Welp, it’s on.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced on Tuesday evening that the US House of Representatives will launch impeachment proceedings into Donald Trump, setting up an extraordinary constitutional clash over allegations he sought the help of a foreign country to harm a political rival.

“The president must be held accountable. No one is above the law,” Pelosi said on Capitol Hill moments after 5pm on Tuesday.

After months of resistance amid calls from many fellow Democrats in Washington, Pelosi determined that Trump’s alleged conduct and his administration’s refusal to comply with congressional requests for information and testimony has forced the House’s hand, leaving them no choice but to move forward with a formal impeachment inquiry.

…

The sharp change

Way back on August 22…

President Donald Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani confirmed Thursday that the State Department assisted his efforts to press the Ukrainian government to probe two prominent Democratic opponents of the president: former Vice President Joe Biden and the Democratic National Committee.

Specifically, Giuliani has wanted Ukrainian officials to look into any impropriety related to the former vice president’s push to crack down on corruption in Ukraine and his son Hunter Biden’s involvement in a natural gas company there. Giuliani also sought to have Ukraine examine whether the Democratic National Committee worked in connection with Ukrainian officials to harm Trump’s 2016 campaign by releasing damaging information on the president’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort.

Giuliani had … Read the rest

Ed Pilkington at the Guardian wonders why the hell Giuliani is doing what he’s doing.

Giuliani began thumping the Ukraine theme in April, when he laid out his theory – some would say, conspiracy theory – on Fox News. He accused the former vice-president of using bribery to shield his son from legal peril relating to business activities in the eastern European country.

Specifically, Giuliani alleged that Biden leant on a former Ukraine president to fire a top prosecutor who had been investigating corruption within a gas company on whose board Hunter Biden then served.

A week after Joe Biden launched his presidential campaign, Giuliani blabbed to the New York Times that he had discussed the issue of

The Wall Street Journal on Trump and Ukraine:

President Trump in a July phone call repeatedly pressured the president of Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden ’s son, according to people familiar with the matter, urging Volodymyr Zelensky about eight times to work with Rudy Giuliani on a probe that could hamper Mr. Trump’s potential 2020 opponent.

“He told him that he should work with [Mr. Giuliani] on Biden, and that people in Washington wanted to know” if his lawyer’s assertions that Mr. Biden acted improperly as vice president were true, one of the people said. Mr. Giuliani has suggested Mr. Biden’s pressure on Ukraine to fight corruption had to do with an investigation of a gas company for which

Interesting. It seems Trump has been using the military to improve revenues at his golf resort in Scotland. What a coincidence: just the other day he used Pence’s drop-in on Dublin to improve revenues at his golf course on the far side of the country. Fun fact: he’s not allowed to do that. It’s corrupt, and he’s not allowed to do corrupt things. Sadly, though, we don’t enforce our own rules, so oh well.

In early Spring of this year, an Air National Guard crew made a routine trip from the U.S. to Kuwait to deliver supplies.

What wasn’t routine was where the crew stopped along the way: President Donald Trump’s Turnberry resort, about 50 miles outside Glasgow, Scotland.

Since

The NY Times dropped a big article on Deutsche Bank and Trump late yesterday, which Everyone Is Talking About.

Before Trump stole the presidency he and DB had a mutually beneficial relationship. It’s obvious how he benefited; how they did, not so much.

Mr. Trump used loans from Deutsche Bank to finance skyscrapers and other high-end properties, and repeatedly cited his relationship with the bank to deflect political attacks on his business acumen. Deutsche Bank used Mr. Trump’s projects to build its investment-banking business, reaped fees from the assets he put in its custody[,] and leveraged his celebrity to lure clients.

I’m not sure what it means to “build” an investment-banking business via bad loans to a cheat, but maybe … Read the rest

Bam.

The Donald J. Trump Foundation will close and give away all its remaining funds under judicial supervision amid a lawsuit accusing the charity and the Trump family of using it illegally for self-dealing and political gain, the New York attorney general’s office announced Tuesday.

