XPost: alt.tv.pol-incorrect, alt.fan.rush-limbaugh, alt.politics.trump
XPost: alt.politics.usa
From: weberm@polaris.net

President Trump agrees with Democrats that the current impeachment
scandal is “bigger than Watergate” — he just disagrees on what exactly
the scandal is and who’s the true culprit.

On Sunday, Trump tweeted out a summary of what he says has actually
been going on for the last three years, resulting in two articles of impeachment against him, passed last week without a single Republican
vote.

It started with the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton campaign-funded Steele dossier, which Justice Department Inspector
General Michael Horowitz’s investigation on FISA abuse found played “a
central and essential role” in the origins of the FBI’s surveillance of
the Trump campaign, said Trump. The Democrats’ smear effort was then
aided and abetted by a “corrupt media.”

“The Democrats and Crooked Hillary paid for & provided a Fake Dossier,
with phony information gotten from foreign sources, pushed it to the
corrupt media & Dirty Cops, & have now been caught,” he tweeted. “They
spied on my campaign, then tried to cover it up — Just Like Watergate,
but bigger!”

“We determined that the Crossfire Hurricane team’s receipt of Steele’s
election reporting on September 19, 2016 played a central and essential
role in the FBI’s and Department’s decision to seek the FISA order,”
Horowitz’s long-anticipated report concludes. A fourth element of the
initial FISA application, which claimed Trump campaign adviser Carter
Page coordinated with Russia on behalf of the campaign, “relied
entirely on” information from the discredited dossier.

Trump’s “bigger than Watergate” tweet comes a few days after he
trollingly suggested impeaching Pelosi for imposing her own “quid pro
quo” on the Senate. “Nancy Pelosi is looking for a Quid Pro Quo with
the Senate. Why aren’t we Impeaching her?” Trump tweeted Friday.

Nancy Pelosi is looking for a Quid Pro Quo with the Senate.
Why aren’t we Impeaching her?
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 20, 2019

Trump’s “quid pro quo” comment is a reference to Pelosi delaying
sending the articles of impeachment to the Republican-controlled Senate
in an attempt to force Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to
capitulate to the Democrats’ demands on how to conduct the impeachment
trial in the name of “fairness.”

“So far we haven’t seen anything that looks fair to us,” Pelosi told
reporters following the partisan impeachment vote. “That would’ve been
our intention, but we’ll see what happens over there.”

Trump has had a lot to say about the Democrats’ delay tactic as well.
“Pelosi gives us the most unfair trial in the history of the U.S.
Congress, and now she is crying for fairness in the Senate, and
breaking all rules while doing so,” he tweeted Monday morning. “She
lost Congress once, she will do it again!”

Many analysts have described Pelosi’s gambit as politically precarious,
as it draws out an increasingly unpopular impeachment and diminishes
Democrats’ insistence that Trump poses a serious “threat” to the
country. As The Daily Wire noted, New York Times columnist David
Brooks, a frequent critic of Trump, told “PBS NewsHour” that Pelosi was
engaged in a “very risky” political ploy.

“As Mitch McConnell said, ‘Why is withholding something I don’t want to
do, why is that leverage?'” Brooks said. “And so it was always going to
be a reality that, once the House voted to impeach, they were going to
lose control of the process.”

Brooks also argued, like many others, that Republicans’ most convincing
case against impeachment centers on the very nature of the accusation
against Trump, his alleged “quid pro quo” trading military aid for a
political favor, which simply “doesn’t rise to the level of
impeachment.”

Republicans can make the case that “if we set this standard, pretty
much every president is going to come under impeachment for this,”
Brooks suggested. “They could go back in history, Iran-Contra, and they
could say, look, every president messes up in some very serious way —
almost every president, many presidents. And if we set this standard,
we will be just impeaching people for years and years.”

--
"We need to impeach the President to find out what crime he committed."
- Nancy Pelosi

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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