US Politics Mega-thread - Page 1420

On May 03 2019 05:55 hunts wrote:


It's not a trap when he is guilty of the thing, but hey you keep living in your fabricated world.

On May 03 2019 05:41 xDaunt wrote:


I don't believe that this is correct. He was asked a very broad definition and he monkeyed around with his answer. That's what got him into trouble. Keep in mind that his trouble went beyond Congress and the impeachment hearing, but also included the federal court in Arkansas who subsequently found him in contempt of court. There's a very good reason why Clinton was disbarred after all of this.

On May 03 2019 06:01 GreenHorizons wrote:


Did I miss a conviction or are you in the fabricated world?

On May 03 2019 06:01 GreenHorizons wrote:


Did I miss a conviction or are you in the fabricated world?

On May 03 2019 06:08 Plansix wrote:
Yeah, that isn’t the argument. The argument is that perjury traps are not real and no one gets caught in them.

On May 03 2019 06:09 KwarK wrote:

You, just like everyone else, knows they’re guilty. It’s not like you to abdicate your opinions to the state and wait to be told whether he’s guilty or not. Whether the state chooses to pursue conviction doesn’t make a criminal less criminal.

On May 03 2019 06:18 GreenHorizons wrote:


Poor people know this not to be true. Perjury traps existence is dependent on whether one adopts the perspective of a defense attorney or prosecutors. The law is a mish mash of trash so "breaking the law" and "doing something wrong" diverge often enough to fail as synonyms.

This is why even non-attorneys know rule 1, with often even innocent clients, is to not let them talk.

On May 03 2019 06:26 Plansix wrote:

You are right. I should have been clearer. Perjury traps do not exist for people at this level of power and privilege. There is no reason for anyone in the justice department to worry about a “perjury trap”. Especially when they are always afforded the opportunity to correct the record if they do make a mistake.

On May 03 2019 06:34 GreenHorizons wrote:


I appreciate the clarification but I do caution people (you've made marked improvement, not that you want or need my praise) to think about how often they may make the mistake of seeing and speaking from a place that doesn't reflect consideration for those of different circumstances. Particularly marginalized people in society rather than "default" anglo-americans who's perspectives are never lacking.

On May 03 2019 05:34 IgnE wrote:


I suspect that no one’s hands are clean. Make no mistake: Trump is an idiot and a criminal. But this might prove to be very interesting and should concern anyone who takes elections seriously.

The boomerang from the Democratic Party’s failed attempt to connect Donald Trump to Russia’s 2016 election meddling is picking up speed, and its flight path crosses right through Moscow’s pesky neighbor, Ukraine. That is where there is growing evidence a foreign power was asked, and in some cases tried, to help Hillary Clinton.

In its most detailed account yet, Ukraine’s embassy in Washington says a Democratic National Committee insider during the 2016 election solicited dirt on Donald Trump’s campaign chairman and even tried to enlist the country's president to help.

In written answers to questions, Ambassador Valeriy Chaly's office says DNC contractor Alexandra Chalupa sought information from the Ukrainian government on Paul Manafort’s dealings inside the country, in hopes of forcing the issue before Congress.

Chalupa later tried to arrange for Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko to comment on Manafort’s Russian ties on a U.S. visit during the 2016 campaign, the ambassador said.

Chaly says that, at the time of the contacts in 2016, the embassy knew Chalupa primarily as a Ukrainian-American activist, and learned only later of her ties to the DNC. He says the embassy considered her requests an inappropriate solicitation of interference in the U.S. election.

“The Embassy got to know Ms. Chalupa because of her engagement with Ukrainian and other diasporas in Washington D.C., and not in her DNC capacity. We’ve learned about her DNC involvement later,” Chaly said in a statement issued by his embassy. “We were surprised to see Alexandra’s interest in Mr. Paul Manafort’s case. It was her own cause. The Embassy representatives unambiguously refused to get involved in any way, as we were convinced that this is a strictly U.S. domestic matter.

“All ideas floated by Alexandra were related to approaching a Member of Congress with a purpose to initiate hearings on Paul Manafort or letting an investigative journalist ask President Poroshenko a question about Mr. Manafort during his public talk in Washington, D.C.,” the ambassador explained.

