Foxconn—Gov Walker’s disaster?

Foxconn finally admits its empty Wisconsin ‘innovation centers’ aren’t being developed

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Took long enough

By Nick Statt@nickstatt Oct 23, 2019, 6:33pm EDT

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Photo by Joshua Lott for The Verge

Electronics manufacturer Foxconn’s promised Wisconsin “innovation centers,” which are to employ hundreds of people in the state if they ever get built, are officially on hold after spending months empty and unused, as the company focuses on meeting revised deadlines on the LCD factory it promised would now open by next year. The news, reported earlier today by Wisconsin Public Radio, is another inexplicable twist in the nearly two-year train wreck that is Foxconn’s US manufacturing plans.

The company originally promised five so-called innovation centers throughout the state would that employ as many as 100 to 200 people each in high-skilled jobs, with the Milwaukee center promising as many as 500. Those jobs were to complement the more than 13,000 jobs Foxconn said its initial Wisconsin electronics manufacturing factory would bring to the US, in exchange for billions in tax breaks and incentives that Governor Scott Walker granted the company back in 2017.

THE INNOVATION CENTERS ARE NOT ONLY EMPTY, BUT NOW ON HOLD TOO

Yet after purchasing a building in Milwaukee and announcing plans to build the centers in other Wisconsin cities, Foxconn has done virtually nothing with the plans. In April, The Verge reported that the buildings Foxconn had purchased were empty, a report that the company disputed without providing any specific corrections or evidence to the contrary — and the company still hasn’t provided any 194 days later.

According to WPR, Foxconn has installed an HVAC system in one of two buildings it said it would purchase in Eau Claire, but no additional work has been completed. “That’s been about the extent of it, it’s pretty minimal,” Aaron White, Eau Claire’s economic development manager, told WPR. “We did get a visit from four Foxconn staffers and they reinforced their intent to move forward, but they gave no indication of a timeline.”

In Racine, another planned innovation center destination, there does not appear to have been any work done whatsoever. “Foxconn is focusing on the (Mount) Pleasant campus,” Shannon Powell, a spokesman for Racine Mayor Cory Mason, told WPR. “Should an innovation center in the city get up and running there would certainly be a grand opening event.”

Beyond the halted innovation centers, Foxconn’s general Wisconsin plans are similarly in flux. The company announced a partnership in September with an automated coffee kiosk company to help manufacture its product domestically, with plans to add the coffee kiosk to its manufacturing contracts for the planned Mount Pleasant factory.

But the factory doesn’t exist yet. The company is now aiming to open it in 2020 after repeatedly shifting its deadlines. It’s also reduced the planned number of jobs and the size of the factory from the original 13,000 jobs and 20 million square feet to a 1,500-employee, 1-million-square foot facility that will no longer produce the promised big-screen LCD TVs that were part of the initial contract. Earlier this month, the company announced, scrapped, and then re-announced plans to build a giant, nine-story glass orb that would serve as a data center.

Above is from:  https://www.theverge.com/2019/10/23/20929453/foxconn-innovation-centers-on-hold-wisconsin-mount-pleasant-trump-deal

Rep Kinzinger slighted by Re-elect Trump Committee

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U.S. Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Channahon, speaks to the media in March 2019 at the White House in Washington.

AP photo/Jacquelyn Martin

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The Republican congressman whose district includes Iroquois County still says he supports President Donald Trump, but the Trump campaign is giving him the cold shoulder.

U.S. Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Channahon, was the only one of the five Republican congressmen from Illinois who was not named this week as an honorary co-chairman of the Trump re-election effort in 2020.

Kinzinger, who was born in Kankakee, has maintained a careful balancing act between backing the president and distancing himself from the president’s rhetoric.

A few days ago, he leveled some of his strongest criticism of the president after Trump quoted a pastor who suggested Trump’s removal from office could result in a civil war.

“I have visited nations ravaged by civil war,” Kinzinger tweeted. “I have never imagined such a quote to be repeated by a President. This is beyond repugnant.”

