Ding Dong the Wicked Witch is Dead. Roger Stone has been successfully convicted on all counts of lying to congress, witness intimidation and obstruction.
Stone had told Congress that he had no specific recollection of communicating with either Wikileaks or the Trump campaign. Yet during his trial we had Rick Gates testify that he was present when Roger Stone called Trump in July 2016 and told him there would be "more information coming from Wikileaks." which made Trump's written answers to Mueller full of lies because he had claimed he "didn't remember" anyone telling him anything about upcoming releases from Wikileaks during the campaign.
That really didn't help him much.
Also during the trial, Steve Bannon outed Stone was being the main conduit between the Trump campaign and Wikileaks.
Steve Bannon, the controversial former adviser to Donald Trump and chief executive of his presidential campaign, told jurors this Friday that Roger Stone was “an access point” to WikiLeaks, the document-dumping website that released hacked emails damaging to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign.
[...]
“The campaign had no official access to WikiLeaks or to Julian Assange. But Roger would be considered if we needed an access point,” Bannon said, adding that Stone repeatedly “implied that he had a connection with WikiLeaks” without stating it directly.
The bottom line here is that this. is. collusion. Sharing data derived from Wikileaks — who were being fed by Russian intelligence — with the campaign, and then sharing the request from the campaign to target the release of information about John Podesta less than an hour after the Access Hollywood "grab ém by the pussy" report was all accomplished by Roger Stone.
Robert Mueller stated that he was not able to find evidence of members of the Trump campaign engaged in a conspiracy to help the Russians, but here we have Trump and members of his campaign engaged in a conspiracy to work with Roger Stone to communicate and coordinate with Wikileaks on releases intended to help his campaign and hurt the candidacy of Hillary Clinton.
It's a subtle distinction but it makes no real difference. Stone was effectively a campaign surrogate and go-between for them with Russian Intelligence including direct messaging with Guccifer 2.0, who was a GRU asset.
Again, that was collusion and now it's been proven in court.
This week also features the first of the Impeachment hearings and one interesting section of the first hearing came when the GOP counsel was questioning Ambassador Taylor and George Kent about what they knew about the attempted prosecution of Burisma by former Prosecutor General Shokin.
Apparently the investigation began after in the 2010-2012 timeframe the head of Burisma Zluchevski issued several contracts to his own companies while he was Secretary of Ecology in the Ukraine government. This investigation began after he left that position, but before Hunter Biden joined the board of Burisma in 2013. During that time, under prosecutor Shokin, it appears that a bribe was paid and the investigation ended around 2014 and 2015. What wasn't mentioned was that it was a year later, in 2016 that Joe Biden spearheaded the movement to remove Shokin because he had a history of ignoring and shelving corruption investigations, which is exactly what had already occurred with Burisma.
If anything, replacing the prosecutor didn't end the investigation — removing Shokin actually might have restarted the investigation into the self-dealing allegations by Burisma founder. None of that had anything to do with Hunter Biden anymore than it had anything to do with Cofer Black who also on the Burisma board.
This questioning by Castor was essentially an "öwn goal." He also repeatedly tried to argue that Trump had legitimate reasons for wanting to investigate Burisma and Crowdstrike, but Tayla\r and Kent stated unequivocally that neither of these were traditional corruption investigations.
His performance in general, was pretty bad.
Ambassador Yovanovich testified that the same corrupt Ukrainians — such as Parnas, Fruman and Firtash — were ironically the one behind her being ousted from her position in Ukraine specifically after Parnas and Fruman had illegally paid $300,000 to the Trump campaign. Once she was gone Giuliani was free to force his agenda down the throat of her replacement Taylor with the help of EU Ambassador Sondland while they tried to force the newly elected Ukrainian President Zelensky to implement their investigation requests.
This effort nearly succeeded as Zelensky scheduled to speak with CNN's Fareed Zaracharia to provide the "deliverable" of publicly announcing the investigation on September 13th, only the announcement of the whistleblower sponsored investigation on September 9th, cause the release of the held security funds on September 11th. Without the funds being held, Zelensky was no longer obliged to make the announcement, and so — he didn't.
Democrats repeatedly made the point that a failed attempt at extortion is still a crime just as much as attempted murder or attempted robbery. And also that Trump's tweets bashing Ambassador Yovanovich while she was testifying was an additional attempt at witness tampering, which is exactly what Roger Stone was convicted of today.
Everybody felt sorry fo Yovanovich getting shit-canned because a bunch of sleazy Ukrainian oligarch's badmouthed her and paid Trump a bunch of cash.
We don't yet know how much or if the public hearings have moved the needle on Impeachment yet, but it has been riveting.
And then there was all this:
1) Trump and surrogates tried to intimidate the Whistleblower and get the media to violate Federal law and reveal their ID.
