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WTF Is An Iowa Caucus Anyway?

You know how at the county fair you and your family of God-fearing Americans line up to place your bets on whichever little pig can run through an obstacle course the fastest, while you sit in the stands eating a corndog and a turkey leg and a fried oreo and a doughnut and a soft-serve ice cream cone? Caucuses are just like that, but at the end of the night, they make the winning pig president. More or less.

Anyway, let's skip the history lesson on WHY IS CAUCUS and move straight to the part you actually care about, which is WHAT IS GOING TO HAPPEN TONIGHT? And also, WHY IS EVERYONE SAYING THIS WILL BE A SHITSHOW? The answer is ANYONE WHO SAYS THEY KNOW IS LYING, and OMG, ALL THE WAYS. Here's how it will go down.

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Trump Tried To Grab John Bolton By The Mustache In MAY. F*cking MAY! Impeachment Liveblog, Day Whatever!

What's that you were saying, Lamar Alexander, my senator, about how you totally agree that Trump is guilty, but you are just sort of OK with that, because you've sold whatever was left of your shriveled soul to hide behind your obsession that impeachments shouldn't be "partisan," as if that matters when the president's party has devolved into a low-rent criminal operation, and as if Justin Amash hadn't indeed been the lone voice for patriotism on the GOP side in the House, who was then hounded out of the party forthwith for having the balls you don't, Lamar Alexander? Were you saying something?

Uh oh, we interrupt our regularly scheduled Lamar-ring for the latest John Bolton book bombshell from the New York Times! Turns out Trump tried to grab Bolton by the mustache and make him get Rudy Giuliani in a room with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in MAY, which is #calendartime LONG before he allegedly got pissed at the White House and said he didn't want to be involved in Trump's "drug deal" with Ukraine. May is also when Volodymyr Zelenskyy was inaugurated, and just after Giuliani finished his insane, immoral pressure campaign to remove Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch, because she was in the way of letting Trump and Giuliani do corruption in Ukraine.

Let's just READ TEH TRANSDRAFDSUIPT!, as least as the Times reports on it:

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Another Day, Another Sh*tshow. Impeachment Q & A Liveblog, Day Two!

All the senators are being a big Grumpy Gus about how there probably won't be any witnesses for what was already a sham Senate impeachment trial, simply because Republicans have decided protecting a criminal president is more important than the oath they took. What will eventually happen at the vote tomorrow? Won't know until they vote and we can liveblog the traitors in real time! Maybe John Bolton will end up having to go on Rachel Maddow like a common Lev Parnas or something.

We have 19,000,000 hours of liveblogging ahead of us, so let's do day two of questions and answers! We hear Rand Paul is going to try to out the whistleblower again, and he is GRRR ARGH mad at that liberal Deep Stater John Roberts, who refuses to let him.

Oh yeah also Alan Dershowitz is trying to pretend now that he did not argue yesterday that Trump is allowed to do anything he wants, abuse any power he wants, declare himself king, as long as he believes he is doing it in the national interest. So the sad decline of Dershowitz continues, and we all get to watch.

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No, Wonkette's Not Giving Larry Klayman $75,000, LARRY.

Larry Klayman, he's this lawyer. As he explains in his lawsuit against me, your editrix, personally, he is a very famous man, a public figure even, and I, your editrix, have committed defamation most foul by saying he seemed, based on (not his first) bar disciplinary proceedings, not to be a very good lawyer. He also seemed, based on his saying Obama administration employees were Barack's "white slaves," and based on his suing Barack Obama, Eric Holder, Louis Farrakhan, and Black Lives Matter, for "starting a race war," to be some flavor of white supremacist. He also seemed, based on those disciplinary proceedings, to have sexually harassed a woman. (I said "harassed," but Larry Klayman, in his lawsuit against me, added [sexually] before harassed in the excerpt from my story, because he is so "honest.")

Also, I let Jamie laugh at him some. And she DID say "sexually" harassed, which I wouldn't have said because it was romantic harassment (and definitely stalking), but she's the First Amendment attorney, not me, so I let it ride. Shall we read some lawsuit, like I read all 185 pages including the footnotes of his HARROWING DC bar disciplinary report, together?

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2020 democratic primary

WTF, Iowa?

You are bad, and you should feed BAD.