Reached by phone last week, Chalupa said she was too busy to talk. She did not respond to email and phone messages seeking subsequent comment.

Chaly’s written answers mark the most direct acknowledgement by Ukraine’s government that an American tied to the Democratic Party sought the country’s help in the 2016 election, and they confirm the main points of a January 2017 story by Politico on Chalupa’s efforts.

In that story, the embassy was broadly quoted as denying interference in the election and suggested Chalupa’s main reason for contacting the ambassador’s office was to organize an event celebrating women leaders.

The fresh statement comes several months after a Ukrainian court ruled that the country’s National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU), closely aligned with the U.S. embassy in Kiev, and a parliamentarian named Serhiy Leshchenko wrongly interfered in the 2016 American election by releasing documents related to Manafort.

The acknowledgement by Kiev’s embassy, plus newly released testimony, suggests the Ukrainian efforts to influence the U.S. election had some intersections in Washington as well.

Nellie Ohr, wife of senior U.S. Justice Department official Bruce Ohr, acknowledged in congressional testimony that, while working for the Clinton-hired research firm Fusion GPS, she researched Trump and Manafort’s ties to Russia and learned Leshchenko, the Ukrainian lawmaker, was providing dirt to Fusion.

Fusion also paid British intelligence operative Christopher Steele, whose anti-Trump dossier the FBI used as primary evidence to support its request to spy on Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.

In addition, I wrote last month that the Obama White House invited Ukrainian law enforcement officials to a meeting in January 2016 as Trump rose in the polls on his improbable path to the presidency. The meeting led to U.S. requests to the Ukrainians to help investigate Manafort, setting in motion a series of events that led to the Ukrainians leaking the documents about Manafort in May 2016.

The DNC’s embassy contacts add a new dimension, though. Chalupa discussed in the 2017 Politico article about her efforts to dig up dirt on Trump and Manafort, including at the Ukrainian embassy.

FEC records show Chalupa’s firm, Chalupa & Associates, was paid $71,918 by the DNC during the 2016 election cycle.

Exactly how the Ukrainian embassy responded to Chalupa’s inquiries remains in dispute.

Chaly’s statement says the embassy rebuffed her requests for information: “No documents related to Trump campaign or any individuals involved in the campaign have been passed to Ms. Chalupa or the DNC neither from the Embassy nor via the Embassy. No documents exchange was even discussed.”

But Andrii Telizhenko, a former political officer who worked under Chaly from December 2015 through June 2016, told me he was instructed by the ambassador and his top deputy to meet with Chalupa in March 2016 and to gather whatever dirt Ukraine had in its government files about Trump and Manafort.

Telizhenko said that, when he was told by the embassy to arrange the meeting, both Chaly and the ambassador’s top deputy identified Chalupa “as someone working for the DNC and trying to get Clinton elected.”

Over lunch at a Washington restaurant, Chalupa told Telizhenko in stark terms what she hoped the Ukrainians could provide the DNC and the Clinton campaign, according to his account.

“She said the DNC wanted to collect evidence that Trump, his organization and Manafort were Russian assets, working to hurt the U.S. and working with Putin against the U.S. interests. She indicated if we could find the evidence they would introduce it in Congress in September and try to build a case that Trump should be removed from the ballot, from the election,” he recalled.

After the meeting, Telizhenko said he became concerned about the legality of using his country’s assets to help an American political party win an U.S. election. But he proceeded with his assignment.

Telizhenko said that, as he began his research, he discovered that Fusion GPS was nosing around Ukraine, seeking similar information, and he believed they, too, worked for the Democrats.

As a former aide inside the general prosecutor’s office in Kiev, Telizhenko used contacts with intelligence, police and prosecutors across the country to secure information connecting Russian figures to assistance on some of the Trump organization’s real estate deals overseas, including a tower in Toronto.

Telizhenko said he did not want to provide the intelligence he collected directly to Chalupa, and instead handed the materials to Chaly: “I told him what we were doing was illegal, that it was unethical doing this as diplomats.” He said the ambassador told him he would handle the matter and had opened a second channel back in Ukraine to continue finding dirt on Trump.

Telizhenko said he also was instructed by his bosses to meet with an American journalist researching Manafort’s ties to Ukraine.

