https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/01/gop-defenses-for-trumps-ukraine-call-quickly-collapse-under-scrutiny.html

John Harwood @JOHNJHARWOOD

KEY POINTS

Trump, his aides and select allies in Congress have feverishly sought to redirect a whistleblower’s complaints toward Democratic adversaries.

Yet even cursory scrutiny of evidence that has emerged so far knocks down assorted GOP arguments like shanties in a hurricane, writes John Harwood.

The Republican defenses for President Donald Trump’s conduct on Ukraine simply don’t hold up.

At first glance, that can be hard to discern. Trump, his aides and select allies in Congress have feverishly sought to redirect a whistleblower’s complaints toward Democratic adversaries.

“It is the height of insanity for the Democrats to try and bogusly impeach President Trump for simply calling out this corruption,” a Republican National Committee spokesman asserted over the weekend.

Yet even cursory scrutiny of evidence that has emerged so far knocks down assorted GOP arguments like shanties in a hurricane. Here’s a brief review:

It was hearsay
House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy notes that “the whistleblower wasn’t on the call” between Trump and his Ukrainian counterpart. “Hearsay,” Sen. Lindsey Graham insists, cannot be a basis for impeachment.

Both observations are irrelevant. In the partial transcript of the call released by the White House itself, Trump’s own words affirm the whistleblower’s account. That is direct evidence, not hearsay.

“If they thought it would be exculpatory, they miscalculated badly,” GOP former Sen. Jeff Flake told me.

Biased whistleblower
The president says the still-unidentified whistleblower harbors “known bias” against him. This observation, which the intelligence community inspector general called “arguable,” does not discredit the whistleblower’s allegations, which the inspector general found “credible.”

If the whistleblower’s information is accurate, his motivation doesn’t matter. Trump’s own former homeland security advisor, Thomas Bossert, has described himself as “deeply disturbed” by the president’s behavior, too.

Media distortion
On “60 Minutes” Sunday night, CBS correspondent Scott Pelley asked about Trump’s comment that “I need you to do us a favor, though” after Ukraine’s new president requested military aid to counter Russian aggression.

“You added a word there,” GOP leader McCarthy replied, referring to the damning “though.”

McCarthy’s assertion was false; Pelley accurately quoted the White House-released document. The most charitable interpretation of the GOP leader’s embarrassment is that he had not actually reviewed the evidence he had gone on national television to discuss.

It wasn’t about Biden
On “Meet the Press,” House GOP Whip Steve Scalise insisted the favor Trump sought was an investigation into the cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike, rather than dirt on Biden. That investigation, in turn, might explain the true source of outside interference in the 2016 election.

In fact, the partial transcript shows Trump specifically requested an investigation of Biden and his son. The U.S. government already knows the origin of 2016 interference: Russia, which favored Trump over Hillary Clinton.

Scalise alluded to unfounded suspicions among conspiracy-minded Republicans that Ukraine, seeking to help Clinton, was the real meddler. Those suspicions, former Trump aide Bossert notes, have been “completely debunked.”

</snip>

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/30/opinion/trump-ukraine-republican.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share

By Michelle Goldberg
Opinion Columnist

Sept. 30, 2019

On Sept. 24, 2015, Geoffrey Pyatt, then the American ambassador to Ukraine, spoke in Odessa about the scourge of corruption. It was about a year and a half after what is sometimes called the Revolution of Dignity, when Ukrainians overthrew the kleptocratic, Russian-aligned regime of Viktor Yanukovych. The country was trying to move in a more liberal, European direction. Corruption, said Pyatt, threatened to hold the new Ukraine back.

Pyatt called out the office of Viktor Shokin, then the prosecutor general of Ukraine. “Corrupt actors within the prosecutor general’s office are making things worse by openly and aggressively undermining reform,” he said. Pyatt specifically lambasted Shokin’s office for subverting a British case against a man named Mykola Zlochevsky, Yanukovych’s former ecology minister.

In 2014, as part of a money-laundering investigation, British authorities froze $23 million Zlochevsky had in London. They requested supporting documentation from Shokin’s office. Instead, it intervened on Zlochevsky’s behalf. “As a result the money was freed by the U.K. court and shortly thereafter the money was moved to Cyprus,” said Pyatt.