WHAT THE HELL WAS THAT? After an entire year of campaigning, and fish frying, and selfie lines, and millions in ad buys, and the national media camping out in Des Moines, the Iowa caucus was a spectacular, unmitigated disaster. There are currently no results to report from last night's first-in-the-nation Democratic contest. Because everything that could go wrong .... DID. There was never a good reason to allow a tiny, conservative, white state which can't even be bothered to vote like normal people to open our primary season, and this debacle should be the last time we let that happen. Iowa needs to go to its room and think about what its done, for a long, long time.

Here's how it went down.

The Warning Signs

Saturday night was supposed to be the big reveal for the gold standard Iowa poll, done by Selzer & Co. for the Des Moines Register and CNN. But moments before the scheduled 7pm drop, they yanked the poll. Turns out, one of the call center operators had enlarged the font so much that it cut off Pete Buttigieg's name, so he wasn't one of the candidates included in that caller's data set. Ooopsie!

But of the course, the results leaked anyway. And FiveThirtyEight reported that it showed Biden collapsing to fourth place at only 13 percent. Which is wildly out of synch with the rest of the polling, which showed Biden and Sanders roughly tied for first place at around 21 percent.

Early Sites

Human error aside there's a reason Ann Selzer's poll is the best. And it's because she gets it right! Which means that my article from yesterday, which relied on every other poll and that assumed Sanders and Biden would reach the 15 percent viability threshold in most precincts turned out to be wildly off. Mea maxima culpa!

Because Iowa's 1,681 precincts aren't enough for a state with a whole three million people, there are an additional 99 "satellite sites" from places as far afield as the Brooklyn Public Library and Tblisi, Georgia. (Why??????) For people who needed to vote early because "jobs," there were satellite caucuses -- which are the only ones we still have any data for. Which meant that the entire American media spent hours focusing on rooms like this one in Ottumwa.

Without denigrating these people exercising their civic duty, the news value of events like these is exceedingly low. It mainly functions as a measure of intensity among a small number of supporters, rather than broad-based support among the wider electorate.

Biden Cratering

It's important to note that there are exactly zero official results available right now. And the national news media tends to cluster in Des Moines, where progressive candidates will do better than a centrist like the former VP. Perhaps Biden dominated in the rural districts that didn't get any coverage. But the early returns show him failing to reach the 15 percent viability threshold in many precincts, in line with the Selzer data.

But Sanders, Buttigieg, and Warren had a HUGE night.

No, but seriously, Iowa, WHAT THE FUCK? Who would choose a president like this?

Kewl! And, oh by the way, turnout was really low, which is an ominous sign for November where Democrats only win if we, you know, SHOW UP.

More Trouble Signs

Because Iowa's place in the calendar gives it outsize clout in the nominating process, the DNC has accommodated the state's flagrantly bassackward voting system. And because there was such a clamor of #DNCRigged after 2016, the party has bent over backward to be as transparent as possible. For the first time, the party would release the initial preference numbers, AKA the first alignment, the tally after supporters of candidates below the 15 percent viability threshold were allowed to switch teams, AKA the second alignment, and the final delegate allocation, AKA state delegate equivalent, or SDE.

To facilitate this open and informative process, they coded up a handy-dandy app for the precinct captains to report their results. And the app ... failed. Which meant that those captains had to wait on hold forever to verbally transmit the results to the Iowa Democratic Party.

Or text them in, which is not how you run a safe digital election. (Heyyyyy, Vlad!)

Some precincts just gave up and started tweeting their results at reporters.

Can we get a UN election monitor in here, please?

More Trouble

In prior years, supporters of viable candidates could shift their allegiance between the first and second alignments. But this year, in a failed attempt to streamline the process, the DNC changed the rules, locking in the first round "votes" for any candidate that met the 15 percent viability threshold. Supporters of a viable candidate could simply go home if they didn't want to spend another hour trying to round up orphans from non-viable candidates to join their team. And some of them did just that, working on the assumption that their votes would still count.

Except it appears that some precincts never got the got the memo. Elizabeth Warren's team reports that precinct captains were doing a straight-up head count for the second alignment, effectively discarding the supporters who had already left before the final tally.

Meanwhile, the Biden people sent a letter demanding that no results be released until the Iowa Democratic Party 'splains what the hell happened and if the tallies got garbled in the DNC's crappy, broken app.

Which is probably not a sign that they think Ol' Joe cleaned up in the delegate count.

Did We Mention That Caucuses Are Bullshit?

