And Now We've Reached the Crime Text Phase of Crime Time

Time to drink a gallon of Diet Dr. Pepper!

Here’s all the shit we couldn’t cover today:

• And now we’ve reached the crime text phase! Texts released by Democrats in Congress “show U.S. ambassadors working to persuade Ukraine to publicly commit to investigating President Donald Trump’s political opponents and explicitly linking the inquiry to whether Ukraine’s president would be granted an official White House visit.” [NBC News]
• Rudy Giuliani and others pushed Donald Trump to remove Marie Yovanovitch, the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, from her post because she was blocking efforts to get the Ukrainian government to investigate Joe Biden. [Wall Street Journal]
• Here’s a story about Donald Trump talking about Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren on a phone call with China’s president Xi Jinping, during which he also promised Xi the U.S. wouldn’t bring up the Hong Kong protests in the midst of trade negotiations. After Trump on Thursday called for the Chinese government to investigate the Bidens, officials responded that they “will not interfere in the internal affairs of the U.S.,” which, okay. “We trust that the American people will be able to sort out their own problems,” the country’s foreign minister Wang Yi said, just a tad rudely. [CNN/Washington Post]
• Meanwhile, here’s weenie Marco Rubio’s thoughts on that request Trump made:

• Energy Secretary Rick Perry plans on resigning later this year, and this is NOT, I repeat, NOT related to anything at all to do with the fact that he led the U.S. delegation to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s inauguration in May. [Politico]
• Toot toot, it’s whistleblower season! An IRS official has filed a whistleblower complaint alleging that political appointees at the Treasury Department “attempted to improperly interfere with the annual audit of the president’s or vice president’s tax returns.” [Washington Post]
• Elizabeth Warren raised a fuckton of money in Q3, just a hair behind the amount raised by Bernie Sanders. [New York Times]
• The Warren campaign has fired Rich McDaniel, its national organizing director, after investigating multiple allegations of “inappropriate behavior” made against him. [Politico]
• And here is an article on how Joe Biden is old, featuring this snippet from a speech he gave in August:

“I think that, uh, the behavior of this administration has awakened, uh, a whole new generation to get engaged in ways that they may not have gotten before,” Biden said, referring to President Donald Trump and the current tumult. “Just like in my generation, when I got out of school that, uh, when Bobby Kennedy and Dr. King had been assassinated in the ’70s, uh, late seven—when I got engaged, um, you know, up to that time, remember the, none of you women will know this, but a couple men may remember, that was a time in the early, late ’60s, and the early ’60s and ’60s, where it was drop out and go to Haight-Ashbury, don’t get engaged, don’t trust anybody over 30. I mean, for real. What happened to them, by the, by the early ’70s, the late ’60s, there was a whole generation that said, ‘Enough.’ The war in Vietnam was underway, and it was—a lot of you served in that war—and, uh, we were fighting like the devil to make sure that there was something dealing with cleaning up the environment, which was only beginning. We were in a position where the women’s movement was just beginning to move. We should have, by now, long before, passed the ERA amendment, but that was another issue …” [Politico]

• Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg believes our current political moment is “an aberration,” which, hmm. [Boston Globe]
• This is alarming! [Defense One]
• This is also incredibly alarming and fucked up! [ProPublica]

Here are some tweets the president was allowed to publish:

This has been Barf Bag.