In a story Thursday, the Chicago Sun-Times said it learned Kinzinger’s “beyond repugnant” comment prompted the campaign’s decision.

According to the Sun-Times, Kinzinger shrugged off the campaign’s move, saying, “It’s fine.”

“I just don’t think it’s a decision probably the president made — probably his political operatives,” he said.

Kinzinger also is incurring the wrath of right-wing groups such as the Oath Keepers, a militia organization accused of supporting white supremacy.

Earlier this week, the Oath Keepers linked to a story about Kinzinger’s “beyond repugnant” quote.

“Trump’s real crime was winning the election. Period. All the rest is smoke and mirrors to justify reversing the election. And some in the GOP are in on it,” the group tweeted.

After the 2016 election, Kinzinger said he did not vote for Trump or Democrat Hillary Clinton but would not say who received his support. Before the election, Kinzinger accused Trump of childish tweets and rhetoric.

Earlier this year, when Trump said four congresswomen of color should “go back” where they came from, Kinzinger took to social media to blast the president.

“What the President tweeted this weekend was wrong and does nothing but further divide us,” Kinzinger said.

In 2017, he condemned Trump for saying that “both sides” were to blame at a deadly protest in Charlottesville, Va., where a woman protesting white supremacy was killed by supremacists.

“In this moment, we need bravery, we need leadership, and we need a president who unites the people of this country,” Kinzinger said in a statement at the time. “Instead, with his remarks this week, President Donald Trump has furthered the divide and downplayed the morally repugnant hate on display this past weekend.”

A version of this story appeared in the Friday digital edition of the Daily Journal.

Above is from:  https://www.daily-journal.com/news/local/president-slights-kinzinger/article_60c73d72-e61a-11e9-91d7-83d1c94262a6.html

Robert Morris University may become Roosevelt University?

Chicago Universities Plan Acquisition

Roosevelt University plans to acquire Robert Morris University in Chicago as a shrinking market bears down on the private nonprofit institutions.

By

Rick Seltzer

October 2, 2019

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JOSH FEENEY PHOTOGRAPHY

Robert Morris University of Illinois president Mablene Krueger and Roosevelt University president Ali Malekzadeh see upside in a planned acquisition deal.

Two private nonprofit universities under enrollment pressure in the difficult Chicago market plan a tie-up, with Roosevelt University acquiring Robert Morris University in a process leaders hope gains accreditor approval in the spring.

Roosevelt is the larger of the two institutions, with enrollment of about 4,100 students compared to Robert Morris’s 1,800. Roosevelt has a developed set of online programs but is built around a liberal arts and sciences core. Roosevelt also runs a broader set of graduate programs than does Robert Morris, which is career focused and brings two-year programs to the union.

Combining the two universities will hopefully create a single institution that can serve student demand for different types of education and programs, says Roosevelt’s president, Ali Malekzadeh. A student might be finishing a nursing degree and decide to stick around to earn a pharmacy doctorate, for example.

“Those who are ready to continue, it would be great to keep them,” Malekzadeh said. “From the students’ perspective, it’s really more and more choices.”

Assembling scale and a range of degree offerings could be an important strategy for the future for institutions in a part of the country where higher education is under intense stress. Illinois and the Chicagoland area have long been exporters of students as colleges and universities in adjacent states seek well-off families who might be willing to send their students away from home to earn degrees. And the pool of traditional-age undergraduates is expected to shrink in the coming years.

A Competitive Market and Falling Enrollment

A larger and larger share of Illinois high school graduates who attend four-year colleges have been going out of state over time, according to the Illinois Board of Higher Education -- 48.4 percent in 2017, up from 46.6 percent in 2016. In 2002, just 29.3 percent of the state’s high school graduates who went on to four-year colleges attended out of state.

