LOL awesome, the Republican talking point is that the President has an obligation to ask foreign powers to investigate his political rivals.

Hi there!

In addition to the Brexit process, I will now have to follow the impeach.

What are you guys doing with the mightiest man on the planet? This is not just a "petty" Clinton style sex scandal. Can't imagine all the dirt that will be dug up.

I’d be interested in seeing the source(outside of Tucker’s made up totally not real- fake news show)for the claim that the office of legal counsel would advise that accepting foreign intelligence on your potential election opponent isn’t a “thing of value”. That goes directly against existing federal election committee law. I would assume Tucker’s swamp guest is trying to obfuscate by saying a president is ok accepting random foreign intelligence outside of oppo research dealing with an upcoming election.

What Trump did was an abuse of power and betrayal of his oath of office. The crimes are extortion and conspiracy to defraud the American people. The office of the Presidency must be cleansed by his removal.


PairTheBoard

Not a single person in this thread has adequately explained why Trump did not turn his alleged suspicion over to the DOJ. The department that administers the most powerful law enforcement agencies in the world.

Instead your talking points are essentially that for an American president to ask a foreign government to investigate the son of a political rival is a natural and conscientious thing to do.

It isn't.

I mean, Jsmith27, you are right now arguing that the head of the executive branch, the branch which enforces the law, should completely bypass the executive branch in order to to enforce the law. Do you really not see how incredibly weak that argument is?

Yeah it’s amazing. Of course the fact that trump released that memo and is releasing the whistleblower report in order to pretend like he wasn’t actually obstructing is amazing. We should see parts of the whistleblower report tomorrow which ironically will likely show obstruction.

Trump surrounding himself with complete incompetence might finally catch up to him.

Jsmith, there is no circumstance where trump’s favor ask is okay. No matter how you want to spin it.

Lol. The AG was a party to this whole thing. He should of recused himself. All the DOJ decision does is show cover up and obstruction. You have a way of misreading every tea leaf.

Also I am curious why the president’s PERSONAL attorney is a key figure in this? He represents Trump not the presidency or the White House. Kind of explodes the idea he was doing this as a law enforcement action.

This is one of the key things about this debacle.

Over the last year the circle around Trump of people who are willing to object to his actions and people who actually properly understand law and politics have been almost completely purged.

It will be interesting to see the consequences of that when it comes to investigation.

These are the same GOPers who are always deeply troubled by whatever fiasco was just exposed. But when it counts and it's voting time they fall in line.

No im not. Did you read the transcript? He told him he would have AG barr call him. He is accessing more information for his branch, not bypassing it.

The president is allowed to ask other presidents to do things. You can't spin that. I don't think you guys have any clue what falls under the presidents powers and what doesnt and I dont think you guys want to put in the research either. I think you want to claim its illegal and hope you are right.

Did they also wear capes and masks while they fought for justice? I'm sorry, but this isn't a crime novel for children.

No good reason for trying to get Ukraine to investigate the son of a political rival has been offered. As a simple man I'll go out on a limb and say that this is likely because no good reason exists.

Not really a good reason to have the US government investigate the son of a political rival during election season either.

Not really into any real territory here that has honest answers.

Every time he throws Rudy's name in. Barr said he was never asked by Trump to contact the Ukraine and Rudy said he the state department asked him to soooooo....

Well, when people argue that "he did the right thing", I think "why didn't he do it the right way?" is an apt question. Anything else just boils down into desperate rhetoric to try and spin it around Biden.

As for actual answers, this administration is such a convoluted mess of contradictions, utter incompetence, straight out lies, half-truths, retractions and cliche talking points that I don't know if answers even exist.

At this point I'm not even sure Trump knows why he did what he did, or if it was a fit of dementia. This is a president who stuck to his lies by drawing them with a sharpie on an official weather map.

The thing is Rudy has been involved in Ukraine for a while. He was tasked with trying to dig up dirt that would give Trump a reason to pardon Manafort and also drum up some conspiracy theories that the Dems were having Ukraine dig up dirt on Manafort/Trump in order to do a false equivalency with Russia hacking the Dems emails

https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2019/0...kraine-scheme/

The investigation was into the business activities of Mykola Zlochevsky, who owned a natural gas company, Burisma Holdings, for which Hunter Biden had sat on the board of directors since 2014. The United Kingdom had begun investigating Zlochevsky before Hunter Biden joined the board.

You miss the point from me. Trump is doing a scummy thing, but what allows that scummy thing is the conflict of interest. It's not surprising it's the partisans here (and everywhere) that hand wave the conflict away. The motivations are political theater at this point. Not many non-partisans are looking at this and saying, hey the R's look bad here, they are looking at both sides and saying you all are idiots.

I don't see any "allows" in this scenario. Trump did his bizarre thing and nobody really knew before a whistle-blower came forward, and would perhaps never have known. Where do we put the "allows" in that scenario?

Only when it became apparent that more and more details would become public, we suddenly see some limited admissions and a transcript.

Yeah, people arguing it's perfectly fine for Trump to do this, are just the partisans on the other side the aisle. Again, if the Biden conflict of interest were not underlying this situation, it'd be more damaging, but the left can't really take the high road on this one. It seems absurd to me the left is asking the public to basically ignore that conflict of interest. That's rather scummy as well.

The donnie supporters are worried about conflicts of interest all the sudden? Weird.

I don't think it is partisan to root a subject in facts. The fact is that the president has behind closed doors undertaken a series of actions that has resulted in a whistle-blower complaint, the content of which has been labelled "very serious" by both the house and senate intelligence committees.

The white house fought to stop the complaint, and only after public details started becoming apparent and a bi-partisan and unanimous senate decision demanding the complaint, did the White House start releasing summaries of a call that was one of the many issues in the complaint.

We know that among other things the president has attempted to get Ukraine to investigate his currently biggest political rival and son not long before a coming election, and there are strong indicators he would use the power of his office to hurt Ukraine financially and strategically if they did not comply.

Other than that we have seen fairly varying and contradictory explanations from the other parties the president has claimed was involved.

We know the president has not utilized any proper or official channels to get his alleged suspicions investigated. As many of his supporters in this thread has pointed out, he is the head of the executive branch. He quite literally has world's most powerful and effective law enforcement capacity at his finger-tips. Nor do I think it is very controversial to say that if these alleged suspicions had any basis other than imagination, it wouldn't be very difficult to pursue an official course of action through those means.