“Shokin was seen as a single point of failure clogging up the system and blocking corruption cases,” a former official in Barack Obama’s administration told me. Vice President Joe Biden eventually took the lead in calling for Shokin’s ouster.

As all this was happening, Biden’s son, Hunter, sat on the board of Burisma Holdings, a natural gas company that Zlochevsky co-founded, at some points earning $50,000 a month. Zlochevsky might have thought he could ingratiate himself with the Obama administration by buying an association with the vice president. All available evidence suggests he was wrong.

Turning this history on its head, Trump has accused Joe Biden of coercing Ukraine to jettison Shokin in order to protect Hunter. He has pressured Ukraine’s current president to open an investigation into the Bidens, which would make Trump’s charges seem more credible. As the president faces impeachment, his surrogates are parroting his attack on Biden, and his campaign is reportedly spending a staggering $10 million on an ad to amplify the smear.

Journalists, perhaps seeking to appear balanced, have sometimes described Trump’s claims about Biden as “unsubstantiated” or “unsupported.” That is misleading, because it suggests more muddiness in the factual record than actually exists. Trump isn’t making unproven charges against Biden. He is blatantly lying about him. He and his defenders are spreading a conspiracy theory that is the precise opposite of the truth.

</snip>

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles_Times_bombing



The Los Angeles Times bombing was the purposeful dynamiting of the Los Angeles Times Building in Los Angeles, California, on October 1, 1910, by a union member belonging to the International Association of Bridge and Structural Iron Workers. The explosion started a fire which killed 21 newspaper employees and injured 100 more. It was termed the "crime of the century" by the Times.

Brothers John J. ("J.J." ) and James B. ("J.B." ) McNamara were arrested in April 1911 for the bombing. Their trial became a cause célèbre for the American labor movement. J.B. admitted to setting the explosive, and was convicted and sentenced to life in prison. J.J. was sentenced to 15 years in prison for bombing a local iron manufacturing plant, and returned to the Iron Workers union as an organizer.

Background
The Iron Workers Union was formed in 1896. As the work was seasonal and most iron workers were unskilled, the union remained weak, and much of the industry remained unorganized until 1902. That year, the union won a strike against the American Bridge Company, a subsidiary of the newly formed U.S. Steel corporation. American Bridge was the dominant company in the iron industry, and within a year the Iron Workers Union had not only organized almost every United States iron manufacturer, but had also won signed contracts including union shop clauses. The McNamara brothers were Irish American trade unionists. John (known as J.J.) and his younger brother James (known as J.B.) were both active in the International Association of Bridge and Structural Iron Workers (the Iron Workers).

Strike against American Bridge Co.


James (left) and John McNamara

In 1903, officials of U.S. Steel and the American Bridge Company founded the National Erectors' Association, a coalition of steel and iron industry employers. The primary goal of the National Erectors' Association was to promote the open shop and assist employers in breaking the unions in their industries. Employers used labor spies, agents provocateurs, private detective agencies, and strike breakers to engage in a campaign of union busting. Local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies generally cooperated in this campaign, which often used violence against union members. Hard pressed by the open shop campaign, the Iron Workers reacted by electing the militant Frank M. Ryan president and John J. McNamara the secretary-treasurer in 1905. In 1906, the Iron Workers struck at American Bridge in an attempt to retain their contract. However, the open shop movement was a significant success. By 1910, U.S. Steel had almost succeeded in driving all unions out of its plants. Unions in other iron manufacturing companies also vanished. Only the Iron Workers held on (though the strike at American Bridge continued).

Dynamite campaign
Union officials used violence to counter the setbacks they had suffered. Beginning in late 1906, national and local officials of the Iron Workers launched a dynamiting campaign. Between 1906 and 1911, the Iron Workers blew up 110 iron works, though only a few thousand dollars in damages was done. The National Erectors' Association was well aware who was responsible for the bombings, since Herbert S. Hockin, a member of the Iron Workers' executive board, was their paid spy.

Los Angeles strike
Los Angeles employers had been successfully resisting unionization for nearly half a century. Harrison Gray Otis, publisher of the Los Angeles Times, was vehemently anti-union. Otis first joined and then seized control of the local Merchants Association in 1896, renaming it the Merchants and Manufacturers' Association (colloquially known as the M&M), and using it and his newspaper's large circulation to spearhead a 20-year campaign to end the city's few remaining unions. Without unions to keep wages high, open shop employers in Los Angeles were able to undermine the wage standards set in heavily unionized San Francisco. Unions in San Francisco feared that employers in their city would also soon begin pressing for wage cuts and start an open shop drive of their own. The only solution they saw was to re-unionize Los Angeles.

