You know how Zelenskiy has been saying he felt no pressure from Trump, no no, no pressure at all? Well, don’t you believe it.

U.S. State Department officials were informed that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy was feeling pressure from the Trump administration to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden even before the July phone call that has led to impeachment hearings in Washington, two people with knowledge of the matter told The Associated Press.

In early May, officials at the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv, including then-Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch, were told Zelenskiy was seeking advice on how to navigate the difficult position he was in, the two people told the AP. He was concerned President Donald Trump and associates were

It turns out Trump has a tendency to attack people who annoy him.

Knowing Trump’s reflex is to lash out, aides have in the past warned him that character assassination is a bad idea. They told him to avoid savaging Special Counsel Robert Mueller, for example, advising that it would do him no good. Trump didn’t listen, treating Mueller as another in a long line of antagonists to be trampled.

“He’s a street fighter,” said a former senior White House official, who like others I talked with this week spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss Trump’s personality. “He’d rather be tearing the head off a rooster than putting caviar on a cracker.” A Republican senator told

Day one of the impeachment hearings.

I’ve just realized, partly because of something Schiff said in his opening statement and partly because/while reading in the Guardian’s live coverage

Echoing his closed-door testimony, Bill Taylor said in his opening statement that he was told “everything” Ukraine sought, including a White House visit and the frozen military aid, was tied to a public announcement of investigations into Joe Biden and the 2016 election.

…that all this and more is going to come out and be nailed down and in the record, and if then nothing happens, we’ll be on the record as knowing all this and nailing it down and then saying no problem.

I know that’s obvious, we’ve all known that … Read the rest

I guess that’s one way to go – “Look, the president says stuff like that all the time, so because he says it all the time, it can’t be impeachable.”

Jesse Lee tweets:

Thornberry admits it was inappropriate for Trump to pressure a foreign country for political smears, but not impeachable because Trump does it all the time.

Thornberry’s argument:

There’s not really anything that the President said in that phone call that’s different from what he says in public all the time. So is there some sort of abuse of power that rises to that threshold that is different than the American people have been hearing for three years? I don’t hear that.

It’s not different from … Read the rest

A Seinfeld writer points out that Trump has never been a real New Yorker.

In his 70 years as a resident, his feet barely touched pavement. He probably still thinks the subway takes tokens. He probably never waited in line for a movie, got sick on street-fair Belgian waffles, or felt the thrill of beating everyone to a cab in the rain. He never had a vicious landlord or a predatory boss, and he sure as hell never had the ultimate New York experience of suffering in silence.

Peter Mehlman doesn’t say this, but I’m betting Trump also never got to know the city by walking around in it. That’s the only way to do it, as far as … Read the rest

Aw, nice, Volodya invited Trump to attend Russia’s next military parade and Don is all excited about it.

… Read the rest

The whistleblower’s lawyer sent the White House counsel a cease and desist letter. That may seem a futile gesture but at least it gets it on the record.

“I am writing out of deep concern that your client, the President of the United States, is engaging in rhetoric and activity that places my client, the Intelligence Community Whistleblower, and their family in physical danger,” Andrew Bakaj wrote to White House counsel Pat Cipollone in a Thursday letter obtained by CNN’s Anderson Cooper.

“I am writing to respectfully request that you counsel your client on the legal and ethical peril in which he is placing himself should anyone be physically harmed as a result of his, or his surrogates’, behavior,”

Ah now this is a good look for a current president. Yes indeed, this really reflects well on us and our institutions and choices.

A New York judge on Thursday ordered President Donald Trump to pay $2 million to an array of charities to resolve a lawsuit alleging he misused his own charitable foundation to further his political and business interests.

Judge Saliann Scarpulla said Trump breached his fiduciary duty to the Trump Foundation by allowing his campaign staff to plan a fundraiser for veterans’ charities in the run-up to the 2016 Iowa caucuses.

The event, which passed money through Trump’s non-profit, was designed “to further Mr. Trump’s political campaign,” Scarpulla said.

The judge also signed off on agreements

Speaking of the Justice Department, and Trump’s efforts to exert complete control of a branch that is supposed to be largely independent, and how that plays out for Attorneys General – Jeff Sessions is running for the Senate again.

Mr. Sessions has remained largely out of the public eye, and has been effectively exiled from Republican politics, since he was forced out of the Trump administration last November. He had repeatedly clashed with the president over his decision to recuse himself from the Justice Department’s investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election.

Mr. Trump relentlessly attacked Mr. Sessions both in public and in private, calling him “scared stiff” and his leadership “a total joke,” among other insults, ultimately

Trump wanted Barr to hold a press conference to say Trump didn do nuthin.

President Donald Trump asked Attorney General William Barr to hold a news conference clearing him of legal wrongdoing with regard to his phone call pressuring the Ukrainian President to investigate Democrats, a person familiar with the matter tells CNN.

