scott1328 wrote:
I am sure pardons will be issued shortly

The_Piper wrote:I was reacting to the leaving our allies for dead part.

The Danger of Abandoning Our Partners

The abrupt policy decision to seemingly abandon our Kurdish partners could not come at a worse time. The decision was made without consulting U.S. allies or senior U.S. military leadership and threatens to affect future partnerships at precisely the time we need them most, given the war-weariness of the American public coupled with ever more sophisticated enemies determined to come after us.

In northeastern Syria, we had one of the most successful partnerships. The Islamic State was using Syria as a sanctuary to support its operations in Iraq and globally, including by hosting and training foreign fighters. We had to go after ISIS quickly and effectively. The answer came in the form of a small band of Kurdish forces pinned up against the Turkish border and fighting for their lives against ISIS militants in the Syrian town of Kobane in 2014.

We had tried many other options first. The U.S. initially worked to partner with moderate Syrian rebel groups, investing $500 million in a train-and-equip program to build their capabilities to fight against ISIS in Syria. That endeavor failed, save for a small force in southeastern Syria near the American al-Tanf base, which began as a U.S. outpost to fight ISIS and remains today as a deterrent against Iran. So we turned to Turkey to identify alternative groups, but the Pentagon found that the force Turkey had trained was simply inadequate and would require tens of thousands of U.S. troops to bolster it in battle. With no public appetite for a full-scale U.S. ground invasion, we were forced to look elsewhere.

I (Joseph Votel) first met General Mazloum Abdi at a base in northern Syria in May 2016. From the start, it was obvious he was not only an impressive and thoughtful man, but a fighter who was clearly thinking about the strategic aspects of the campaign against ISIS and aware of the challenges of fighting a formidable enemy. He could see the long-term perils from the civil war, but recognized that the most immediate threat to his people was ISIS. After a fitful start in Syria, I concluded that we had finally found the right partner who could help us defeat ISIS without getting drawn into the murkier conflict against Bashar al-Assad’s regime.

The Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), initially composed of the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG), was then conceived: a fighting force that eventually grew to 60,000 battle-hardened and determined soldiers. The decision to partner with the YPG, beginning with the fight in Kobane, was made across two administrations and had required years of deliberation and planning, especially given the concerns of our NATO ally Turkey, who regards the SDF as an offshoot of the designated terrorist group the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). Eventually, the YPG became the backbone of the fighting force against ISIS in Syria. Without it, President Donald Trump could not have declared the complete defeat of ISIS.

full article: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/10/danger-abandoning-our-partners/599632/

I just spoke to a distraught US Special Forces soldier who is among the 1000 or so US troops in Syria tonight who is serving alongside the SDF Kurdish forces. It was one of the hardest phone calls I have ever taken.

"I am ashamed for the first time in my career."
This veteran US Special forces soldier has trained indigenous forces on multiple continents. He is on the frontlines tonight and said they are witnessing Turkish atrocities.

"Turkey is not doing what it agreed to. It's horrible," this military source on the ground told me.
"We met every single security agreement. The Kurds met every single agreement. There was NO threat to the Turks - NONE - from this side of the border." "This is insanity," the concerned US service member told me. ""I don't know what they call atrocities but they are happening."
This American soldier told me the Kurds have not left their positions guarding the ISIS prisoners. In fact "they prevented a prison break last night without us."
"They are not abandoning our side (yet)."
The Kurds are "pleading for our support." We are doing "nothing."
Troops on the ground in Syria and their commanders were "surprised" by the decision Sunday night.
Of the President's decision: "He doesn't understand the problem. He doesn't understand the repercussions of this. Erdogan is an Islamist, not a level headed actor."
Acc to this US soldier on the ground tonight in Syria: "The Kurds are as close to Western thinking in the Middle East as anyone. "It's a shame. It's horrible." "This is not helping the ISIS fight." Re: ISIS prisoners: "Many of them will be free in the coming days and weeks."
This US Special Forces soldier wanted me to know: "The Kurds are sticking by us. No other partner I have ever dealt with would stand by us."
Disappointed in the decisions coming from their senior leaders.

https://twitter.com/JenGriffinFNC/status/1182053870744276993

Donald Trump's longtime business connections in Turkey back in the spotlight

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump’s sudden decision to pull U.S. troops out of Northern Syria late Sunday night has drawn harsh rebukes from both Republicans and Democrats in Congress, raised alarm bells among America’s allies across the globe and sent the Pentagon and the State Department scrambling to contain the fallout.

While the president has defended the decision as part of his longtime promise to end U.S. military involvement in the region, even his staunchest supporters at home warned that it has essentially given Turkey a green light for a major military offensive against the Kurdish minority there, a key U.S. ally in the fight against the Islamic State militant group and a longtime target of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

The president has denied that the U.S. is abandoning the Kurds, tweeting on Tuesday that, "we may be in the process of leaving Syria, but in no way have we abandoned the Kurds, who are special people and wonderful fighters.”

