My cat could have exposed the incompetencies of the Bush administration.
And he is no longer a journalist; he’s a commentator.
Sure there’s plenty of corruption. I’m speaking specifically to politicians vs. organized crime families.
We take for granted the ideal that our politicians - while generally shady, selfish, and liars - at bottom understand and endorse in some form the separation of “what’s best for the country” and “what’s in it for me”.
In other words, we don’t accept major corruption as the status quo. We expect our attorney generals to be reasonably unbiased and to work hard. We expect our DAs to prosecute regardless of their personal feelings on any matter and we expect our top law enforcement officials to do their job and not be distracted by personal connection or gain.
This isn’t true in large swathes of the world.
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He probably has an agenda and is being fed select English language documents, but the defining factor is staggering American naivete when it comes to corruption.
You see, when he hears the word “prosecutor”, he automatically assumes he was “prosecuting” someone and therefore the notion that he was prevented from said prosecution by a powerful individual is very plausible. This is the American expectation of criminal wrongdoing.
What he doesn’t understand is that “prosecutor” is a member of a crime syndicate that was personally stealing between 10 and 20 million USD anually and wasn’t prosecuting anyone.
The same thing with the “sworn affidavit”. Again, in an American mind based on the experiences of the US legal system this carries significant weight due to the risk of perjury. What he - and many of you guys here - don’t understand that is is a meaningless document.
Had Firtash ordered him to do so, the prosecutor would have produced an affidavit in which he’d state that he personally witnessed Hillary Clinton kill Seth Rich.
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Exactly. And therefore US political and legal system is singularly unprepared for massive corruption efforts from other state actors as the difference is in several orders of magnitude. Reimbursed cash expenses, paid for private golfing trips, hotel stays on taxpayers expense?
Sounds like kindergarten to me. The Rotenberg brothers in Russia are personally stealing between 20 and 50 billion anually. So Trump’s petty schemes seem despicable.
Russians usually raise their eyebrows in comical disbelief upon hearing about campaign donations in the US due to small sums involved.
These sums you couldn’t use to influence a mayor of a small town in Russia.
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How DARE you forget the hookers, @loppar!
That is simply unexcusable!
How is anyone supposed to formulate a definitive decision when 6-8 guys (with Ph D level education) on this thread alone, have conclusively determined guilt on the opposite party, as compared to their usual ideological bent?
I am not sure either side (along with their supporters) give a Tinker’s damn about any true damage, but are highly motivaed to see opponents get political damage.
I have a radical idea - go read stuff.
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Okay bub. No such thing as organized crime. Gotcha.
My point is that both sides are coloring the documents, a la the transcripts are/aren’t enough. One is supposed to discern some unspoken intent, or not. The English speaking press is or isn’t giving the true background, etc.
I’m not sure if you are inferring l need to read, doesn’t matter. But when reading ‘facts’ that are in opposition, based on author, l find it difficult to see the true story.
Mafia does not mean organized crime. They aren’t interchangeable terms.
Ok, there is finally a coherent English language telling of events. As former US Ambassador to Moscow, Michael McFaul (the same McFaul Putin asked Trump for) said, Biden delivered talking points agreed upon by an interagency process.
Shokin was fired,” Kaleniuk observed, “because he failed to do investigations of corruption and economic crimes of President Yanukovych and his close associates, including Zlochevsky, and basically it was the big demand within society in Ukraine, including our organization and many other organizations, to get rid of this guy.”
By getting Shokin removed, Biden in fact made it more rather than less likely that the oligarch who employed his son would be subject to prosecution for corruption.
As the former Reuters correspondent Oliver Bullough explains in his book “Moneyland,” just weeks before Hunter Biden joined the Burisma board in May 2014, ostensibly “to strengthen corporate governance,” Britain’s Serious Fraud Office had frozen $23 million of Zlochevsky’s assets in a money laundering investigation. (Zlochevsky and Burisma have denied all allegations of corruption.) At the time, Bullough writes, “The White House insisted that the position was private matter for Hunter Biden unrelated to his father’s job, but that is not how anyone I spoke to in Ukraine interpreted it. Hunter Biden is an undistinguished corporate lawyer with no previous Ukraine experience. Why then would a Ukrainian tycoon hire him?”
Indeed, hiring the vice president’s son might have seemed to Zlochevsky like a way to protect his business from scrutiny by international investigators. But the facts show that the Obama-Biden administration strenuously opposed the decision by Ukrainian prosecutors to let Zlochevsky off the hook.
Vitaliy Kasko, a former deputy prosecutor who resigned in 2016 and accused Shokin’s office of being a “hotbed of corruption,” told Bullough that he had tried and failed to get his colleagues in the prosecutor general’s office to offer proper assistance to the British inquiry in 2014. But the British investigation was eventually stymied because Ukrainian prosecutors failed to provide a court with evidence that the $23 million — the proceeds from the sale of an oil storage facility Zlochevsky owned via a shell company in the British Virgin Islands — were related to criminal abuse of office by the former natural resources minister.