The San Francisco unions relied heavily on the Iron Workers, one of the few strong unions remaining in Los Angeles. The unionization campaign began in the spring of 1910. On June 1, 1910, 1,500 Iron Workers struck iron manufacturers in the city to win a $0.50 an hour minimum wage ($13.26 in 2018 dollars) and overtime pay. The M&M raised $350,000 ($9.3 million in 2018 dollars) to break the strike. A superior court judge issued a series of injunctions which all but banned picketing. On July 15, the Los Angeles City Council unanimously enacted an ordinance banning picketing and "speaking in public streets in a loud or unusual tone", with a penalty of 50 days in jail or a $100 fine or both. Most union members refused to obey the injunctions or ordinance, and 472 strikers were arrested. The strike, however, proved effective: by September, 13 new unions had formed, increasing union membership in the city by almost 60 percent.

Leading up to the explosion
On June 3, 1910, two days after the start of the strike, Eugene Clancy, the top Iron Workers' Union official on the West Coast, wrote to J. J. McNamara: "Now, Joe, what I want here is Hockin," referring to Herbert Hockin, the union official in charge of the dynamite bombings. However, Hockin had been caught taking money earmarked for bombing jobs, and J. J. McNamara no longer trusted him. McNamara asked another dynamiter, Jack Barry of St. Louis, to go to California, but Barry turned down the job when he learned of the targets. J. J. McNamara finally sent his younger brother, James B. McNamara, to California on the bombing mission.

Bombing


The Los Angeles Times Building after the bombing disaster on October 1, 1910. Nicknamed "the fortress", the 1886 brick and granite building was on Broadway and First Street, across the street from the present 1935 building.

On the evening of 30 September 1910, J. B. McNamara left a suitcase full of dynamite in the narrow alley between the Times building and the Times annex, known as "Ink Alley." The suitcase was left near barrels of flammable printer's ink. The dynamite had a detonator connected to a mechanical windup clock, set to close an electric battery circuit at 1 am, and set off the explosion. He then left similar bombs, also set to explode at 1 am, next to the home of Times publisher Harrison Gray Otis and the home of Felix Zeehandelaar, secretary of the M&M. McNamara then boarded a train to San Francisco, and was out of town when the Times building bomb went off.

This was an escalation of the bombing campaign. Previously, only nonunion workplaces had been targeted. Now the Iron Workers union was expanding the targets to the homes of anti-union leaders, and a newspaper noted for its anti-union editorial policy.

At 1:07 a.m. on October 1, 1910, the bomb went off in the alley outside the three-story Los Angeles Times Building located at First Street and Broadway in Los Angeles. The 16 sticks of dynamite in the suitcase bomb were not enough to destroy the whole building, but the bomb ignited natural gas piped into the building. The Times was a morning paper, and so had employees working during the late-night early-morning hours. The bombers were unaware that a number of Times employees were working overnight to produce an extra edition the next afternoon which would carry the results of the Vanderbilt Cup auto race. The bomb collapsed the side of the building, and the ensuing fire destroyed the Times building and a second structure next door that housed the paper's printing press. Of the 115 people still in the building, 21 died (most of them in the fire). The Times called the bombing the "crime of the century", and publisher Otis excoriated unions as "anarchic scum," "cowardly murderers," "leeches upon honest labor," and "midnight assassins."

The exact number of deaths is uncertain. The remains of 20 were identified. Parts of either one or two additional bodies were pulled from the rubble.

An unresolved contradiction was J. B. McNamara's knowledge of the gas pipes in the Times building. After he confessed to the bombing, he insisted that he had not known of the gas pipes. However, Ortie McManigal testified that before their arrest, McNamara had told him that he had gone into the Times building – he was challenged twice, but each time passed by saying he was on his way to the composing room – went into the basement and wrenched off a gas valve, to maximize the destruction.

</snip>

https://twitter.com/Acosta/status/1178817540941914117
Jim Acosta ✔ @Acosta

A GOP congressional aide said there is a sense that things are heading in a bad direction for Trump: “We are entering a phase with a lot of unknowns. People are anxious about what else is out there,” the aide said about growing feeling among Republicans staffers and lawmakers.