Brass tacks, Iowa does not make a damn bit of difference to the Democratic nominating process. The state contributes 41 delegates to the 3,979 that will choose our nominee -- a whopping 0.1 percent!

And to select those 41 delegates, the precincts will send 2,107 state delegates to be winnowed at a convention in April. And then a further pare-down at another convention in June. And THIS IS RIDICULOUS!

You know what else is ridiculous? The way the delegate allocation works at the precinct level.

So Klobuchar, whose supporters likely made Biden viable, gets zero delegates. Buttigieg gets almost twice as many "votes" as Biden, but only nets one extra delegate. Wanna play again?

Where is the logic in a 2-vote differential tipping Warren to two delegates, and a 24 vote differential (between Warren and Buttigieg) only netting one extra delegate for Mayor Pete? Wouldn't it make sense to just count the damn votes?

So, Was It #Rigged?

No, it wasn't rigged! The DNC couldn't rig a game of Rock-Paper-Scissors with a kindergartner! It was a catastrophic series of human fuckups because one tiny, white, rural state, which is probably going to vote for Donald Trump anyway, refuses to give up its anachronistic buggy whip of a nominating process and insists on going first. And we continue to let it!

NEVER AGAIN. No more caucuses, no more letting Iowa go first. This has to stop!

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Right Wing Extremism

Coast Guard Nazi Going To Prison. For The Mass-Murder Planning, Not The Racism.

Even though there's no law against 'domestic terrorism.'

White supremacist Coast Guard Lt. Christopher Hasson, 50, was sentenced on Friday to 13 years in prison after pleading guilty in October to four federal weapons charges.

Hasson was arrested in February of last year after authorities found a massive cache of guns and other weapons in the former Marine's home, along with various other materials detailing his plans to commit a massive domestic terrorist attack against American citizens— but primarily against journalists, commentators and Democratic legislators, whom he listed on an Excel spreadsheet. These targets included Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Nancy Pelosi, Angela Davis, Van Jones, Ilhan Omar, Maxine Waters, and the entire DSA.

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Elections

Ben Shapiro's Constitution Literacy Tests For Voting Would Ensure Trump, GOP Can't Vote. LET'S DO IT!

What's a literacy test among friends?

Noted conservative scholar Ben Shapiro is just wondering why Americans can vote who aren't landowning super geniuses like himself. He's stuck in the ethical debates of the 19th Century. Next up is whether pantaloons are appropriate dinner attire.

Shapiro argued yesterday for some "required testing" before citizens receive the privilege of voting. He absolutely doesn't want a "fake poll test, literacy test designed to exclude black people ... or something." He just thinks we should have a real test that excludes people he doesn't like from exercising the franchise.

SHAPIRO: The idea that you'd have to have a basic knowledge of America's Constitution, for example, in order to vote. I don't see that as a horrible idea. I really don't.

This "idea" would exclude the president and most Republicans in Congress. Maybe Shapiro is fine with that, but I still think voting is a fundamental right and we shouldn't deny it even to presidents who don't know what Article Two (or Two Corinthians) is. Trump's hero, Andrew Jackson, was a big proponent of universal suffrage with the only tiny restriction being your race and gender. By 1856, the requirements for owning property or even paying taxes were eliminated. You could even still believe in witches and vote.

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Impeachment

Lisa Murkowski Sick Of All The Corruption, Will Vote To Let It Continue

There's too much partisanship for a fair trial, so I'll vote with my party.

After Donald Trump manages to read his State of the Union address tonight -- which he wrote every word of himself -- the Senate will get on to the important business tomorrow of acquitting him in his impeachment trial. Maybe Congress will take up Joe Manchin's proposal to censure Trump, but we wouldn't hold our breath on that, either.

In a speech before a near-empty Senate chamber yesterday, Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) explained why she simply couldn't vote to remove Donald Trump from office: Sure, he's terrible and did a terrible thing, but we're terrible too, so convicting him of the bad thing he did would be bad.

youtu.be

Murkowski said the Senate had built a really good mechanism for trying a president accused of abuse of power, but it rested on a "rotted foundation" because the House rushed its investigation and didn't even send the Articles of Impeachment to the Senate for a month. During which time, she quite noticeably did not say, we kept finding out even more damning evidence of Trump's scheme to get foreign help in the 2020 election.

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2020 democratic primary

Judicial Watch Just Making Up Iowa 'Voter Fraud' Numbers, As If Iowa Needed Their Sh*t

And the (Republican!) secretary of state is pisssssed.

