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Trump Timeline ... Trumpocalypse
- Thread starter CdnGuy
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100 year old former Nuremberg prosecutor speaks out against Trump:
WASHINGTON — A former associate of Rudolph W. Giuliani, President Trump’s personal lawyer, said on Friday that he had turned over to congressional Democrats a recording from 2018 of the president ordering the dismissal of Marie L. Yovanovitch, the United States ambassador to Ukraine at the time.
The associate, Lev Parnas, who worked with Mr. Giuliani on the effort to oust the ambassador and to pressure the Ukrainian government to pursue investigations to help Mr. Trump, located the recording on Friday after its existence was first reported by ABC News, said Mr. Parnas’s lawyer, Joseph A. Bondy.
Mr. Bondy said it “is of high materiality to the impeachment inquiry” of Mr. Trump, which House Democrats are presenting in the Senate. He said the tape had been provided to the House Intelligence Committee, whose chairman, Representative Adam B. Schiff, is leading the House impeachment managers in their presentation of the case against Mr. Trump to the Senate.
The recording emerged as Democrats are pressing the Senate to call more witnesses and seek additional evidence for the trial, saying there is more to be learned about the pressure campaign against Ukraine.
Perhaps distracted by the beauty and billionaires of Davos, Switzerland, this week Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin let slip an embarrassing admission: President Trump’s justification for his trade wars is hogwash.
For two years, the administration has offered increasingly ludicrous explanations for its tariffs. Sometimes tariffs are designed to shield pet U.S. industries from unfair competition. (Those industries are https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/06/19/steel-industry-begins-idle-plants-shows-signs-weakness-despite-trumps-support/?tid=lk_inline_manual_2 (still) shuttering plants despite the tariffs, but no matter.) Sometimes, tariffs are instead intended to raise revenue from abroad. (That additional tax revenue is being https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Publication%20Files/CGNT_c5c09860-3aad-4f6b-b610-20754cdc11a8.pdf by Americans, not foreigners, but whatever.)
Perhaps the most farcical rationale, however, has been that massive tariffs are necessary to safeguard America’s “national security.”
...
At a Davos panel Wednesday, Mnuchin finally acknowledged the obvious: that the administration’s official rationale for auto tariffs was made up, a legal fiction designed to let it bully or retaliate against opponents whenever Trump felt like it. In the context of a discussion about digital service taxes proposed by European countries, Mnuchin told the audience: “If people want to just arbitrarily put taxes on our digital companies, we will consider arbitrarily putting taxes on car companies.”
This is also not the only recent occasion in which the administration has suggested it knows it has disingenuously weaponized national security.
