Smokey wrote:This is already falling apart and will backfire on the Democrat party.
Nothing is falling apart. The contents of the whistleblower complaint have been remarkably accurate, given that most of it was not observed first hand.
Maybe Smokey/Honkler can tell us how the whistleblower talking to a politician he doesn't like managed to change how the White House's own account exactly matches the whistleblower's.
A Democratic committee official said Thursday that Schiff "could have been more clear" when he told MSNBC the committee had not spoken to the whistleblower. The official explained that Schiff was referring to the fact that he and the committee had not officially interviewed the whistleblower, not the whistleblower's initial contact with the committee staff.
But Schiff's comments and the committee's contacts with the whistleblower have sparked a barrage of attacks from Republicans in Congress and President Donald Trump, who have accused Schiff of orchestrating the complaint that has sparked the impeachment inquiry that the House Intelligence chairman is now leading.
“I think that it’s a scandal that he knew before,” Trump said of Schiff. “I’d go a step further -- I think he probably helped write it.”
In fact, the Times’ reporting noted that the staffer the whistleblower approached (who also shared some of the information with Schiff) had first asked a colleague to share the concerns with the CIA’s top lawyer, and the staffer was “following the committee’s procedures” in suggesting “the officer find a lawyer to advise him and meet with an inspector general, with whom he could file a whistle-blower complaint.”
And one of the article's co-authors even clarified that the piece does not support claims that Schiff was somehow behind the complaint. After House Minority Leader Rep. Kevin McCarthy pointed to the Times article as evidence that Schiff had been “caught orchestrating” the complaint, the article's co-author responded, “Nope. Not what the NYT reported. The whistleblower went to an intel committee staffer with a vague account of the complaint, and was told to file through proper channels. Schiff personally never knew the whistleblower’s identity. That’s hardly 'orchestrating' the complaint.”
Yet the piece quickly became fodder for Trump’s defenders, who willfully misrepresented it -- and they were aided by mainstream outlets that amplified Trump's baseless conspiracy theory.
"One of the hardest things for me to accept is the fact that Kevin Graham has blonde hair, blue eyes and an English last name. This ugly truth blows any arguments one might have for actual white supremacism out of the water. He's truly a disgrace." - Ajax
On an aside, Glenn Kessler of Washington Post is absolutely awful at his job. This is a good recent example. In the words of Brian Beutler, Schiff gets "four Pinocchios" for answering several questions accurately and one question inaccurately because of a good faith misunderstanding of the question, and the near-explicit purpose is to balance out a fact check of Pompeo who covered up a crime.
Kessler does versions of this all the time. He hates Bernie Sanders for whatever reason and routinely fact checks him as a lying liar when what Sanders states is either backed up by blue-chip research or is just literally true.
The NYT deserves some blame for the misrepresentation of Schiff media cycle that Smokey is a little behind the times on. While reading the full story lets you understand what actually happened, their clickbaity headline did make it seem like the disinformation version could be true. They could've not done that.
Yeah, things are completely falling apart for the Democrats.
"One of the hardest things for me to accept is the fact that Kevin Graham has blonde hair, blue eyes and an English last name. This ugly truth blows any arguments one might have for actual white supremacism out of the water. He's truly a disgrace." - Ajax
Yeah, things are completely falling apart for the Democrats.
Trump defenders are trying so many mutually self-contradictory defenses at such a rapid pace that it's difficult to keep track of them unto themselves. In this case, the conspiracy theory is that Schiff has a plant in the Trump administration that allowed him to shadow write a whistleblower complaint to frame Donald Trump with lies.
That defense seems to be hurt a little bit by the mountain of evidence that what the whistleblower alleged did occur, including - and it is hard to make this up - the whitehouse freely providing information showing them to have done it.
Smokey wrote:This is already falling apart and will backfire on the Democrat party.
"An official confirms the whistleblower failed to disclose prior contacts with House Democrats regarding the allegations of his August 12 complaint. The box in Part 3, Question 1 of the form regarding contacts with Congress or congressional committees was unchecked and left blank. The dates of those contacts were also not disclosed as required. And the specific members and committees that were contacted were likewise not disclosed in the section requiring that information."
And while the whistleblower concealed his contacts with Schiff's committee, Schiff lied about them - claiming last month that his panel had "not spoken directly with the whistleblower." This earned Schiff four Pinocchios from the Washington Post.
