Last Edited Gaming Blogs (3,353)

In response to:

NO PURCHASE NECESSARY. Open to residents of the fifty (50) United States and D.C. only. Limit one (1) Free Doritos® Locos Tacos per person or registered account at participating Taco Bell locations in the United States from 2-6 PM local time on October 30, 2019, while supplies last. Free taco offer also valid for store pickup all redemption day via online or the mobile app, for registered users of tacobell.com or the Taco Bell App. Offer excludes Doritos® Locos Tacos Supreme®. Offer excludes delivery. See Terms & Conditions at Tacobell.com/stealataco/terms for details. Void where prohibited. ©2019 Taco Bell IP Holder, LLC. Major League Baseball trademarks and copyrights are used with permission of the applicable MLB entities. Visit MLB.com. All rights reserved. Official licensee of MLBPA. MLBPA trademarks, copyrighted works and other intellectual property rights are owned by MLBPA and may not be used without MLBPA written consent. Taco Bell is a Proud Sponsor of the 2019 MLB® World Series®. Doritos® and Doritos® Logo are trademarks of Frito-Lay North America, Inc. ©2019.

In response to:
Diplomat provides House with 'disturbing' account on Ukraine

Associated Press LISA MASCARO, MARY CLARE JALONICK and LAURIE KELLMAN, Associated Press 7 minutes ago

WASHINGTON (AP) — Former U.S. Ambassador William Taylor provided lawmakers Tuesday with a vivid, detailed and what some lawmakers called "disturbing" account of the way President Donald Trump wanted to put the new Ukraine president "in a public box" by demanding a quid pro quo at the center of the impeachment probe.

In a lengthy opening statement to House investigators, Taylor described the way Trump's demand that "everything" Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy wanted, including vital military aid to counter Russia, hinged on making a public vow that he would investigate Democrats going back to the 2016 U.S. election as well as a company linked to the family of Trump's potential 2020 Democratic rival Joe Biden.

Taylor testified that what he discovered in Kyiv was the Trump administration's back channel to foreign policy, led by the president's personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani and a "weird combination" of "ultimately alarming circumstances" that threaten to erode the United States' relationship with a budding Eastern European ally.

Lawmakers emerging after hours of the private deposition said Taylor relayed a "disturbing" account, including establishing a "direct line" to the quid pro quo at the center of the impeachment probe .

Lawmakers said Taylor recalled events that filled in gaps from the testimony of other witnesses, particularly Ambassador Gordon Sondland, who testified last week and whose statements now are being called into question by Taylor's account. They said Taylor kept records of conversations and documents.

"The testimony is very disturbing," said Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y. Rep. Dean Phillips, D-Minn., used the same word. Asked why, he said, "Because it's becoming more distinct."

Taylor's appearance was among the most watched because of a text message, released by House investigators earlier in the probe, in which he called Trump's attempt to hold back military aid to Ukraine "crazy."

Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla., said Taylor "drew a straight line" with documents, timelines and individual conversations in his records.

"I do not know how you would listen to today's testimony from Ambassador Taylor and come to any other (conclusion) except that the president abused his power and withheld foreign aid," she said.

Lawmakers did not discuss other details of the closed-door session, which was expected to continue into the evening. Taylor declined to comment as he entered the deposition. He was the latest diplomat with concerns to testify. Like the others, he was subpoenaed to appear.

But the career civil servant's delivery was credible and consistent, people said, as he answered hours of questions from Democrats and Republicans, drawing silence in the room as lawmakers exchanged glances.

Taylor laid out the quid pro quo of the White House's decision to withhold military aid to Ukraine unless the new president, Zelenskiy, agreed to Trump's requests to investigate Democrats, according to a person who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the person was not authorized to discuss the private testimony.

In a July phone call, Trump told Zelenskiy he wanted "a favor," which the White House later acknowledged in a rough transcript of the conversation was Trump's desire for Ukraine to investigate the Democratic National Committee's email hack in 2016 as well as a Ukrainian gas company, Burisma, with ties to Biden's family.

Taylor told lawmakers that another diplomat on the string of text messages, the U.S. ambassador to the European Union, Sondland, was aware of the demands and later admitted he made a mistake....

In response to:

U.S. diplomat Bill Taylor, who called Trump's Ukraine policy 'crazy,' testifies in impeachment inquiry

Oct. 22, 2019, 9:34 AM EDT
By Rebecca Shabad and Alex Moe

WASHINGTON — The top U.S. diplomat in Ukraine, Bill Taylor, testified Tuesday behind closed doors as part of House Democrats' ongoing impeachment investigation.

According to an official working on the investigation, Taylor was issued a subpoena Tuesday morning by the House Intelligence Committee to compel his deposition in light of Trump administration efforts to block or limit his appearance.

Members of the House Intelligence, Oversight and Foreign Affairs committees were expected to question him about text messages between him and two other American diplomats about the Trump administration's policy toward Ukraine.

As part of text messages between Taylor, U.S. ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland, and the now-former U.S. special envoy to Ukraine Kurt Volker, Taylor expressed concern about why U.S. military assistance for Ukraine was held up by the White House.

"As I said on the phone, I think it's crazy to withhold security assistance for help with a political campaign," Taylor texted Sondland on Sept. 9, according to text messages provided to Congress by Volker and released by the committees involved in the inquiry.

Democrats have pointed to the text exchange, a critical piece of the impeachment investigation, as part of burgeoning body of proof that there was a quid pro quo involved between President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy in which Trump held up the military aid in exchange for Ukraine agreeing to conduct probes that would be politically advantageous to Trump.

