"What we’re actually witnessing is a test of the depths to which the Republican Party will sink. How much corruption, how much collusion with foreign powers and betrayal of the national interest will that party’s elected representatives stand for? And the result of that test seems increasingly clear: There is no bottom. The inquiry hasn’t found a smoking gun; it has found what amounts to a smoking battery of artillery. Yet almost no partisan Republicans have turned on Trump and his high-crimes-and-misdemeanors collaborators. Why not?
The G.O.P. is now a thoroughly corrupt party. Trump is a symptom, not the disease, and our democracy will remain under dire threat even if and when he’s gone."
Paul Krugman, NY Times, '
Trump and his Corrupt Old Party'
It doesn't get much better than it did yesterday morning in the House Impeachment hearings. There, in dramatic testimony, British-born Fiona Hill, openly attacked a debunked conspiracy theory used by Republicans (like Devin Nunes) to defend the criminal Trump against allegations that he sought to bribe Ukraine for his own political gain.
Dr. Hill let it be known by one and all that Republicans loyal to Trump must stop pushing the “fictional narrative that Ukraine interfered in the 2016 presidential election " because it plays into Vladimir Putin’s hands. Indeed, she noted pointedly while staring at Nunes that it was a whole cloth fabrication of the Russian security services.
Make no mistake Dr. Hill's opening statement alone provided perhaps the most striking moment in the House of Representatives’ intelligence committee’s inquiry: A respected, no nonsense official on the biggest possible stage, accusing Republican House Intelligence Committee members of boosting Russian propaganda efforts to undermine American democracy. As Dr. Hill, who until July was the national security council’s director for European and Russian affairs. put it:
“Based on questions and statements I have heard, some of you on this committee appear to believe that Russia and its security services did not conduct a campaign against our country – and that perhaps, somehow, for some reason, Ukraine did,"
Adding:
"This is a fictional narrative that has been perpetrated and propagated by the Russian security services themselves.”
This conspiracy theory, embraced by Trump and amplified by conservative media like FOX, claims that Ukraine, rather than Russia, meddled in the last election. These Reeptards contend that Ukraine was complicit in the
2016 hacking of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and that computer records were fabricated in order to cast blame on Russia. A key talking point was that a tech company called CrowdStrike, a security firm hired by the DNC, detected the hack. However, Crowdstrike then worked in cahoots with the DNC and Hillary Clinton to cover it all up in order to make it look like Russia was really helping Trump.
No, folks, you cannot make up this batshit crazy baloney.
According to a rough transcript of the July 25th phone call with Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, Trump said:
“I would like to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine, they say CrowdStrike. I guess you have one of your wealthy people. The server, they say Ukraine has it.”
It was this investigation, along with one into Burisma - a gas company with ties to Joe Biden’s son Hunter - that Trump and his personal hack Giuliani, pressed for relentlessly. This was in exchange for the release of nearly $400m in military aid to Ukraine– the classic, unvarnished quid pro quo.
During the impeachment hearings, Republicans have made frequent references to alleged election meddling by Ukraine, without offering evidence. On the opening day, Devin Nunes, the top Republican on the committee, said “indications of Ukrainian election meddling” had troubled Trump.
Hill, the co-author of the book Mr Putin: Operative in the Kremlin, warned in forensic and measured terms that such rumor-mongering only empowers the Russian president who, as intelligence agencies and Congress concluded, systematically attacked America’s democratic institutions in 2016 and is already plotting do so again next year.
"The impact of the successful 2016 Russian campaign remains evident today,” she said, wearing black and speaking in an accent from north-east England. “Our nation is being torn apart. Truth is questioned. Our highly professional and expert career foreign service is being undermined. U.S. support for Ukraine – which continues to face armed Russian aggression – has been politicized.”
She added:
“Right now, Russia’s security services and their proxies have geared up to repeat their interference in the 2020 election. We are running out of time to stop them. In the course of this investigation, I would ask that you please not promote politically driven falsehoods that so clearly advance Russian interests.”
