Public impeachment hearings start tomorrow, and like literally every day since November 4th, 2016, it’s bound to be a sh*t show. The public will be able to watch the hearings, which is what the Republicans wanted, but that seems off because I, a liberal woman, am excited about it? It seems like the hearings are going to be pretty damning for Trump, and letting the general public see that for themselves could lead to people losing faith in the president. On the other hand, sounds great to me! Is this what straight dudes feel like on the eve of the “Superbowl?” Anyway, here’s what to expect when expecting the president to get impeached.
When Exactly Are The Hearings?
First things first. The initial hearing is on Wednesday morning at 10am EST. The second hearing is on Friday at 9am EST. Both of these are usually during the sacred time when I hit ‘snooze’ for the 17th time of the morning, but I’m willing to make an exception for these iconic events.
Who Will Be Starring in These Hearings?
Great Q. Adam Schiff will be calling three major witnesses who have already testified behind closed doors. Those people are:
William Taylor: Homeboi is the guy who texted Gordon Sondland after the infamous Ukraine call and was all like, “Yoooo, are we really saying that security assistance and WH meeting are conditioned on investigations? Seems pretty sketch lol,” (paraphrasing), and then Sondland was all like, “Dude, call me. We can’t have this in writing.” (paraphrasing) Taylor’s testimony behind closed doors didn’t look good for Trump, as he made it clear that there seemed to be a quid pro quo directly at the center of the call, so we’re looking forward to round two in his public hearing! Oh, William Taylor is also the top diplomat in Ukraine, so kind of a big deal.
George Kent: This guy is the deputy assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, and he previously went awf on how Rudy Giuliani is a moron went against the traditional bipartisan approach regarding U.S. support for Ukraine in an effort to push for political investigations. We love to see it.
Marie Yovanovitch: A queen!!! You may remember her as the woman who was ousted from her position as the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, which she says was due to her lack of blind support for Trump. She said that she was told by Ukrainians to “watch my back” because Giuliani’s associates were pushing their business interests and viewed her as an obstacle. Tea!!!
WTF Is Gonna Happen?
Another great Q. The country is clearly divided, and it’s hard to say if these hearings will help persuade people into believing that the president should be impeached. Call me cynical, but I have a feeling those who believe he should be impeached will continue to feel that way, and those who don’t will continue to come up with whatever they need to in order to make some roundabout argument that Trump is a god.
Either way, Democrats are likely to keep pushing what they have been during this process: that Trump withheld military aid from Ukraine for political gain, and for that he should be impeached because of it. Their strategy seems to be to simply make what was made clear behind closed doors public.
Republicans have come up with a lot of ways to defend the president’s actions, but a memo with their defense plan was released by CNN and it looks like their main talking points will be that a) the July 25 call summary “shows no conditionality or evidence of pressure”, b) Zelensky and Trump have said there was no pressure on the call, c) the Ukrainian government was not aware of the hold on assistance during the July 25 call and d) the security assistance hold was lifted on September 11. There are some holes in these arguments, so stay tuned to see how they defend them.
Will The Republicans Call Witnesses?
Devin Nunes has sent a list of people the Republicans would like to call as witnesses, though the House has to sign off on them. The Repubs famously want to call the original whistleblower as a witness, which would go against protecting their identity and put their life at risk. So, yeah, that’s probs not going to happen. Looking forward to seeing Lindsey Graham cry about it, though.
So, Then What?
There will likely be more hearings the following week, but Democrats have made it clear that they want to wrap this all up quickly, ideally by the end of the year. The Intelligence Committee will prepare a report with recommendations and send it on over to the House Judiciary Committee. Then the House Judiciary Committee will be in charge of drafting any impeachment articles they see fit. The House Judiciary Committee is also likely to hold hearings. Once they draft their impeachment articles, there will be a House vote on whether or not to impeach the prez. So basically, there will be lots of hearings and lots of committees. Rude that the only committee I am a part of — The Itty Bitty Titty Committee — will not be asked to make any input, but ok.
So Like, Will Trump Be Forced to Leave Office?
Tbh, probs not. Again, I’m cynical, but the past few years haven’t given me any reason not to be. The Senate would have to vote to remove Trump from office, and Republicans are in the majority. They’ve made it pretty clear that they’ll willing to back up the president, even if it means ignoring clear evidence of wrongdoings. But who knows, maybe the Ghost of Christmas Past will visit all Republican senators this holiday season and convince them to get their moral compasses in line!!
Until then, see you at the impeachment hearing viewing party!