A call Sunday between Trump and Erdogan, which NBC News reported was set up to ease Erdogan’s anger for not getting a one-on-one meeting with Trump at last month’s United Nations General Assembly gathering, was the latest chapter in a relationship that goes back to before the president’s election and marked yet another milestone Tuesday when Trump announced that he is inviting Erdogan to the White House in November.

Trump has appeared to side with Erdogan at times throughout his presidency. For example, when Republican senators sought to punish Turkey this summer for its purchase of a Russian missile defense system by pushing the president to impose congressionally mandated sanctions, Trump invited them to a White House meeting to ask for "flexibility" in dealing with the issue. Those sanctions have not been implemented.

And the fact that Trump made his decision to pull the U.S. troops out of Syria shortly after the phone call with Erdogan has raised alarm bells from policymakers, as well as government ethics watchdog groups who have long seen Trump’s extensive business interests as a potential area for conflicts of interest.

“It’s absolutely staggering” that Trump made a decision that “has put us on the brink of causing genocide in Syria,” said Wendy Sherman, an undersecretary at the State Department during the Obama administration. The decision underscores the “impulsiveness” and “the transactional, quid pro quo-ness of the president,” she said.

That “transactional” charge is based on the Trump family’s multitude of continuing business entities and interests, all separated from the president — at least on paper — by the trust that now controls them. But the president is the beneficiary of that trust and two of his children have roles in it.

"It always is a concern that those business ties, at the very least, color his judgment," Sherman said, "and at the very worst are the reasons for his judgment."

Trump and his family have long had business ties in and with Turkey, the most visible example being the Trump Towers Istanbul, which licenses the Trump name. The Trump Organization describes the buildings on its website as “a landmark in the historic city of Istanbul” and it is the organization’s first and only office and residential tower in Europe, with offices, apartments and upscale shops. The Washington Post has reported that the organization was paid up to $10 million to put the Trump name on the two buildings.

Erdogan attended the opening ceremony of the office and residential towers in 2012 and Ivanka Trump tweeted a message thanking him for attending, although a photo of Erdogan at the ribbon cutting has been removed from his Facebook page.

Thank you Prime Minister Erdogan for joining us yesterday to celebrate the launch of #TrumpTowers Istanbul!

— Ivanka Trump (@IvankaTrump) April 20, 2012

According to a review of Trump family social media posts, Ivanka Trump made business trips to Turkey in 2009, 2010 and 2012.

In 2015, Trump acknowledged having a potential “conflict” when it came to issues involving Turkey.

“I have a little conflict of interest because I have a major, major building in Istanbul,” Trump said in 2015. “It’s a tremendously successful job. It’s called Trump Towers — two towers, instead of one, not the usual one, it’s two,” Trump said in an interview with Stephen Bannon, then chairman of Breitbart News.

A lawsuit filed by 29 senators and 186 House Democrats — one of three lawsuits that have alleged that Trump is in violation of the Constitution’s emoluments clauses, which bar the president from receiving monetary or other benefits of value from foreign or U.S. state entities while in office — claims that Turkey has among the highest number of foreign business ventures in which Trump is at least a partial owner, with 119 listed. Others include China, with 115, and the Philippines, with 121.

Businesses linked to the Turkish government are also major patrons of the Trump Organization. Turkish officials have made 14 visits to Trump properties, more than any other country, according to an analysis performed for NBC News by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, or CREW.

Government watchdogs say those ties mixed with unpredictable policymaking are precisely why Trump’s business dealings have been so concerning, especially since the president has refused to divest from them or establish a blind trust.

Richard Painter, the chief ethics lawyer in the George W. Bush administration who has been a frequent Trump critic, says the lack of any buffer between the president and his business interests is both a violation of the Constitution’s Emoluments clause as well as long-held presidential precedent.

“Now you’ve got his business interests at the negotiating table in addition to everything else,” Painter told NBC News.

He said Turkey "had a democracy that is flipping and going in the wrong direction.”

“Can you imagine if the Roosevelt family had business interests in Germany in the 1930s” before World War II? he asked. “It creates points of vulnerability, and that’s where we are.”

“You can’t have a president with business interests in hot spots all over the world,” Painter added.

continued: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/trump-impeachment-inquiry/donald-trump-s-longtime-business-connections-turkey-back-spotlight-n1064011

Giuliani’s Ukraine Team: In Search of Influence, Dirt and Money

WASHINGTON — When Rudolph W. Giuliani set out to dredge up damaging information on President Trump’s rivals in Ukraine, he turned to a native of the former Soviet republic with whom he already had a lucrative business relationship.

Lev Parnas, a Ukrainian-American businessman with a trail of debts and lawsuits, had known Mr. Giuliani casually for years through Republican political circles. Last year, their relationship deepened when a company he helped found retained Mr. Giuliani — associates of Mr. Parnas said he told them he paid hundreds of thousands of dollars — for what Mr. Giuliani said on Thursday was business and legal advice.

