Starting with the two BIG ones:
- Without notifying the Kurds, the French, or the British, we announced this weekend that we were abandoning our positions in Northern Syria and allowing Turkey to invade. (If you know me from Facebook, we already covered this.) We had previously made a deal with the Kurdish forces for them to abandon their northern fortifications and fall back while we acted as a bulwark against Turkey. We have betrayed them and the lives which will be lost are to blame on President Trump.
- Trump’s White House counsel sent a letter to the House of Representatives saying they are refusing to cooperate with ANY aspects of the impeachment investigation as they view it as illegitimate and unconstitutional. The letter is legally absurd and they have absolutely no legal ground to stand on. Lawyers of all political persuasions today were openly mocking how ludicrous the claims were. One of the articles of impeachment drawn up against Nixon was explicitly over refusing to cooperate with the Houses’s investigation. Expect the same to happen here.
On to more minor news:
- As Giuliani and Trump claim to be on a crusade against Ukrainian corruption, Rick Perry and Giuliani were pressuring Ukraine to replace the board of a state-owned energy company with an associate of Trump’s. The goal here was to move contracts the company handled to friends of the president in the United States. Nothing the Bidens have falsely been accused of even approaches this level of corruption.
- Michael Cohen is headed to court in NYC to give information about the state investigation of the Trump Organization. We already know that the hush money payments to Stormy Daniels are being investigated by local prosecutors, but the investigation is now larger than that one issue.
- Last week we saw several suspicious texts from Gordon Sondland, the ambassador to the EU. In one exchange Sondland took 5 hours to reply to a text about requiring Ukraine to investigate the Bidens. His eventual response explicitly stated there was “no quid pro quo” in legal-sounding language. We now know Sondland spoke to Trump before making the reply.
