of their personalities.

In the 80s, literally every American knew that was Trump was a crook, a racist, and a pig. He was the most, or close to the most, hated person in the country.

Then he got a reality show, and somehow all was forgiven.
 
Going somewhat unremarked here is that the guy with the nuclear suitcase is so slushy-brained that he’s pursuing weird Fox News conspiracy theories about the 2016 election and similar conspiratorial talking points on calls with foreign leaders in 2019.
 
Going somewhat unremarked here is that the guy with the nuclear suitcase is so slushy-brained that he’s pursuing weird Fox News conspiracy theories about the 2016 election and similar conspiratorial talking points on calls with foreign leaders in 2019.

Actually that's my big takeaway. Trump is as much gaslit as he is gaslighter. I've suspected it for a while.
 
Apparently the Ukrainians were forewarned the phone call would take place only if they were willing to play ball on Biden.
 
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It's pretty LOL to think there's going to be 2/3 vote for impeachment based on the transcript. There's no chance. I doubt it's enough to even pass in the house.

Those swing district Democrats won't want their name on this at all.
 
"Mr. President, Venezuela's on the line. They say they know someone who used to work for Elizabeth Warren. They'd like a few hundred million and some cruise missiles."
 
It's pretty LOL to think there's going to be 2/3 vote for impeachment based on the transcript. There's no chance. I doubt it's enough to even pass in the house.

It's not about crime but the appearance of it.

I doesn't matter what the Senate does. This is going to play out in an election season and it all hinges on which way public opinion breaks. Pelosi should frame the impeachment as a public airing of all Trump's crimes, betrayals, lies and abuses, of which the list is long and varied. She should also mention Mitch McConnell, William Barr and all the others as often as possible because the GOP are Trump's enablers. They are joined at the hip to Trump and his abuses of power. She should put as much pressure on Senate Reps as possible starting today.
 
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