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A functioning democracy depends on the support of its citizens. The popularity of specific leaders and political parties may rise and fall, but ideally without affecting the extent to which citizens are satisfied with the political system and have trust in its core institutions, including the executive, the legislature and the judiciary.

In recent years, concerns have been raised about the decline in confidence in democracy in many Western countries.

Read more: Are we witnessing the death of liberal democracy?

In the Canadian context, these concerns appear overstated: on the whole, satisfaction with democracy and trust in the political system in Canada has gradually been rising over the past decade, not falling.

This national trend, however, may disguise divergent trends at the sub-national level. Given the countrys decentralized federal political structure, its essential to look deeper by focusing on provinces and regions.

Using data on Canadians from the AmericasBarometer surveys, the Environics Institute for Survey Research examined a variety of questions related to confidence in the political system.

Polls of approximately 1,500 adult Canadians were conducted online five times over the past decade: in 2010, 2012, 2014, 2017 and 2019. These questions asked about satisfaction with, pride in, support for, respect for, trust in and approval of different political institutions or politicians.

In general, the survey results confirm that on these questions, national trends in Canada can be misleading, precisely because they often mask opposing regional ones. The answer to the question of whether Canadians are gaining or losing confidence in their democratic institutions depends in part on which region one is referring to. This can be illustrated in more detail by contrasting the trends in Qubec and Alberta.

Those concerned with national unity will find it reassuring that confidence in Canadas political system in Qubec is not significantly lower than average. This is notable given Qubecs status as a minority nation within the larger Canadian federal state and one whose political leaders frequently contest the extent of the autonomy afforded to the province under the current federal arrangement.

Qubecers are now slightly more likely than other Canadians to be satisfied with the way the political system works in Canada, and just as likely as other Canadians to be satisfied with the way democracy works. Qubecers are also more likely than other Canadians to have a lot of respect for the countrys key political institutions, and just as likely to feel proud of living under the political system of Canada and to feel that that political system is worthy of support.

They have just as much trust as other Canadians do in elections, in Parliament and in the prime minister. They also have just as much trust in the Supreme Court, which is important since it is, among other things, the final arbiter of the federal-provincial division of powers.

Where Qubecers stand out is on questions of identity. They are much less likely than other Canadians to feel a lot of pride in being Canadian (although very few feel no pride at all, indicating that while Qubecers do not embrace a Canadian identity as strongly as other Canadians, most do not reject that identity either).

They are also much less likely to strongly agree that Canadians have many things that unite them as a country.

More worryingly, from a national unity perspective, is the finding that satisfaction with democracy and trust in the political system has declined significantly in Alberta.

Notably, the largest declines did not occur immediately after the start of the recession in the province in late 2014. The data suggest that Albertans initially remained hopeful, but that levels of satisfaction with Canadian democracy faltered after changes of government at both the provincial and federal levels in 2015 proved unable to quickly reverse the provinces economic fortunes.

To illustrate, in Alberta, between the 2017 and 2019 surveys:

Satisfaction with the way democracy works in Canada fell by 19 points;

Trust in elections fell by 10 points;

Strong agreement with the proposition that those who govern this country are interested in what people like you think fell by 19 points;

Strong respect for the political institutions of Canada fell by six points;

Strong agreement that one should support the political system of Canada fell by 10 points;

Strong pride in living under Canadas political system fell by 10 points;

Trust in parliament fell by eight points

Trust in political parties fell by five points;

Trust in the prime minister fell by 18 points; and

Trust in the Supreme Court fell by 13 points.

In short, in Alberta, a decline was registered on a wide range of measures, and in each case, the decline was greater than that in any other region (in fact, in most cases, confidence in democracy in other regions improved over this period, with the exception of Atlantic Canada, which registered several modest declines).

Importantly, the declines are not limited to questions related to party politics (such as approval of the performance of the prime minister), but also to those related to support for the political system.

These findings, drawn from a more comprehensive report entitled Public Support for Canadas Political System: Regional Trends, show that these declines leave levels of confidence in Alberta only slightly lower than average.

This is because confidence in democracy was previously higher in Alberta than in the other regions. But even though Albertans dont yet have significantly lower confidence in the countrys political system than other Canadians, they do stand out as the one region where confidence across a range of measures has declined sharply in recent years.

The main takeaway from this analysis is this: if the trend continues, a significant gap in support for the political system will emerge between Alberta and the rest of Canada.

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Satisfaction with Canada's democracy declines significantly in Alberta - The Conversation CA

Last winter, I found myself seated around a massive table with about forty others on the ground floor of the historic Jane Addams Hull-House Museum, in Chicago. A group of curators had invited me to participate in Parts of Speech, an exhibit consisting of six lectures by six artists held at venues across the city. Instead of a typical talk, where Id speak from a stage or behind a lectern, Id proposed hosting a debtors assemblya forum where people could share stories of their financial hardship.

Id never hosted such an assembly before. As the participants (not audience members) trickled into the room, I reminded myself that the event was supposed to be about listening, not talking. Even so, I couldnt resist making some opening remarks. I told the group that my work as an organizer and documentary filmmaker had led me to understand listening as a deeply political act, and an underappreciated one. I suggested that our lack of attention to listening connected to the larger crisis of American democracy, in which the wealthy and powerful shape the discourse while many others go unheard. After Id finished, Laura Hanna, the co-director of the Debt Collective, an economic-justice group Id helped found, reeled off statistics demonstrating that we live with Gilded Age levels of inequality. Then she invited people to share their stories. In that ornate, wood-panelled room, an ominous silence descended. Looking from one quiet face to another, I panicked. What if no one talked?

The first person to speak confessed to owing a hundred and fifty thousand dollars in student loans; many people in his life were unsympathetic to his plight, he said, because he had studied art and not law or something. A young woman began to cry. Im a first-generation student, I come from a family of poverty, she said. Sorry if I get emotional, but Im here with my little one, and Im thinking about her future. Im a hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars in student-loan debt, and thats a huge number. When she finished, the room burst into applause.

The dam broke. A young man spoke of a mental-health crisis that had caused his debt to balloon; it included ambulance and hospital bills that took three years to pay off. A middle-aged woman described herself as teetering at that edge of poverty after she quit her job because of racist comments made by a colleague; her high debt load meant she couldnt help her college-age son. Another woman explained that her hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars in student loans were overwhelming not just her but her mother, who had taken many of them out on her behalf; she described the pain of feeling judged a failure when you are trying the best you can. An older man told how, after arriving as a refugee from Liberia, hed thought education would be a lifeline. Hed gotten a degree in chemistry and then attended nursing school, but now the money he owed was a trap from which he couldnt escape.

As the forum progressed, the mood in the room changed. Some people listened silently. Others, taking it all in, felt emboldened to reveal hardships theyd been reluctant to divulge elsewhere. A few got fired up: after hearing others stories, the crying woman asked, How can this be legal? A mountain of debt and shame was becoming visiblean overwhelming burden that was also a common bond. Id suggested a debtors assembly because I wanted to create a space in which both sides of the communicative coinspeaking and listeningcould be valued equally. Even so, I found myself surprised by listenings power. Though I work on issues of inequality, I was stunned by how much suffering the circle held.

We have two ears and one mouth so we can listen twice as much as we speak, the stoic philosopher Epictetus wrote, two thousand years ago. Thats long been one of my favorite quotes. The truth, though, was that it had been a long time since Id had an opportunity to listen, silently and at length, to what many other people had to say. Afterward, walking in the cold, I couldnt help but think of listening as something were all entitled toa right were often denied, and that the assembly had just reclaimed. Today, we are constantly reminded of the importance of free speech and the First Amendment; we exalt freedom in the expressive realm. Is there some corresponding principle of listening worth defending?

We expect powerful people to be talkers, not listeners.

The idea that the right to listen to one another should be defended in a democracy seems strange. Thats probably because we lack a shared vocabulary or framework for understanding listening as a political act. We pay lip service to the idea of listening: stage-managed town-hall meetings, at which politicians and candidates respond to curated questions from a screened audience, are a familiar part of the political landscape. In 2017, Mark Zuckerberg embarked on a highly publicized national listening tour, which yielded photographs of him riding a tractor with a farmer, going to church in a small town, helping out on an automobile assembly line, and so on. No one really imagined that Zuckerberg would listen to anything the people he visited had to say. We expect powerful people to be talkers, not listeners.

