Sunday, January 26, 2020

If it doesn't have a groove, you must not remove


Drawing by W.S. Gilbert, from the 1864 "Bab Ballad" on which his and Arthur Sullivan's first opera was based. Via Wikimedia Commons.


Ladies and gentlemen, we will only take up of couple of hours of your time this morning sketching out the full and completely fact-based argument on behalf of my client that we will be presenting to you as soon as we've finished drafting it sometime Monday afternoon, because we don't plan to make you wait for us to start repeating ourselves the way the Democrats did, with their hysterical and deeply improper attempts to talk you into accepting witness testimony before you'd even been given a chance to hear the witness testimony summarized.

We intend, in contrast, to start the process of repeating ourselves immediately, with a kind of "coming attractions" reel of all the fine points we expect to be making next week, all of which will refer themselves exclusively to the evidentiary record that the Democrats laid out for us this week, and no reference at all to that time Trump asked somebody to "take out" Ambassador Yovanovitch at dinner in April 2018 before Rudolph Giuliani even got involved with the case*. We will not even bore you by acknowledging that Rudolph Giuliani exists, and this is a promise.


We will also not insist the way the Democrats do that you can speculate on what was on the President's mind when he performed such and such an action or made such and such a statement, which is pretty absurd to anybody who actually knows the President. We will demonstrate that it is impossible to guess what is on the President's mind unless you assume that he was thinking the eminently sensible (and legally sound) thoughts we will be suggesting, which is an entirely non-hypothetical, unspeculative approach.

For example, when President Trump briefly mentioned that he thought President Zelenskyy should order a Ukrainian investigation of the imaginary computer server with the DNC emails that the Crowdstrike firm would have hidden in Ukraine if it was a Ukrainian firm and the server existed, Democrats claimed that he was doing it for his own personal benefit, favoring his presidential campaign with the message that the Russians didn't do it. Nothing could be further from the truth! President Trump was simply expressing his deep and long-held concern about Ukrainian corruption! After all, if a country is the kind of place where you might harbor a nonexistent computer server containing emails that the Russians have been accused of stealing, how corrupt is that? Aren't you concerned too, ladies and gentlemen?

And by the same token, when President Trump asked President Zelenskyy to look into the fact that there was a lot of talk about Biden's son and that Biden had stopped some prosecution or other and that a lot of people wanted to find out about that, Democrats want you to think he only did this because Biden was running for president and Trump hoped to get "dirt" on him, which is absurd, because why would he want to do that?** The main thing is, if you were interested in corruption in Ukraine, the first place you'd want to look would be at the members of the former US vice president's family, if they'd ever done any business in Ukraine, even if you had somebody in your own entourage currently engaged in doing a bunch of business in Ukraine with suspected bribe-takers, like your personal attorney.***

And then there's the way Democrats act as if President only held up the military and foreign aid money to pressure Ukraine to announce the investigations, just because that's what Ambassador Sondland said he was doing, when it's obvious he was doing it to protest against unequal burden sharing, the cause on which his entire foreign policy has been based on! NATO has to pay more money, South Korea has to pay more money, Japan has to pay more money, Saudi Arabia pays enough money (and cash is always appreciated!), Iraq doesn't have any money and can go eat a bag of dicks, etc. And if it's true that Ukraine doesn't have any money either, as Trump has sagely noted, why shouldn't Germany pay more? And if they don't, why shouldn't Ukraine provide the United States with something else, like investigating Hunter Biden? Is that a lot to ask? Not to benefit Donald Trump, just to show they're on our side! Everybody needs to make some kind of sacrifice!

Now we find that the House Democrat committee members, after ruthlessly carrying on their vicious maneuvers in a dank and insalubrious basement in total secrecy from prying eyes,**** is intent on calling a bunch of witnesses to testify brazenly in public even after the President has said he'd prefer they didn't, and acting as if the president's refusal to permit witnesses and documents is some method of hiding something, some kind of "obstruction" of their evil plans, when in fact President Trump has made it absolutely clear that he'd love to give up the witnesses and the documents if he weren't so anxious to get the Supreme Court to rule once and for all on the important question of whether he can do whatever he wants thanks to his article II.

Please understand that the Democrats' purpose in this whole nightmare has been to overturn the results of an election and the will of the people who elected him.***** And not only that, but to overturn the next election before it even takes place, by preventing the winner from even competing! And maybe all the elections after that that he might want to compete in, although he's just kidding when he talks about that! How hideously ironic when we find the party that has bitterly complained about Russian interference in our presidential elections of 2016 now openly interferes in the election itself! Don't let this happen, ladies and gentlemen! As  hope to tell you again and Monday, and Tuesday if the weather is nice. Have a pleasant day.


*According to Rudolph Giuliani, who claims not to have met Parnas and Fruman until the summer, but his pal Roy Bailey, a Texas businessman and Trump donor, was at the dinner. (WaPo)

**Well, on the other hand, he'd apparently thought of it before, according to information from Parnas that may be backed by documentation, and, Lordy, tapes:
In February , Parnas and Fruman met with Ukraine’s then-president, Petro Poroshenko, according to Edward B. MacMahon Jr., a lawyer for Parnas. They were doing so, he said, on a request from Giuliani, who was acting on orders from Trump.
MacMahon said the two proposed that in exchange for a state visit, the Ukrainian president would announce investigations into former vice president Joe Biden’s son and an unfounded theory that Ukraine interfered in the 2016 presidential race. (ibid.)
***As in:
As Rudolph W. Giuliani waged a public campaign this year to unearth damaging information in Ukraine about President Trump’s political rivals, he privately pursued hundreds of thousands of dollars in business from Ukrainian government officials, documents reviewed by The New York Times show.
Mr. Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer, has repeatedly said he has no business in Ukraine, and none of the deals were finalized [funny how that's exactly what Trump said about Russia in the 2016 campaign]. But the documents indicate that while he was pushing Mr. Trump’s agenda with Ukrainian officials eager for support from the United States, Mr. Giuliani also explored financial agreements with members of the same government. (The New York Times 11/27/2019)

****
Except for the 47 Republican members who were allowed to participate and ask questions in all the interviews and depositions.


*****



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