Judicial Watch is the conservative yet supposedly "non-partisan" activist group that exposes all several dozen of Hillary Clinton's murders. This weekend, the group made some shocking claims of voter fraud in Iowa. Judicial Watch issued a press release on its site declaring that eight Iowa counties had "total registration rates larger than [the] eligible voter population." There were allegedly 18,658 extra names on that state's voting rolls. That is alarming, but on the upside, it's also a big fat lie.

According to Iowa's (Republican!) Secretary of State Paul Pate, the official data from his office, as well as the US Census Bureau, showed that Judicial Watch's claim was false. From Pate's own press release on the subject:

"It's unfortunate this organization continues to put out inaccurate data regarding voter registration, and it's especially disconcerting they chose the day of the Iowa Caucus to do this," Secretary Pate said. "My office has told this organization, and others who have made similar claims, that their data regarding Iowa is deeply flawed and their false claims erode voter confidence in elections. They should stop this misinformation campaign immediately and quit trying to disenfranchise Iowa voters."

Iowa's voter registration statistics are publicly available on the Secretary of State's website. They are updated monthly. These numbers show that the ones claimed by Judicial Watch in their news release today are patently false.

Along with their false claims about the voter registration numbers, the organization's claims about Iowa population are greatly underestimated, according to actual data from the U.S. Census Bureau.

This still didn't prevent Judicial Watch's president, Tom Fitton, from promoting his debunked conspiracy theories on Twitter. Iowa has enough real problems with elections. It doesn't need this crap.

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Class War

U.S. Bank's Simple Wisdom: Look For The Helpers. And Fire Them.

Also please put a lady with cancer in prison for stealing groceries. That's justice.

In the week that the US Senate is set to formally declare Donald Trump above the law, a couple of reminders that people who make the grievous mistake of not having the right connections will get every bit as much justice as the rich and powerful can pile on them. In Portland, Oregon, a nice woman who worked for U.S. Bank got shitcanned after giving $20 to a bank customer who was being screwed over by the bank's delays in processing a check he deposited just before Christmas, and a Pennsylvania woman being treated for two advanced types of cancer has been sentenced to 10 months in prison for stealing $109.63 in groceries a bit over a year ago. And somewhere in the cosmos, Anatole France may be rolling his eyes that his 1894 line about the law's "majestic equality" in forbidding both the rich and the poor "to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread" is still so very apt.

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News

We Finally Know Why This Actress You Sort Of Remember Disappeared From Your TV! Tabs, Tues., Feb. 4, 2020

It's TABS!

Will there be Iowa caucus reports? There will! Are there at 1:30 a.m. while I'm tabbing? There aren't! But BOY is the (Republican) secretary of state PIIIISSSSED at Judicial Watch for just stone cold making up vote fraud numbers from thin air. Which is a tab I put in here four hours ago before we knew about clusterfuuuuuuuuuuuck!!!!!

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Right Wing Extremism

Oh No All The Nazi Website People Are Getting Laid Off

That's a shame.

Neo-Nazi and noted Tucker Carlson superfan Andrew Anglin is having a real bad week. Apparently, the hatemongering game just ain't what it used to be, and he's had to lay off most of his staff at the Daily Stormer, because his fellow Nazis are just not coming through with the cash to support him anymore. Too bad, so sad.

As first highlighted by Ars Technica journalist Jon Brodkin on Twitter, Anglin published a massive tantrum today in which he screamed at his Daily Stormer readers — only 60 of whom even sent him any bitcoins last month. Said rant was accompanied by a watermarked stock photo of a man with a gun to his head.

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Trump

President Great Words Will Write Very Own SOTU Address Without Parents' Help

New York Times blows cover of 'anonymous' writers who make Trump almost sound normal.

The New York Times has an article out today about the brave men and women mostly men whose job it is to put somewhat coherent words into Donald Trump's mouth when he speaks publicly. The (impeached) president is set to deliver his third and preferably final State of the Union address Tuesday night to a stunned nation. The theme is the "Great American Comeback," but don't call it a comeback! He's gonna be here another four years, because it's in the "national interest" for him to rig the hell out of the upcoming election.