2) Richard Spencer is Super Racist! [Who knew?] He was recorded ranting about how "My people enslaved you" during the Unite to Right rally in Charlottesville.
3) Hand-wringing about Trump getting booed and "Lock Him Up-ed” at the World Series.
4) Non-partisan shows offering Don Jr. a chance to shill his book.
5) Trump tried to save face after Gov. Matt Bevin got smashed on re-election in Kentucky, while Trump was fined $2 Million for stealing from a Veterans Charity.
Here are the remaining detailed events for the week.
November 9th—
November 10th—
November 11th —
November 12th —
November 13tth —
- Trump is bulking up his comms team to fight Impeachment and rage tweets about the public hearings and praises "amazing warrior" Sean Hannity for saying the hearings are a "phony show trial." Then Trump whines to Erdogan that he only takes questions from friendly reporters and fires a warning shot at the intelligence IG.
- Giuliani begins flogging that Trump "requested" but didn't "demand" a quid pro quo. [A distinction with no difference.]
- WH requests streaming webcams to show the building of the border wall.
- Aides advise Trump not to fire Mulvaney.
- Schiff tosses Mulvaney's "Get over it" statement back in his face and slaps down Jim Jordon's claim that he knows who the whistleblower is. "That's a false statement."
- Devin Nunes spouts debunked conspiracy theories of nonsense during his opening statement, claiming what matters it how Schiff's staff interacted with the Whistleblower, and what Hunter Biden has to say.
- GOPers try to demand that the whistleblower be subpoenaed for the hearing, Schiff says they'll address that after the testimony. Ultimately the motion is tabled 13 to 9.
- George Kent testifies that Burisma founder Lucheski was already under investigation for self-dealing when he learned that Hunter Biden was on his board. Shokin and Lutshtenko were peddling false information about Ambassador Yovanovich. Giuliani was leveraging Zelensky's desire for a private WH meeting. He also says there is no factual basis for arguing that Ukraine interfered in the 2016 election.
- Amb. Bill Taylor says he was concerned about Giuliani's statements about Ukraine. There was a regular and irregular channel for Ukraine policy which involved Rick Perry, Mulvaney, Sondland and Giuliani. By August it became clear that the channels had diverged, both wanted for Zelansky to meet in the WH. Sondland told Taylor that Zelansky needed to state that he would not stand in the way of investigations. On July 1st Volker stated Zelensky needed to make clear he supported anti-corruption efforts. Later he was informed during a conference call that Trump and Mulvaney had held the Ukrainian support money. After the July 10th meeting where Sondland demanded investigations, Bolton said he didn't want to be involved in "that drug deal." Zelensky did not want to be used as an instrument in Trump's re-election. After the phone call Pence met with Zelensky in Warsaw. Sondland told Yermak that the money would not be released until Ukraine pursued investigations, then admitted to Taylor he made a mistake and that everything was dependent on the investigations. Mr. Morrison told him that Trump told Sondland that it was not a "quid pro quo" but Zelensky needed to "clear things up" in public on CNN. He texted Sondland that holding up funds "was crazy", and he responded that "Trump is a businessman" which didn't make sense. On July 26 his aide could overhear Trump asking Sondland about the "investigations" in the background on the phone.
- Chris Wallace slaps down Fox Host spouting GOP Talking points on Ukraine.
- WH claims Trump isn't watching the hearings as he RT's clips from it.
- WaPo reports that Giuliani's henchmen personally told Trump that Ambassador Yovanovich was "against him" last year.
- GOP Lawyer Steve Castor tries to argue that Trump had a legitimate reason to ask to investigate Burisma and corruption, then Schiff points out that he never asked about corruption only the Bidens and Crowdstrike.
- The DOJ is nearly finished with its re-investigation of the Russia investigation.
- AG Barr says he doesn't remember Trump asking him to hold a press conference exonerating him.
- Eric Trump calls the Impeachment hearing "boring" but keeps tweeting about it.
- George Conway says on MSNBC that Trump can't understand why what he did was wrong.
- Rep. Jim Jordan tries to argue that Taylor had 3 meetings with Zelensky without bringing up the investigation as if that erases Sondland and Trump bringing up investigations and holding the security aid funds. [It doesn't.]
- Rep. Ratcliff puts on a show as he asks "What's the impeachable offense?" then withdraws the question in order to make a speech about Zelensky not knowing that the security aid was held.
- Rep. Joaquin Casto makes it clear that attempted murder, attempted robbery and attempted extortion and bribery are all crimes.
- Turkish forces launch attacks on Syrian Christians as Erdogan meets with Trump.
- Dem Trolls Jim Jordon's whine that they don't have the direct witnesses before them: "There's room for Mr. Trump to sit right there."'
November 14th—
November 15th —
November 16th --