This afternoon, Congressman Adam Schiff held a press conference to share the official findings of the House Intelligence Committee’s impeachment inquiry. Stating, “No one is above the law,” Chairman Schiff introduced the committee’s 300-page report, which he said contained, “overwhelming and uncontested evidence that President Trump abused the powers of his office to solicit foreign interference in our election for his own personal, political gain.”
As of right now, I’m a little over an hour into the Committee’s report, and it’s an absolutely staggering document in terms of both scope and detail, starting with the writings of our founding fathers, and then methodically making the case that the President of the United States, by withholding military aid deemed to have been in the national security interest of our country in hopes of obtaining something of personal value, had failed to faithfully execute his oath of office “to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” It’s truly an epic piece of work, and I’d encourage everyone reading this right now to follow the link and spend some time with it… and maybe even print a copy or two to leave leave around town, give as Christmas gifts, etc.
As impressive as the report is, I’m afraid most of the coverage this evening isn’t going to be about the persuasive narrative laid out by Schiff and Intelligence Committee, but instead about the “newly disclosed call logs” included in the report, which appear to document, among other things, communications between Trump 2020 campaign lawyer Rudy Giuliani, Republican Congressman Devin Nunes, and the White House Office of Management and Budget, the entity, run by Mick Mulvaney, that ultimately interceded on the President’s behalf to stop the military aid authorized by Congress from being disbursed to Ukraine. While I don’t think it’s anywhere near as important as the big picture, it is infinitely interesting, especially given the lengths to which Nunes went to undermine the inquiry from his position as the ranking Republican on the Committee. Here, with more on the Nunes connection, is an excerpt from Talking Points Memo.
…In April, Nunes was in conversation with Giuliani and his indicted associate Lev Parnas on several occasions while the pair were also speaking with The Hill’s opinion writer John Solomon. The repeated contacts lined up with the publishing timestamps of several Solomon opinion pieces, which alleged former Vice President Joe Biden petitioned for the removal of a Ukrainian prosecutor to protect his son’s business interests and attacked former Ukrainian Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch. Notably, many of the Ukrainian officials cited in Solomon’s pieces were being represented by Victoria Toensing, who briefly represented President Trump in special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe.
Yovanovitch and others have testified during the House Intelligence Committee’s public hearings that Giuliani led the effort to get her ousted from her post in Kyiv, primarily because she stood in the way of Giuliani’s attempts to pressure the Ukrainian government into investigating Biden, one of President Trump’s key political rivals…
I could go on, but, as I have a lot more reading to do before I fall asleep, I’ll just leave you with the following three items related to the this new information about the involvement of Devin Nunes.
Here’s Adam Schiff commenting on this most recent development. Among other things, he says, “It is deeply concerning that at a time when the president of the United States was using the power of his office to dig up dirt on a political rival, that there may be evidence that there were members of Congress complicit in that activity.”
Schiff calls revelations about Nunes in his committee's report "deeply concerning" pic.twitter.com/lHj1M89Ifu
— TPM Livewire (@TPMLiveWire) December 3, 2019
And here’s another juicy tidbit. This one comes from Joseph Bondy, the attorney for indicted Giuliani associate Lev Parnas, whose name also shows up on the Nunes call logs. Parnas, as you may recall, has commented in the past that he has evidence that might be of interest to federal investigators. Now, it would appear, that evidence might possibly implicate not only Giuliani but Nunes.
And here’s Nunes earlier this evening on Fox News saying that he “(doesn’t) really recall (the) name” Lev Parnas, which is obviously a lie, given that Parnas’s name has been all over the news since he was taken into federal custody while trying to flee the country no too long ago. His name, if I’m not mistaken, also came up several times during the impeachment inquiry, which Nunes participated in.
Hannity: Did you ever talk to this guy Lev Parnas?
Devin Nunes: You know it’s possible but I haven’t gone through all my phone records. I don’t really recall that name. pic.twitter.com/NY8PXPdUC9
— Acyn Torabi (@Acyn) December 4, 2019
Why Nunes, the ranking Republican member on the House Intelligence Committee, would not have mentioned the fact that he’d been involved in these conversations with Parnas and Giuliani is a question that needs to be explored. One would think, at the very least, it should earn him a censure from the House…. This should be interesting.
22 Comments
Entire GOP are traitors. I want to see Nadler call McCarty to testify about his recorded assertion that pootin pays agent orange. Nunes is just total Constitutional scum, so a hero to those complicit traitors.
I remember during the Reagan years having a sense of dissonance between what I saw when he spoke and what the country saw. But it wasn’t this degree of straight up propagandizing. How many times has Hannity talked about Parnas? Probably not enough, but no one truly following the impeachment doesn’t know that name by now. That clip is so obviously disinformation, but not to people who only watch Fox News. I don’t know that we’ll ever bridge that gap. We may not need to. The median age of a Fox News watcher is 65. https://www.cheatsheet.com/entertainment/how-old-is-the-average-fox-news-viewer-in-america.html/
It gets worse. Check this out.