Philosophers, too, have thought mostly about speechbiased, perhaps understandably, toward dazzling utterances. When Aristotle declared man a political animal, he argued that what distinguished us from other creatures was our capacity for rational discourse. Modern philosophers have developed a framework of deliberative democracy in which oration and argument, declamation and debate, play out in an idealized public sphere. Careers have been made studying speech-act theory, which examines how certain verbal expressions do things in the world (a judge declaring a defendant guilty, for instance, or a couple married). A corresponding listening-act theory doesnt yet exist.

But to listen is to act; of that, theres no doubt. It takes effort and doesnt happen by default. As anyone who has been in a heated argumentor whos simply tried to coexist with family members, colleagues, friends, and neighborswell knows, its often easier not to listen. We can tune out and let others words wash over us, hearing only what we want to hear, or we can pantomime the act of listening, nodding along while waiting for our turn to speak. Even when we want to be rapt, our attentions wane. Deciding to listen to someone is a meaningful gesture. It accords them a special kind of recognition and respect.

In 2015, I began making a documentary called What Is Democracy?a feature exploring the fate of self-government in the Trump era. Immediately, I remembered that one of the hardest things about beginning to shoot a new documentary is remembering how to listen. I had to make a concerted effort to bite my tongue, so as not to babble over my subjects, ruining the footage (the way I had, to my eternal embarrassment, during my first film shoot, more than fifteen years ago). I found that listening well, so that I could respond genuinely and substantively, was exhausting work.

One of the things I heard, when I listened, was that many of the people I spoke withimmigrant factory workers, asylum seekers, former prisoners, schoolchildrensimply assumed that no one was interested in listening to them. At a community center in Miami, I asked a group of teen-agers if they ever discussed democracy at school. Yes, but its about branches of government, a boy said. They dont ask us, How do you feel about the school? As far as the kids could tell, their opinions didnt matter to their teachers or the administrators in charge, and they didnt feel there was much they could do about it. My voice isnt going to change anything, a girl told me, with a shrug. I asked them whether they thought the adults in their lives had more of a say than they did. I dont think people of higher power really want to hear a black mom thats poor in a ghetto, the girl responded, matter-of-factly. Similarly, a boy warned, an adult standing up for himself at work would only get into trouble; it was better not to speak out and just get it over with. Their certainty about going unheard was painful to hear.

The rest is here:
The Right to Listen - The New Yorker

An anvil, of course, is a block of iron, on whose flat top a piece of metal is hammered and battered to give it the desired shape and give it strength. Anvils went out of fashion along with the old blacksmiths bellows and forge, in which fire, muscle and sweat worked together to let strength work tools from metal. But a metaphorical anvil has cropped up practically in every place in India and, on it, democracy is being bashed and battered but bearing up and, it is to be hoped, would emerge stronger for the experience.

At no point in Indias history as an independent nation has democracy been the central theme of widespread popular protest, not even during the Emergency. Yes, people have mobilised themselves in large numbers, on several occasions, for specific causes: for or against reservations, to rebel against governance failure, particularly on holding the price line, against corruption, against the rape of middle class women, against disrespect to a language, to celebrate the triumph of a popular leader, to mourn the death of another, and so on. But todays protests are about the state and citizenship, peoples rights and their ability to assert them against state power. Never before has political mobilisation has been on matters that form the core of democracy.

This is a great development.

Women, young people and the minorities are in the forefront of these protests. Much as the ruling party would like to attribute the protests to the evil machinations of the Opposition, the reality is that a spontaneous current of political awakening, stirred by seeming state contempt for popular opinion and the basic ethos of the Constitution, has been surging across India, among people of all classes and ages, in country and town, bringing people out on to the street, marching, shouting slogans and reiterating the Preamble to the Constitution, in defence of the idea of India as a multicultural nation in which everyone has the right to live with dignity.

In India, political parties have paid lip service to secularism while practising patronage politics. Instead of negotiating the meaning of the secular and the democratic, to re-forge ties amongst communities and within them, parties have chosen to present themselves as protectors of minorities, who would enable them to lead their lives as before, complete with some customs that have little in common with democracy. Such claims to patronage are not just false but undermine minority rights as well.

The ability of minorities to live with security and dignity in Independent India is grounded in liberal democracy and the Constitutional guarantees of freedom of conscience and minority rights, not patronage. The weaker the democratic framework, the weaker also minority rights. It is in strengthening democracy that all subaltern groups have to seek their emancipation not in this party or that leader. A party would be relevant to the extant it champions strengthening democracy.

