The youngster has a chess tournament tonight. I kind of wish I was playing because there’s less pressure that way. In any case, that’s the reason why I won’t have more to say about this this evening, per the Wall Street Journal:
President Trump in a July phone call repeatedly pressured the president of Ukraine to investigate Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden ’s son, urging Volodymyr Zelensky about eight times to work with Rudy Giuliani, his personal lawyer, on a probe, according to people familiar with the matter.
“He told him that he should work with [Mr. Giuliani] on Biden, and that people in Washington wanted to know” whether allegations were true or not, one of the people said.
Is that all there is to the story? Is there even more damning stuff coming? What’s the potential for this to be more that the run-of-the-mill scandal we’ve all grown accustomed to hearing about and then seeing nothing happen?
Eight times in a single phone call, the president actually pressured a foreign leader to investigate the family of his most likely 2020 opponent. That’s outrageous behavior. And he followed up on it by sending Giuliani to Ukraine, so it can’t be finessed as a joke.
I’ve decided that if they damn ever breaks it will come as a surprise to me. I’m just not sure what will trigger Trump’s downfall. I feel like it’s like a sandpile where if you keep adding a single grains of sand to the pile eventually it will cause an avalanche. But no one can predict which grain will start the process.
My imperfect understanding is that he’s breaking campaign laws by soliciting aide from a foreign power. Like Russia 2016 but caught on tape. The Trumpenproletariat won’t care about campaign finance law, but this should play well in those suburbs. Ideally, the Three Stooges running against him in the primary will batter him with this. And maybe….maybe…depress turnout next November.
But the arcana of campaign laws is unlikely to “get him.”
It’s always worse than it seems. But damn, this is bad. And they seem to be playing the same game as always…deny and attack.
Who exactly is going to do anything about this? Nobody. They’ll probably appoint Mueller to investigate.
The guy is unbelievable. On the phone, in front of witnesses. Nobody gets away with this……..except him.
.
And there it is. Whatever he does he gets away with it. Shit.
HatTip Emptywheel, but it might be connected;
https://www.cnn.com/2019/08/09/politics/sue-gordon-resignation-coats-interrupts-meeting/index.html
.
Sure it’s connected. She had to go to get her out of succession and allow Trump to approve another political hack.
I mean ‘connected’ in that the phone conversation in which Trump tried to blackmail Ukraine happened in July. Right after, around the 28th of July, it was announced Coats was quitting, then on August 7 he interrupted a meeting to urge his deputy to resign.
Yeah, this will be another ho-hum scandal–if it’s even reported as a “scandal” and not just as “today’s news”. Just another pious “norm” that has been nuked by National Trumpalism. If this is a campaign finance violation, there’s no existing enforcement mechanism in our failed state, and in any event less than 1% of The 46% would even raise an eyebrow over it. Indeed, as the Mueller/Russia debacle showed, The 46% love how outside influence (and plutocrat dark money) aid their side in our elections.
It does mean that Dem prez candidates can feel free to pressure or suborn Trumper-hating governments to make life difficult for Der Trumper as a way to influence the 2020 election, because the old norm (or principle) of Americans sticking together against foreign interests is now totally kaput. I suppose the problem is that, for our failed corporate media and Repub judiciary, a Repub prez can do this, but it would be totally disqualifying if a Dem were to do something similar. That’s known as Both Sides (Can’t) Do It!
Deny, attack, then hold up a shiny penny.
It worked his whole life, then it got him elected POTUS.
I just listened to Joy Reid of MSNBC lay out this whole affair starting with the Trump Tower meeting and the change in the platform all the way up to the squabble about the G7. The man should be impeached and locked up that is as close as I can get to how I feel about him now.
The whistle blowers identity is at risk here along with potential legal liability. How is it this man can behave a dictator and no one can stop him.
Little tyke won the chess tournament and has a trophy the size of a house.
Good news! I was hoping for an update.
You should do a write up of the experience.
.
Not a whole lot to report. The thing that would probably interest non-chess players the most is that he was the only person in the tournament who isn’t Indian. He belongs to two chess clubs, one in school and one outside of school. He’s the only white kid in his outside school chess club, too.
This was an official FIDE-sponsored tournament, so he just jacked up his rating quite a bit. We won’t know how much for a few days. He won all his matches, so no draws, and he came in first by winning some tiebreaker that the algorithm spat out with the only other player to win all his matches.
He notated the first two matches but not the third for some reason. I think he knew he could win the tournament and just wanted to concentrate. He can run those matches through the computers tomorrow and review all the inaccuracies and mistakes he made.
I really don’t know what strategies he used. He was black for the first match and I suspect he used a Sicilian Defense but I have no idea what he did as white. If he thought the player wasn’t too strong he probably used a Danish Gambit on them because he tends to destroy people who don’t know how to defend it. He probably did not risk that if he judged them as competent. Personally, I obsessively use the Queen’s Gambit to avoid the Sicilian Defense, but I think that biases him against using it himself. He may have just gone with a vanilla Ruy Lopez opening and relied on his superior vision of the board to just grind people down.
I know in the last match he was in a real dogfight because I saw the board briefly during the midgame and it was dead even. Later on, he blasted open the queen side and promoted a pawn to queen, and it was over shortly after that.
He just had to wait on pins and needles to see if he won the tiebreaker, and he did. Big smile. Big trophy!
Great report!
I don’t play much anymore, but watch agadmater’s channel on YouTube, and follow the international tournaments through him.
.
I just played this quick game as white against a 1200 player and he resigned after 12 moves.
1.
d4 d5
2.
c4 dxc4
3.
Nc3 Be6
4.
e4 Na6
5.
d5 Bd7
6.
Bxc4 b5
7.
Be2 b4
8.
Na4 Bxa4
9.
Qxa4+ Qd7
10.
Qxa6 Nf6
11.
Bb5 c6
12.
Bxc6 Qxc6
I still screwed this up. I absolutely should have played 11. Bb5 before 10. Qxa6
I’ll put this opening paragraph of Jimmy Breslin’s How the Good Guys Finally Won here with a number of qualifications:
1) It’s Jimmy Breslin, a great reporter and storyteller who was known to, on occasion, not let the details get in the way of a good story;
2) It’s after the fact, published after the end of the story was known; and,
3) It’s possible Pelosi or someone else in the House leadership is doing something like what Breslin describes but just not being public about it.
That said, I sure hope someone in the Democratic House leadership is and has been doing what Breslin describes O’Neill as doing 46 1/2 years ago:
“He doesn’t remember the date, he wasn’t keeping notes on everything at the time, but Congressman Thomas P. O’Neill, Jr., does know that it was just after he had become Majority Leaders of the House of Representatives in January of 1973 that he walked into Speaker Carl Albert’s office and said, ‘All my years tell me what’s happening. They did so many bad things during that campaign that there is no way to keep it from coming out. They did too many things. Too many people know about it. There is no way to keep it quiet. The time is going to come when impeachment is going to hit this Congress and we better be ready for it.'”
This, too, is part of political leadership: anticipating what’s coming and then working to make sure your people are prepared to deal with it.
“He told him that he should work with [Mr. Giuliani] on Biden, and that people in Washington wanted to know” whether allegations were true or not, one of the people said.
That’s not enough. If they find evidence that he said “and report that the allegations are true, regardless of what you find,” then it would be enough. That may very well have been implied, but it needs to be explicit. Another smoking gun won’t help. We need video of the bullet emerging from the barrel.
This only matters if the House Dems grow a spine and start severely inconveniencing administration officials who ignore plainly written laws. “Inherent contempt”, take over a D.C. jail (it is a federal district, no?), throw them into the slammer, and let them stew until the administration officials decide to follow the frickin’ law. Maybe have the admin officials tap an old Staples Easy Button after they decide to follow the law. That was easy, now wasn’t it?
Oh right, I forgot, laws are for Dems and us proles. They are Republicans, so laws don’t apply to them…