Republicans Are Far From Ready To Give Up On Trump-- Or Trumpism-- Yet

 

We didn't do much coverage of the manufactured Hunter Biden scandal here, not even when we were pushing Bernie in the primaries. As disgusting as it has always been that Biden has so many sleazy lobbyists in his family and that DC functions like that, the whole "scandal" generally reeked of bullshit. On the other hand, we consistently warned that if Biden was handed the nomination, the general election would devolve into-- among other things-- a discussion of whose family is more repulsively corrupt... and that's a battle in which no one could ever top the Trumps.

Earlier today, London's Times published a piece by Manveen Rana about how a Kremlin-linked Ukrainian oligarch and Giuliani "associate," Dmytro Firtash, was involved in a Trump campaign conspiracy to manufacture "evidence" against the Bidens.

Assorted Dildoes by Chip Proser

According to Lev Parnas, one of Mr Giuliani’s associates, they had sought help in their quest for a scandal that would damage Joe Biden’s run for the presidency from Dmytro Firtash, a Kremlin-linked Ukrainian oligarch.

Mr Firtash, who has faced extradition to America since 2014, had cut a deal, Mr Parnas claimed, that would quash his extradition order in return for any evidence of scandal surrounding the Bidens. Mr Firtash, who was shown to have extended a $1 million loan to Mr Parnas during this period, has always denied any involvement in the smear campaign directed at the Bidens.

The allegations come from Hares Youssef, a Ukrainian businessman and close friend of Mr Firtash. An adviser to Viktor Yushchenko, the former president of Ukraine, Mr Youssef said that he was asked to invent links between Hunter Biden and a business deal with one of his former associates that had gone wrong.

“The deal was to lie,” Mr Youssef claimed. “I had never even met him. But the hunting dogs were out for Hunter Biden.”

Mr Youssef, who was born in Syria and is a dual national, invested just under $3 million in mbloom, a tech start-up fund backed by Devon Archer, Hunter Biden’s former business partner.

The details of mbloom’s investments were always obscure. Mr Youssef claimed that he believed his investment would be used to create a gold-backed virtual currency named Golden Hearts, a project he has long wanted to get off the ground. The managers of mbloom, however, used the fund to invest in their own start-ups.

Mr Youssef lost the bulk of his investment when the fund was shut down in 2016 after Mr Archer was accused of fraud in a separate and unrelated case.

Hunter, the youngest son of Mr Biden, now the president-elect, had previously been on the board of Burisma, a Ukrainian gas company, with Mr Archer and had become involved in his investment firm, Rosemont Seneca Technology Partners, one of the main funders behind mbloom.

Hunter had ceased any association with the company before Mr Youssef made his investment in mbloom.

Yet last year, Mr Youssef briefly courted journalists with a story about Hunter’s links to the now-defunct mbloom fund and claims that he had promised businessmen access to his father in 2015, when Mr Biden was vice-president under Barack Obama. Mr Youssef had no evidence at the time to support his assertions and now he has admitted that it was all untrue.

...Youssef claimed a member of Mr Firtash’s team approached him, saying: “We can solve this relationship with America if you can help us.” He said that he was told his friend’s extradition order could be rescinded if he could find enough evidence against Hunter Biden.

He claimed that knowing that Mr Youssef had been involved with mbloom, the Firtash team asked him to create a story about Hunter Biden being linked to the doomed fund.

“But I told them Hunter Biden wasn’t linked to mbloom,” Mr Youssef insisted. “I said it was absolutely impossible because the documents I signed with this investment could appear anywhere and they would show Hunter Biden was not involved. It would break the story because it’s not true.”

...“Somebody from Firtash’s team asked me if I wanted to get my visa back and to be able to travel to the United States again,” Mr Youssef claimed. “They said if we solved the problem in the United States, we can solve the problem of your visa, you can even get immunity, if we can use your investment in mbloom in this Hunter Biden case.”

...Firtash, a billionaire who is closely linked to the Kremlin, made his fortune acting as a middleman for the Russian government’s gas interests in Ukraine.

The US Justice Department has alleged that Mr Firtash was also heavily involved with “Russian organised crime.”

...Firtash has been a frequent presence in the controversies surrounding Mr Trump. Paul Manafort, the Republican strategist who was Mr Trump’s campaign chairman during the last election before he was convicted of fraud, had also worked for Mr Firtash, who hired him to help with the campaign for Viktor Yanukovych, the former Ukrainian president. Mr Yanukovych was overthrown in 2014 and has since lived in Russia. He has links to President Putin.

Mr Firtash also hired two lawyers with links to Mr Trump to present his case to William Barr, the US attorney-general.

That process was halted when the Ukraine inquiry began and Mr Trump was impeached.

The attacks on Hunter Biden’s business dealings took centre stage in Mr Trump’s re-election campaign. However, Mr Youssef said that the election had no bearing on his decision to talk about his own experience of how evidence against Hunter was collected in Ukraine.

Instead it was a report published by the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project this week that carried evidence from leaked bank records showing Mr Youssef’s investment in mbloom, he said.

Not having learned their lesson yet about involving themselves and their party in the Trump crime operation, Republican aspirants for the 2024 Republican nomination are backing Trump's election fraud lies. In his New York Magazine column this afternoon, Jonathan Chait noted that "watching the Republican Party absorb Trump’s ludicrous accusations has been depressingly instructive. It replicates the process by which Republicans accepted Trump in the first place. It also reflects, in miniature, the process by which the party has surrendered to kookery over several generations... The most revealing responses came from the pool of prospective 2024 presidential nominees. Hopefuls like Ted Cruz, Tom Cotton, Ron DeSantis, and Josh Hawley endorsed various groundless charges of mass voter fraud gloated by Trump. South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem forcefully rejected the premise that Republican secretaries of State have testified to the legitimacy of their election processes. 'The media can project an election winner, but they don’t get to decide if claims of broken election laws & irregularities are true,' tweeted Marco Rubio. Lindsey Graham proclaimed, 'Philadelphia elections are crooked as a snake,' and went so far as to suggest legislators in states won by Biden nullify the vote and appoint pro-Trump electors. 'This is a contested election,' Graham announced on Fox News, adding, 'President Trump should not concede.' 'Every time they close the doors and shut out the lights, they always find more Democratic votes,' declared Cruz-- even though the doors were in fact open to Republican observers and the lights in fact on."

GOP Senate Lemmings Headed For Cliff

 

There was a ton of info in the latest Change Research poll of new and infrequent voters in Arizona, Florida, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin that was released yesterday. "New and infrequent" but this year 84% of them say they are definitely voting. This is going to be the highest turnout election in our lifetimes and Trump is the motivating factor-- mostly antipathy towards him. Biden leads by 49-37% among these voters, who went for Hillary Clinton by 35-30%. Undecided voters are largely negative about both candidates, but they’re much more strongly negative about Trump than Biden. Biden leads among this cohort of voters in all 6 of these swing states-- 50-36% in Arizona, 52-37% in Florida, 58-31% in Michigan, 47-38% in North Carolina, 49-39% in Pennsylvania and 43-41% in Wisconsin. More factoids:

• Biden leads 44-16 among Gary Johnson voters
• Biden leads 42-17 among Jill Stein voters
• Biden leads 47-32 among those who did not vote in 2016
• A plurality of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents believe every single conspiracy theory and falsehood Change Research asked about, although more voters believe Trump is trying to suppress the vote, and that Russia is interfering, than that Democrats are trying to rig the election
• 5% of these voters would take a vaccine as soon as possible, even if it has not gone through standard safety procedures

And Republicans up and down the ballot are circling the drain with Trump. The latest poll in Arizona how's Mark Kelly ousting GOP incumbent Martha McSally by 10 points 52-42%. The latest poll in Maine has Sara Gideon beating GOP incumbent Susan Collins by 12 points 54-42%. The latest poll of Colorado voters shows them picking Hickenlooper over incumbent Cory Gardner by 10 points, 52-42%. Even in beet red South Carolina the latest polling shows Democratic lobbyist Jaime Harrison tied (48-48%) with Trump-whisperer Lindsey Graham!