The attorney general, Barbara Underwood, accused the foundation of “a shocking pattern of illegality” that was “willful and repeated” and included unlawfully coordinating with Mr. Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.

“This amounted to the Trump Foundation functioning as little more than a checkbook to serve Mr. Trump’s business and political interests,” Ms. Underwood said.

In short, he’s a crook and a liar and a fraud and a thief…and he’s also the president of the United … Read the rest

Trump’s lawyer basically told Walter Shaub that Trump’s financial disclosure wasn’t true and asked if that would be ok, USNews reported a year ago:

President Donald Trump’s attorneys initially wanted him to submit an updated financial disclosure without certifying the information as true, according to correspondence with the Office of Government Ethics.

Attorney Sheri Dillon said she saw no need for Trump to sign his 2016 personal financial disclosure because he is filing voluntarily this year. But OGE director Walter Shaub said his office would only work with Dillon if she agreed to follow the typical process of having Trump make the certification.

He put it more strongly on Twitter just now.

https://twitter.com/waltshaub/status/996813720524349441

Back to the story:

The documents

The Times on Trump’s oopsie:

President Trump’s financial disclosure, released on Wednesday, revealed for the first time that he paid more than $100,000 to his personal attorney, Michael D. Cohen, as reimbursement for payment to a third-party.

That is, this is the first time Trump has admitted it to the feds.

Mr. Trump’s disclosure of the 2016 payment to Mr. Cohen raises the question of whether he erred in not reporting the debt on last year’s disclosure form. The document released Wednesday said that Mr. Trump was reporting the repaid debt “in the interest of transparency” but that it was “not required to be disclosed as reportable liabilities.”

Yet a letter accompanying the report sent to Rod J. Rosenstein,

This could get interesting.

https://twitter.com/NormEisen/status/996803765264113664

SIREN: by disclosing Cohen debt on his just-released 278, Donald Trump just substantiated our @crewcrew criminal complaint that he should have disclosed it last year as well. Form is here https://oge.app.box.com/v/Trump2018Annual278 … and our criminal complaint is here

https://twitter.com/NormEisen/status/996810077414854656

BREAKING: @OfficeGovEthics agrees with our @CREWcrew analysis that Trump was required to report Cohen debt & sends last year’s form with omission under false statement liability to DOJ & Rod Rosenstein in case “relevant to any inquiry you may be pursuing”! https://oge.app.box.com/v/OGELettertoDOJ …

Well. No doubt Trump will explain it all in a tweet.… Read the rest

Meanwhile Congressional Republicans are also pretending to think Mueller is a Secret Agent for The Democrats Plus The Devil Plus The King of the Mooslims.

Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein adamantly defended the character and impartiality of Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel, as he came head-to-head on Wednesday with an increasingly aggressive campaign by Republicans to discredit the inquiry.

The Republicans’ effort received a fresh jolt from the release one night earlier of text messages exchanged last year between an F.B.I. agent, Peter Strzok, and an F.B.I. lawyer, Lisa Page, describing the possibility of an election victory by President Trump as “terrifying” and saying that Hillary Clinton “just has to win.” Mr. Mueller removed Mr. Strzok from

Pro Publica, the New Yorker, and WNYC have collaborated on an investigation of that time a few years ago when New York prosecutors were considering bringing a felony fraud case against Ivanka and Donald Junior Trump, but didn’t.

In the spring of 2012, Donald Trump’s two eldest children, Ivanka Trump and Donald Trump Jr., found themselves in a precarious legal position. For two years, prosecutors in the Manhattan District Attorney’s office had been building a criminal case against them for misleading prospective buyers of units in the Trump SoHo, a hotel and condo development that was failing to sell.

Oh surely not. Real estate grifters never mislead prospective buyers.

By which I mean, they do that routinely; I’m surprised to … Read the rest