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Trump makes falsehoods central to impeachment defense as incriminating evidence mounts

  

Category:  News & Politics

Via:  john-russell  •  5 years ago  •  11 comments

By:   @ToluseO and @PhilipRucker

Trump makes falsehoods central to impeachment defense as incriminating evidence mounts
Standing before a crowd of supporters this week in Lexington, Ky., President Trump repeated a false claim he has made more than 100 times in the past six weeks: that a whistleblower from the intelligence community misrepresented a presidential phone call at the center of the impeachment inquiry that threatens his presidency.

This might be the most important article you have ever read about Donald Trump. In a way, I think , this is a landmark article that may eventually be seen as having been of importance when the Trump era is cast as history. 

What makes it special?  

This is a Washington Post NEWS story, written by factual reporters, not opinion columnists. It openly reports that the president is constantly speaking falsehoods to the American people, and reports that as FACT, not opinion. And in the Washington Post, the major newspaper in the nation's capitol and one of the most important papers in the country. 


S E E D E D   C O N T E N T




Trump makes falsehoods central to impeachment defense as incriminating evidence mounts


NOVEMBER 06, 2019

7UIA3CAAEUI6VBIBFJYSHI4MLA.jpg People wearing shirts with the words “Read the Transcript” arrive to attend a campaign rally with President Trump in Lexington, Ky. (Susan Walsh/AP)

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Standing before a crowd of supporters this week in Lexington, Ky., President Trump repeated a false claim he has made more than 100 times in the past six weeks: that a whistleblower from the intelligence community misrepresented a presidential phone call at the center of the impeachment inquiry that threatens his presidency.

“The whistleblower said lots of things that weren’t so good, folks. You’re going to find out,” Trump said Monday at a campaign rally. “These are very dishonest people.”

Behind him were men and women in “Read the Transcript” T-shirts — echoing through their apparel Trump’s attempt to recast an incriminating summary of his July 25 call with Ukraine’s president as a piece of exonerating evidence.

It’s a form of gaslighting that has become the central defense strategy for the president as he faces his greatest political threat yet. But the approach is coming under increasing strain as congressional Democrats release transcripts and prepare to hold public hearings presenting evidence that directly undercuts Trump’s claims.

That the whistleblower report essentially mirrors the set of facts that have since been revealed by a stream of documented evidence and sworn testimony has not stopped Trump from repeatedly claiming otherwise. He has also pushed other specious arguments in his harried attempt to counter the growing evidence from witnesses implicating his administration in a quid pro quo scheme linking military aid to Ukrainian investigations targeting Democrats.

Without evidence, Trump has claimed that his own administration officials who have complied with congressional subpoenas are “Never Trumpers.” He has recounted conversations in which senators deemed him “innocent,” only to have the lawmakers deny making the statements. He has dismissed polls that show growing support for impeachment as “fake,” while repeatedly claiming levels of Republican support that exceed anything that exists in public polling.

“I don’t know whether he believes all these things or he takes pleasure in inventing false narratives, but I think the most important thing here is that no president can sustain his hold on the public for long when he loses his credibility,” said Robert Dallek, a presidential historian.

Trump’s repetitive use of false claims represents an attempt to immunize himself from impeachment by seeding favorable information in the minds of the public, even when that information is incorrect, said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Public Policy Center.

“We know from work in social psychology that repeated exposure to a claim increases the likelihood that you think it’s accurate,” she said. “As you hear or read something repeatedly, you are more likely to think it’s accurate even if faced with evidence that it’s not.”

While Trump has made  more than 13,000 false and misleading claims  since he became president, his attempts to distort reality have crashed headlong into a fast-moving impeachment process that has secured damaging testimony from several Trump administration officials who have contradicted him under oath.

Since Democrats began their impeachment inquiry in September, Trump’s most consistent defense has been the false assertion that the whistleblower complaint “bears no resemblance” to his July 25 phone call with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky. Trump has referred to the whistleblower’s allegations as “false,” “fraudulent,” “wrong,” “incorrect,” “so bad,” “very inaccurate,” and “phony.”

But the whistleblower’s account — which documented how Trump pressed Zelensky to work with Attorney General William P. Barr and Trump’s personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani to investigate former vice president Joe Biden and his son Hunter — has been corroborated by the reconstructed transcript released by the White House. Witness testimony has also backed up most of the whistleblower report’s main conclusions, including that White House lawyers sought to “lock down” records of the call by moving it onto a highly classified system.

In his repeated claims disputing the accuracy of the whistleblower’s account, Trump has only rarely gone into any detail to say what he considered inaccurate. Trump has misquoted the report each time he has attempted to provide evidence of the whistleblower’s alleged errors.

Trump’s willingness to repeatedly mislead the public represents an attempt to protect himself by creating doubt about the fundamental nature of truth, said Michael Steele, former chairman of the Republican National Committee.

“One thing we’ve all noticed with Trump is he knows how to strategically create confusion,” he said. “To go on the record with a bald-faced lie, it doesn’t matter whether you fact-check him in real time, it doesn’t matter if there’s a hue and cry afterwards, his calculation is that there’s enough confusion that you don’t know what’s true and what isn’t.”

Trump has also sought to draw other Republicans into his truth-defying defenses, drawing rare pushback from lawmakers who disputed his accounts of their conversations.

Last month, Trump quoted conversations with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.), claiming that both lawmakers deemed his conduct with Ukraine “innocent.”