About a month later, he said his relationship with the ambassador soured and, by June 2016, he was ordered to return to Ukraine. There, he reported his concerns about the embassy’s contacts with the Democrats to the former prosecutor general’s office and officials in the Poroshenko administration: “Everybody already knew what was going on and told me it had been approved at the highest levels.”

Telizhenko said he never was able to confirm whether the information he collected for Chalupa was delivered to her, the DNC or the Clinton campaign.

Chalupa, meanwhile, continued to build a case that Manafort and Trump were tied to Russia.

In April 2016, she attended an international symposium where she reported back to the DNC that she had met with 68 Ukrainian investigative journalists to talk about Manafort. She also wrote that she invited American reporter Michael Isikoff to speak with her. Isikoff wrote some of the seminal stories tying Manafort to Ukraine and Trump to Russia; he later wrote a book making a case for Russian collusion.

“A lot more coming down the pipe,” Chalupa wrote a top DNC official on May 3, 2016, recounting her effort to educate Ukrainian journalists and Isikoff about Manafort.

Then she added: “More offline tomorrow since there is a big Trump component you and Lauren need to be aware of that will hit in next few weeks and something I’m working on you should be aware of.”

Less than a month later, the “black ledger” identifying payments to Manafort was announced in Ukraine, forcing Manafort to resign as Trump’s campaign chairman and eventually face criminal prosecution for improper foreign lobbying.

DNC officials have suggested in the past that Chalupa’s efforts were personal, not officially on behalf of the DNC. But Chalupa’s May 2016 email clearly informed a senior DNC official that she was “digging into Manafort” and she suspected someone was trying to hack into her email account.

Chaly over the years has tried to portray his role as Ukraine’s ambassador in Washington as one of neutrality during the 2016 election. But in August 2016 he raised eyebrows in some diplomatic circles when he wrote an OpEd in The Hill skewering Trump for some of his comments on Russia. “Trump’s comments send wrong message to world,” Chaly’s article blared in the headline.

In his statement to me, Chaly said he wrote the article because he had been solicited for his views by The Hill’s opinion team.

Chaly’s office also acknowledged that a month after the OpEd, President Poroshenko met with then-candidate Clinton during a stop in New York. The office said the ambassador requested a similar meeting with Trump but it didn’t get organized.

Though Chaly and Telizhenko disagree on what Ukraine did after it got Chalupa’s request, they confirm that a paid contractor of the DNC solicited their government’s help to find dirt on Trump that could sway the 2016 election.

For a Democratic Party that spent more than two years building the now-disproven theory that Trump colluded with Russia to hijack the 2016 election, the tale of the Ukrainian embassy in Washington feels just like a speeding political boomerang.

On May 03 2019 08:17 xDaunt wrote:

As much as I enjoy watching Barr tool with the Democrats, the real reason why I tune into his hearings is that Barr has established a pattern of dropping little nuggets as to where the investigation is going at the hearings. For example, in the first hearing, he very deliberately said that the Trump and his people were spied upon. In the second hearing, he said that he was assembling a team to look at all aspects of how the investigation in Trump and his people came to be. Yesterday, Barr deliberately dropped that he was looking into whether the FBI and intelligence services had acted upon false information from Russia. Lindsey Graham stated something a similar this week as well. This raises some interesting questions about everyone who was involved in the Steele dossier (Steele, Nellie Ohr, Glenn Simpson and Fusion GPS, Hillary, etc) and where that information was coming from.

On May 03 2019 08:37 JimmiC wrote:


I was not talking to congress in front of the cameras. I'm talking about talking to Mueller in a professional setting with his lawyer present so that his rights are not violated and he can be honest about the situation.

On May 03 2019 08:51 JimmiC wrote:


Me, there would be pretty hilarious (and extraordinarily disturbing) if Hilary was doing with Ukraine what we already know Trump did.

So I'll be arguing to arrest and charge Hilary and you will be arguing that what she did was not criminal.

On May 03 2019 08:51 JimmiC wrote:


Me, there would be pretty hilarious (and extraordinarily disturbing) if Hilary was doing with Ukraine what we already know Trump did.

So I'll be arguing to arrest and charge Hilary and you will be arguing that what she did was not criminal.