This week in the ongoing disaster film that is the Trump administration, now that we’ve had our first set of Impeachment Hearings we can now see the collective GOP curl itself into a tight ball of denial and delusion. They have but one duty, to make it look perfectly “reasonable” to want to try and implement an investigation of Ukraine, Burisma, Hunter and Joe Biden.
And right now the poster child of deep dish delusion is currently Senator Lindsay Graham who has said it smell “fishy” for Hunter to have a job. Like apparently anywhere. Even though he also says “He loves Joe Biden, but...”
"I love Joe Biden as a person but we are not going to give a pass to what is obviously a conflict of interest. I believe Hunter Biden's association on the Burisma board doesn't pass the smell test. If a Republican was in the same position, they'd certainly be investigated!" Graham tweeted.
Graham's comments come a few days after a clip resurfaced of Graham saying Biden was "as good a man as God ever created" and "the nicest person I think I've ever met in politics" in a 2015 interview with the Huffington Post.
As has been documented by the dread pirates at CNN, Hunter Biden is a Yale Law School educated attorney who likely commands a retainer fee about about $50k per month. He’s started his own investment firm, has worked as a bank executive and had previously been a member of the board of Amtrak prior to working with Burisma advising them on navigating the U.S. legal system. He has had personal issues such as being seperated from the Navy due to testing positive on a drug test, and he’s had various marital problems, but the idea that he’s some kind of untalented layabout who rests entirely on a father’s laurels simply isn’t the case. I mean, he not Don Trump Jr. or anything.
Obviously various members of the GOP House caucus have caught this disease too. Gym Jordan, Mark Meadow, Elise Stefanik all seem to have fairly acute cases. But then the infection spread to Senator John Kennedy (R-LA) when he proclaimed Ukraine was behind the attack on our 2016 election.
Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) on Sunday still pushed President Donald Trump’s conspiracy theory that Ukraine was behind the DNC email hacks even after former NSC senior director Fiona Hill firmly debunked the claim.
“Senator Kennedy, who do you believe was responsible for hacking the DNC and Clinton campaign computers, their emails?” Fox News host Chris Wallace asked. “Was it Russia or Ukraine?”
Kennedy responded with “I don’t know, nor do you, nor do any of us. Ms. Hill-” before Wallace cut in.
“Let me just interrupt to say the entire intelligence community says it was Russia,” the Fox News host said.
“Right, but it could also be Ukraine,” Kennedy replied.
So the idea here is that NSA, CIA, FBI and Mueller investigation all looked into the source of the hacks which led to email released by Wikileaks for almost two years and all they came up with is non-committal shrug?
“Who did it?”
“Uh, I don’t know — it could have been the tooth fairy, maybe it was Robin Hood and 7 dwarves? But you don’t know either, see!”
Yeah, we do know. The Senate Intelligence Committee knows and said that Russia was responsible for the hacks and active measures in no uncertain terms.
The Senate Intelligence Committee has just released the first section of its report on 2016 Russian interference, which found that hackers likely tried to access election systems in all 50 states, confirming widespread fears that America’s election system may not be secure from attack.
For the past two and a half years, the panel led by Chair Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC) and Vice Chair Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) has reviewed the intelligence that the Kremlin sought to meddle in the last presidential election, an effort separate from the highly partisan probe in the House that ended in 2018 and found no collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.
The document released on Thursday afternoon — one day after former special counsel Robert Mueller testified in front of Congress on his effort — is not the entirety of the committee’s findings. It’s one of five volumes the panel will release over the coming month. This report focuses specifically on Russian efforts to infiltrate election infrastructure — that is, the actual systems that allow citizens to vote across the country.
The heavily redacted report contains almost entirely known information, so in that sense it’s not a bombshell document. But it does detail how Russia “directed extensive activity, beginning in at least 2014 and carrying into at least 2017, against US election infrastructure at the state and local level.”
And then you had the amazing announcement by Secretary of State Pompeo that we need to investigate Ukraine for the “Hacking and Interference.”
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo signaled on Tuesday that he would be open to investigating President Donald Trump’s bogus conspiracy theory that Ukraine, not Russia, interfered in the 2016 elections, even though that claim has been thoroughly debunked.
“Any time there is information that indicates that any country has messed with American elections, we not only have a right but a duty to make sure we chase that down,” Pompeo said when asked if the U.S. would pursue an investigation into the conspiracy theory.
The U.S. intelligence community has concluded unequivocally that it was Russia who meddled in the 2016 election, and last week former National Security Council adviser Fiona Hill slammed the Ukraine conspiracy theory as a “fictional narrative” propagated by “Russian security services themselves.”
Yet Pompeo pushed the false claim anyway on Tuesday, asserting that the U.S. “should leave no stone unturned.”
“Whatever nation it is that we have information that so much as suggests that there might have been interference or an effort to interfere in our elections, we have an obligation to make sure that the American people get to go to the ballot box, cast their ballots in a way that is unimpacted by these malevolent actors trying to undermine our Western democratic values,” he said.
So yeah, I think if the CIA, the NSA, the FBI, Mueller the Democratic House Intelligence report and/or the Senate Intel committee had found evidence that an. entirely. different. country. had also hacked and interfered in our election… they just might have mentioned it by now. They just might have brought the subject up.
I think they might have noticed such a thing.
I might have been part of the discussion previously, not just suddenly coming up now.
And what’s worse, Pompeo was HEAD OF THE FUCKING CIA while these investigations was going on. Is he saying he got a briefing about Ukrainian interference and never brought it up until now?
What is this delusion? Where does it come from? I mean, besides the Kremlin and Putin.
For years now, Russia has sought to frame Ukraine for its own actions interfering with the 2016 presidential election, the New York Times reported, citing three American officials. And, despite being briefed on Russia’s efforts, some in Congress are pushing these conspiracy theories, as seen in Republicans’ questions and speeches during the impeachment hearings.
[...]
According to the Times, beginning in 2017, Russian intelligence agents spread misinformation that Ukraine was behind the 2016 election hacking, mixing facts — that a very small number Ukranians did try to stop Trump from being elected — with blatant conspiracy theories. These agents, trying to mask the source of this smear campaign, then used oligarchs and businessmen as intermediaries to spread the information to American politicians and journalists. American intelligence officials have briefed senators and their aides on this very issue in recent weeks.
[...]
The throughline between Russian and Republican talking points is blatantly obvious. On Wednesday, Russian President Vladimir Putin continued to push the notion of Ukrainian meddling. He even celebrated that US politicians were forwarding Russian talking points on the matter. “We see what is going on there in the US now. Thank God nobody is accusing us anymore of interfering in the US elections. Now they’re accusing Ukraine,” he said.
Yeah, Thank God. You see what he did there?
This ploy is thinly transparent and weak, and yet the GOP keeps falling for it like Lucy and the football. It’s almost enough to think they don’t know what the frack they’re talking about it.
Almost.
Here are the rest of this weeks daily events and Steve Shives:
November 23rd —
November 24th —
November 25th—
November 26th —
November 27th —
November 28th —
November 29th —