eeeeesh...

I never thought these would see the light of day, and they are just exactly what I thought they'd be.

I've worked for the government. (NASA) I've been a part of hundreds of these types of email chains with career government employees, who know how these arcane processes work, and make sure to get the other person to say very specific words that absolve the recipient of any responsibility for making a decision they know is bad and stupid, and will come back to bite someone eventually.

But if they can show the email chain where they push back and get the OTHER person to say the magic words of absolution, they go along with it... and then print the emails, and put them in their desk drawer.

As an IT nerd at NASA, I was brought in to people's offices when they were fired and escorted out of the building without getting a chance to clear out their desk, turn off their computer, etc.

Manager brings me in, points at the screensaver, and says, "figure out the password, and get me into that computer."

And I did. Almost every time.

I also went through drawers and files, and saw folders with dozens of pages of printed emails that highlighted some wrongdoing or some shit that was going to hit the fan at some point, and the user had printed out to save their butt if it ever came up.

Someone at DOD is PISSED at the White House (and OMB), and has brought out the big guns... the email printouts.

This ain't the last we will see of incriminating email chains. Once a government employee sees the opportunity to expose how they have been wronged, that folder is coming out of the bottom drawer, and getting sent to the WaPo. I guarantee it.

Agree, that write-up was amateur, but maybe it's a lesson in the ills of associating factual information with a certain type of (more efficient, more formal, and more neutral?) prose like NYT, WaPo, WSJ. And how did Just Security score the unredacted emails? I'd never heard of them before today, and "I google 'Trump' at least five times every day, because I hate myself", but don't quote me on that.

Although there is no reputable reporting of it yet, I suspect that the redactions may criminally implicate William Barr. I have a hard time believing that this process couldn't involve him intimately, since any dumbass can see that it all directly implicates Trump, firstly. It's quite like a serious attempt at re-creating Watergate, which we Hubskites (Hubskians? is there a consensus?) have previously "joked" about. But why the hell would we have these systems of bureaucratic accounting (which produced these verryyyyy important emails) if not to protect against the self-dealing corruption that the impeachment effort aims to remove?

To rehash it all, in case anyone hasn't heard:

Trump illegally withheld Congressionally approved funding to a crucial US and EU ally, Ukraine. The funding was designed to enable a better defense against the Russian forces currently occupying a strategic region of Ukraine (Crimea). In addition to the defense funding, Trump also leveraged a White House visit for the new Ukrainian president in exchange for an announcement that he would open up two investigations in Ukraine. One investigation would look into Trump's foremost upcoming political rival, Joe Biden, and his son. The other would undermine the findings of the entire US intelligence community that it was Putin/Russia who overwhelmingly meddled in the 2016 election.

BTW, Hunter Biden mos def had no bidness being on the Burisma bidness board without knowin' the bidness, especially with daddy being VPOTUS. But my god, if we're going to talk about weird shit with US executive branch children... Is every one of Trump's complaints and attacks a projection? It's gotta be somewhere around 90%+. He legit believes that everyone behaves just like he does, like no one has principles or aspires to a greater good. SAD