The premium the protests against the Citizenship Amendment Bill, the National Population Register and the National Register of Indian Citizens have placed on the Constitution shows that this awareness is seeping in. The coming together of two relatively oppressed groups, Dalits and Muslims, in these protests is yet more proof of this new subaltern solidarity for democracy.

Women are yet to join this fight for democracy as those who strengthen the fight for minority rights by fighting for their own rights. Women in India have made progress, of sorts, from the normative status assigned to them in tradition, of being eligible to be beaten, along with dhol, gawar, shudra and pashu (the drum, the rustic idiot, a member of the caste of servitude and animals), yet not recognised as human beings in their own right. The present outcry for their safety and security is the bleating of mens insecurity of their own honour being tarnished by the violation of their women. The normative order that denies women freedom, especially freedom of sexual choice, also reduces them, as a corollary, to objects of desire that need be contained only when such objects are located within coordinates of space and time that are considered decent. For women to gain full equality in access to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, deepening of democracy is the only answer.

Yes, India has acquired the ability to feed itself, it has stayed together as a nation, retained relative strategic autonomy and alleviated poverty and illiteracy. Yet, democracy remains more form than substance, in most parts of the country. Periodic elections are only a means or a symptom, not the totality of democracy. However, on the 71st anniversary of the Republic, substantive democracy is receiving a booster shot.

Jai Hind.

DISCLAIMER : Views expressed above are the author's own.

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Democracy on the anvil on Republic Day - Economic Times

IRELAND is the sixth most democratic country in the world, according to a new report.

In their newly-issued research into democracy around the world in 2019, the Economist Intelligence Unit (The EIU) states that there are only 22 truly democratic countries in the world, with Norway, Iceland and Sweden being the most democratic, and Ireland in sixth place, just ahead of Denmark.

The United Kingdom lies in 14th place.

The Democracy Index is deemed important in matters of trade democracy means stability and a marked lack of corruption, two factors crucial in commercial as well as social development in any country.

Irelands improved position on the index is due to advances in civil liberties in recent times in issues such as gay rights and abortion.

The EIUs Democracy Index provides a snapshot of the state of democracy worldwide in 165 independent states and two territories. The survey covers the vast majority of the worlds states, encompassing almost the entire population of the world.

Ranking is judged on five categories:electoral process and pluralism, functioning of government, political participation, political culture, and civil liberties. Ireland, scoring high in all categories, has steadily moved up the index since 2011.

Based on its scores on a range of indicators within the categories, each country is itself classified as one of four types of regime: full democracy, flawed democracy, hybrid regime or authoritarian regime

Five EU countries are regarded as having flawed democracies: Portugal, Malta, Belgium, Cyprus and Greece. The rest of the EU countries, including Ireland, are regarded as full democracies.

According to the EIUs measure of democracy, almost one-half (48.4 per cent) of the worlds population live in a democracy of some sort, although only 5.7 per cent reside in a full democracy.

This is down from 8.9 per cent in 2015 as a result of the US being demoted from a full democracy to a flawed democracy in 2016.

More than one-third of the worlds population lives under authoritarian rule, with China accounting for a large part of this, according to the report.

The worlds least democratic country is adjudged to be North Korea, just behind the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Central African Republic.

Norway

Iceland

Sweden

New Zealand

Finland

Ireland

Denmark

Canada

Australia

Switzerland

Originally posted here:
New study ranks Ireland one of the world's most democratic nations - Irish Post

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: Calls are growing for the Senate to call witnesses in President Trumps impeachment trial, after The New York Times published details about former national security adviser John Boltons forthcoming book. In an unpublished draft of the book, Bolton writes that President Trump personally told him in August that he wanted to maintain a freeze on $391 million in security assistance to Ukraine until Ukraine turned over materials related to former Vice President Joe Biden and supporters of Hillary Clinton in Ukraine. Bolton sent a draft of the book to the White House for review in December.

The Democratic House impeachment managers issued a statement saying, quote, There can be no doubt now that Mr. Bolton directly contradicts the heart of the Presidents defense and therefore must be called as a witness at the impeachment trial of President Trump, unquote.

