Month: November 2019

In Trump’s World, Not Hanging His Portrait Is a Fireable Offense

Buck Banks

“This ambassador that everybody says was so wonderful, she wouldn’t hang my picture in the embassy. She wouldn’t hang it.”

— President Trump attacked former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch on Friday, saying she was “not an angel” and claiming she refused to hang his framed photograph in the embassy in Kiev for at least a year, CBS News reports.

Trump’s ‘Defenders’ Are Actually His Accomplices

Buck Banks

“It’s time to drop the posture that Trump’s defenders can be shamed into accepting what has been unearthed, or that they can be shamed into arguing from a baseline of shared democratic values, or into arguing over how to interpret a comprehensive set of shared facts. … Instead, let’s rhetorically treat Trump’s defenders as his criminal accomplices. Not just as ‘enablers’ of Trump’s corruption but as active participants in it.”

— Greg Sargent

Trump’s Biggest Crime Against America

Buck Banks

“All of these arguments, ranging from the weak to the false, obscure the core reason for the impeachment inquiry, which is that the Trump administration was engaged in a conspiracy against American democracy. Fearing that the 2016 election was a fluke in which Trump prevailed only because of a successful Russian hacking and disinformation campaign, and a last-minute intervention on Trump’s behalf by the very national-security state Trump defenders supposedly loathe, Trump and his advisers sought to rig the 2020 election by forcing a foreign country to implicate the then-Democratic front-runner in a crime that did not take place. If the American people could not be trusted to choose Trump on their own, Trump would use his official powers to make the choice for them.”

— Adam Serwer

Fiona Hill Takes Down Three Republican Congressmen

Buck Banks

“I don’t believe there should be any interference of any kind in our election… That’s actually why as a nonpartisan person and as an expert on Russia and an expert on Vladimir Putin and on the Russian security services, I wanted to come in to serve the country to try to see if I could help… We’re here to relate to you what we heard, what we saw and what we did. And to be of some help to all of you in really making a very momentous decision here. We are not the people who make that decision.”

— In a stunning moment at Thursday’s impeachment hearing, Fiona Hill asked whether she may respond to Republican attacks, after three GOP congressman in a row used their five-minute question allotments to criticize the impeachment inquiry and its witnesses, Axios reports.