Know What This Trump Impeachment Needs? More Pay-To-Play Horsesh*t!
This Trump impeachment was boring and didn't feature near enough crimes Donald Trump has constantly accused Hillary Clinton of doing, when he was actually doing them himself. Dontcha think?
How about some PAY-TO-PLAY?
Trump's administration is notoriously understaffed, partially because it's damn near impossible to find competent people who actually want to work for him. (He's gotten lotsa incompetent right-wing judges confirmed, though!) And of the positions that are staffed, many are unqualified hacks like EU Ambassador Gordon Sondland, who donated a cool million to the Trump inaugural and somehow magically became the EU ambassador, which is an actual real job. (No offense to the Maldives or whatever, but some of these jobs are ceremonial and any idiot who may or may not be currently married to Newt Gingrich can do them. It's actually normal for some of those positions to go to donors.)
CBS News reports that it may have discovered an actual pay-to-play scandal, where a Trump idiot donated a lot of money maybe in exchange for the ambassadorship to the Bahamas.
Emails obtained by CBS News show the nominee, San Diego billionaire Doug Manchester, was asked by the RNC to donate half a million dollars as his confirmation in the Senate hung in the balance, chief investigative correspondent Jim Axelrod reports. [...]
A Trump supporter, Manchester donated $1 million to Trump's inauguration fund. He was offered the Bahamas post the day after Mr. Trump was sworn in. Manchester said Trump told him, "I should probably be the ambassador to the Bahamas and you should be president."
HAW HAW, good joke, Mr. President Crimey McGoodBrain!
As CBS News notes, Manchester's nomination sat there in the Senate forever and ever, which is odd considering how quickly they will confirm any paste-eating bigot for a lifetime judicial appointment. Was there something wrong with Manchester's nomination?
The emails in question, obtained by CBS News, center around Hurricane Dorian, the one that slammed the Bahamas recently, and would have slammed Alabama if the dicks Trump drew on the hurricane forecast maps had any basis in science. (They did not.) Manchester had done some nice things to help out the Bahamas -- he has a house there, of course -- and Trump told him thank you in a nice presidential tweet in September.
AND THEN:
Three days after the tweet, RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel hit up Manchester for a donation. It was no small sum. In an email, obtained exclusively by CBS News, she asked Manchester, "Would you consider putting together $500,000 worth of contributions from your family to ensure we hit our ambitious fundraising goal?"
Remember how Trump, on the campaign trail, would weirdly enunciate things advisers had told him to say, but the way he said them SO CLEARLY, you knew they were entirely new words for him? "LGBT" is a good example. Also "Pay to play," which he delivered as "PAY ... FOR ... PLAY."
Here's a video of Trump accusing Hillary Clinton of "PAY ... FOR ... PLAY" during the campaign, based on something he learned from WICKILICKS, which he also pronounced all weird and fucked up.
Trump accuses Clinton of 'pay for play' in Moroccowww.youtube.com
We have no idea what made us think of that just now, it is a mystery.
Anyway!
The Trump tweet thanking Doug Manchester for all his nice acts in the Bahamas came on September 7, so if that email from Ronna ROMNEY McDaniel came three days later, that means it was September 10, which is a day after Congress found out about the whistleblower complaint, and a day before Trump magically released the hold on aid to Ukraine. It's also the same day John Bolton quit. You know, just to put in context HOW MANY CRIMES THESE PEOPLE ARE COMMITTING AT ANY GIVEN TIME.
Allegedly, of course. If this is indeed pay-to-play.
Manchester himself says NO GOLLY, it's just politics! He adds that he doesn't necessarily think he would have suddenly become ambassador if he had gone ahead and paid his fee donation, because you know how the Senate is, yadda yadda. Of course, Manchester's wife went ahead and donated $100,000, because, and we are quoting from Manchester's response to Ms. ROMNEY McDaniel:
"As you know I am not supposed to do any, but my wife is sending a contribution for $100,000. Assuming I get voted out of the [Foreign Relations Committee] on Wednesday to the floor we need you to have the majority leader bring it to a majority vote … Once confirmed, I our [sic] family will respond!"
But this is totally normal and fine, Doug Manchester says! His wife is a big Trump supporter! She gave that FROM HER HEART.
"You know what this looks like," [CBS's] Axelrod said.
"Well -- it looks like it to you. But it's not the facts," Manchester said. "My wife gave out of separate funds and she in fact loves Donald Trump."
See? It's fine.
The RNC's statement on the matter is that "The Chairwoman did not suggest to Mr. Manchester in any way that it would more quickly advance his confirmation if members of his family made a political contribution," which we guess means she didn't say the magic words "quid pro quo," and as we all know, if you don't say the magic crime words, you have not committed a crime. (NO COLLUSION!)
All that said, we have questions. And we bet Congress has questions. CBS quotes former GOP Senator Bob Corker, who was the one responsible for holding up Manchester's nomination until he quit-fired himself and let Marsha Blackburn stink up his former seat, who had questions then and has questions now:
"We had concerns about judgment, about demeanor, about just the whole reason for taking the job," Corker said.
He found McDaniel's fundraising pitch problematic. "The timing of that request obviously was not appropriate," he said.
Even worse, he said, was Manchester's response. His big mistake was copying staffers of two senators who controlled his nomination, Kentucky's Rand Paul and Idaho's Jim Risch, alerting them to his willingness to donate more after confirmation.
"I can only tell you that if I received an email like that, there would have been a five-bell alarm that went off," Corker said.
Of course the idiot hit "reply all." Why wouldn't he!
Anyway, Manchester took his name out of consideration in October, which obviously means none of this matters, because even if there WAS a pay-to-play crime, Ronna ROMNEY McDaniel and this idiot Manchester and Trump were too stupid to complete the alleged crime without getting caught, which means there was no crime in the first place.
Isn't that what they've been telling us about Trump's Ukraine crimes?
Also, Ronna ROMNEY McDaniel, what have you done?
[CBS News]
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