7:42 PM - Sep 30, 2019

https://twitter.com/jimsciutto/status/1178797345129017349
Jim Sciutto ✔ @jimsciutto

—>>IC Inspector General contradicts Trump/GOP claim whistleblower had only secondhand into stating, he/she had “...direct knowledge of certain alleged conduct, and that the Complainant has subject matter expertise related to much of the material information provided”.

6:22 PM - Sep 30, 2019

https://twitter.com/RichardEngel/status/1178797093684678656
Richard Engel ✔ @RichardEngel

A former Ukrainian lawmaker deeply familiar with the Giuliani dirt-digging campaign told me Trump's phone call to the Ukrainian president asking for an investigation into the Bidens, while withholding vital military aid, was "pressure," "blackmail," and "quid pro quo."

6:21 PM - Sep 30, 2019

https://twitter.com/RichardEngel/status/1178794914118803458
Richard Engel ✔ @RichardEngel

Not normal is an understatement. It's off the hook, The wheels have come off the bus. The AG investigating US intel services, via foreign intel services? ,.. what?

Greg Miller ✔ @gregpmiller

The attorney general is making undisclosed trips overseas asking foreign intel services to help investigate U.S. intel services. That is not normal. @DevlinBarrett @shaneharris @mattzap
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/attorney-general-barr-personally-asked-foreign-officials-to-aid-inquiry-into-cia-fbi-activities-in-2016/2019/09/30/d50cd5c4-e3a5-11e9-b403-f738899982d2_story.html …

6:13 PM - Sep 30, 2019

https://thehill.com/hilltv/rising/463676-poll-54-percent-say-democrats-should-cancel-recess-start-impeachment

Slightly more than half of voters say the House should cancel its current two-week recess and begin impeachment proceedings as soon as possible, according to a Hill-HarrisX poll released Monday.

The survey found that 54 percent of respondents said they would support lawmakers returning to Washington now to advance the impeachment inquiry, compared to 46 percent who disagreed.

Support for canceling the break was strongest among Democratic voters, at 77 percent.

Among GOP respondents, 36 percent said the House should cancel its recess, with 45 percent of independent voters agreeing.

The margin of error for partisan voters was plus or minus 5.8 percentage points.

Several Democrats last week called on House leadership to cancel the recess and proceed with the impeachment inquiry.

Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) said in a video posted to social media that lawmakers need “to stay in Washington to work for the American people,” adding that “we need to do the work to hold this president accountable.”

</snip>

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/virginia-sixth-grader-now-says-she-falsely-accused-classmates-of-cutting-her-hair/2019/09/30/ad0cbd92-e390-11e9-a331-2df12d56a80b_story.html

By Joe Heim September 30, 2019 at 11:50 a.m. EDT

The sixth-grade girl at a private Virginia school who accused three classmates last week of forcibly cutting her hair now says the allegations were false, according to statements from the girl’s family and the principal at Immanuel Christian School in Springfield. School officials met with the girl and her family Monday morning before releasing the statement.

The 12-year-old, who is African American, said three white boy students held her down in a school playground a week ago during recess, covered her mouth, called her insulting names and used scissors to cut her hair.

The grandparents of the girl, who are her legal guardians, released an apology Monday.

“To those young boys and their parents, we sincerely apologize for the pain and anxiety these allegations have caused,” the grandparents wrote in a statement sent to The Washington Post by the school. “To the administrators and families of Immanuel Christian School, we are sorry for the damage this incident has done to trust within the school family and the undue scorn it has brought to the school. To the broader community, who rallied in such passionate support for our daughter, we apologize for betraying your trust.”

</snip>

https://twitter.com/NicolleDWallace/status/1178705921414963201
Nicolle Wallace ✔ @NicolleDWallace

I resisted replying but need to know - what happened to you? I knew you when you were a respected senator from the great state of TX who held up Bush 41 + 43 as men of integrity- now you tweet at an MSNBC host sharing a nyt article + you parrot Stephen Miller’s tailing points ?

Senator John Cornyn ✔ @JohnCornyn

You forgot to mention that the criminal division at the Department of Justice concluded that there was no such violation of the law. #howaboutalittlefairness https://twitter.com/nicolledwallace/status/1177026790872801280 …

12:19 PM - Sep 30, 2019