The New York Times broke the story Sunday, one day after President Trumps legal team began its defense of the president at the impeachment trial. During Saturdays opening arguments, White House deputy counsel Mike Purpura claimed the Democratic case for impeachment is based on assumptions.

MIKE PURPURA: In his public testimony, Ambassador Sondland used variations of the words assume, presume, guess, speculate and believe over 30 times. Here are some examples.

GORDON SONDLAND: That was my presumption, my personal presumption. That was my belief. That was my presumption, yeah.

REP. ADAM SCHIFF: Is that right?

GORDON SONDLAND: I said I presume that might have to be done in order to get the aid released. It was a presumption. Ive been very clear as to when I was presuming, and I was presuming on the aid. It would be pure, you know, guesswork on my part, speculation, I dont know. That was the problem, Mr. Goldman. No one told me directly that the aid was tied to anything. I was presuming it was.

MIKE PURPURA: All the Democrats have to support the alleged link between security assistance and investigations is Ambassador Sondlands assumptions and presumptions.

AMY GOODMAN: During Saturdays opening argument, Trumps attorney Pat Cipollone accused the Democrats of attempting to overturn an election.

PAT CIPOLLONE: For all their talk about election interference, that theyre here to perpetrate the most massive interference in an election in American history. And we cant allow that to happen. It would violate our Constitution. It would violate our history. It would violate our obligations to the future.

AMY GOODMAN: Trumps lawyers will continue their opening arguments today. On Friday, the Democratic House impeachment managers wrapped up their three days of opening arguments. This is Democratic Congressmember Adam Schiff, the chair of the House Intelligence Committee.

REP. ADAM SCHIFF: But lets just try to step into someone elses shoes for a moment. Lets imagine it wasnt Joe Biden. Lets imagine it was any one of us. Lets imagine the most powerful person in the world was asking a foreign nation to conduct a sham investigation into one of us. What would we think about it then? Would we think, Thats good U.S. policy? Would we think, He has every right to do it? Would we think, Thats a perfect call? It shouldnt have mattered that it was Marie Yovanovitch. It shouldnt matter that it was Joe Biden, because, Ill tell you something, the next time it just may be you.

AMY GOODMAN: To talk more about the Senate impeachment trial, were joined by Dan Friedman, reporter in Mother Jones D.C. bureau who focuses on foreign influence and national security. His recent piece is headlined Trumps Legal Team Opened Their Impeachment Defense with a Blizzard of Lies.

And I want to go into that, Dan, but, first, this latest news that has just been released over the last 24 hours, The New York Times saying that Bolton, in his book manuscript, has said that Trump directly told him that he was withholding military aid to Ukraine unless they would investigate the Bidens, as well, if you can talk about this, the significance of this?

DAN FRIEDMAN: Sure, yeah. I think a key argument that Trumps lawyers have made is that there is no evidence, as I think some of your clips showed they have argued that there is no evidence indicating that Trump linked the hold on aid to Ukraine to his push for Ukraine to announce these investigations that would help him politically. And Trump has also said that the aid was not related to his wish for investigations. So, Boltons manuscript, as reported by the Times, completely blows up that claim. It falsifies the sort of key, crux claim of their defense of him so far. So its hard to overestimate how bad it is for Trumps defense.

I would also point out that Mick Mulvaney, in public testimony, the White House chief of staff excuse me, in his press conference that he had back in October, also said that he had direct conversations with Trump in which Trump linked the hold on aid to wanting Ukraine to announce investigations. So, we shouldnt forget that also Mulvaney could be a witness linking, connecting the push for aid to investigations. So, the Senate is going to have an opportunity to vote on whether they want to subpoena Bolton, Mulvaney and others. And obviously, the report from the Times makes that vote a lot harder from Republicans if theyre going to try to continue to suppress this evidence.

AMY GOODMAN: So, talk about what this means and what Republicans you see I mean, well see today will be as theyre confronted with what Bolton is going to say. And then also address the issue of executive privilege that President Trump will try to make. And does that protect is it a broad shield, or can that be challenged? And if Bolton himself, if subpoenaed, wants to testify, whether or not Trump invokes executive privilege, can he say what he wants?

DAN FRIEDMAN: I think the short answer is they can assert executive privilege. If the Senate subpoenas him, there is for information that he has already reportedly put in the manuscript of a book that is going to be published for anyone to read and, of course, theres still a review process for that. But nevertheless, it is a very difficult argument for them to make, and I think ultimately its a political question. So, they can attempt to assert executive privilege, but with a Senate subpoena and Bolton wanting to testify, its very difficult to suppress that information.