“I read Mitch McConnell’s statement yesterday, and he read my phone call. And, as you know, he put out a statement that said that was the most innocent phone call he’s read,” Trump told reporters last month. “And I spoke to him about it, too. He read my phone call with the President of Ukraine. Mitch McConnell — he said, ‘That was the most innocent phone call that I’ve read.’ ”

McConnell never released such a statement, and when asked about Trump’s claim, said, “We’ve not had any conversations on that subject.” Asked if the president was lying, McConnell responded: “You’d have to ask him.”

Trump also claimed that Scott made a statement saying that “the president is innocent. Forget about due process. He’s innocent.”

Scott, when asked if he had said what Trump claimed he had, said “yeah, no,” disputing the claim that he did not care about due process. He did say, for the first time publicly, that he considered Trump “innocent of an impeachable offense.”

Trump’s defenders say his unorthodox style is what allowed him to connect with voters and win the presidency three years ago. Many dismiss hand-wringing over the accuracy of Trump’s statements as a sign of Washington’s disconnectedness from average voters.

“This is another case in American politics of those on each side taking the same written words and reaching their own conclusions,” said Ed Brookover, a Republican strategist and former Trump campaign adviser. “Just as with the so-called Russian collusion case, you’re going to find a whole lot of nothing here again. . . . When the president says, ‘Here we go again,’ it’s a very believable message.”

Public polling has shown steadily increasing support for the Democratic-led impeachment probe into whether Trump abused his power for personal and political gain. Officials from the State Department and White House have provided sworn testimony describing the Trump administration’s attempt to secure political investigations by the government in Ukraine while the president withheld almost $400 million in congressionally approved military aid and the chance for a visit with Zelensky.

Trump has dismissed the unfavorable poll numbers as “fake,” claiming on Saturday that he had “the real polls.” Trump has tweeted several times that he has 95 percent support within the Republican Party,  an inflated number  that far exceeds the 74 percent figure in the latest Washington Post-ABC News poll. No other public polling has shown Trump’s GOP support at 95 percent.

But the president’s varying assertions have had trouble gaining a foothold amid mounting incriminating information from the impeachment probe, which has begun to enter a more public-facing phase.

On Tuesday, Gordon Sondland, U.S. ambassador to the European Union, acknowledged telling one of Zelensky’s advisers that resumption of U.S. aid was tied to anti-corruption investigations that would target Democrats.

The acknowledgment in a deposition released Tuesday was a reversal from his earlier testimony, which Trump had previously cited in an attempt defend himself from charges of a quid pro quo.

The testimony from Sondland, a Trump donor and political appointee, could be more difficult for the president to dismiss than the allegations of several other Trump administration officials who have also described a political quid pro quo.

Trump has claimed without evidence that those officials were “Never Trumpers” peddling false accusations.

“If you can construct the world that anybody who says anything negative about the president is a venal partisan, you never have to get into any of the evidence because you distort the evidence and discredit the source of it,” she said. “That’s what Donald Trump does.”


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JohnRussell
Professor Principal
1  seeder  JohnRussell    5 years ago
Standing before a crowd of supporters this week in Lexington, Ky., President Trump repeated a false claim he has made more than 100 times in the past six weeks: that a whistleblower from the intelligence community misrepresented a presidential phone call at the center of the impeachment inquiry that threatens his presidency.

“The whistleblower said lots of things that weren’t so good, folks. You’re going to find out,” Trump said Monday at a campaign rally. “These are very dishonest people.”

Behind him were men and women in “Read the Transcript” T-shirts — echoing through their apparel Trump’s attempt to recast an incriminating summary of his July 25 call with Ukraine’s president as a piece of exonerating evidence.
 
 
 
lady in black
Professor Quiet
2  lady in black    5 years ago

Crooked donnie lies like a rug every time he opens his mouth

 
 
 
JohnRussell
Professor Principal
2.1  seeder  JohnRussell  replied to  lady in black @2    5 years ago

The point is at hand when people have to decide what side they are on.  The truth, or Trump.  I hope good people make the right choice. 

 
 
 
Paula Bartholomew
Professor Participates
2.1.1  Paula Bartholomew  replied to  JohnRussell @2.1    5 years ago

Don't count the Trumpers in.  They are a lost cause.

 
 
 
JohnRussell
Professor Principal
2.1.2  seeder  JohnRussell  replied to  Paula Bartholomew @2.1.1    5 years ago

They will be known by what they do now. 

 
 
 
JohnRussell
Professor Principal
2.1.4  seeder  JohnRussell  replied to    5 years ago

"We are not punished for our sins, but by them. "

Christmas Humphreys, Buddhist philosopher. 

 
 
 
Ozzwald
Professor Quiet
3  Ozzwald    5 years ago

Want to bet the Trump provided, "read the transcript" T-shirts, were made in China???

 
 
 
Paula Bartholomew
Professor Participates
3.1  Paula Bartholomew  replied to  Ozzwald @3    5 years ago

And the tariffs don't apply to him.

 
 
 
It Is ME
Masters Guide
4  It Is ME    5 years ago

Even the "Witness's" are changing their original "Raise your right hand and swear to tell the truth" stories now.

They must be on the Schiff "Parody" wagon too. jrSmiley_10_smiley_image.gif

What does Caporegimes Schifty Schiff and Mob boss Poluki have on these persons anyway. jrSmiley_18_smiley_image.gif

 
 

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