Republican senators may know they're marching over the cliff but these lemmings are not breaking ranks with Trump. Eric Lutz wrote yesterday at Vanity Fair that Senate Republicans still seem dead set on doing Trump's dirty work. Especially Wisconsin sociopathic reactionary Ron Johnson, who has already announced his 2022 lame-duckiness.

I doubt there's a more blatant and preposterous hack in the Senate than Ron Johnson. Ginning up a fake investigation of Hunter Biden's moronic adventures in Ukraine, Johnson said, "I would think it would certainly help Donald Trump win reelection." He's been running around telling anyone who will listen that he has an October surprise to tarnish Biden coming out of his Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee fishing expedition.

Following a vote Wednesday morning, Johnson will expand his panel’s Crossfire Hurricane probe. The committee authorized dozens of subpoenas to be issued to Obama era officials, including Bruce Ohr and Andrew McCabe-- two frequent Trump targets over their role in the Russia investigation that consumed the first two years of his presidency. But another vote, to issue subpoenas in the Burisma probe, was canceled after Mitt Romney slammed that inquiry as a “political exercise” aimed at taking down Biden.

“It’s not the legitimate role of government, for Congress or for taxpayer expense, to be used in an effort to damage political opponents,” Romney said. “I do believe it's very important that the committees of Congress, and ours in particular, not fall into an increasing pattern that we're seeing, which is using taxpayer dollars and the power of Congress to do political work. That's the role of campaigns.”

Romney, the only Republican who voted to convict during Trump’s impeachment trial earlier this year, had previously expressed concerns that Johnson’s Burisma probe was being driven by partisan politics rather than oversight. On Wednesday, he said recent remarks by the committee leader “have only confirmed that perspective.” He was likely referring to comments Johnson made earlier this week during a video conference with Republicans, in which he promised to release a report that would hurt Biden politically. “Stay tuned,” the Wisconsin Republican said, as reported by the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. “In about a week we’re going to learn a whole lot more of Vice President Biden’s unfitness for office.”

Of course, there’s been no evidence that Biden did anything wrong in Ukraine, and Gary Peters, the top Democrat on the committee, has railed against Johnson for “knowingly advancing discredited claims that our own Intelligence Community has warned are part of a Russian attack on our democracy.” Nevertheless, Johnson has continued to promise a report by election day November 3.

With his sharp rebuke of the Burisma probe, Romney effectively got the vote to issue subpoenas in the Burisma probe scrapped. But the Utah Senator did vote in favor of dozens of subpoenas in the committee’s investigation into the origins of the FBI’s Russia inquiry, which the president and his allies have claimed was a “witch hunt” by deep state officials who sought to undermine Barack Obama’s successor. Michael Horowitz, the Justice Department’s inspector general, identified procedural missteps by federal law enforcement in the early days of the investigation, but found no evidence of political bias. Still, Attorney General William Barr and other Trump allies have been investigating their boss’s investigators, particularly since Biden, the vice president under Obama, became the Democratic nominee. Romney expressed support for a narrow inquiry by Johnson’s committee into the errors outlined by Horowitz, as long as it “does not fall in the realm of rank political undertaking.” But, in the hands of a loyalist like Johnson, whose stated mission is to damage Biden and help Trump, it’s hard to imagine such a probe being anything but that.

Yesterday afternoon, Johnson announced he has COVID-19 and is going into quarantine. Pray that the October surprise isn't the one he was plotting. Samantha Bee has a November surprise to discuss:

Midnight Meme Of The Day!

by Noah

Just as they pervert every American ideal, republicans in the $enate have made no bones about being driven to pervert the concept of blind justice. Last week, they broke the agreed to rules of behavior and decorum and sat around reading books, playing with their fidget spinners (if that's what they call it now) that North Carolina $enator Richard Burr handed out to all 52 of his Repug Party colleagues, some played with their Apple watches that they were supposed to leave at the door. Some just left for the $enate cloakroom without a hall pass. We can only guess what goes on in the cloakroom; pole dancing? A floating crap game perhaps? Chief "Justice" John Roberts once again showed his party bias, as if anyone needed to be reminded, by not enforcing said agreed to rules; no surprise there. What did you expect? Integrity? $enator Marsha Blackburn of nut state Tennessee was the first to bring a book, perhaps as if to show us that some people from her state can actually read. It was a swell prop. Worse, she spent hours questioning the patriotism of Lt. Col. Vindman, a man who has bled for this country, via tweet because he had testified negatively about her beloved president during the House Impeachment hearings. To be fair, and I'm always fair, Marsha may be trying to be her party's new Sarah Palin or Louis Gohmert but she still has a little way to go, maybe.

This is the Republican Party.2020. Their behavior during the Democratic Party's Trump impeachment trial presentation was just a step better than an out of control pack of chimpanzees peddling their tricycles around in circles in their soiled diapers. You could show them film of their cherished president stabbing Melania and her Tiffany's boyfriend to death, complete with his clown shoe footprints in blood on the sidewalk, and they'd rationalize it away. That's what they're doing with the trial anyway.

In the so-called corporate liberal media, you'll periodically hear that the republican $enators are secretly appalled at Trump, his behavior, and his actions, but they don't go public for whatever reason. That's just an example of those who own the corporate media protecting their overall lean to the right agenda. Have we ever heard even one single republican $enator say they are appalled about their guy? Of course not, because they aren't appalled at all. In fact they are proud to be counted with Trump, fully, completely, 100%. Can you imagine any of them saying that they are appalled and dismayed or even lightly embarrassed by Trump? Nope, not if you're sane. Even if they did say it, what they really think is clear from their actions and they've made it even more clear during the trial. They are all in with Dear Leader and screw the Constitution. Screw the country. And, screw each and every one of us! It's who they are.

Midnight Meme Of The Day!

by Noah

Not everyone gets to throw a treasonous, psychopathic president under the bus. That alone makes Lev Parnas special, but, as actors in other dramas often do, Parnas asked "What's my motivation?" To me, the answer is simple. Lev Parnas found himself in a unique position with unique incriminating information about the criminal actions of people who could either at worst make him disappear, or, at best, use a lawless "Justice" Department to "lock him up" forever. He knew details no one else knew, and those in position above him would naturally fear those details coming out. In the mobster-styled world Lev Parnas travelled in, that put Lev's very existence in extreme danger. If you have serious facts surrounding serious crimes and you're the only one who does, then you're a big risk to the higher ups and the clock is ticking. Only by getting that information out there as soon as you legally can, in a very, very public way, will you even have a chance of being safe. That is what Lev Parnas has done with his full hour interview with Rachel Maddow a few days ago.