Illinois high school enrollment has declined over the last decade and is expected to fall more sharply in coming years. The result is a drop in higher education enrollments across institution type in Illinois. Fall head-count enrollment in private nonprofit institutions fell by 7.4 percent between 2008 and 2017, IBHE data show, to 209,197.

Declining enrollment means shrinking revenue for many private colleges and universities, because they are dependent on tuition. Both Roosevelt and Robert Morris have lost students and showed signs of financial stress in recent years.

Roosevelt has reported operating deficits every year since 2014. It launched a five-year plan in 2017 that Malekzadeh has said was intended to eliminate deficits and rightsize operations. Today the university points to a “three-pronged” approach intended to improve enrollments, grow revenues and cut expenses, all while investing in academic programs.

In June 2018, Moody’s Investors Service kept Roosevelt’s bonds in junk territory because of a “material structural imbalance, with large operating deficits and insufficient debt service coverage that require draws on the university’s reserves.” The ratings agency noted that upcoming class sizes seemed to be stabilizing and that the university’s management team had cut expenses.

But it kept a negative outlook on the university’s debt, citing low retention rates and large graduating classes pushing down overall enrollment, as well as high financial leverage and fixed costs that were becoming “increasingly unaffordable as its scale declines.”

Roosevelt has since restructured debt to free up funding for turnaround efforts. Its leaders expect a balanced budget in the coming year, Malekzadeh said. Projections show the budget balancing after the acquisition of Robert Morris.

The Situation Next Door

Robert Morris has been under its own financial pressures. It has been losing money for much of the last decade. In May, it moved to close a Springfield campus that enrolled 20 or so students. Then last month, it sold the campus to a credit union for just under $1 million.

Robert Morris has not stopped recruiting a new class of students for next year. The acquisition might increase Roosevelt’s enrollment, but it will not swell head count to previously seen levels on its own.

If Roosevelt and Robert Morris were combined today, the resulting institution would have about 5,900 students. That’s below Roosevelt’s enrollment level from 2008, which was almost 7,700 students. Robert Morris enrolled about 4,600 at that time.

Presidents at both universities stressed the educational and programmatic upside of the deal. Both institutions stress missions to promote diversity, access to education and enrollment of first-generation and minority students.

“Even though it is a tough market with the outmigration and the decreased number of students who are graduating from high schools, there is still such a great need for students who need or want to stay locally and go to school,” said Mablene Krueger, president of Robert Morris.

Acquisition Details

Several factors lined up to make the two institutions potential partners for a merger or acquisition.

Roosevelt’s and Robert Morris’s main locations are very close to one another. They are nearly back to back in Chicago.

“I’m 5'2", and it’s 256 steps for me,” Krueger said. “The vast majority of Robert Morris students take public transportation to come to class every day. As we were looking at the opportunity to acquire or be acquired, that’s very important.”

Leaders of the two universities also have a pre-existing relationship. Malekzadeh and Krueger became presidents of their respective institutions in 2015. The timing fueled a good relationship based in similar experiences, Krueger said.

The idea of a partnership first came up over a “friendly breakfast” between the two presidents, Krueger said. They were discussing ways Robert Morris students could have access to advanced science or math offerings, then they began talking about the possibility of providing Roosevelt students with career-focused programs. Talk moved into student housing, where the universities have worked together, and evolved from there.

Leaders at Roosevelt and Robert Morris were scheduled to tell their campuses about the acquisition Wednesday morning. They have submitted an application to their accreditor, the Higher Learning Commission, that they hope will be approved in the spring. The deal also requires approval from the Illinois Board of Higher Education, the U.S. Department of Education and each institution’s governing board.

Plans call for Robert Morris to be absorbed into Roosevelt University and take the larger institution’s name. Roosevelt will create a new college that will house many of Robert Morris’s existing programs. It will be called the Robert Morris Experiential College.

Robert Morris’s president, Krueger, will continue with the combined institution with the title of chief operating officer. Her focus will be growing the institution through external relationships with constituencies like employers and the City Colleges of Chicago.