Vince Haley and Ross Worthington are described as "little-known aides" who'll "assemble" Trump's address from the robbed graves of abnormal ideas. Haley and Worthington will humbly give the president "all the credit" for his speech (if that was their plan, they shouldn't have spoken with the New York Times). Trump play-acts as president every day, but the State of the Union is when you're forced to watch someone's dumb child perform "I'm a Little Teapot." How adorable! That kid's going places!

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Impeachment

Goddamn It, We Forgot The Impeachment Trial Was Actually Still On

Stupid brain.

I blame literally everyone on staff for knowing I have Menopause Brain and not reminding me about the impeachment trial continuing, since Evan is out. I would have badly liveblogged it for you, had all my writers reminded me about the thing that I should definitely know.

HAVE A LIVESTREAM! And a COMMENT THREAD! On the thing that LITERALLY JUST ENDED AS WE POSTED THIS, so go back and rewind it, if you so choose!

www.youtube.com

Class War

Ex-Wells Fargo CEO Fined $17.5 Million, Will Have To Make It On $116 Million Of Parachute Left

The Wall Street Journal will have to write a column on how he gets by.

Starting in 2011, Wells Fargo began pressuring its employees to create at least eight separate accounts for every customer banking with them — a practice called cross-selling. Pressuring would be putting it lightly — employees were not only given impossible-to-accomplish sales goals, but were routinely screamed at and threatened with the loss of their jobs. They were encouraged to open fraudulent credit cards in the names of customers, create additional fraudulent checking and saving accounts in customers' names and move their money around without their consent to accomplish this, and they even conned homeless people into opening up multiple accounts. Those who complained about the fraud to the company's ethics line were fired and subsequently blackballed in the industry.

Why? Because these high cross-selling numbers raised the value of the company's stock and gave stockholders confidence to invest, and in the wake of new regulations on the banking industry following the 2007-2008 financial crisis, this was one way for those at the top to profit.

This all came to a head in 2016, once the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and other regulator agencies fined Wells Fargo hundreds of millions of dollars for these illegal activities.

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Politics

Republicans Aren't 'Afraid' Of Trump. They're Afraid Of Losing Power. Period.

Why do TV pundits keep thinking Republicans secretly have consciences?

Amy Klobuchar was on "Morning Joe" this morning talking up her KLOMENTUM. I like Klobuchar and not just because she wants to visit "Erotic City" with Prince. I'm impressed with anyone who's so optimistic that early in the morning about a day that'll probably end badly for her. The Minnesota senator kept insisting that if it wasn't for her "constitutional duty" she'd be right there on the "Morning Joe" set in Des Moines, Iowa. She actually insisted this a little too much -- like when you keep telling your cousin that if not for your kid's chicken pox, you'd totally have attended their destination wedding.

Klobuchar said what Republicans were doing during the impeachment trial "sickened" her, as well it should. Willie Geist asked the senator about her Republican colleagues, who I'll remind you are mostly a bunch of crooks. Geist thought it was the EXISTENTIAL QUESTION OF OUR TIME why Republicans still supported Trump. He asked Klobuchar if any Republicans had confessed to her their regret and shame over the sham impeachment trial, as if she's a common priest and not literally competing in the Democratic presidential primary. If any Republicans were secretly Arthur Dimmesdale -- and they aren't --- they'd flagellate themselves in private. They wouldn't confide in their political opponents. Nevertheless, the myth of Senate comity persists.

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Journamalism

Mike Pompeo Will Let NPR Come Back When They Are As Good At Journalism As Fox News

He's not setting a very good example for the other foreign ministers.

During a visit to Kazakhstan, one of the many nations Donald Trump can't find on a map or even pronounce, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo explained to that plucky little former Soviet republic that a free press is probably a good thing, but that some journalists need to be punished for asking questions they shouldn't. Fine, not in those words, but he was pretty clear.

In an interview with by Kazakh journamalist Aigerim Toleukhan, Pompeo was asked what the USA plans to do to help improve human rights in Kazakhstan (its only post-Soviet president, Nursultan Nazarbayev, only left office last year and is still a powerful player in the government). Pompeo answered the US would "provide technical assistance," and added,

As a journalist, I'm sure you know the good work the State Department does to train journalists in press freedoms – all of those things that build out civil society inside of countries are things we're deeply committed to. We're here, we're here to help, and we'll continue to do that.

Commitments to press freedoms like banning an NPR reporter from the pool for the very trip Pompeo's on, because another NPR reporter asked Pompeo a tough but polite question about Pompeo's involvement in Trump's Ukrainian election fuckery, which prompted him to lose his shit and cuss her out for being uppity.