New reporting from Bloomberg News this week revealed that the 2014 case against Zlochevsky “was assigned to Shokin, then a deputy prosecutor. But Shokin and others weren’t pursuing it, according to the internal reports from the Ukrainian prosecutor’s office reviewed by Bloomberg.”
In December 2014, U.S. officials threatened Ukrainian prosecutors that there would be consequences if they failed to assist the British investigation, according to the documents obtained by Bloomberg. Instead, the Ukrainian prosecutors provided a letter to Zlochevsky’s lawyer stating that they knew of no evidence that the former minister had been involved in embezzlement.
The British investigation collapsed soon after that and the funds were unfrozen and quickly moved to Cyprus.
Kasko, the former deputy prosecutor, told Bloomberg News that there was no truth to the accusation that Biden or anyone in the Obama administration had tried to block the investigation of Zlochevsky. “There was no pressure from anyone from the U.S. to close cases against Zlochevsky,” Kasko said. “It was shelved by Ukrainian prosecutors in 2014 and through 2015.”
On her center’s website, Kaleniuk has been working to debunk a series of conspiratorial stories about supposed “Ukrainian collusion” in the 2016 election which have recently been embraced and promoted by President Donald Trump, his personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, and his son, Donald Trump Jr. But Kaleniuk was stunned and annoyed by a New York Times report published last week that focused on how the politics of the accusation against Biden might play. The report failed, in her view, to make it clear that the innuendo was false.
> “What I’m pissed off about,” Kaleniuk said, “is that Shokin, who was totally corrupt, who undermined the reform of prosecution, and reformers, and who didn’t want to investigate Zlochevsky, now appears in the New York Times as the hero who wanted to investigate Zlochevsky and Burisma and who suffered because Joe Biden demanded to dismiss him because of his willingness to investigate Burisma — which is absolute nonsense.”
Compounding her frustration, Kaleniuk said, is that she was interviewed for the Times story, but it focused more on the potential harm the anti-Biden conspiracy theory could inflict on his presidential candidacy than on making clear that Shokin was fired because of his failure to properly investigate suspected corruption, including by Zlochevsky. Kaleniuk’s fear — that the Times report would be taken as confirmation that Biden had acted improperly — seemed to be realized by a viral tweet promoting the story from Ken Vogel, the Washington correspondent who wrote it, which claimed that “The BIDENS are entangled in a Ukrainian corruption scandal.”
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But that’s the entire point - go get as many facts as you can that are undisputed, then where there are gaps, use logic/reason/common-sense to reach an informed conclusion.
Here’s an undisputed fact - Giuliani, the President’s personal lawyer clothed with no authority to represent the US, has been trying to persuade Ukraine leadership to turn up the heat on Biden through investigation, etc.
That’s a fact not in dispute.
My question to you is - why? What is Giuliani trying to do?
Now, use logic/reason/common sense to answer.
What’s your answer?
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Aren’t you a lawyer?
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Haven’t you heard of the Chewbacca defense?
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And you are a stereotype of your side… Elitist, cannot be bothered with facts or to converse and present opposing facts, perhaps in this case there are none.
ABC, NYT were quick to jump on a story that wasn’t true. They admitted the story wasn’t true as they issued retractions on the original story. But you believe the original factually untrue story anyway… That indicates you live in an echo chamber a bubble of lies spoken often enough.
Then you shut down the conversation before it even begins because I don’t agree with your point of view…
“Um, like, you’re so stupid, you should, like Google it or something.Uh!”
Thanks for the cintilating conversation. Perhaps if you don’t care for my company, you should not speak to me, I am liable to speak backp
I usually take it that when the rebuttle is simply an insult I won by default. If that’s all he had, insulting me, he really had no argument in the first place or cannot articulate it.
“You’re, just so like typical!”
This is a literal description of Donald Trump.
Could be. I would like to have character and policy. But if I have to choose one I’ll take policy.
Hundreds of millions of choices, and you believe we can sacrifice character in lieu of “policy” and still be a free nation. By Lindsey Graham’s OWN WORDS concerning Bill Clinton,
“You don’t even have to be convicted of a crime to lose your job in this constitutional republic if this body determines that your conduct as a public official is clearly out of bounds in your role,” the politician said. “Impeachment is not about punishment. Impeachment is about cleansing the office. Impeachment is about restoring honor and integrity to the office.”
The funny part is, we have a RECONSTRUCTED TRANSCRIPT, meaning it’s however much of the actual transcript the White House WANTED you to see, and it absolutely involves a quid pro quo - I do a lot for you, more than you do for me, I’d like you to do me a favor. It’s a mob shakedown. No explicit quid pro quo is required, it can absolutely be suggested and that has been ample evidence in mob trials for decades.
So there could be a crime, which is why you open an impeachment inquiry. And if there might be a crime, and there need be no actual crime, and you openly admit his character is flawed (understatement), why are you not interested in this process?
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Do you just lie or are you mentally ill? You admitted you don’t follow the news media so how do you know what they did? Who said the story isn’t true?
You really are full of shit. Post these retractions.