Malekzadeh will remain president of Roosevelt. Roosevelt’s 35-member board will remain intact. Robert Morris’s 10-member board will not be integrated into Roosevelt and will dissolve, although individual board members could be brought onto the Roosevelt board as positions open up there over time.

Students will keep their enrollment at the merged institution, which will work to make sure they don’t lose credits, Malekzadeh said. Roosevelt plans to offer employment to all Robert Morris faculty and staff members.

Roosevelt employed 201 full-time faculty members and 379 staff members as of last fall, the latest date for which data are available. Robert Morris had 49 full-time faculty members and 115 staff members.

Both institutions have been run efficiently, Malekzadeh said. Student demand will determine program mix, facilities use and other spending priorities in the future.

Full financial terms of the deal aren’t being made public. University assets will be purchased from Robert Morris, but a spokeswoman declined further comment until the transaction is approved by the Higher Learning Commission.

Roosevelt has been working to boost its retention rates, Malekzadeh said. He sees that as a key strategy for the institution going forward.

“It’s a contracting market, and we need to be cognizant of that,” Malekzadeh said. “Adding the Robert Morris students to our students, we keep absolutely every one of them, if at all possible.”

Wider Ramifications?

Higher education merger experts have been skeptical of the idea that institutions with falling enrollments, relatively small endowments and significant liabilities can reliably increase their strength through mergers and acquisitions. Yes, the merged institution may add scale and certain areas of strength. But mergers and acquisitions are likely to add each institution’s weaknesses to the resulting university as well.

Still, in highly competitive markets with declining numbers of students -- like Illinois -- colleges and universities are likely to be under increasing pressure to find ways to cut capacity, add scale or realign themselves to meet changing student needs. That makes the Roosevelt and Robert Morris deal worth watching.

“An institution that’s going to acquire another institution is going to have to really scrub and look through and see if there are programs they want,” said David Tretter, president of the Federation of Independent Illinois Colleges and Universities. Tretter was interviewed before the deal between Roosevelt and Robert Morris had been announced. He was discussing mergers and acquisitions generally.

Infrastructure can make it hard for college mergers to pan out financially. Small institutions are the ones most likely to be in existential peril, so they are the most likely ones to be exploring deals. But two institutions that aren’t very large might not have enough scale to realize cost savings, even after a merger.

“It’s pretty hard to make that work with the cost of the physical plant and insurance,” Tretter said.

Institutions that are close to one another might be able to find merger partners. So institutions in urban areas could be more likely candidates for the type of deal that Roosevelt and Robert Morris are pursuing than ones in rural areas.

“Probably my greater concerns are those institutions in those rural areas where you’re not going to have an institution down the street,” Tretter said.

Malekzadeh is a former business school dean who has studied strategic management and mergers. He said talk of such deals has become popular among college leaders recently.

“Almost any university president I had lunch or breakfast with for the past year or two has been mentioning mergers and acquisitions,” he said.

Roosevelt’s and Robert Morris’s academic programs have about 40 percent overlap, Malekzadeh said. Robert Morris nursing programs and associate programs in allied health could fit with biology, biochemistry, allied health and health science administration baccalaureate programs at Roosevelt. Robert Morris has a master of information systems to be folded into Roosevelt’s computer science programs.

Making it all fit together while focusing on retention will be complicated.

“True integration is looking at what each institution does well -- what we both do well, what we separately do well -- and leveraging that to help everybody,” Krueger said.

Above is from:  https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2019/10/02/roosevelt-plans-acquire-chicago-neighbor-robert-morris

Danville picks casino operator

Danville picks casino operator

Wednesday, Oct 2, 2019

* Jennifer Bailey at the Danville Commercial News…

D-Vegas has been a long-running nickname used by some residents for Danville, it being the opposite of a bright lights big city.

Now after a 30-year wait for a casino, Danville is living up to that nickname and could be called that by a lot more people. The casino renderings of Haven Gaming LLC’s casino resort and entertainment center is reminiscent of a Las Vegas-style property.