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2020 democratic primary

WTF Is An Iowa Caucus Anyway?

It's a hot mess is what it is! But we'll splain it to you.

You know how at the county fair you and your family of God-fearing Americans line up to place your bets on whichever little pig can run through an obstacle course the fastest, while you sit in the stands eating a corndog and a turkey leg and a fried oreo and a doughnut and a soft-serve ice cream cone? Caucuses are just like that, but at the end of the night, they make the winning pig president. More or less.

Anyway, let's skip the history lesson on WHY IS CAUCUS and move straight to the part you actually care about, which is WHAT IS GOING TO HAPPEN TONIGHT? And also, WHY IS EVERYONE SAYING THIS WILL BE A SHITSHOW? The answer is ANYONE WHO SAYS THEY KNOW IS LYING, and OMG, ALL THE WAYS. Here's how it will go down.

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Ukraine

Lindsey Graham Is No Longer Welcome At Jill Biden, Her Husband's House

Dr. Biden unfriends Lindsey Graham on live TV.

Dr. Jill Biden, her husband's most enthusiastic supporter, was a guest on CNN's "New Day" this morning. During the interview, she officially declared the Bidens' friendship with South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham "so yesterday." Ever since Graham became Donald Trump's personal wet wipe, Dr. Biden doesn't even know who he is anymore. (Hint: He's a sycophantic slimeball.)

DR. BIDEN: I don't know what happened to Lindsey. We used to be great friends. And friends with John McCain. We've traveled together with the foreign relations committee. We've had dinner. Now he's changed.

It's probably tough to accept, but there's a great likelihood that Graham himself hasn't personally changed. He's only changed toward the Bidens because they are no longer useful to him. I'm sure they had lots of fun together when the Bidens were more politically convenient. Graham's a Southerner and Southerners are charming. This is not a dig at Delaware, which I've always enjoyed driving through on my way to someplace else, but I don't think the Bidens were prepared for that level of a charm offensive.

At his core, Graham is a political scorpion who likes to hitch rides to relevance on the backs of trusting frogs. Ironically, Graham will never disappoint Donald Trump because everything in life is transactional to the president. Trump has never had a real friend in his entire miserable life -- just an ever-changing series of mutually advantageous alliances, and like any good supervillain team-up, it's only a question of who'll betray the other party first.

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Impeachment

Lamar Alexander, Ronna ​McDaniel​ Love It When Trump Does Crimes

It's your Sunday show rundown!

After the Republican-held Senate decided to vote against allowing new witnesses at the Senate impeachment trial of Donnie Trump, it was time for Republicans to go into two modes: Justification and Gloating.

On NBC's "Meet The Press," Tennessee Senator Lamar Alexander went the excuse/justification route to explain why he's letting Trump's crime train keep rolling.

ALEXANDER: Well, I mean, if you have eight witnesses who say someone left the scene of an accident, why do you need nine? I mean, the question for me was: Do I need more evidence to conclude that the president did what he did? And I concluded no. So, I voted we don't --

TODD: What do you believe he did?

ALEXANDER
: What --

TODD
: What do you believe he did?

ALEXANDER
: What I believe he did, one, was that he called the president of Ukraine and asked him to become involved in investigating Joe Biden, who was --

TODD
: You believe his wrongdoing began there, not before --

ALEXANDER
: Yeah, but he --

TODD
: Not before?

ALEXANDER
: I don't know about that. But he admitted that. The president admitted that. He released a transcript, he said it on television. The second thing was, at least in part, he delayed the military and other assistance to Ukraine in order to encourage that investigation. Those are the two things he did. I think he shouldn't have done it. I think it was wrong. Inappropriate was the way I'd say -- improper, crossing the line. And then the only question left is who decides what to do about that.

TODD
: Well, who decides what to do about that?

ALEXANDER
: The people. The people is my conclusion.

So Alexander believes we don't need more witnesses because Trump really did crimes. The part where Alexander loses everyone is in "letting the people decide" while abdicating the responsibility thrust upon ALL elected officials to represent the people. This line of thinking also always conveniently forgets that the reason Trump is finally being held accountable is THE PEOPLE voting to do that in 2018! The fact the Senate is doing an impeachment trial is the will of the people, Alexander!

But Lamar Alexander tried one more excuse just in case after Chuck Todd called him out:

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