Even as he worked with Mr. Parnas’s company, Fraud Guarantee, Mr. Giuliani increasingly relied on Mr. Parnas to carry out Mr. Trump’s quest for evidence in Ukraine that would undercut the legitimacy of the special counsel’s investigation into Russia’s interference on his behalf in the 2016 election and help him heading into his 2020 re-election campaign.

Mr. Giuliani dispatched Mr. Parnas and an associate, Igor Fruman, a Belarusian-American businessman, to Kiev, the Ukrainian capital, where, despite fending off creditors at home, BuzzFeed reported, they ran up big charges at a strip club and the Hilton International hotel. Their mission was to find people and information that could be used to undermine the special counsel’s investigation, and also to damage former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., a prospective Democratic challenger to Mr. Trump.

Over the past year, the two men connected Mr. Giuliani with Ukrainians who were willing to participate in efforts to push a largely unsubstantiated narrative about the Bidens. They played a key role in a campaign by pro-Trump forces to press for the removal of the United States ambassador to Ukraine on the grounds that she had not shown sufficient loyalty to the president as he pursued his agenda there.

They met regularly with Mr. Giuliani, often at the Trump International hotel in Washington. And all the while, they were pursuing their own business schemes and, according to an indictment unsealed on Thursday, illegally funneling campaign contributions in the United States in the service of both their political and business activities.

The indictment, along with interviews and other documents, show Mr. Parnas, Mr. Fruman and their associates as somewhat hapless operators, scrambling recklessly to use their new connections to the highest levels of American politics to seek financial gain while guiding Mr. Giuliani, the former New York City mayor, into a Ukrainian political culture rife with self-dealing and ever-shifting alliances.

continued: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/10/us/politics/rudy-giuliani-ukraine-associates.html

President Donald Trump lost a key court decision Friday in his bid to stop House Democrats from obtaining his financial records, the latest blow to his authority in legal rulings this week.

The 2-1 decision from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit stems from a case where Trump sued to block Democrats from subpoenaing one of his accounting firms for a vast trove of materials as Congress probes for potential conflicts of interest and payments from foreign governments to the president.

Story Continued Below
“Contrary to the President’s arguments, the Committee possesses authority under both the House Rules and the Constitution to issue the subpoena,” Judge David Tatel wrote in an opinion joined by Judge Patricia Millett.
Story Continued Below
The 66-page opinion against Trump backs Congress by citing a long history of lawmakers using subpoenas to demand information in connection with investigations. The two Democrat-appointed judges in the majority leaned on more than two centuries of history, including Watergate-era precedent that “strongly implies that Presidents enjoy no blanket immunity from congressional subpoenas.”

Svartalf wrote:for some reason, I'm not sure this will be enough to make him comply.

A federal judge ruled Friday that President Donald Trump violated federal law when he used his declaration of a national emergency to get millions for building a wall on the southern border.

The ruling is a victory for El Paso County, Texas, and the Border Network for Human Rights, which sued to stop border construction in their community. They argued that Trump had no legal authority to spend more than what Congress appropriated for the wall project

...

Spearthrower wrote:It does say he left. Perhaps there was some pressure on him to toe the line, and he decided not to.

Lev Parnas, one of the two associates of Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, served as a translator for lawyers representing oligarch Dmytro Firtash. Parnas was arrested on Thursday along with the other Florida businessman, Igor Fruman, on unrelated charges that included illegally funneling $325,000 to a political action committee supporting pro-Trump candidates.

Both men had worked in an unspecified capacity for Firtash before Parnas joined the Ukrainian’s legal team, according to a person familiar with the Florida men’s business dealings with Firtash.

The Floridians’ connection to indicted oligarch Firtash injects an intriguing new character into the rapidly unfolding drama surrounding the effort to impeach Trump.

Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives launched the impeachment inquiry, the first step in unseating a U.S. president, over allegations that Trump pressured the Ukrainian president to help investigate Biden, a leading contender for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Giuliani was probing discredited allegations that Biden, when he was vice president, sought the firing of Ukraine’s chief prosecutor to halt the investigation of a gas company on which his son, Hunter Biden, was a board member. The Bidens have denied the claims, and the Trump camp has produced no evidence to support the assertions.

Firtash, one of Ukraine’s wealthiest businessmen, is battling extradition by U.S. authorities on bribery charges from Vienna, where he has lived for five years.

Federal prosecutors in Illinois said in court papers in 2017 that Firtash was an “upper-echelon” associate of Russian organized crime. He was indicted in 2013 and charged with bribing Indian officials for access to titanium mines. Firtash has denied any wrongdoing.

Firtash was “financing” the activities of Parnas and Fruman, the source familiar with their business dealings said. The source did not detail their specific work for the oligarch or how much money he had paid them and over what period.