The Danville City Council voted 12-0, with Ward 4 Alderman Mike O’Kane absent and a vacant Ward 1 seat at the start of the meeting Tuesday night to accept the casino steering-committee’s recommendation of Haven Gaming as the casino operating partner. Haven Gaming is a team of about seven people with more than a century of gaming experience combined with casinos, for example in Joliet, Michigan City, Ind., and in California.

The proposed casino will have 1,250 slot machines, 40 gaming tables and also sports betting lounges and bars, a 2,500 seat entertainment venue, conference/banquet center, 300-seat buffet, a boutique hotel and rooftop spa/salon, pool and lazy river, celebrity-style restaurants and other amenities. There also will be waterfall and other outside features.

* Artist rendering…

Rep Kinzinger on both side of the impeachment issue

Letter: Rep. Kinzinger has protected this president

Posted at 2:12 PM

Rep. Adam Kinzinger publicly denounces the president’s tweets but solicits donations on the “baseless” whistleblower complaint. He has protected this president to his base and in his votes which leaves this behavior unchecked to our national security detriment.

How convenient for him to develop a public record to hide behind when this unacceptable behavior is finally condemned in a way to stop it. It does not take courage to denounce hateful rhetoric to solicit publicity, but it is cowardice to avoid taking actions to make a difference.

— Chantal Stiles, Belvidere

Above is from:  https://www.rrstar.com/opinion/20191001/letter-rep-kinzinger-has-protected-this-president

Where does Rep Kinzinger stand on impeachment?

Congressman Kinzinger uses impeachment talk to fundraise for campaign

Campaign Facebook page calls impeaching Trump 'radical agenda'

By Derek BarichelloEmailFollow

Sept. 25, 2019

Contributed

Caption

Congressman Adam Kinzinger's campaign Wednesday took a different tone than a press statement his office released a day earlier regarding an impeachment probe of President Donald Trump.

The congressman utilized the impeachment news to launch into fundraising efforts.

Tuesday, the Channahon Republican said he is reserving judgment until more information is released whether Trump used his presidential powers to seek help from a foreign government for his re-election.

A day later Kinzinger on his campaign page asked supporters "to make their voice heard and donate whatever you can right now, to send a message that we will not stand for this attack on the very foundation of our country."

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi launched a formal impeachment inquiry against Trump on Tuesday. The probe centers on whether Trump abused his presidential powers and sought help from Ukraine for his re-election. Pelosi said such actions would mark a "betrayal of his oath of office" and declared, "No one is above the law," according to Associated Press reports.

The White House account shows Trump was willing to engage a foreign leader to dig up dirt on a political foe and he volunteered his attorney general to help, according to the Associated Press. But Trump appears to stop short in the call of any explicit quid pro quo, such as linking Ukraine's help to American military aid or other assistance.

Days before the call, Trump froze nearly $400 million in aid to Ukraine. It was not clear from the summary whether Zelenskiy was aware of that, and the White House did not respond to requests to clarify. The president has said he did nothing wrong and has denied any request for help was tied to the aid freeze.

It's illegal under federal law to seek foreign government assistance for U.S. elections.

Kinzinger said Tuesday he was looking forward to reviewing the White House transcript and that he'd reserve judgment. Kinzinger's office hasn't responded Wednesday to questions of what the congressman thought of the transcript.

His Facebook post Wednesday said of Democrats: "Now, more than ever, we have to stand up to these radical socialists."

"Their crusade to impeach the President has never been about the facts -- we know because they've pulled the impeachment trigger when Congress is still missing crucial information that could prove the President did nothing wrong. But that doesn't matter to them. This is nothing short of a blatant disregard for the will of the American people and our democracy. The Far Left didn’t like the result of the 2016 election, so they have chosen to tear apart our country to advance their radical agenda."

Kinzinger had said Monday on a Fox News program if Trump utilized his presidential power, he didn't believe it rises to the level of impeachment.