Doubts over the legitimacy of a U.S. election result, she said, are: “exactly what the Russian government was hoping for. They would pit one side of our electorate against the other.”
The remarks echoed a public warning by former special counsel Robert Mueller, whose investigation demonstrated concerted efforts by Russia in the 2016 election to hurt Democrat Hillary Clinton and help Trump. It also came one day after Putin himself told an event in Moscow: “Thank God, no one is accusing us of interfering in the US elections any more. Now they’re accusing Ukraine.”
When the text of Fiona Hill’s opening statement was released, it was rebuffed by the traitor Nunes, who circulated a specious copy of a 2018 GOP congressional report on Russian meddling. He insisted in his opening remarks that Democrats had dissented from that report’s findings. But hold strain. Those "findings" were based on tying the FBI, James Comey and the Steele dossier into undermining Trump, see e.g.
So we behold merely another permutation of the Russian conspiracy codswallop that Dr. Hill had exposed. Meantime, Adam Schiff, the Dem Intel committee chairman, welcomed Dr. Hill’s intervention and said he shared her concerns. Especially in view of how the top Reepo clowns had used the specious conspiracy mumbo-jumbo to try to hammer witnesses and attack their credibility.
Daniel Goldman, the Democratic counsel, asked if Trump had ignored the advice of his experts on the Ukraine conspiracy theory and instead taken the word of Giuliani. Dr. Hill replied: “That appears to be the case, yes.”
Recall that Rudy "Nosferatu" Giuliani -the schizoid personality vampire disruptor -
was
put front and centre of the Ukraine scandal on Wednesday by Gordon Sondland, U.S. ambassador to the EU. That remained the case on Thursday. Dr. Hill acidly observed, after recognizing a two track approach to Ukraine:
"He was being involved in a domestic political errand, and we were involved in national security foreign policy."
That one dynamite sentence undercut the spurious arguments of the Republicans. Dr. Hill then reiterated earlier evidence, given behind closed doors, that John Bolton, the former national security adviser, had related to her how Giuliani was like "a hand grenade" about to blow up and that Bolton added: "I am not part of whatever drug deal Sondland and Mulvaney are cooking up."
It remains to be seen whether Fiona Hill's testimony (or any other) will have any remote effect on the millions of Trumpkins throughout the land who still buy into the "Dems did it to Trump" balderdash. I refer to delirious dingbats like this loser (Steve Gehrke) part of whose Denver Post letter- from November 20- I reproduce below :
Is there any hope for this kool aid - slurping moron? Not bloody likely. He isn't even remotely aware that Mueller not only defined a conspiracy in the case of an indictment filed against 12 GRU agents in 2018, but made it public, E.g.
Mueller also - if you read part one of his report- makes it clear Trump was involved in this conspiracy. As Harvard Law Professor Lawrence Tribe elegantly summed up earlier this year ('Last Word' with Lawrence O'Donnell):
"What we have here is a situation where the Mueller report shows without any doubt that a hostile foreign power attacked the United States in this (2016) election. That Donald Trump welcomed that attack, benefited from it and then - the last couple of years - tried to cover it up every possible way. "
Even more explicit is the take from Mimi Rocah, former federal prosecutor, appearing January 25th on 'All In':
"There's just so many facts in this indictment about the coordination of the Trump campaign with Wikileaks, through Roger Stone. Remember that GRU indictment - if you go back to that- one of the objects of the conspiracy is not just hacking but hacking and disseminating. You can't look at them alone, you have to go back to everything we know, the Trump Tower meeting, the calling out by Trump to Russia (to grab Hillary's emails)...there's just so many other things."
A de facto conspiracy by any other name.