Am I scared? Yes, because I think I'm more scared of our own Justice Department than these criminals right now...they trying to scare me into not talking...The difference between why Trump is so powerful now, he wasn't as powerful in '16 or '17. He became that powerful when he got William Barr.

For sure, Lev Parnas still has to worry about revenge but that revenge would be even more obvious and suspicious if it happens now, after he spoke out than, say, his being found dead in his jail cell with a sheet around his broken neck like Jeffrey Epstein. Did Lev Parnas look at what happened to Epstein and decide not to make the same mistake of keeping silent and going to his grave with what he knew and what only he would expose? When you look at the people at the top of all of this, you have to ask that question. I have no illusions about Lev Parnas being a great guy but I do know what I would have done.

Midnight Meme Of The Day!

by Noah

Sunday Thoughts:

Putin's Chosen One looks a little slender in this depiction. Not to worry. His worshipers will send out for some Bigly Macs with Fascist Fries and get him back up to 400 pounds in no time. Meanwhile, the frothy chanting of his supporters is getting more intense by the day as the impeachment trial gets closer and closer. I think I just heard someone yell out "Perfect phone call." Just a while ago, another one was warbling "He did nothing wrong. He did nothing wrong!" Then there was the wailing of the guy who said "Bring me the head of Lev Parnas."

By the way, the guy in the lower left is Lindsey Graham in disguise.

Mixing Up The Voters-- A Cover-Up Strategy

Chuck Schumer by Nancy Ohanian

Writing for Bloomberg News yesterday, Jonathan Bernstein noted that Republican senators don’t even know what they’re covering up for, or at least what they would be covering up for if they follow the White House’s preference to rush through the Senate impeachment trial that starts next week and refuse to hear from relevant witnesses and collect relevant documents." He's right, although Moscow Mitch very much does know exactly what he's covering up.

"Some of those senators, to be sure, just don’t care," continued Bernstein. "They’ve decided they can live with (both politically and ethically) any revelations that may come down the road-- that no one who they care about will hold them accountable for burying important evidence, no matter what it turns out to be. Others may really be so fully inside the conservative information-feedback loop that they sincerely think that Trump is an honest, innocent man being railroaded by partisans; they may not even be aware of the considerable evidence to the contrary. But for anyone else? As I said just 24 hours and a couple rounds of ugly revelations ago: 'If new ugly details are still emerging, who’s to say that more won’t turn up later?'"

And it has. Will it matter is the question. Sean Illing pointed to the method in their madness: flooding the zone with shit, utterly overwhelming the capacity for Trump's low-info supporters to be able to discern what's real and what isn't. Illing wrote that "Regardless of how clear a case Democrats make, it seems likely that a majority of voters will remain confused and unsure about the details of Trump’s transgressions. No single version of the truth will be accepted. This is a serious problem for our democratic culture. No amount of evidence, on virtually any topic, is likely to move public opinion one way or the other. We can attribute some of this to rank partisanship-- some people simply refuse to acknowledge inconvenient facts about their own side... We live in a media ecosystem that overwhelms people with information. Some of that information is accurate, some of it is bogus, and much of it is intentionally misleading. The result is a polity that has increasingly given up on finding out the truth. As Sabrina Tavernise and Aidan Gardiner put it in a New York Times piece, 'people are numb and disoriented, struggling to discern what is real in a sea of slant, fake, and fact.' This is partly why an earth-shattering historical event like a president’s impeachment has done very little to move public opinion. The core challenge we’re facing today is information saturation and a hackable media system. If you follow politics at all, you know how exhausting the environment is. The sheer volume of content, the dizzying number of narratives and counternarratives, and the pace of the news cycle are too much for anyone to process. One response to this situation is to walk away and tune everything out. After all, it takes real effort to comb through the bullshit, and most people have busy lives and limited bandwidth. Another reaction is to retreat into tribal allegiances. There’s Team Liberal and Team Conservative and pretty much everyone knows which side they’re on. So you stick to the places that feed you the information you most want to hear."

We’re in an age of manufactured nihilism.

The issue for many people isn’t exactly a denial of truth as such. It’s more a growing weariness over the process of finding the truth at all. And that weariness leads more and more people to abandon the idea that the truth is knowable.

I call this “manufactured” because it’s the consequence of a deliberate strategy. It was distilled almost perfectly by Steve Bannon, the former head of Breitbart News and chief strategist for Donald Trump. “The Democrats don’t matter,” Bannon reportedly said in 2018. “The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.”

...For most of recent history, the goal of propaganda was to reinforce a consistent narrative. But zone-flooding takes a different approach: It seeks to disorient audiences with an avalanche of competing stories.

And it produces a certain nihilism in which people are so skeptical about the possibility of finding the truth that they give up the search. The fact that 60 percent of Americans say they encounter conflicting reports about the same event is an example of what I mean. In the face of such confusion, it’s not surprising that less than half the country trusts what they read in the press.

...Trump can dictate an entire news cycle with a few unhinged tweets or an absurd press conference. The media cycle is easily commandeered by misinformation, innuendo, and outrageous content. These are problems because of the norms that govern journalism and because the political economy of media makes it very hard to ignore or dispel bullshit stories. This is at the root of our nihilism problem and a solution is nowhere in sight.

The instinct of the mainstream press has always been to conquer lies by exposing them. But it’s just not that simple anymore (if it ever was). There are too many claims to debunk and too many conflicting narratives. And the decision to cover something is a decision to amplify it and, in some cases, normalize it.

We probably need a paradigm shift in how the press covers politics. Nearly all of the incentives driving media militate against this kind of rethinking, however. And so we’re likely stuck with this problem for a very long time.

As is often the case, the diagnosis is much easier than the cure. But liberal democracy cannot function without a shared understanding of reality. As long as the zone is flooded with shit, that shared understanding is impossible.

Yesterday, for example, it was widely reported by the mainstream media that "The nonpartisan Government Accountability Office found that the Trump administration broke the law when it put a hold on aid to Ukraine." That line was from the Murdoch-owned, Republican-leaning Wall Street Journal. Think about it: "the Trump administration broke the law." There were no mainstream news sources that didn't run with the story. This is from Jeff Stein's and Ellen Nakashima's at the Washington Post, White House hold on Ukraine aid violated federal law, congressional watchdog says. Ironically, Trump and Giuliani are probably happy to see it moving Maddow's devastating interview with Trump crony Lev Parnas Wednesday night (video below). Stein and Nakashima wrote that "The White House violated federal law in its hold on security aid to Ukraine last year, according to a decision by a congressional watchdog released on Thursday and reviewed by the Washington Post. The Government Accountability Office, a nonpartisan agency that reports to Congress, found the Trump administration violated a law that governs how the White House disburses money approved by Congress. The GAO decision comes as the Senate prepares for the impeachment trial of President Trump, a process set to begin Thursday. 'Faithful execution of the law does not permit the President to substitute his own policy priorities for those that Congress has enacted into law,' the decision states. 'OMB withheld funds for a policy reason, which is not permitted under the Impoundment Control Act.' ... The GAO found that the administration broke the Impoundment Control Act-- a 1974 law that provides a mechanism for the executive branch to request that Congress reconsider a funding decision that’s been signed into law. 'This bombshell legal opinion from the independent Government Accountability Office demonstrates, without a doubt, that the Trump administration illegally withheld security assistance from Ukraine' said Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD), who requested GAO write the report in December... 'If the executive branch violates the [Impoundment Control Act] with impunity, then Congress loses its power to direct the expenditures of federal funds and any program authorized in law could be defunded by Executive fiat,' Van Hollen wrote in a letter to Gene L. Dodaro, comptroller general of the GAO, in December."

That all said, let's remember that the case against Trump being removed has continued to grow in popularity-- despite the Republican gaslighting strategy-- as more information leaks out. The Morning Consult poll released by Politico earlier this week shows Trump's approval number's underwater, with 54% of registered voters disapproving and just 43% approving. Also among registered voters 31% say they are definitely voting to reelect Trump and 45% say they are definitely voting against reelecting him. When you add in leaners, 39% will vote for him and 52% will vote against him. 49% of registered voters approved of the House impeaching Trump and 43% disapproved and 49% say he should now be removed by the Senate, 43% saying he should not be removed.

There Are Billions Of Dollars To Be Sucked Out Of Fragile Counties Like Ukraine-- Giuliani Wanted Some Of That... How About Trump?

Last week I was asking members of Congress who they thought the impeachment managers would be. No one wanted to say, especially not the potential members of the team. But one senior Democrat who may or may not have been drinking, blurted out, "Oh you know Nancy... two men, two women, two whites, two blacks, a Hispanic, a gay, a straight, girls... boys. The last thing she's ever going to do is pick anyone because they're most qualified for the job. That's against everything she stands for." Oh dear-- but true. Just look at that mess she did pick to back up the totally competent but anti-charismatic Adam Schiff and Jerry Nadler. Where the hell is Jamie Raskin, the Maryland Democrat who knows more about the constitution than the whole batch of them combined? And Pramila Jayapal and Ted Lieu? Joe Neguse? Swalwell would have been a good choice, since he's fast on his feet, a member of both Intel and Judiciary, telegenic and a lot smarter than some of the identity politics picks. But leave off Jamie Raskin, Ted Lieu and Pramila Jayapal? Insane! Pelosi has lost it!

That said, Philip Bump's Washington Post column yesterday, With An Impeachment Trial Looming, New Evidence That Trump Sought Personal Benefit In Ukraine, kind of rocked the house... if not Moscow Mitch and the Senate Republicans. Let's start with a look at this document Lev Parnas-- of the infamous team, Lev and Igor-- turned over to the House Intelligence Committee in recent days:

The the incomplete transcript-- Trump still refuses to turn over the actual transcript-- of the July 25 call between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, wrote Bump, "Trump cajoles his counterpart to start investigations focused on former vice president Joe Biden and an unfounded theory about Ukrainian interference in the 2016 presidential election. Zelensky agrees to the probes with alacrity, in part, no doubt, because it had already been made clear to his team that agreement was a necessary criterion for a much-sought meeting with Trump at the White House. To move the probes forward, Trump then suggests that Zelensky work with two people: Attorney General William P. Barr, head of the Justice Department-- and Rudolph W. Giuliani, Trump’s personal attorney. The inclusion of Giuliani in the conversation has long made it hard for Trump to argue that he was seeking Zelensky’s aid only insofar as it would benefit the United States generally. When he asked Zelensky to 'do us a favor,' he has argued, he meant 'us' as in the United States. That he then suggested Zelensky work with Giuliani, who is not an employee of the United States, and that his request in that specific case focused on his efforts to undermine the investigation into Russian interference that he saw as a cloud over his presidency make it particularly hard to take Trump’s claims at face value."

Giuliani has been central to the campaign to pressure Ukraine for some time. When a group of officials who’d attended Zelensky’s inauguration in May met with the president to brief him on the event, it was Giuliani whom Trump insisted they work with on Ukraine. It was Giuliani who then made explicit a quid pro quo related to Trump’s desired investigations, according to Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland. Giuliani pushed Trump’s team to get Zelensky’s administration to announce the same specific investigations that Trump raised on his call-- all while working for Trump, not the United States.

He made clear early in the process that his focus was his client and not his country. When he spoke with the New York Times before a planned trip to Ukraine in May, he told the paper that he was “asking them to do an investigation that they’re doing already and that other people are telling them to stop. And I’m going to give them reasons why they shouldn’t stop it because that information will be very, very helpful to my client, and may turn out to be helpful to my government.”

The “investigation they were already doing” was an investigation into a company for which Biden’s son worked. That inquiry is at the center of the impeachment allegations that Trump pressured Ukraine for information that might undercut the political viability of Biden, who then and now was the leading contender for his party’s presidential nomination this year. Giuliani’s presentation of the status of the purported investigation is itself questionable, but the point is how he characterized his work to The Times: of benefit to Trump and, who knows, maybe the country as well.

Parnas worked for Giuliani for years, helping Trump’s attorney in Ukraine, including by doing translations. Parnas was asked for documents by House investigators as they began to dig into Trump’s interactions with Ukraine last year but he refused to comply. When he was subsequently arrested and charged with campaign finance violations, Parnas became more amenable to offering assistance and turned over material to House Democrats. On Tuesday evening, some of that material was made public by the House Intelligence Committee.

The material included the letter below, sent by Giuliani to Zelensky shortly before the Ukrainian president’s inauguration-- and shortly before Giuliani’s planned trip to Ukraine. In the letter, Giuliani is explicit about the role he plays.

“I am private counsel to President Donald J. Trump,” he writes. “Just to be precise, I represent him as a private citizen, not as President of the United States.” He goes on to explain that this seemingly unusual situation in fact isn’t unusual at all-- clarifying for readers in the present moment just how odd Zelensky might have found the letter.

“I have a more specific request,” Giuliani writes later, echoing Trump’s language two months later in his phone call. “In my capacity as personal counsel to President Trump and with his knowledge and consent, I request a meeting with you” during his planned visit. (After The Times reported on his planned trip, he canceled it.)

Asked about Giuliani’s planned trip in an interview with Bill O’Reilly in November, the president denied awareness of what his lawyer was up to.

“I know that he was going to go to Ukraine and I think he canceled the trip. But Rudy has other clients, other than me,” Trump said. Asked if Giuliani was going to Ukraine on his behalf to try to find negative information about Biden, Trump said, “No, I didn’t direct him, but he is a warrior, he is a warrior.”

Giuliani told The Times he was going for Trump. He told Zelensky he was going for Trump. But in November, once the impeachment inquiry was well underway, Trump dismissed the idea.

As for the part about focusing on Biden, there’s a note written on a Vienna Ritz-Carlton notepad that was included in the material Parnas gave to House investigators.

“Get Zalensky [sic] to Annouce [sic] that the Biden case will be Investigated,” it reads-- suggesting that Parnas, the presumed author of the note, understood one key goal of interactions with the Ukrainian president. Who gave Parnas that direction? He worked with Giuliani as well as a husband-wife team of lawyers-- Victoria Toensing and Joe diGenova. Later notes on the same pad mention Toensing and diGenova in a way that suggests they weren’t the ones offering instruction. (The documents turned over to investigators include another interesting attorney-related message: authorization from the president, through his attorney Jay Sekulow, for Parnas to be represented by one of Trump’s former attorneys, John Dowd.)

There are a lot of questions about those notes. When were they written? What was the context? What did Parnas actually do?

But there aren’t many questions about the letter from Giuliani to Zelensky. In that letter, Giuliani is explicit about whom he works for and the extent to which Trump was aware of his efforts. While he didn’t tell Zelensky what the purpose of the meeting was, he did tell The Times: the investigation that Parnas’s note refers to as the “Biden case.”

It’s right there in the rough transcript, too, of course. But with Trump’s impeachment trial expected to begin in the Senate next week, it’s worth noting that the transcript isn’t the only evidence that undercuts Trump’s assertions.

But when is the media going to start covering the fact that Giuliani's motivate was to make a few bucks from the Ukrainian gas and energy sector for himself (and for Trump?) That's one of the big untold stories of this whole sordid saga. PBS gave it a try just before Christmas when no one was paying much attention. It starts in Houston with an attempt to bribe by Lev and Igor-- boasting of their relationship with Señor Trumpanzee-- to bribe Andrew Favorov, the number two guy at Ukraine’s state-run gas company Naftogaz. They were proposing a deal to sell large quantities of liquified natural gas from Texas to Ukraine. Keep in mind, the since-resigned Secretary of Energy at the time was former Texas Governor Rick Perry, a very easily blackmailed GOP closet case. They told Favorov two obstacles would have to be removed first-- Favorov's boss and the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, corruption-fighter Marie Yovanovitch. Favorov was dumbstruck by not taking Lev and Igor-- who appeared to be more of a clown act that high level White House emissaries-- all that seriously.

Favorov says he hardly took the proposal at the early March meeting seriously. The men, who sported open shirts showing off thick gold chains at a conference where most wore business attire, had zero experience in the gas business. And it wasn’t plausible to Favorov that they would be able to oust his boss, never mind remove a U.S. ambassador.

What he didn’t know as he sipped whiskey that evening was that high-ranking officials in the Ukrainian government were already taking steps to topple his boss, Naftogaz CEO Andriy Kobolyev. And two months later, Trump recalled U.S. Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch, a career diplomat with a reputation as an anti-corruption crusader.

The gas deal sought by Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman never came to pass. But their efforts to profit from contacts with GOP luminaries is now part of a broad federal criminal investigation into the two men and their close associate, Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal attorney.

The Associated Press reported some details in October of the brash pitch that Parnas and Fruman made to Favorov in Houston. But in a recent series of interviews with the AP in Kyiv, Favorov painted a more complete picture of his dealings with Giuliani’s associates.

His tale, corroborated by interviews with other key witnesses, reveals that the pair continued to pursue a deal for months. The campaign culminated in May, at a meeting at the Trump International Hotel in Washington that included a lobbyist with deep ties to U.S. Energy Secretary Rick Perry and a Republican fundraiser from Texas close to Donald Trump Jr. Three people with direct knowledge of that meeting described it to the AP on condition of anonymity because some of the players are under federal investigation.

The maneuvering over Naftogaz came at the same time that Giuliani, with the help of Parnas and Fruman, were trying to get Yovanovitch out of the way and persuade Ukraine’s leaders to launch an investigation of former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter’s work with Burisma, a rival Ukrainian gas company.

To achieve those ends, they sought to eliminate the safeguards put in place over the last decade at the urging of American and European diplomats to help insulate Naftogaz from the corruption rife in the former Soviet bloc.

The story illustrates an essential backdrop of both the impeachment drama roiling U.S. politics and the criminal investigation of Giuliani and his associates: the decades-long tug of war between Russia and the West over Ukraine, in which geopolitical influence, natural resources and corruption are major themes.

Yovanovitch is now a key witness in the impeachment inquiry, and federal prosecutors investigating Giuliani have interviewed both Favorov and Kobolyev. Parnas and Fruman were arrested Oct. 9 at an airport outside Washington carrying one-way tickets to Europe and are charged with conspiracy, making false statements and falsification of records in a case centered on alleged campaign finance violations.

It was about seven years ago that Favorov says he first crossed paths with Fruman, who owned the luxurious Otrada Hotel in Odessa, a Ukranian city famous for its opulent Black Sea resorts. Favorov, who ran a gas trading company, was there for a retreat and became friendly with the hotel owner, and the two men have kept in sporadic touch ever since.

After Naftogaz announced early this year that Favorov had been appointed its No. 2, he says Fruman, who had emigrated to the United States years earlier, called to chat about the U.S. natural gas business and tout his connections to the Trump administration. Favorov, a dual U.S.-Russian citizen based in Kyiv, had heard that his acquaintance was involved in Republican politics in Florida. Favorov recalls suggesting they meet up at an energy industry conference he was attending in Houston.

“Good,” he says Fruman told him. “I want to introduce you to someone.”

Hyde and Stone

Did You Know A Democrat Won A Trump District In Connecticut Last Night? But Can ANYONE Beat Robert Hyde?

Last night, while that horrible CNN debate was droning on-- the DNC should tell CNN there will be no more debates on CNN if they use anchors as viciously bigoted as Abby Phillip-- there was an actual special election going on in Connecticut. One way to look at it is-- a Democrat replaced another Democrat in a blue state. And that is what happened. 23 year long Democratic veteran legislator Linda Orange died in November and Democrat/Working Families Party candidate Brian Smith defeated Republican Mark DeCaprio in the 48th District.

But there's another way to look at the results as well. The 48th district in eastern Connecticut is relatively conservative compared to other parts of the state. It includes large parts of Colchester and Lebanon and smaller pieces of Mansfield and Windham. It was an Obama district that slipped over to the Dark Side in 2016. Trump took 52% of the vote, beating Hillary. And two years later, during the big anti-red wave of 2018, this district did not flip back to blue. Republican gubernatorial nominee Bob Stefanowski beat Ned Lamont with 56% of the vote, even as Lamont was victorious statewide.

So, while Abby Phillip was blatantly smearing Bernie on CNN last night, Brian Smith was helping Connecticut Democrats breath a sigh of relief in one of the first special elections of 2020. 

And, by the way, there's another Connecticut special election coming up next week, because by the resignation of Republican Fred Camillo on December 2. Democrat Cheryl Moss will face Republican Harry Arora in this Republican-leaning district in Greenwich. In 2018 Camillo beat Democrat Laura Koston there 56.2% to 43.8%.

Connecticut elections are on people's minds today, though, for another reason. A GOP congressional candidate hoping to take on freshman Jahana Hayes (CT-05) is the latest in a cast of Trumpian crackpots from the daily news cycle, lunatic fringe character Robert Hyde has been written into the realty show. We'll come back to him in a moment. First CT-05, in the northwest corner of the state (along with part of central Connecticut ). With a PVI of D+2, it's the least blue part of the state. Hillary beat Trump there but not by much-- 49.9% to 45.8%. (In 2008, Obama beat McCain 56.4% to 42.4%.) The district is made up of Litchfield County (which leans red and where both Ned Lamont and Chris Murphy lost in 2018 and where Trump won in 2016) and parts of New Haven, Hartford and Fairfield counties, all safely blue. Hayes won in all 4 counties in 2018, although very narrowly in Litchfield. Litchfield was the only county is Connecticut that Hillary lost-- 53,376 (54.8%) to 39,836 (40.9%). Establishment Democrats aren't popular there. Bernie also beat Hillary in the county-- 56.4% to 41.6%.

So who's Hyde? He's a mentally ill (literally) Trumpist-- an incompetent gardener-turned-lobbyist and Giuliani fan boy-- who probably has little chance of even winning the Republican primary-- or at least he didn't until the scandal we're about to talk about broke this week. Now... who knows? Republicans might be crazy enough to turn to him just because... he's so obviously unfit for elected office and... well, that's what the GOP is all about these days, isn't it?

There are 4 Republicans vying for the GOP nomination against Hayes-- David Sullivan, Ruben Rodriguez, Peter Barresi and Robert Hyde. Hyde hasn't filed any FEC reports yet, indicating he probably hasn't raised or spent $5,000. You can hear him being interviewed by another far right crackpot last month here. Kind of funny/sad. TrumpStock 2020! The video below, though, is from Rachel Maddow's show that run while the debate was going on last night:





Will Sommer and Betsy Swan from the Daily Beast started the ball rolling earlier in the week. They wrote that "Before Tuesday, he was best known as a little-known, scandal-scarred Republican congressional candidate who tweeted an obscene joke at Kamala Harris. But new documents from the House Intelligence Committee have put a completely different kind of spotlight on Robert F. Hyde, the Trump donor who appears to have tracked U.S. Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch’s movements in Ukraine."

In WhatsApp messages exchanged in March 2019 with Rudy Giuliani associate Lev Parnas, who provided the committee with the files, Hyde and Parnas discussed Yovanovitch’s location. Hyde, a retired Marine, appeared to have associates in Ukraine monitoring her.

“They know she’s a political puppet,” Hyde wrote to Parnas. “They will let me know when she’s on the move… They are willing to help if you/we would like a price.”

“Guess you can do anything in Ukraine with money… what I was told,” Hyde wrote in another message. Parnas responded: “LOL.”

Parnas attorney Joseph A. Bondy confirmed to The Daily Beast that the Hyde in the text messages is the same person as the Republican congressional candidate. 

Asked about his previously undisclosed involvement in Ukraine, Hyde texted The Daily Beast an insult about House Intel chairman Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), writing “Bull Schiff is a giant bitch.”

“Did Pelosi get drunk and lose the impeachment articles?” he added. “Looks like Schiff wants to whistle blow me.”

Hyde seemed to acknowledge authoring the messages in a Facebook post, but claimed they were just meant as jokes meant to fool Parnas, who he called a “dweeb.”

“How low can liddle Adam Bull Schiff go?” Hyde wrote. “I was never in Kiev. For them to take some texts my buddy’s and I wrote back to some dweeb we were playing with that we met a few times while we had a few drinks is definitely laughable. Schiff is a desperate turd playing with this Lev guy. Have fun with your witch-hunt liddle Schiff.”

In messages released to Schiff’s committee, Hyde used similarly off-color language, describing Yovanovitch as a “bitch” and providing other details about the ambassador, such as her “heavy security.”

Yovanovitch, the United States ambassador to Ukraine from 2016 to 2019, was targeted by Parnas and conservative media figures intent on ousting her from the embassy. Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer, has claimed that Yovanovitch hurt his attempts to dig up dirt on former Vice President Joe Biden’s son Hunter in Ukraine. In November, Yovanovitch testified in an impeachment hearing that her firing had been motivated by “a campaign of disinformation.”

"They are moving her tomorrow,” Hyde wrote to Parnas, who has since been indicted on campaign finance charges. “The guys over they (sic) asked me what I would like to do and what is in it for them. Wake up Yankees man. She's talked to three people. Her phone is off. Computer is off. She's next to the embassy. Not in the embassy. Private security. Been there since Thursday."

Hyde runs a Washington-based government relations firm, Finley Hyde & Associates, according to his LinkedIn account. The company’s website is decorated with pictures of Hyde and high-powered Republicans like Trump, Vice President Mike Pence, and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX). Hyde’s firm claims to have handled “major public affairs projects in the U.S. and abroad” and worked for clients that included “foreign government allies of the U.S.”

In August, Hyde launched a bid against Rep. Jahana Hayes (D) in Connecticut’s 5th District. Hyde’s Twitter and Facebook accounts are filled with pictures of him and prominent Republicans, including House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, and Sen. Rand Paul (KY). Hyde has also taken pictures with Trump at the president’s Mar-a-Lago resort.

Hyde with his lover, Eric Trumpanzee

Hyde frequently took pictures with other Republican figures and posted online. Pictures on Hyde’s Instagram account show him posing with former Gov. Chris Christie (R-NJ), Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL), Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), former Trump adviser Roger Stone, and former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn.

Hyde also took pictures with Trump children Eric, Tiffany, and Don Jr., as well as Fox News employee Shannon Bream and Ed Henry.

He reportedly suffered some sort of episode at a Trump resort last year, according to Mother Jones, which cited a 2019 police report from the City of Doral Police Department. According to that report, Hyde was taken into police custody at the Trump National Doral Miami last May before being involuntarily admitted to a medical facility in accordance with a state law that allows the confinement of people believed to pose a danger to themselves.

He was described as a “male in distress fearing for his life” and reportedly told police he believed a “hit man was out to get him.” Police described him as acting “paranoid” and said he claimed “landscape workers” and the Secret Service were targeting him.

Hyde with bestie Kevin McCarthy, minority leader (D-CA)

Before the Intelligence Committee’s release, Hyde also drew attention by sending an obscene tweet about Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) and oral sex after the senator dropped out of the presidential race.

“She went down, brought to her knees,” Hyde tweeted. “Blew it. Must be a hard one to swallow….”

Leading Connecticut Republicans called on Hyde to drop out of the race, but he declined. (“We are winning in the polls and will win this seat from the squad member Jahana Hayes. Liddle Adam Bull Schiff will twist anything to carry on in his SHAM,” he texted the Daily Beast on Tuesday.)

In the aftermath of that controversy, the Connecticut GOP refunded contributions Hyde had made to the party.

"I appreciate you putting this out there publicly too," Hyde shot back on Twitter. "It's almost my birthday so double win. #thanks."

Hyde has made $56,000 in political contributions since 2016, according to the Hartford Courant, with much of it going to the Republican National Committee. But as of November, Hyde owed more than $2,000 in child support to Jennyfer Morin, the mother of his son.

"He can't even afford $100 a week in child support but he's golfing with Trump," Morin said, according to The Courant.

As news of Hyde’s involvement in the Ukraine scandal broke Tuesday, he was tweeting about his child support and claiming that he wasn’t a “deadbeat.” Hyde later deleted the tweets.

Impeachment evidence for MoscowMitch's coverup?

Wouldn't It Be Hilarious If The Senate Actually Found Him Guilty After All?

You can't 'unknow' something like this, right?

Monday, on Maine public Radio’s Morning Edition, Susan Collins used her experience from the Clinton impeachment trial to urge Moscow Mitch and Little Chucky Schmucky to play nice. “I think that the model and the precedent established by the trial for President Clinton is one that our leaders should take a hard look at. What happened back then is Senator Trent Lott on the Republican side, Senator Tom Daschle on the Democratic side, negotiated the terms to begin the trial. And those terms were adopted unanimously by the Senate, 100 to zero. I can't imagine anything like that happening today, regrettably. They decided that we would start with the opening arguments from both sides. And then we proceeded to a period where senators questioned the two sides through the Chief Justice. I remember submitting the only bipartisan question with Senator Russ Feingold at the time. And those questions, of which there were more than 100, elicited a lot of information that was very useful. So I hope we do that approach this time as well. Then we move to what I call the third stage. At that point, we debated whether or not we wanted to hear from witnesses and get additional documents. And there was a roll call vote, with Republicans wanting witnesses at that point. And Democrats, with few exceptions, not wanting witnesses, so we have a reverse of the current situation. And we decided to call just three witnesses and to have them deposed, rather than testifying live.”

Pressed by the host, she said she is open to calling witnesses, which is not the Trumpist line. “I am open to witnesses. I think it's premature to decide who should be called until we see the evidence that is presented and get the answers to the questions that we senators can submit through the Chief Justice to both sides.”

The reason Collins and Lisa Murkowski are even thinking about breaking with Trump and Moscow Mitch about calling witnesses is because of the bombshell reporting from the NY Times last week. Democrats-- and the media in general-- are presenting it as a game changer in the impeachment process.

Basically, the report reveals what many assumed, namely that Mulvaney was involved in withholding aid from Ukraine at Trump’s orders and that other Trumpists, primarily Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Secretary of Defense Mark Esper and then-National Security Adviser John Bolton overtly opposed the move. Monday, Schumer was running around like a chicken without a head, shrieking about calling them as witnesses.

"This new story shows all four witnesses that we Senate Democrats have requested" were "intimately involved and had direct knowledge of President Trump's decision to cut off aid and benefit himself," Schumer, a Democrat, told reporters in a press conference at his New York office.

"Simply put, in our fight to have key documents and witnesses in the Senate impeachment trial, these new revelations are a game changer."

The New York Times reported Sunday that Mulvaney was flying with President Donald Trump on Air Force One in June when he emailed his senior adviser to ask, “Did we ever find out about the money for Ukraine and whether we can hold it back?”

The adviser, Robert Blair, emailed back that it could be done, but he warned that they should "[e]xpect Congress to become unhinged," the report said, citing a previously undisclosed email. Assisting Mulvaney execute the hold were Blair and three officials in the White House Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought, the office's acting head, Michael Duffey, who oversees funding, and lawyer Mark Paoletta, the report said.

The Times' report also showed there was high-level pushback from top Trump officials, including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Secretary of Defense Mark Esper and now-former national security adviser John Bolton.

The trio met with Trump in the Oval Office in late August and pressed him to release the aid, with Bolton telling the president, "This is in America's interest," the Times reported, citing an official briefed on the gathering.

Trump responded that he didn't believe Ukraine's new president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, was a genuine reformer. "Ukraine is a corrupt country," Trump reportedly replied, adding that "We are pissing away our money."

Trump reversed course after news of the freeze became public and House Democrats announced they were investigating the hold.

The White House blocked Mulvaney, Pompeo, Esper, Vought, Bolton, Blair and others from testifying or turning over documents to House impeachment investigators.

Schumer is demanding Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) call Mulvaney, Bolton, Blair and Duffey as witnesses at Trump's Senate trial. Emails made public last week showed that Duffey was the official who told the Pentagon that the president wanted the aid frozen-- a request that came just hours after Trump's July phone call with the Ukrainian president that has served as the backbone of the impeachment proceedings against him.

The four witnesses "were intimately involved" with what was going on behind the scenes, Schumer said.

"Let me be clear, this is about getting to the truth," the Democratic leader said. "Will the Senate hold a fair trial or will it enable a cover-up? President Trump, if you are so confident you did nothing wrong, why won't you let your men testify?"

The Senate trial will begin after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) sends the two articles of impeachment over to the Senate, but it's unclear when exactly that will be. Senators are slated to return to Washington on Jan. 3.

Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD), a member of the House Judiciary and Oversight committees, told MSNBC's Katy Tur on Monday that the Times’ article “vindicates the judgment of the House of Representatives.”

"The New York Times story just fills in a lot more details about the essential narrative that is in the impeachment report coming from the House of Representatives," he said. "And we hope that the Senate would indeed fill in further facts that have since surfaced, you know, after our impeachment of the president."

Rep. Adam Schiff, the Intelligence Committee chairman who led the House impeachment inquiry, tweeted a link to the story and wrote, "Despite the President’s obstruction, additional damning evidence of his abuse of power continues to come to light. The question is whether the Senate will demand to see these and other emails and hear from those who were involved."

Expect Trump To Be Busy Pardoning A Lot Of People In His Last Month In The White House

Josh Dawsey, Carol Leonnig and Tom Hamburger reported in the Washington Post about more trouble for Trump. They wrote that a confidential White House review of Trump’s decision to place a hold on military aid to Ukraine has turned up hundreds of documents that reveal extensive efforts to generate an after-the-fact justification for the decision and a debate over whether the delay was legal-- clearly part of a cover-up. "The research by the White House Counsel’s Office," they wrote, "which was triggered by a congressional impeachment inquiry announced in September, includes early August email exchanges between acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney and White House budget officials seeking to provide an explanation for withholding the funds after President Trump had already ordered a hold in mid-July on the nearly $400 million in security assistance."

Meanwhile, Schiff told Jake Tapper on State of the Union that the House Intel Committee "will press ahead with its impeachment report even though key witnesses have not testified, in the latest signal that Democrats are moving swiftly in their probe of President Trump’s alleged efforts to pressure Ukraine... Schiff said the evidence against Trump is 'already overwhelming.'" Felicia Sonmez and Elise Viebeck reported that "Democrats are seeking to prove Trump leveraged military assistance and an Oval Office meeting in exchange for investigations of former vice president Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden and a debunked theory concerning purported Ukrainian interference in the 2016 presidential election.

Several key figures, including acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, Vice President Pence, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, former national security adviser John Bolton and Trump attorney Rudolph W. Giuliani, have declined to cooperate with the impeachment inquiry.

A federal judge is expected to rule Monday on whether former White House counsel Donald McGahn must testify under subpoena.

Some have argued that Democrats should litigate the matter in the courts to force more witnesses to testify. But Schiff said Sunday that time is of the essence and that Democrats will continue to investigate even after they have submitted their report to the House Judiciary Committee.

“We’re going to continue our investigation… The investigation isn’t going to end,” he said, adding that “we may have other depositions and hearings to do.”

He took particular aim at Bolton, arguing that the former national security adviser will have to explain why he chose to give his account of events “in a book” rather than show the “courage” that Fiona Hill, the former National Security Council Russia adviser, did in testifying before lawmakers last week.

Schiff declined to say how long it might take impeachment investigators to finish their report, saying only that “we’ll take the time that’s necessary.”

Trump, meanwhile, continued to take aim at Democrats, saying in a tweet on Sunday that they “are not getting important legislation done” because of the impeachment inquiry.

“USMCA, National Defense Authorization Act, Gun Safety, Prescription Drug Prices, & Infrastructure are dead in the water because of the Dems!” Trump said, referring to the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement and other matters.

In another tweet, Trump claimed that public opinion has “turned very strongly against Impeachment, especially in swing states,” though national polls have shown that public sentiment about impeachment has remained stable.

According to an NPR-PBS-Marist poll, 49 percent of respondents supported removing Trump from office in mid-November. This is similar to the 48 percent who said the same in early October in another NPR-PBS-Marist poll.

Administration officials and other Republicans on Sunday continued to defend Trump and sought to keep the focus on Biden, who is running for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination.

White House counselor Kellyanne Conway argued that there was no quid pro quo because Ukraine eventually received its military aid and Trump met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly in late September.

Conway also dismissed the notion that last week’s testimony strengthened Democrats’ hand, claiming that she sees swing-district Democrats “wringing their hands” over what to do.

“I think defense will go on offense if there is a Senate trial, and we’ll be able to call witnesses, we’ll be able to challenge their witnesses, produce other evidence,” Conway said on CBS News’s Face the Nation.

She added, “We simply can’t impeach and remove a democratically elected president from office because they didn’t beat him in 2016, they haven’t a clue how to beat him in 2020, [and] they don’t much like him.”

Rep. Jim Himes (D-CT), a member of the House Intelligence Committee, said he was “pretty sure that every single one” of Conway’s assertions was “inaccurate,” noting that Ukraine received its military aid and Trump met with Zelensky in New York only after a whistleblower made the complaint that triggered the impeachment inquiry.

“I understand that the White House is all about making facts slippery,” Himes said. “When the jig was up, yes, then the aid was released, once they [Trump and his allies] were caught.”

Himes also challenged Conway’s claim that Democrats in Congress were losing faith in the allegations.

“I don’t think any Democrat in the Congress looked at what happened over the last two weeks and said, ‘Gosh, there’s nothing there,’ ” Himes said, adding: “Every single day, every single piece of testimony brought up new information.”

Calling Trump’s alleged quid pro quo with Ukraine a “red herring,” Sen. John Neely Kennedy (R-LA) said it’s important for lawmakers to understand why Trump asked Zelensky for an investigation of the Bidens and what Hunter Biden did as a board member for Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company.

Kennedy said it was unfair that Trump was unable to call witnesses or offer a direct rebuttal during the initial proceedings of the impeachment inquiry.

“I think Speaker [Nancy] Pelosi’s judicial philosophy from the beginning has been ‘guilty,’ ” Kennedy said on Fox News Sunday. But he said that if there is a Senate trial, he does not think the allegations will be “summarily dismissed.”

“I’m in favor of doing it in accordance with due process and [letting] everybody offer whatever they want to in terms of evidence,” Kennedy said, even if that “takes a long time.”

The Louisiana Republican said he was unsure whether Russia or Ukraine hacked the Democratic National Committee’s servers during the 2016 election despite the intelligence community’s consensus that Russia was to blame. His comment drew a strong response from Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA), who said, “It was Russia, and as a country, we have to make sure that we absolutely acknowledge it was Russia [and] condemn Russia for it.”

“It actually plays into Russia’s hands if they [Republicans] have this equivalence with Ukraine where we’re saying, ‘Well, maybe we don’t know which one it was,’ ” Swalwell said.

In a separate interview on NBC News’s Meet the Press, Schiff said there is no longer a need for testimony from the anonymous whistleblower-- though Schiff had previously pledged that his panel would hear from the individual.

“We don’t need the whistleblower’s secondhand evidence anymore,” he said. “It would only serve to endanger this person and to gratify the president’s desire for retribution, and that is not a good enough reason to bring in the whistleblower.”

Schiff also pushed back against the argument that he himself should be called to testify in the Senate trial, noting, “I’m not a fact witness.”

“All I can relate is what the witnesses said in deposition and in the open hearings,” he said, arguing that calling him to testify would show a lack of seriousness by Senate Republicans.

On CNN, Schiff also declined to say whether he believes the House Ethics Committee should investigate Rep. Devin Nunes (CA), the top Republican on the intelligence panel, over allegations that he met with an ex-Ukranian official to obtain information about Joe Biden and his son.

House Armed Services Committee Chairman Adam Smith (D-WA) said Saturday that it was “quite likely” that Nunes would face a House inquiry. But Schiff said Sunday that he did not want to weigh in on the matter.

“I don’t want to comment on what the Ethics Committee should do, particularly vis-a-vis the ranking member of my committee,” Schiff said.

There seems to be an unending flow of impeachment-related witnesses and information the Democrats could still tap. Sunday night, for example, CNBC reported that Lev-- of Lev and Igor-- "wants to testify to Congress that aides to Rep. Devin Nunes called off a trip to Ukraine this year when they realized they would be required to notify Democratic committee chairman Adam Schiff. The purpose of the trip was to interview two Ukrainian prosecutors who claim to have evidence that could help President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign, according to Parnas’ lawyer. Parnas also alleges that Nunes, a leading Trump ally, himself traveled to Vienna last year to interview a potential source of political dirt on Joe Biden.

And Schiff is already in possession of video and audio tapes and photographs from Lev that are supposedly damning to Giuliani, Nunes and possibly Trump himself. "Some of the material sought by congressional investigators is already in possession of federal investigators within the Southern District of New York and thus held up from being turned over, according to sources familiar with the matter."

This morning, Bloomberg columnist Jonathan Bernstein, reminded his readers that conservative Republicans stuck with President Richard Nixon in 1974… right up until they didn’t. In other words: it ain't over 'til it's over. "Trump’s seemingly unanimous support right now is similar to the backing that Nixon had even as his original cover-up collapsed in early 1973; as the Senate Watergate committee hearings dominated that summer; as the Saturday Night Massacre unfolded in October; and as the House judiciary committee debated and voted on specific articles of impeachment in 1974. And then: The smoking gun tape came out and it all collapsed immediately. Even Nixon’s strongest supporter on the judiciary committee, the Jim Jordan of the day, who had just vigorously defended the president during televised deliberations, flipped and said he’d vote to impeach on the House floor."

Hannity & Friends Raise The Flag by Nancy Ohanian

You don't go to prison for hackery, of which Nunes is clearly guilty, but Nunes has gone much further than that. This morning, Charlie Sykes wrote that "In the real world, Nunes’ behavior has become so openly outlandish it's drawing fire from former colleagues. Even among the antics of Jordan and Stefanik on the House Intelligence Committee, Nunes stands out. As the hearings wrapped up, former Republican congressman and current (long-shot) presidential candidate Joe Walsh tweeted: 'One takeaway for what it’s worth: @DevinNunes is a stupid, partisan hack.' Perhaps, but Walsh’s critique seems incomplete. It is true that Nunes will never be confused with Abraham Lincoln in either intellect or statesmanship. It also is worth remembering that he is the guy suing a Twitter account called “Devin Nunes' Cow,” for $250 million for (among other things) calling him a 'treasonous cowpoke,' and tweeting that: 'Devin’s boots are full of manure. He’s udder-ly worthless and its pasture time to move him to prison.'"

Walsh is also right that Nunes is, like so many of his colleagues, a political hack. But he’s more than that. Devin Nunes has redefined hackery in the age of Trump.

Old-fashioned hackery generally consisted of loyalty and a willingness to take one for the party, because hacks were concerned with self-preservation. But the thing about this form of hackery is that there were limits-- a point beyond which even the most devoted hack would not go. (See: Watergate.)

So how to explain Nunes and his colleagues?

It is one thing to defend their party’s president against his partisan foes. This is hardly unprecedented. But the innovation of Trumpian hackery is the demand that hacks set their intellect, character and political future on fire.

Nunes is the very model of this new hackery. He is not merely Trump’s defender, he has become his doppelgänger and co-conspirator, willing to peddle discredited propaganda likely cooked up by Russian military intelligence if Trump demands it.

There are two possibilities here: Nunes knows that he is cynically using Trump-friendly talking points because they play well on Fox News, or he actually believes this fetid mass of falsehoods because, as Slate’s Will Saletan told me, “he’s been using his own product.” It’s not clear which is worse, but the question goes to the essence of the new hackery.

I have a strong feeling that a judge and jury will be deciding before this is all over.