He also said Monday no foreign government should have an influence on the U.S. election, nor should an American president utilize his power to affect an election, calling the action wrong and one that should not be defended.

Above is from:  https://www.mywebtimes.com/2019/09/25/congressman-kinzinger-uses-impeachment-talk-to-fundraise-for-campaign/a9jbt8a/

House Republican Mark Amodei backs inquiry but not impeachment

By MELANIE ZANONA

09/27/2019 09:14 PM EDT

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Rep. Mark Amodei on Friday became the first Republican to explicitly back the House’s investigation into President Donald Trump over his interactions with Ukraine, though the Nevada lawmaker made clear that he does not support impeachment.

In a conference call with local media, the five-term congressman told reporters, “I’m a big fan of oversight, so let’s let the committees get to work and see where it goes,” according to an audio of the call released by The Nevada Independent.

Amodei said he is withholding judgment on whether Trump’s actions amounted to an impeachable offense — “Let’s put it through the process and see what happens,” he said — but he did express concern over the possibility that Trump asked a foreign government to dig up dirt on a political opponent.

“Using government agencies to, if it’s proven, to put your finger on the scale of an election, I don’t think that’s right,” Amodei said. “If it turns out that it’s something along those lines, then there’s a problem.”

After the Nevada Independent ran an article saying Amodei backs an impeachment inquiry, he put out a statement through his office to clarify that “in no way, shape, or form, did I indicate support for impeachment."

But he added that “we have to follow the facts and figure out what happened here.”

Amodei joins a small but growing list of Republicans who are alarmed by Trump’s efforts to press Ukraine into investigating the Biden family, at the same time that the Trump administration was withholding $250 million in foreign aid from Ukraine.

Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) has said he found Trump’s Ukraine call “troubling,” and Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) has called it “inappropriate.”

Rep. Mike Turner (R-Ohio) said on Thursday, “I want to say to the president, 'This is not okay. That conversation is not okay.'” Rep. Adam Kinzinger said the whistleblower complaint raises “important questions.” And Rep. Will Hurd (R-Texas) said “there is a lot in the whistleblower complaint that is concerning.”

But even as some Republicans try to put some daylight between them and Trump, they’re still unwilling to wholly break with him, suggesting the president's firewall of GOP support on Capitol Hill is still standing firm — for now.

Above is from: 

With Trump under threat, his allies are seizing on various defenses. Most aren’t great.

• U.S. from…

With Trump under threat, his allies are seizing on various defenses. Most aren’t great.

Philip Bump

11 hrs ago

If the goal posts you use to evaluate the significance of a presidential scandal are his inevitable removal from office then, no, the still-ballooning allegations surrounding President Trump are not yet a significant scandal. If your goal posts are pretty much anywhere else, however, what Trump currently faces may be the most significant scandal of his presidency.

© Calla Kessler/The Washington Post (Calla Kessler/The Washington Post)

For Trump’s experienced defenders, the president’s solicitation of electoral aid from a foreign country, the possibility that he leveraged government resources to solicit that aid and his administration’s alleged effort to hide that solicitation poses a new and evolving challenge. Over the past week, they’ve had to follow Trump’s shifting explanations as information came out. (Remember when Trump claimed that he was just looking to combat corruption?) With the past two days’ document releases — the rough transcript of a call with Ukraine’s president and a complaint from an intelligence community whistleblower — his defenders have been operating on quickly shifting terrain.

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With that in mind, we decided to evaluate those arguments. How effective have Trump’s team and his defenders been at repelling the looming allegations?

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The answer, in short, is: not terribly.

Joe Biden did it, too.

While the rest of this article focuses on recently emerging defenses, it’s worth lifting up one of the central ongoing claims made by Trump and his team: Former vice president Joe Biden was the one who acted inappropriately.

The assertion here is that Biden pushed for the firing of a Ukrainian prosecutor in December 2015 because the prosecutor was investigating a company who had hired Biden’s son Hunter as a board member. Biden even bragged about withholding aid to Ukraine in early 2018 at an event hosted by the Council on Foreign Relations.

By now, though, this has been shown to be an inaccurate depiction of what happened. The prosecutor at the time, Viktor Shokin, was broadly and publicly criticized for not acting on corruption cases — including criticism from other members of the U.S. government. It’s not clear there was an investigation at that point into the company for which Hunter Biden worked, much less one targeting Hunter Biden. There’s been no evidence to emerge tying Joe Biden’s request to a defense of Hunter.

Trump first made this argument in an interview with Fox News on May 19. Interestingly, that was apparently before his administration decided to withhold aid intended for Ukraine that was still on track to be delivered as of May 23. By July, the aid was on hold, and it was still on hold when Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky spoke on July 25.

What’s interesting here is that Trump is accusing Biden of doing what he himself stands accused of doing: withholding aid or perhaps an in-person meeting until Zelensky signed on to an investigation of Biden. What Biden did, by all accounts, is what Trump claims he himself did: took an action to push back on corruption.

Democratic senators did it, too.

A Washington Post opinion piece by columnist Marc Thiessen pointed to a letter sent by three Democratic senators last year which, Thiessen suggested, demonstrated the sort of attempted arm-twisting of which Trump stood accused.

“[I]n May, CNN reported that Sens. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) and Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) wrote a letter to Ukraine’s prosecutor general, Yuriy Lutsenko, expressing concern at the closing of four investigations they said were critical to the Mueller probe. In the letter, they implied that their support for U.S. assistance to Ukraine was at stake,” he wrote. “… So, it’s okay for Democratic senators to encourage Ukraine to investigate Trump, but it’s not okay for the president to allegedly encourage Ukraine to investigate Hunter Biden?”

Thiessen’s argument was quickly lifted up as an example of Democratic hypocrisy. There are a few large differences between the two situations, though.

The first is that the threat Thiessen’s column (and subsequent defensive tweets) identifies the Democrats making is at best indirect. What’s more, there’s a big difference between three senators in the minority party threatening to curtail aid and the president of the United States doing it. Zelensky and Ukrainian officials are almost certainly aware that Trump has a lot more leverage over their fates than do three senators.

What’s more, the intent of the purported threats is quite different. It’s not investigate Trump vs. investigate Hunter Biden, as Thiessen has it. The Democrats were responding to a report in the New York Times suggesting that Ukraine was curtailing its assistance in former special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s probe to avoid offending the Trump administration. In other words, it’s senators pushing Ukraine not to stonewall an ongoing investigation being conducted by the Justice Department.

What Trump wanted was more basic. He wanted dirt on Biden. The beneficiary of tearing down Biden — Trump — is quite different than the beneficiaries of a robust Mueller probe. The senators weren’t asking for a probe of Trump; they were asking that a probe of Trump and his team not be hindered. Trump was asking for a probe of the Bidens.

The media isn’t quoting the rough transcript properly.

The rough transcript of that July 25 call includes a number of tantalizing and suggestive passages. One that attracted a great deal of attention was Trump’s responding to Zelensky’s mention of possibly seeking military aid by saying, “I would like you to do us a favor though.” Another was his subsequent mention of Biden:

“The other thing, there’s a lot of talk about Biden’s son, that Biden stopped the prosecution and a lot of people want to find out about that so whatever you can do with the Attorney General would be great. Biden went around bragging that he stopped the prosecution so if you can look into it ... It sounds horrible to me.”

Trump allies disparaged outlets that linked the two. After all, the specific favor Trump was mentioning wasn’t that probe of Biden. The favor was an investigation into Ukraine’s role in the hacking of Democratic National Committee’s server in 2016 (a role that doesn’t exist). Between the two were Zelensky’s reply (solicitous), Trump objecting to the firing of a prosecutor (presumably Shokin) and Trump praising his personal attorney Rudolph W. Giuliani.