Trump has raised the idea in conversations surrounding the ongoing impeachment inquiry over recent weeks, and has said he thought the idea could help project the message that he hadn’t done anything wrong, the person familiar with the matter said.

Right, because that’s how that works – big honcho guy gets up and says Nobody did nuthin, and that’s the end of it.

In Trump’s dreamworld … Read the rest

Trump breaking the law yesterday by promoting his son’s new “book” on Twitter:

My son, @DonaldJTrumpJr is coming out with a new book, “Triggered: How the Left Thrives on Hate and Wants to Silence Us” – available tomorrow, November 5th! A great new book that I highly recommend for ALL to read. Go order it today!

A reply:

Another:

The director of public policy at the Project on Government Oversight sums it up well … “Frankly he’s using his Twitter account to try to financially benefit his son .. That’s not only distasteful, but it’s a misuse of public office.”

One more:

2635.702 Use of public office for private gain. “An employee shall not use his public

It all points to Trump’s desire to be a dictator.

A common thread is emerging from the impeachment bombshells, court fights and multiple scandals all coming to head this week inside the one-year mark to the next general election. It’s a picture of a President and his men who subscribe to a staggeringly broad interpretation of executive power and have no reservations about using it[,] often for domestic political ends.

The trend, which threatens to recast the conception of the presidency shared by America’s founders, shone through the first witness testimony released from the impeachment inquiry Monday.

One former ambassador, Marie Yovanovitch, who apparently had been in the way of Trump’s plans to get dirt from Ukraine

More on Trump N Twitter:

Aides said they often compiled positive feedback for Mr. Trump. He revels in the stream of praise from his most loyal followers, on paper or as he scrolls through his phone early in the morning and late at night.

That’s so pathetic. No, I don’t feel sorry for him, I just find it pathetic. Contemptible, and pathetic. Random fools on Twitter think he’s awwwwwwsome, and that gives him the cuddly feelz.

The Times presents a graph showing that tweets that get lots of love on Twitter are repellent to the sane adult public. It’s kind of as if Trump spent all his time courting gamers or zombie fans.

The president is keenly aware of

The Times has a huge multi-author piece on Trump N Twitter. It’s nothing we don’t already know, I think, but it does provide some details that are interesting.

Mr. Trump’s Twitter habit is most intense in the morning, when he is in the White House residence, watching Fox News, scrolling through his Twitter mentions and turning the social media platform into what one aide called the “ultimate weapon of mass dissemination.”

Of the attack tweets identified in the Times analysis, nearly half were sent between 6 a.m. and 10 a.m., hours that Mr. Trump spends mostly without advisers present.

After waking early, Mr. Trump typically watches news shows recorded the previous night on his “Super TiVo,” several DVRs connected

Two transcripts from the impeachment inquiry have been made public, I guess with more to follow. One stomach-turning item:

Marie Yovanovitch, the ousted U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, told House impeachment investigators last month that U.S. Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland told her she should tweet out support or praise for President Donald Trump if she wanted to save her job, according to a transcript of her testimony made public Monday.

On one level, the higher level, that’s serious bad governance, bad policy, bad dealing with civil servants, all that. On the lower level, it’s the usual absolutely sickening contemptible infantile egotism of this ravenously greedy-for-praise monster. The higher level is vastly more consequential but it’s the lower … Read the rest

Speaking of Only in Trump’s White House…what other president, even the shittiest of them, ever decided the best thing to do when a state was suffering a disaster would be to shout abuse at its governor, in public? I don’t know of any. But for Trump it’s just another Sunday.

The Governor of California, @GavinNewsom, has done a terrible job of forest management. I told him from the first day we met that he must “clean” his forest floors regardless of what his bosses, the environmentalists, DEMAND of him. Must also do burns and cut fire stoppers…….Every year, as the fire’s rage & California burns, it is the same thing-and then he comes to the Federal Government for $$$

It’s ok to commit high crimes and misdemeanors as long as you keep it secret.

The senior White House lawyer who placed a record of President Donald Trump’s July 25 call with Ukraine’s president in a top-secret system also instructed at least one official who heard the call not to tell anyone about it, according to testimony heard by House impeachment investigators this week.

Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, a decorated Army officer who served as the National Security Council’s director for Ukraine, told lawmakers that he went to the lawyer, John Eisenberg, to register his concerns about the call, in which Trump asked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate the Bidens, according to a person in the room for

Oh lord. Apparently Trump and The Sharpie Gang photoshopped a photo so that it looked as if Trump were putting a medal on the Hero Dog?

Or maybe Daily Wire did and he retweeted it?

AMERICAN HERO!

I did a comment retweet of it at the time saying “Trump hates dogs.” I also wondered why the dog was always photographed with her tongue lolling in exactly the same way…but I didn’t think of photoshop. Stupid of me.

Jim Acosta:

A WH official said “the dog is not at the WH.”

The NY Times:

The photo President Trump shared seemed to be an altered version of a 2017 photo of James McCloughan receiving a Medal of Honor. McCloughan told