"We have not spoken directly with the whistleblower. We would like to," Schiff told MSNBC's Sam Stein when asked if they had ever spoken. "But I am sure the whistleblower has concerns that he has not been advised, as the law requires, by the inspector general or the director of national Intelligence just how he is supposed to communicate with Congress, and so the risk to the whistleblower is retaliation."
There's now a second whistleblower working with investigators who has first hand knowledge that corroberates the first whistleblower. Yep, this is really backfiring on the Democrats. But maybe, just maybe, this is all fake news and Trump is actually winning.
"We have taken up arms in defense of our liberty, our property, our wives, and our children; we are determined to preserve them, or die." - Captain Moroni - 'Address to the Inhabitants of Canada' 1775
DarkHelmet wrote:There's now a second whistleblower working with investigators who has first hand knowledge that corroberates the first whistleblower. Yep, this is really backfiring on the Democrats. But maybe, just maybe, this is all fake news and Trump is actually winning.
A second whistleblower with direct knowledge of an alleged plot by Donald Trump to extort Ukraine into producing dirt on his Democratic 2020 election rival Joe Biden has stepped forward, according to Mark Zaid, a lawyer for the first whistleblower in the case.
Zaid told ABC News on Sunday that he was representing a second whistleblower, described as a member of the intelligence community, in the case that has sparked an impeachment inquiry by the House of Representatives on Capitol Hill.
Zaid said he did not know whether his second client was the same “second whistleblower” whose existence was first reported by the New York Times on Saturday.
A colleague of Zaid’s, Andrew Bakaj, confirmed the news Sunday morning on Twitter: “I can confirm that my firm and my team represent multiple whistleblowers in connection to the underlying 12 August disclosure to the Intelligence Community Inspector General. No further comment at this time.”
An account by a second whistleblower reinforcing the original whistleblower complaint, made public two weeks ago, could accelerate the impeachment inquiry against Trump, announced by House speaker Nancy Pelosi on 24 September. The first complaint helped Democrats in Congress focus their inquiry on Ukrainian diplomats who helped arrange a phone call between Trump and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelinskiy.
The testimony by one of those diplomats, Kurt Volker, on Thursday led to the disclosure of six pages of text messages among diplomats and a Ukrainian presidential aid that captured a long-running conversation about how to procure a “deliverable” in extending a White House invitation to Zelenskiy.
The second whistleblower has spoken with the inspector general of the intelligence community, Zaid said. By becoming an official whistleblower, the individual would receive protections under federal law against retaliation by the president or anyone else.
A complaint submitted to the inspector general by the first whistleblower was made public two weeks ago. The complaint included a description of a phone call between Trump and Zelenskiy that to a high degree matched a summary of the call released by the White House a day earlier.
Trump and his defenders have attacked the first whistleblower by saying that the individual did not have direct knowledge of the conversations he or she was describing, and by saying, misleadingly, that the whistleblower had not accurately described the phone call, which Trump has said was “perfect” and “beautiful”.
As news emerged on Saturday that a second whistleblower was preparing to step forward, Trump kept up those lines of attack.
“The first so-called second hand information ‘Whistleblower’ got my phone conversation almost completely wrong,” the president tweeted, “so now word is they are going to the bench and another ‘Whistleblower’ is coming in from the Deep State, also with second hand information. Meet with Shifty. Keep them coming!”
“Shifty” is Trump’s smear for Representative Adam Schiff, the chairman of the intelligence committee, which is heading up the impeachment inquiry.
Trump, who often spends time over the weekend at one of his golf resorts, planned to stay at the White House all day on Sunday, Bloomberg News reported.
Hmm. Trump is missing his golf? Must be serious this time ...
Zadok: I did not have a faith crisis. I discovered that the Church was having a truth crisis. Maksutov: That's the problem with this supernatural stuff, it doesn't really solve anything. It's a placeholder for ignorance.
Trump's defense yesterday that, essentially, "I didn't do it, but Rick Perry made me do it" was hilarious. Again, this admin is like the Godfather, but everyone is Fredo.
please delete. duplicate post about second whistleblower. Sorry, Bigfry.
Last edited by Guest on Sun Oct 06, 2019 4:12 pm, edited 1 time in total.
"The great problem of any civilization is how to rejuvenate itself without rebarbarization." - Will Durant "We've kept more promises than we've even made" - Donald Trump "Of what meaning is the world without mind? The question cannot exist." - Edwin Land
