I don't often watch MSNBC as it's not available on my Sling system, but I do peek in occasionally through the NBC News App and there's been an amazing change that's taken place there that shoud be noted. Chris Hayes now hosts a live audience on his Friday broadcast, and that takes his usually insightful and witty articulation of the days news to an entirely new level. We've seen this type of thing on The Daily Show and on Full Frontal for years now, but seeing it done not just for satire purposes but with the real news is a genuine treat to behold.
Hayes points out that while Trump ranted about "Crowdstrike having the server", Steven Doocy gently spoke up and said "Are you sure they have the server?" This is something that CNN has fact-checked.
CrowdStrike
Trump said that Democrats gave a computer server that was hacked in 2016 to "a company owned by a very wealthy Ukrainian."
Facts First:
The cybersecurity company that investigated the hack, CrowdStrike, is a publicly traded American company co-founded by Dmitri Alperovitch, an American citizen who was born in Russia, not Ukraine. Regardless, such firms do not typically take possession of physical servers to conduct their analysis.
Asked if he is sure the Democrats gave the server to Ukraine, Trump did not cite any specific evidence. He said, "That's what the word is."
The word? What "word?" As I pointed out when I went into a deep dive of the Crowdstrike conspiracy a few weeks ago — there actually is no physical "Server" for either Crowdstrike or the FBI to have taken physical possession of, because the DNC email system was largely cloud-based.
The “server” Trump is obsessed with is actually 140 servers, most of them cloud-based, which the DNC was forced to decommission in June 2016 while trying to rid its network of the Russian GRU officers working to help Trump win the election, according to the figures in the DNC’s civil lawsuit against Russia and the Trump campaign. Another 180 desktop and laptop computers were also swapped out as the DNC raced to get the organization back on its feet and free of Putin’s surveillance.
But despite Trump’s repeated feverish claims to the contrary, no machines are actually missing.
What the FBI received were digital copies of the server hard drives, which is basically all that they could give them. Crowdstrike never took physical possession of the servers, they worked on the live active system at the same time that the hackers were accessing them in order to track and identify them. What they found was that the hackers were working 9 to 5 hours from a Russian Time Zone.
As Hayes goes on to say, "This is 9-11 Truther level nuts."
Then Hayes goes on the address the horrible betrayal of American values that Trump's repeated attacks on Hunter Biden entails.
“Because the president — and I know he doesn’t believe this, but it’s true — the president is the president of Hunter Biden, too,” Hayes said. “He is.”
“Because Hunter Biden is an American citizen and it is the president’s duty to protect all Americans — all Americans — from the deprivations of foreign judicial systems. In fact, it is really the president’s job to represent all of America’s national interests. That’s the job.”
“He took an oath to take care that the laws are faithfully executed, and he has used the position to benefit himself instead. and not just to benefit himself, he benefits himself at the cost of the American interests, at the cost of American citizens, at the cost of America’s reputation, at the cost of Americans’ sovereignty and self-determination over our own electoral process,” Hayes said.
“And that is the reason that he’s being impeached,” Hayes said.
It hasn't been covered much, but Hunter Biden is an attorney. He has previously worked prior to Joe Biden's time as Vice President as a bank executive. He was a lobbyist for the Department of Commerce and was also a member of the board for Amtrak. The idea that he doesn't possess any skill or experience that would make him suitable for the board of gas company Burisma is flatly false. Also I don't see anyone asking what were the qualifications for former George W. Bush CIA Official Cofer Black to be on the board of Barisma at the exact same time? Why aren't people saying that Cofer Black was the coffee boy?
There were good reason to investigate Burisma head Mykola Zlochevsky for allegations of self-dealing when he funneled several government contracts to his own companies when he was the Ukrainian Minister of Ecology back in 2010-2012. Hunter Biden didn't join the board of Burisma until after that had happened, and the that investigation of Zlochesvsky had already been shutdown by Viktor Shokin over a year before Joe Biden began pushing for his removal in late 2015.
Hunter Biden deserves the protection of the American Justice system, he doesn't deserve to be tossed under the bus of Trump political ambitions. He shouldn't be used as a tool in Trump's attempt to subvert our election system using a foreign government. Trying to extort Zelensky to generate foreign election aid using a private citizen, Giuliani, in violation of the Logan Act while pushing Government officials to help his campaign is a violation of the Hatch Act. If he's willing to violate our Constitution and letter of our laws at this level now, what's he going to do if he gets re-elected?
All of that is why he should be impeached and removed.