Strange things are afoot at the Circle-Ukraine

From Vox:

Ed MacMahon, a lawyer for Rudy Giuliani associate Lev Parnas, who faces charges of campaign finance violations, has told the Daily Beast that his client helped Republican Rep. Devin Nunes arrange meetings meant to advance the Ukrainian investigations into the Biden family that are at the center of the ongoing impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump.

Now, another lawyer for Parnas — Joseph A. Bondy — has told CNN that Parnas is willing to testify before the House Intelligence Committee about Nunes’s involvement in the Ukraine scandal.

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MAGAzine Guide for Impeachment Week 2

Hey kids, here’s a Raisin public service announcement. Here’s some info on Impeachment, Week 2.

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Peter Welch, Jim Teacher

From GQ:

On Wednesday, the House Intelligence Committee held its first public hearings for the impeachment inquiry of Donald Trump. U.S. diplomat Bill Taylor gave a particularly damning testimony about the president’s efforts to withhold military aid from the Ukrainian president in an attempt to force him to announce a corruption investigation of former vice president Joe Biden. For the most part, Republican lawmakers used it as an opportunity to grandstand: Ohio’s Jim Jordan and California’s Devin Nunes, in particular, made loud efforts to distract from the facts at hand.

 

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Well, here’s another nice mess he’s gotten us into!

From The Guardian:

An effort in recent months by Donald Trump to rewrite the history of the 2016 US presidential election and set up a 2020 re-election victory was more geographically sprawling and reliant on the day-to-day participation of top cabinet members than previously reported, it emerged on Monday.

William Barr, the attorney general, and Mike Pompeo, the secretary of state, collectively participated in contacts between Trump and leaders of at least four foreign countries, according to multiple reports.

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Hopelessly Devoted

From The Post and Courier:

BLUFFTON — South Carolina’s two Republican senators sought to discredit the whistleblower complaint that has spurred an impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump.

Lindsey Graham and Tim Scott separately came to the same conclusion Friday, calling the complaint “hearsay” and questioning the validity of the claims.

“It’s over the top,” Graham told The Post and Courier on Friday night moments before he was set to give the keynote address at a Beaufort County Republican Party dinner.

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Whistleblowing past the graveyard

From CBS News:

Washington — President Trump moved on Wednesday to stave off the most serious threat to his presidency yet, releasing a summary of a conversation with the president of Ukraine that’s at the center of an impeachment inquiry by House Democrats. In a series of public appearances, Mr. Trump argued the summary cleared him of wrongdoing, despite it showing he repeatedly urged the Ukrainian president to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden, his potential Democratic rival.

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Biden Their Time

From Jennifer Rubin at the Washington Post:

It’s long past time that media outlets stop hyping the story line that former vice president Joe Biden did something untoward regarding Ukraine. Last week New York Times reporter Ken Vogel called Ukraine a “significant liability” for Biden and teased that “there is a story here.” Vogel added: “We’ve told some of it. There is more to be told. We are going to continue to sort of pull that back.”

In fact, there never was any “liability” whatsoever and the “more to be told” has turned out to be “nothing to be told.” When it came time to put the facts in print, Vogel reported: “As The New York Times reported this spring, no evidence has surfaced that the former vice president intentionally tried to help his son by pressing for the prosecutor’s dismissal. In fact, some of the vice president’s former associates said he never did anything to deter other efforts to go after the oligarch, Mykola Zlochevsky.” Vogel omits mention that the spring report came under a misleading headline and that the admission there was no “there there” only came after paragraph upon paragraph suggesting Biden had some kind of problem.

At any rate, the jig is up, and it’s time for reporters without any proof to cease attempting to convert this into a Biden scandal.

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Just Put Your Lips Together and Blow

From THINK PROGRESS ECONOMY:

A new Stop Snitchin campaign to deter would-be informants, in this case against people speaking up against crimes on Wall Street, is quietly taking shape, this time far from the media’s eye.

Financial experts and academics agree that strong whistleblower regulations could have prevented the Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme and indeed much of the financial crisis if employees at firms engaged in fraudulent activity had spoken up early or had reported complex crimes to the appropriate authorities. Employees at firms at the center for the financial crisis, including troubled lender Countrywide, have cited intimidation and other illicit tactics as the reason few people spoke up as whistleblowers. Since the old whistleblower laws provided for weak legal protections for informants and relatively rare rewards, the Dodd-Frank financial reform law passed last year revamped the system with new rights for informants blowing the whistle on financial crimes.

Bank lobbyists and Fox News, however, have made such protections enemy number one.

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