Great news, fellow Americans! After a year of being hounded by the corrupt FBI and the libelous FAKE NEWS liberal media, our esteemed president scored a big win. I’m proud to report that after months of speculation and obstruction from the Deep State congress and their secret president Hillary Clinton, President Trump used his famed dealmaking prowess the powers granted to the office to declassify Devin Nunes’ BOMBSHELL memo on Friday. And folks, it has the libtard Democrats running scar—
Nevermind folks, the memo is a bunch of dumb ass bullshit, like pretty much everything else to come out of this administration.
You can cut to the chase and read the whole memo, but a quick recap: For weeks (that, yes, have felt like decades), Congress has been percolating over the existence of a memo penned by House Intel Committee chairman Devin Nunes. It supposedly showed all kinds of bias and malfeasance on the part of the FBI concerning their investigation into Trump’s campaign, except that the more congress got to see of it, the less they wanted to do with it. Democrats complained that it was partisan and devoid of context, and even Republicans feared it didn’t paint the whole picture and that they’d have little to gain from its release (spoiler: they were right!). But despite warnings from the DOJ and even Paul fucking Ryan to not release it, President Deals declassified it and released it in all its today. If your Twitter feed has been even worse than usual, now you know why.
So like, what exactly does this memo say? To the extent that this dumbfuck memo important document asserts anything, these are the main points:
- In seeking FISA warrants to surveil Trump campaign aid Carter Page, the FBI and DOJ did not disclose to the FISC (the court responsible for issuing FISA warrants) that Chris Steele’s famous dossier (the one that talks about the pee tape) was partially funded by the DNC.
- Steele was biased and not credible, both because he had expressed his desire to discredit Trump and had been dismissed as a source by the FBI for speaking to the media, a serious violation for Bureau sources.
- And ANYWAY, even if that didn’t matter, the Steele dossier hadn’t yet been fully corroborated, so it shouldn’t have counted (or something).
- Oh, and those FBI agents were saying mean things about Trump to each other, probably between bouts of sex under a beaming portrait of George W. Bush (no really, the FBI text “scandal” is tacked onto the end, for some reason).
This is all supposed to mean that the FBI was biased against Donald Trump, aka the Republican candidate? Give me a fucking break. If you’ve so much as imagined the concept of marijuana, your computer explodes and agents swarm your house when you try to apply for a job at the FBI. They’re the nation’s top fucking law enforcement agency, the cop-iest of cops, for chrissakes. They’re the most conservative apolitical agency on the planet.
Even if a couple of FBI agents exhibited some kind of “bias” against Trump (wait till they hear that FBI agents are allowed to vote!), could it be because they had good reason to suspect that the Trump camp was up to no good? Consider the following, which Nunes’ memo (nor Nunes himself, I suspect) never bothers to do at any point:
- The FBI has been up Carter Page’s weasley ass since 2013, when they interviewed him after Russian attempts to recruit him as an intelligence agent (God, why does nothing this cool ever happen to me?). Let’s put it this way: if the FBI sees you talking to recruiters from Sarah Lawrence College, and you tell them you want nothing to do with Sarah Lawrence College, and then the FBI catches you taking trips to visit Sarah Lawrence College a few years later, they’re going to… question your intentions, to say the least. The point is, the FBI did not necessarily need the Steele dossier as their only (or even primary) proof that Carter Page needed some good old fashioned survelin’.
- Speaking of the dossier, it was originally paid for by The Washington Free Beacon, a conservative website funded by billionaire and Republican donor Paul Singer. Fusion GPS was hired to in turn hire Steele to dig up dirt on several Republican candidates, and Singer only gave up on the project in May 2016, once it was clear Trump would clinch the nomination. For those keeping count, that means the “DNC funded Steele dossier” was “DNC funded” for a total of like four months.
- While perhaps more pertinent to Page specifically, the dossier itself wasn’t the impetus for the FBI’s probe into Russian ratfucking in our election. That would be a drunken conversation Trump campaign aide George Papadopoulos had with an Australian diplomat, where he let slip that the Trump campaign had major dirt on Hillary and the Democrats. When the leaked DNC emails appeared online, the diplomat helpfully made a phone call to his American counterparts.
So, yeah. If it’s anything at all (and that’s being generous), it’s a reason to reexamine the laws governing FISC/FISA procedures. Otherwise, the memo is nothing. In fact, it’s worse than nothing for Trump: while it will surely fire up his idiot base, those people would gladly follow him off a cliff. To the rest of the country, it’s an extremely petty act of the president bypassing norms and conventions to release a document that contains no information of consequence. Not to mention, by complaining about the methods by which it was obtained and the timing of the corroboration, it doesn’t actually say anything to refute the contents of the Steele dossier. In other words, THE PEE TAPE IS OUT THERE, FOLKS.
May we never speak of this dumb fucking thing ever again.