The incredible ignorance and brainwashing (by too much FOX watching) explains the problem of those like Gehrke who think Dems are "smearing" the orange ape occupying the Oval office when they brand him the criminal that he clearly is. Smearing him? He's lucky no one's hanging him yet! Even FOX legal specialist Judge Andrew Naplitano observed not long after the infamous transcript appeared, that "in the olden days Trump would be hung, drawn and quartered". As Adam Schiff made clear at the conclusion of the hearings yesterday:
"I can tell you why I can resist no more and it comes down to timing. It came down to the fact that the day after Bob Mueller testified, that Donald Trump invited Russia again to interfere in our elections. The day after that! Donald Trump is back on the phone asking another nation to involve itself in another U.S. election. That says to me this president believes he is above the law."
And the Russian connection? Fiona Hill made that clear in her excoriation of the Republicans' attachment to the "Crowdstrike" conspiracy bilge. In addition we can reference the words of former acting Solicitor General Walter Dellinger ('All In' Monday night):
"The president excuses Russia and therefore invites their further participation. What 2016 is about - this reference to investigating 2016 - is trying to hold the Russians harmless by blaming the Ukrainians for what happened. And that is telling Vladiir Putiin, 'we've really got y0ur back. We're not going to try to sanction you we're even going to point the finger at somebody else.'
In other words we have Trump committing conspiracy as well as other crimes in spades. There is no need to "look for crimes" there are dozens smashing us in the face. The truth is that Trump is unfit for office - an "anti-President" in Prof. Tribe's words. Last night on MSNBC Prof. Tribe even laid out the basis for specific articles of impeachment based on evidence from first hand witnesses. Those articles include the following high crimes and misdemeanors:
"Bribery, extortion, the usurpation of congress' power of the purse, the abuse of his office and violation of his oath. On top of that is his unprecedented erection of a stone wall in which he directs everybody connected to the White House and State Department not to testify, not to comply with subpoenas. That amounts to contempt of congress - a far more sweeping violation of separation of powers than even Richard Nixon was guilty of, cited in impeachment article 3."
Hence, a stone criminal who's already committed numerous impeachable high crimes and misdemeanors - from flouting the Emoluments clause, to multiple 'pay for play' schemes, to violation of federal financing laws, to collaboration with foreign powers (Russia, Ukraine) to advance his own personal election chances. The most recent crime was on full display live during last Friday's impeachment hearing when he openly threatened witness Marie Yovonavitch, e.g.
Julia Ioffe, on 'All In' last night, best summed up the predicament of this country now with half its citizens mind-fucked by false news, misinformation and outright propaganda:
"What we're seeing is two parts of the population are living in parallel information universes only one of which is true. That also exists in Russia and now we have that happening here."
Adding that: "as the scandal started brewing and continuing through the hearings, the people trapped in the right wing media kept harping that 'Oh they never got over the Russia hoax' and they kept on about the Steele dossier. It's like those conspiracy theories never went away. It's like Devin Nunes asking 'Hi, witness, have you heard of conspiracy theory 72 B.? That stuff is all from the Mueller era and it's been baked in."
Clearly the Denver Post letter writer is one of those trapped in Nunes' and the Reeptards' pseudo-conspiracy twaddle which Fiona Hill so forcefully skewered.
Sadly, the trumpeting of false news and narratives isn't only on FOX. The mainstream media outside FOX is now also giving validation to disinfo and propaganda. Exhibit One was CBS this morning featuring former RNC chief Reince Priebus as the guest, commenting on the hearing yesterday. Priebus, as expected, spun the trope there was "no direct evidence" given Trump never said the specific "magic" words ('I hereby order you to do a quid pro quo' for me!') to any of the witnesses. The questions then asked by the 3 CBS hosts were all softball types, so Reince could laugh his way out of it, leaving the CBS trio sucking air.
The question is "Why would any serious news outfit feature a political hack and clown like Priebus to discuss impeachment, rather than a learned professor like Lawrence Tribe? "
If the country is going to survive this crisis, we need more savvy and critically thinking citizens else we shall not "keep" this Republic. As Benjamin Franklin once told a woman who asked him what kind of government we had: "A Republic...if you can keep it."
Right now that Republic is on the line.
See also:
