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Originally Posted by detbuch
You are conjecturing. The fact is that Zelensky said that there was no quid pro quo. There was no pressure. He said so after he got the money. He knows that Trump cannot stop the money. Trump cannot throw him anywhere.
Ukraine needs the help and support now and in the foreseeable future. Your isolationist viewpoint will result in the spread of the corrupt Putin administration, quite interesting that you express concern about corruption.
Floridaman's actions at the meeting at the UN, in words afterwards and meeting Lavrov at the same time as Zelensky's meeting Putin for peace negotiations are very detrimental to the survival of Ukraine as an independent nation. To claim that Zelensky's statements are made freely and without duress is obtuse, but it is the only defense Floridaman has.
You post article after article, opinion after opinion, conjecture after conjecture, hearsay after hearsay, all manner of second hand testimony as if they were the truth. But direct disclosure from the actual source you dismiss as a lie.
This whole impeachment thing, the Russian "collusion" thing, the obstruction of justice thing were all driven by the same piling on of conjectures driven by inconclusive circumstantial evidence (resulting in 34 indictments and 7 convictions with more expected) as well as many so called "mistakes" (all against Trump and no "mistakes" in his favor) (except Comeys "mistake" in announcing more info on Clintons emails days before the election, while not announcing the investigation into Russia and Floridaman) as well as withholding exculpatory evidence and actual falsifying of a document. It all has been a bunch of manufactured smoke with no actual fire.
You state quite simply, every mobsters defense against a RICO case
And the so-called obstruction of Congress bit is total nonsense. Executive privilege has not been decided as unconstitutional. If the House wanted to challenge that in SCOTUS they could. But to assume (there's that assumption, conjecture, thing again) that the President asserting his rights is obstruction is turning the law and the Constitution on its head. The whole notion of separation of powers is exactly to create a tension between the branches of the federal government which prevents one from overpowering the other.
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You could be correct, but Floridaman blocked ALL testimony and evidence with the exception of a memcon of a conversation. Everything that the administration does is not subject to executive privilege and no reasonable person would think so. But once he is impeached it is likely null and void. Since you are a great fan of the Founding Fathers, here is some timely correspondence for you to consider. SCOTUS certainly will. Perhaps the House should wait to send the articles of impeachment to the Senate till it wades it's way thru the courts and SCOTUS decides.
Here are some key quotes (with emphasis added), from Washington’s Cabinet (whose advice he had requested) and several others:
Secretary of State Timothy Pickering (in an early draft of what would become Washington’s Message to the House):
“[I]n the case of a treaty, if there be any grounds for an impeachment, they will probably be found in the instrument itself. If at any time a treaty should present such grounds; and it should have been so pronounced by the House of Representatives; and a further enquiry should be necessary to discover the culpable person, or the degree of his offence; there being then a declared and ascertained object;
I should deem it to be the duty of the President to furnish all the evidence which could be derived from the papers in his possession.”
Treasury Secretary Oliver Wolcott (in a letter to Washington on March 26, 1796):
“Except when an Impeachment is proposed & a formal enquiry instituted, I am of opinion that the House of Representatives has no right to demand papers relating to foreign negociations [sic] either pending or compleated [sic].”
Secretary of War James McHenry (in a letter to Washington of March 26, 1796):
“But as the house of representatives are vested with ‘the sole power of impeachment’ has it not a right as an incident of that power to call for papers respecting a treaty when the object is impeachment? I would presume that it has; but to legitimate such a call the object ought to be explicitly and formally announced. Where it is not, it is not to be presumed.”
Attorney General Charles Lee (in a letter to Washington of March 26, 1796):
“The house of representatives has generally from the nature of its functions a right to demand from the President such statements of the transactions in any of the executive departments as they shall conceive necessary or useful in forming their laws,
and there may be occasions when the books and original papers should be produced: for instance to sustain an impeachment commenced or to discover whether there be any malversation in office which might require impeachment—But it does not therefore follow that this branch of Congress possesses a right to demand and possess without the consent of the President copies of all the instructions and documents in his custody relative to any subject whatsoever, whenever they shall be pleased to require them.”
It will surprise no one that, in addition to asking his Cabinet for advice, Washington also asked Alexander Hamilton for his thoughts. In response, on March 29, 1796, Hamilton sent back a draft message for Washington’s consideration. It included the following language:
“Even with reference to an animadversion on the conduct of the Agents who made the Treaty—the
presumption of a criminal mismanagement of the interests of the U [sic] States ought first it is conceived to be deduced from the intrinsic nature of the Treaty & ought to be pronounced to exist previous to a further inquiry to ascertain the guilt or the guilty. Whenever the House of Representatives, proceeding upon any Treaty, shall have taken the ground that such a presumption exists in order to such an inquiry, their request to the Executive to cause to be laid before them papers which may contain information on the subject will rest on a foundation that cannot fail to secure to it due efficacy.”
In addition to all this, at some point in time, Washington’s papers came to contain a letter sent by the Chief Justice of the United States, Oliver Ellsworth, on March 13, 1796, to Jonathan Trumbull, a member of the Senate and a former aid-de-camp of Washington’s. In this letter, Ellsworth wrote:
“[N]or does it appear from [the pending House resolution] that [the House has] before them any legitimate object of enquiry to which the papers can apply.
They have indeed a right to impeach or to originate a declaration of war, and might for those purposes have possible use for some of the papers in the late negociation [sic], but neither of those objects are avowed by the House nor are they to be presumed.”
It bears emphasizing that this mulling over the possibility of impeachment was not theoretical. The Jay Treaty was a controversy that roiled the new Republic. It created a rift that would never close between James Madison and Washington. There had been popular outcry that Washington was a traitor or at best senile. And some had spoken openly of impeachment. This backdrop makes the unity of opinion regarding the House’s entitlement to documents in an impeachment proceeding all the more impressive.
These writings do not address the question of how the House is to initiate an official impeachment inquiry. We will leave that issue to others. But these writings do make plain that Washington’s line about impeachment in the Jay Treaty was a deliberate concession, a seed planted in history that only now has full occasion to blossom.
The above is quoted from Just Security