While everyone was still hungover from the weekend on Monday night, House Republicans voted to make a classified document called the Nunes Memo public. The memo supposedly confirms Donald Trump’s beliefs that the FBI is out to get him and that the Russia investigation is one big anti-Trump political attack. Final say on the memo going public comes down to him, so naturally he’s leading the #ReleaseTheMemo campaign and is potentially rumored to be exposing it today. Here’s a rundown of what might happen if it does drop and what might be inside so you can, like, get with the memo (LOL I crack myself up).
Who TF Is Devin Nunes?
TBH when I heard “Nunes Memo,” my first thought was, “Woah, the actor who played Oscar on The Office is getting into politics? Good for you, Oscar!”
Turns out there’s more than one person named Nunes in the world (plus they don’t even spell it the same way – it was a hard stretch). The man behind the memo is Devin Nunes, chair of the House Intelligence Committee and loyal bestie of Trump. He served on Trump’s post-election transition team and has spoken up in defense of the President on numerous occasions. It’s pretty clear where his loyalties lie, so right away, you can bet that this memo is going to be more than just a passive aggressive post-it note on the White House office fridge telling the Democrats to stop drinking his LaCroix.
What’s In The Memo?
The memo is reportedly packed with some majorly juicy goss that, if true, could mean serious trouble for the integrity of the FBI. Nunes claims to have uncovered proof that the FBI and Justice Department are biased against Trump and are only conducting the Russia investigation as a means to attack him and make him look bad.
Trump to the FBI:
Back in the Fall of 2016, the FBI applied for a warrant with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA) to wiretap a Trump adviser named Carter Page, on suspicions that he might have secretly been a Russian agent. However, Nunes alleges that the FBI got their evidence of Page’s ties to Russia from a document called the Steele dossier – which was written by a British spy and conveniently funded by the Hillary campaign and the Democratic National Committee. So if that’s what the FBI is basing their investigation warrant on, it might suggest that the FBI plays political favorites, and that their favorite is literally anyone who doesn’t have orange skin, tiny hands, and a love for eating cheeseburgers in bed. Following so far? Because this theory is twisted AF and there’s still tons more yarn to pin up on the conspiracy cork board.
Who’s Getting Dragged?
If this memo does get out, it has the potential to really fuck up a lot of people’s jobs – especially when it comes to the Russia investigation. The person who signed off on the FBI’s renewal application to keep the warrant open was Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. Rosenstein also just so happens to be the guy supervising Mueller’s entire investigation and protecting him from getting fired without actual cause. Call me Olivia Benson, because I’m pretty sure I just cracked the case on where this is going next.
Say the memo actually does uncover some shady partisan shit, Rosenstein is definitely at risk of being implicated for letting it slide, potentially proving that he’s biased against Trump too. If that happens, Trump could have reason to dust off his favorite phrase again and fire Rosenstein’s ass. With Rosenstein out of the way, the White House would have direct access to Mueller, and no one to tell them Mueller shouldn’t get the boot, effectively ending the Russia investigation if he gets fired as well. Trump is honestly using this memo to crack Rosenstein the way Janice Ian cracked Gretchen Wieners to eventually crack the lock on Regina. It’s risky. It’s diabolical. It’s so fetch.
How Do The Dems/Repubs Feel?
Naturally the Democrats and Republicans have VERY different feelings about this memo, because they’d sooner watch the National Mall go up in flames than come to a common stance on anything. Republicans are thrilled about the possible release of the memo, since they feel that it shows indisputable evidence that the FBI is v scandalous and is using their resources to attack Trump based on personal and political bias. Democrats, on the other hand, are desperately trying to stop this memo from getting out, claiming it’s completely skewed and cherry-picks the facts to make it look like the FBI did something wrong, when really it’s four pages of straight bullshit.
Weirdly enough, no one seems to care very much about changing policy or reforming the process of applying for warrants, which could mean that the main motive behind releasing the memo is really just to find a way to get closer to firing Mueller and ending the Russia probe for good. But, like, no guilty person would ever want to halt a major investigation before it has a chance to find key evidence, right? That would be obstruction of justice.
So will this memo actually reveal anything substantial? No one really knows yet because the actual contents have been kept top secret – Sarah Huckabee Sanders said that Trump hasn’t even read it yet, so the hype must be so real if he’s ready to put the FBI on blast with something he hasn’t even officially seen. We’ll have to wait and see how it all goes down today, but my guess is that it will look a little something like this:
…and then turn into a whole lot of this:
Heads up, you need to keep up with the news. It’s not cute anymore. That’s why we’ve created a 5x weekly newsletter called The Sup that will explain all the news of the week in a hilarious af way. Because if we weren’t laughing, we’d be crying. Sign up for The Sup now!