The other point that I would make is, Trump, in his tweet, in which he denied that he had told Bolton that he wanted to hold the aid to force the investigations, is making the case for why Bolton should be subpoenaed. If Trump is saying Bolton is lying, that is a very strong argument for why Bolton should be put under oath, under penalty of perjury, and asked whether it is true that Trump made this connection. So, you know, the Republicans are going to have a hard time keeping Bolton from testifying, and Im sure that theyll try.

AMY GOODMAN: So, Dan, lets go to what happened on Saturday. The Democratic House managers wrapped up their arguments on Friday. Talk about the gist of what you call the blizzard of lies, what the Trump defense team said in their first day of arguments, and how little time they actually used.

DAN FRIEDMAN: Yeah. They did it all in just a few hours, and they managed to make a lot of claims that are false or deeply misleading.

One of the claims, which was in the clips you played, was that there was no link established between the hold on aid and investigations by Ukraine. One problem with that, we just talked about, is that Bolton has now contradicted that. Another problem with that is that they simply ignored that there was testimony by Gordon Sondland, who they were quoting, linking a refusal to have a White House meeting with Ukraines president, Volodymyr Zelensky, to trying to force him to have these investigations that would help Trump politically. So, Sondland, elsewhere in his testimony, said there was a quid pro quo, famously it was a big deal There was a quid pro quo, I am sure of that, linking excuse me linking a White House meeting to investigations. And, you know, Trumps lawyers didnt say, Well, dont pay attention to that. Its not as important. They just literally ignored it. So, I think that goes to sort of the veracity of their argument overall.

Another argument they made is that the Ukrainians were not aware of the hold on aid until, I think, September. That also ignored public statements by the former deputy foreign minister from Ukraine, who said, We did know about it, and also testimony by Laura Cooper, whos a Defense Department official, who said that she also heard the Ukrainians were concerned about the hold on aid, back in July. In both cases, theyre saying they knew about it in July.

So, those are, I think, two big examples, but, you know, there are a whole bunch of others. They said that there is a they talked about the call that Trump had with Zelensky, and repeatedly referred to it, the transcript of the call. I think anybody whos paid attention to that knows its not actually a transcript. There may be important parts of that testimony that conversation that are not included in that memorandum of the conversation. Its a summary of what people who were listening remember. So, there was just a lot of false and misleading claims to pick through, if you were watching on Saturday.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk more about ABC News obtaining that recording of what appears to show President Trump saying that he wanted the then-U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch fired, after speaking at a private gathering that included Lev Parnas? Let me go to that

DAN FRIEDMAN: Sure.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, let me go, before you respond, Dan, to that clip.

LEV PARNAS: Germany is going behind our

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Germany is not doing much.

UNIDENTIFIED 1: Theyre supporting Russia.

LEV PARNAS: Theyre supporting Russia.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: You think so?

UNIDENTIFIED 2: Oh, I think so.

LEV PARNAS: A hundred percent, 100%.

UNIDENTIFIED 1: Two billion to pay Russia.

LEV PARNAS: A hundred percent, 100%.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: It just makes no sense.

LEV PARNAS: It doesnt, exactly. It doesnt make sense.

UNIDENTIFIED 1: Im sure they need support from you, President.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: It makes no sense.

LEV PARNAS: A lot of the exactly. A lot of the European countries, theyre backstabbing us, basically, and dealing with Russia. And thats why youre having such I think if you take a look, the biggest problem there, I think, where we need to start is, weve got to get rid of the ambassador. Shes still left over from the Clinton administration.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Where? The ambassador where? Ukraine?

LEV PARNAS: Yeah. And shes basically walking around telling everybody, Wait. Hes going to get impeached. Just wait.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Really?

LEV PARNAS: Its incredible. Its like

UNIDENTIFIED 3: Shell be gone tomorrow.

LEV PARNAS: Yeah. Well

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Whats her name?

UNIDENTIFIED 1: I dont remember the name.

LEV PARNAS: I dont have her name off back.

UNIDENTIFIED 4: So, one of the things that will be, now that we have a secretary of state thats been sworn in

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Get rid of her. Get her out tomorrow. I dont care. Get her out tomorrow. Take her out. OK?