Taylor came out of retirement in June to serve as chargé d'affaires in Kyiv after Marie Yovanovitch was abruptly recalled from her post as ambassador to Ukraine in the spring.

Yovanovitch, Sondland and Volker are among the key witnesses who have already testified in the impeachment inquiry. The White House has vowed not to cooperate with what it called an invalid investigation, with the House exercising its subpoena powers in response.

Yovanovitch, a career diplomat, told impeachment investigators in a deposition that lasted more than 9 hours that Trump had personally pressured the State Department to remove her, even though a top department official assured her that she had "done nothing wrong."

In response to:
As Inquiry Widens, McConnell Sees Impeachment Trial as Inevitable

Carl Hulse

The New York Times•October 19, 2019

WASHINGTON — It was only a few weeks ago that the top Senate Republican was hinting that his chamber would make short work of impeachment.

But this week, Sen. Mitch McConnell, the majority leader, sat his colleagues down over lunch in the Capitol and warned them to prepare for an extended impeachment trial of President Donald Trump.

According to people who were there, he came equipped with a PowerPoint presentation, complete with quotes from the Constitution, as he schooled fellow senators on the intricacies of a process he portrayed as all but inevitable.

Few Republicans are inclined to convict Trump on charges that he abused his power to enlist Ukraine in an effort to smear his political rivals. Instead, McConnell, R-Ky., sees the proceedings as necessary to protect a half-dozen moderates in states like Maine, Colorado and North Carolina who face reelection next year and must show voters they are giving the House impeachment charges a serious review.

It’s people like Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, who will be under immense political pressure as they decide the president’s fate.

“To overturn an election, to decide whether or not to convict a president is about as serious as it gets,” Collins said.

McConnell is walking a careful line of his own in managing the fast-moving impeachment process. On Friday, the senator wrote a scathing op-ed criticizing the president’s decision to pull back troops from northern Syria, calling it a “grave strategic mistake,” without naming Trump. But McConnell, who is known for his ruthless partisan maneuvering, also views it as his role to protect a president of his own party from impeachment, and in a recent fundraising video, he vowed to stop it.

The mood among Republicans on Capitol Hill has shifted from indignant to anxious as a parade of administration witnesses has submitted to closed-door questioning by impeachment investigators and corroborated central elements of the whistleblower complaint that sparked the inquiry.

They grew more worried still Thursday, after Mick Mulvaney, the acting White House chief of staff, undercut the president’s defense by saying that Trump had indeed withheld security aid from Ukraine in order to spur an investigation of his political rivals. Mulvaney later backtracked, but the damage was done.

“I couldn’t believe it — I was very surprised that he said that,” said Rep. Francis Rooney, R-Fla., who mocked Mulvaney’s attempts to take back comments, that had been broadcast live from the White House briefing room.

“It’s not an Etch-A-Sketch,” Rooney said, miming the tipping movement that erases the toy drawing board. “There were a lot of Republicans looking at that headline yesterday when it came up, I certainly was.”

Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, who is seen as potentially open to removing Trump from office — told reporters that a president should never engage in the kinds of actions that Mulvaney appeared to acknowledge.

“You don’t hold up foreign aid that we had previously appropriated for a political initiative,” she said. “Period.”...

In response to:

Trump veterans see a presidency veering off the rails

By DANIEL LIPPMAN

10/19/2019 06:31 AM EDT

Former Trump White House officials and other Republicans close to the White House are increasingly worried about President Trump’s erratic behavior and say there are no longer enough safeguards around him to prevent self-inflicted disasters large and small.

Just in the last two weeks, Trump precipitously withdrew U.S. troops from northern Syria and attacked America’s Kurdish allies as “no angels,” sparking outrage among GOP lawmakers; released a letter to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan whose undiplomatic language was widely mocked; called his former defense secretary “the world’s most overrated general”; and blew up at House Speaker Nancy Pelosi during a meeting his own White House had called.

His acting chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, also admitted on national television that the administration had held up aid to Ukraine for political purposes, before reversing himself hours later on Trump’s orders and claiming his remarks had been “misconstrued.”

Under the strain of a metastasizing impeachment probe on Capitol Hill and helming an administration run by a diminishing number of heavyweight officials of independent stature, the president is displaying the kind of capricious behavior that once might have been contained or at least mitigated, former officials say.

“The wheels are not off the car. The situation is way worse than that. The car has been impounded and we are now waiting to figure out what the fine is and to see whether or not we’re going to get the car back,” said former White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci. “Mulvaney is a good Catholic and in fairness to him, that was a full-blown Catholic confessional on Thursday afternoon.”

Trump has never felt shackled by traditional ways of running a government. But earlier in his administration, “there was enough guardrails around Trump or enough caution on his part that when he did things that were more impulsive, they had less significance and fewer external ramifications,” said a former White House official.

Now it’s become more of a one-man White House and government.

Trying to constrain Trump is “a pipe dream,” said one current White House official. “Everyone who has tried had eventually failed in some way.”

“It’s just looking like everything is coming apart,” said a former White House official. Another former senior West Wing aide agreed that the White House seemed to be “a little bit unraveling” in recent days.

Some current White House officials say they are simply exhausted after all the constant fighting, and lack the energy to try to constrain a wilful president bent on having his own way. It’s normal for officials to return to the private sector after a few years of pressure-cooker public service, but the Trump administration has seen extraordinary levels of turnover, and the administration’s current ranks are thin and getting thinner. A current White House official described a “who cares” attitude creeping through the building under Mulvaney’s hands-off management style....