Fox “legal analyst” Gregg Jarrett says that maybe Devin Nunes did *not* have calls with with Giuliani, the White House, and Lev Parnas, because it could’ve been “somebody else” using Nunes’ phone, “we just don’t know.”
https://twitter.com/revrrlewis/status/1202200070373937153?s=20
The Bulwark:
“A censure would require Nunes to stand in the well of the chamber… Such a well-deserved spectacle would also send a message—to our children, to our leaders, and to the world—that self-dealing, bullying, and lying are unacceptable.”
Read more:
https://thebulwark.com/phone-records-drag-nunes-into-the-ukraine-scandal/
They are going to do the same to Schiff for his opening remarks. We’ve seen conservatives hammering home that disinformation campaign here in the MM comments section. They do that free of charge. It’s a grossly false equivalency but such are the wages of gotcha politics. I would venture a guess that zero ‘children, leaders’ nor ‘the world’ draw any lessons from gotcha politics. What would a censure mean at this point? Their unreasoned faux outrage frames our reasoned outrage as equally corrupt. It’s a clever game of turn around. False equivalency seems to be part of the natural flow of human reasoning, aka ‘logic’ models, right up there next to confirmation bias.
The dick from Judicial Watch:
BREAKING: House Democrats somehow obtain @RudyGiuliani phone records in a remarkable abuse of @RealDonaldTrump’s constitutional rights.
Schiffty is so full of shit. He claimed to have evidence of Trump Russia collusion but never had anything. That’s amazing you stick with him even now. Do you get rewarded for doing this shit barky or is it instinctual?
Warlord, you really would eat Trump’s feeble little pile of steaming feces. Like Divine in Pink Flamingos. You are one sad sack.
I think it’s pathetic you try to get gratification out of saying degrading things like that. You never ever have information of any quality. It’s 100% ad hominem; nothing at all.
It’s funny though you think not believing CIA lies equals eating Trump’s shit. Enjoy being a tool of the true fascists in this country.
Hey HW I was going to buy some of this legal pot. Any recommendations?
What’s up with Ypsilanti not allowing pot stores? What kind of reactionary racist shit is that?
I do not consent to any harassment and will take legal action if I get treated poorly!
I guess Ypsilanti decided they have enough problems.
A Brit I spoke with the other day, who came up through his teens and early twenties during the 1960s, said he won’t touch the marijuana products these days. He said it’s become far more impure and at the same time overly potent, over the decades.
A lot of UK people don’t know what they are talking about when it comes to weeeed. They have no experience growing it so they think things like that out of ignorance. They say “It’s not cannabis. It’s that GM skunk! It’s full of chemicals.”
Aaron Maté
Verified account @aaronjmate
19h19 hours ago
Trump just finalized a rule that will deny food stamps to hundreds of thousands (https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/04/us/politics/food-stamps.html …). I wrote that this is one of “many Trump admin scandals that Ukrainegate, like Russiagate before it, overshadows.” What have Dems done to oppose it? https://www.thenation.com/article/trump-impeachment-cold-war/ …
64 replies 473 retweets 854 likes
Aaron Maté
Verified account @aaronjmate
This, at minimum, is an undeniable fact: Democratic leaders, cheered on by media allies, are fighting harder to protect $400m in sales for US weapons firms & a proxy war in Ukraine than they are for the food stamps of over 700,000 low-income Americans. History will judge indeed.
11:20 AM – 4 Dec 2019
HW, it’s better home grown by organic standards isn’t it? Less unhealthy side affects I assume. I’d just assume it’s like any other plant we consume.
Organic growing produces the highest quality in my opinion. If your meds contain harmful pesticides and fungicides not meant for consumption then that is bad obviously. There are unscrupulous dealers it’s true. Some years ago there was a flap about certain UK weed being dusted with micro beads of glass that fuck your lungs up for example so it might not be totally “baseless” what your acquaintance said.
IG Horowitz’ report comes out Monday. It says the FBI investigation was justified so now Trump is pivoting to Barr/Durham’s report about that one falsified FISA doc, “The cynical view of the Durham investigation is that it exists simply to give the president something to talk about regardless of the outcome of the Horowitz investigation.”
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2019/12/05/fisa-report-inspector-general-probe-into-fbi-may-not-satisfy-trumps-predictions-william-barr/2597748001/
Nothing.Butger.
PS Qanon is still promising more because he places a lot of weight on the FISA docs. Just keep waiting, HW. Be their pawn.
You can’t even spell burger let alone identify a nothingburger.
Hey HW, how about a Han Solo Burger?
https://www.frostedleaf.com/selfserve/product/han-solo-burger/
I tend to not get excited about OG hybrids; too samey.
Re. less-clean cannabis with legalization, think of the decades of Mexico and the U.S. spraying it with Paraquat. I can only imagine what else. (Not quite Nunes related. Or maybe it is.)
HW– I can spell burger. I can’t type well. And don’t care to correct most of the time here.honestly. Not worth the effort. Apparently you got my meaning.