LEV PARNAS: Excellent.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Do it.

LEV PARNAS: Excellent.

AMY GOODMAN: So, that video was obtained from Lev Parnass attorney, Joseph Bondy. It begins with Trump posing for photos, then entering a private dining room. And halfway through the recording, one of the participants suggests Yovanovitch is posing problems, and you can hear Trump saying, Get rid of her. Get her out tomorrow. I dont care. Get her out tomorrow. Take her out. OK? Do it. And then the video, its sort of showing the ceiling. But, Dan, just explain this whole thing.

DAN FRIEDMAN: Yeah. I think, number one, Parnas and the guy who took the video, Igor Fruman, are associates of Rudy Giuliani, and they were kind of running around Ukraine. As Parnas claimed, he was acting as an emissary of Giuliani, and then, since Giuliani is Trumps personal lawyer, Trump emissary of Trump himself, attempting to effectuate this scheme to get Ukraine to have these investigations, and, as part of that excuse me to get Marie Yovanovitch fired, the ambassador to Ukraine. Trump, President Trump, has said that he doesnt know Lev Parnas or Igor Fruman. So, I think, quite clearly, he was lying, is lying, when he says he doesnt know them. Heres a video of them having a private meeting with him. And thats not all. Theres pictures of them together on other occasions.

I think another important point about this meeting, which occurred in May of 2018 at the Trump Hotel, is that Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman were there because they had pledged to give a million dollars to a super PAC supporting Trump. They wound up giving, a few weeks later, $325,000 through a shell company that they set up in Delaware. So, that is, I think, in many peoples assessment, pretty corrupt that they are able to influence U.S. policy toward Ukraine which is in a war, of course because they gave pledged a million dollars to Trumps super PAC and gave $325,000. In addition, they have been indicted in Manhattan for campaign finance violations that include allegations that they accepted money from foreign sources, including an unnamed Russian businessman, and used that money to make campaign donations in the United States to influence the U.S. political system. So, we dont know that this particular donation came from a foreign source, but we dont know that it didnt. And it certainly creates the suspicion that foreign interests, for possibly someone in Ukraine who doesnt who is concerned that Marie Yovanovitch was an ardent opponent of corruption, and therefore was making it harder to do some kind of potentially corrupt business a person like that could quite easily be influencing U.S. policy toward Ukraine, through Parnas and Fruman, in this case.

And I think one thing it shows is that there is a lot more investigation to be done, whether its by the House, by the Senate, by the Department of Justice, to figure out what was going on, particularly since these events occurred a year before, more than a little more than a year before most of the action that is at issue in the impeachment trial.

AMY GOODMAN: And finally, if you can just comment quickly, in 30 seconds, on what some have called the Epstein dream team, Trumps his team defending him being Ken Starr and Alan Dershowitz?

DAN FRIEDMAN: Yeah. So, Ken Starr and Alan Dershowitz are both, of course, very famous lawyers. And I think that, obviously, the significant thing about Starr was that he was oversaw the investigation into Bill Clintons relationship with Monica Lewinsky and related issues. And Alan Dershowitz was a member of O.J. Simpsons dream team, who helped get him acquitted for murder.

Both of them have previously made arguments that are departures from what they will presumably be arguing this afternoon. Dershowitz has said that you do not have to have committed a crime to be impeached. Today Dershowitz has indicated that he will make the opposite argument. Ken Starr, who was forced out of a job at Baylor University because the football team had a sexual harassment scandal, will be arguing against Trumps removal from office, as well. Thats obviously inconsistent with Starrs position when he was going after Clinton.

They will be, I think, really trying to make the case to the public. And I think it is worth keeping in mind that even though their legal arguments may be dubious, they are going to be trying to give Republican senators and Trump supporters something to hang their hat on in terms of saying he shouldnt be removed.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, Dan Friedman, I want to thank you for being with us, reporter in Mother Jones D.C. bureau focusing on foreign policy and national security, covering Trumps impeachment trial. Well link to your piece, Trumps Legal Team Opened Their Impeachment Defense with a Blizzard of Lies.

When we come back, basketball legend Kobe Bryant dies in a helicopter crash with his 13-year-old daughter and seven others. Well speak with The Nations Dave Zirin and Fatima Goss Graves. Stay with us.

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