It is indeed a tough way to make a living, but our lived experience tells us that we can survive Trumpism. Even if he steals the election he will get removed. Like the Las Vegas show The Act, and the Steele report of golden showers in the Russian hotel, it will get conflated with the histories of every removal of a petty tyrant.
Even if Trump wins in November, the first steps to a second impeachment will begin, if anything the indictment challenge for a sitting president may get fully litigated. AG Barr may have to be impeached first, however.
Much of what the report says about Kilimnik has previously been touched upon or mentioned briefly during political investigations and in media reports.
What’s new here is the level of detail. Kilimnik’s name appears about 800 times in the Senate intelligence report.
The report said Manafort’s proximity to Trump “created opportunities for the Russian intelligence services to exert influence over, and acquire confidential information.”
Kilimnik, for his part, “likely served as a channel to Manafort for Russian intelligence services, and that those services likely sought to exploit Manafort’s access to gain insight into the Campaign,” the report said.
Kilimnik may also have been key in spreading the false narrative that the Ukrainians interceded in the 2016 election. The committee, in a footnote, said it “identified no reliable evidence” that the Ukrainian government interfered.
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Kos gives us the best summary of next week’s attempt to distract us:
I’m not even talking about content. You know those cabinet meetings where everyone around the table took turns to praise their Dear Leader Trump? This will be 1,000 times worse, a three-day festival to a single man and the deplorable people who idolize him. For a campaign and party bleeding critical suburban support among college-educated white women, we can fully expect Trump and company to double down on the very bullying, racism, xenophobia, and misogyny that drove those voters away in the first place.
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Justice will arrive eventually. Volume 5 Senate Intelligence Committee report will be a part.
Some of the characters and many of the themes that populate the roughly 1,000-page Senate report released Tuesday on Russia’s interference in the 2016 election remain part of President Trump’s political orbit or his reelection effort four years later.
The investigation from the Senate Intelligence Committee portrays Trump’s 2016 campaign as eager to accept help from a foreign power and the then-candidate as a direct participant.
Its arrival also underscores how little the evidence of Russia’s desire to wreak havoc on U.S. elections laid out now in numerous reports and investigations has chastened the president and his allies.
With the 2020 election only a few months away, new warnings are being raised about the desire of Russia, China and other countries to interfere in America’s democratic process.
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Last fall, Mr. Trump became the third president in history to be impeached. The House of Representatives charged him with what amounts to extortion for personal political gain: Mr. Trump held up an arms sale and a White House meeting in an effort to pressure the president of Ukraine to slander former vice president Joe Biden. The House also charged him with illegally refusing to cooperate with its investigation.
In February, the Senate voted to acquit the president, with Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah the lone Republican honest enough to acknowledge that the evidence was irrefutable. A few other Republicans, perhaps embarrassed by their own moral collapse, suggested that Mr. Trump would be chastened by impeachment and mend his ways.
Instead, he has been emboldened, and his behavior in the half-year since provides an indication of the lawlessness we can expect if Mr. Trump is reelected. He has swept aside U.S. attorneys who would not bend the law to his whim; fired officials throughout the government whose only offense was to do their jobs honestly or seek to hold his administration accountable; sicced unbadged troops on peaceful protesters in D.C. and Portland, Ore., for the benefit of his reelection campaign; ignored and lied about credible reports of Russian bounties on U.S. soldiers.
He has sought to undermine confidence in democracy itself, lying about the prevalence of fraud, floating the possibility of delaying the election and even suggesting he may not accept its results.
These are high crimes and misdemeanors, as the framers of the Constitution understood the term. But this time it is up to us, the American people, to remove Mr. Trump from office.
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It may still be Trump-Russia, but Trump’s latest failure simply puts a fork in Trump because of his consistency in being what GHW Bush called a “blowhard”.
The ad, which will be rotated into a multimillion-dollar buy in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, suggests that the man decided to “follow” his leaders in some sense on the coronavirus and that this “cost him his life.”
The ad doesn’t say exactly how. But CNN reports that the young woman, Kristin Urquiza, wrote a letter to Gov. Doug Ducey of Arizona that blamed her father’s death in part on the Republican governor’s opposition to local governments implementing safety measures, which Trump generally opposed as well.
An operative at American Bridge tells me the group’s testing found this ad is potent with Trump-friendly constituencies. Viewing it moved elderly people, non-college whites, voters who switched from Barack Obama in 2012 to Trump in 2016 and low-enthusiasm Trump supporters toward Biden.
It might be that there is a kind of unique power in the sheer horror of the mounting carnage under the coronavirus crisis, particularly when it’s combined with Trump’s constant denial of its existence, his undisguised prioritization of his reelection needs over any obligation to level with the public about it and his appalling refusal to use all his powers to combat it.
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