It’s inaccurate to say that Trump directly asked Zelensky for the favor of investigating Biden. But it’s accurate to say that Trump asked for a favor and also asked for an investigation of Biden.

It’s a subtle distinction.

The whistleblower didn’t observe things firsthand.

Even before the release of the whistleblower’s complaint on Thursday, Trump allies were pointing to reports that the whistleblower hadn’t observed the July 25 call firsthand. After it was released, that argument became a primary point of objection.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, for example, was asked about the complaint on Thursday. He hadn’t had a chance to read the whole thing, he said, but “if I understand it right, it’s from someone who had secondhand knowledge.”

That’s largely true. The whistleblower notes that the information about the call is secondhand and in other places points to information shared with him or her or to public reporting to build out his case.

As a general rule, it’s worth considering secondhand sources with more skepticism. In this case, though, a primary focus of the whistleblower’s information — that call — has been made public. What the transcript of the call shows is that the whistleblower’s presentation in the complaint is largely accurate. It’s unfair, then, to dismiss the entire document out of hand for being indirectly sourced.

One effort to diminish the complaint tried to cast doubt on it by noting, among other things, that the whistleblower’s complaint referred to a mention of “servers,” plural, instead of the one server mentioned in the rough transcript. Such discrepancies are hardly disqualifying, of course — and may in fact reflect that the whistleblower was hearing from people listening to the call live, not reading the rough transcript.

The whistleblower and their lawyers are biased.

Allies of the president have alleged an apparent political bias on the part of the whistleblower (whose identity remains unknown). It was, in fact, one of the considerations taken into account by the inspector general for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in evaluating the complaint’s credibility.

That, after all, is the key question. If the complaint is credible, then bias doesn’t matter. If your sworn enemy robs a bank and you have proof, should the police dismiss your evidence simply because it’s your sworn enemy?

In the case of the whistleblower complaint, the inspector general specifically decided that the credibility of the complaint outweighed concerns of bias.

“Although the ICIG’s preliminary review found ‘some indicia of an arguable political bias on the part of the Complainant in favor of a rival political candidate,’ ” an Office of Legal Counsel evaluation states, “the ICIG concluded that the complaint’s allegations nonetheless appeared credible.”

Trump and his allies also targeted the whistleblower’s attorney.

As others have pointed out, Trump himself donated to Biden in 2001.

The whistleblower and their sources are equivalent to spies.

At an event on Thursday morning, Trump used remarkably aggressive language to disparage the whistleblower and the people who spoke with them.

“Basically, that person never saw the report, never saw the call, he never saw the call — heard something and decided that he or she or whoever the hell they saw — they’re almost a spy,” Trump said according to audio obtained by the Los Angeles Times’s Eli Stokols.

“I want to know who’s the person, who’s the person who gave the whistleblower the information?” Trump said. “Because that’s close to a spy. You know what we used to do in the old days when we were smart? Right? The spies and treason, we used to handle it a little differently than we do now.”

The whistleblower used the defined legal process to raise concerns about the president’s behavior. It was Trump himself who decided to release the rough transcript and the complaint after keeping them out of Congress’s hands for weeks. The whistleblower didn’t leak information, as far as is known; nor did that person share information with any foreign power. Those who spoke with the whistleblower were expressing concerns to a peer.

If those are the actions of spies, then in the opinion of the president anyone who legally shares any derogatory information about Trump is a spy deserving of the punishment once meted out to spies — death.

Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) is wary about Trump’s interactions with Ukraine because one of the 24 foreign policy advisers he had on his 2012 campaign joined the board of the company for which Hunter Biden was working six months after Biden left.

Donald Trump Jr. thinks this makes sense (per a tweet), and the Trump campaign’s rapid-response shop soon retweeted it.

This one we will allow you to evaluate yourself.

Above is from:  http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/with-trump-under-threat-his-allies-are-seizing-on-various-defenses-most-arent-great/ar-AAHTn9T?li=BBnb7Kz&ocid=UE13DHP