There’s a growing consensus among Senate Republicans that President Donald Trump’s all-but-certain impeachment trial should be shorter rather than longer, lasting roughly 10 days to two weeks, with no witnesses called by either side.
One senior GOP senator told reporters that Majority Leader Mitch McConnell favors a shorter trial with a vote on impeachment articles soon after arguments are made by both sides.
President Donald Trump tweeted telling Greta Thunberg, the 16-year-old Swedish climate activist, to “chill.”
Trump wrote “so ridiculous” in response to a tweet from actress and producer Roma Downey congratulating Thunberg on being named Time magazine’s 2019 person of the year.
“Greta must work on her Anger Management problem, then go to a good old fashioned movie with a friend!” the president continued. “Chill Greta, Chill!”
House Judiciary Committee Chair Jerry Nadler gaveled in a hearing of the House Judiciary Committee at 7 p.m. on Wednesday, kicking off the committee’s marathon session to approve two articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump for debate and approval, holding a “markup” — a public meeting where members can debate and offer amendments to the charges — ahead of a House floor vote next week.
“Taken together, these two articles charge President Trump, with placing his private, political interests above our national security, and above our free and fair elections, and above our ability to hold public officials accountable,” Nadler said.
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., on Tuesday announced the introduction of two articles of impeachment — one for abuse of power, the other for obstruction of Congress — against President Donald Trump.
Senate Republicans on Tuesday suggested that they may not call up live witnesses to testify as part of a likely impeachment trial slated to begin in January — a move that pits the Republican-led Senate against the desires of President Donald Trump.
“I think the prospect of calling witnesses, in my view, seems unlikely, as much as some people might like to complete the incomplete record,” Sen. Kevin Cramer, R-N.D. told reporters Tuesday. “The premise of the whole impeachment process is so warped that completing a bad record just doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me.”
Attorney General William Barr said he still believes the FBI may have operated out of “bad faith” when it investigated whether the Trump campaign colluded with Russia, and he contends the FBI acted improperly by continuing the investigation after Donald Trump took office.
In an exclusive interview with NBC News, Barr essentially dismissed the findings of the Justice Department’s inspector general that there was no evidence of political bias in the launching of the Russia probe, saying that his hand-picked prosecutor, John Durham, will have the last word on the matter.
President Donald Trump bashed the impeachment inquiry on Tuesday just hours after House Democrats introduced two articles of impeachment, calling them “flimsy, pathetic, ridiculous articles of impeachment.”
“They are now admitting that there was no collusion, no obstruction of justice, there are no crimes,” Trump told a crowd of thousands of supporters at the Giant Center. “They are impeaching me and there are no crimes, this has to be a first.”
Anti-choice conservatives aren’t big fans of science, but the decision this week by the Supreme Court to uphold a Kentucky law mandating transvaginal ultrasounds for women seeking abortion procedures isn’t just anti-science, it’s medieval. It’s state-sanctioned rape. And it’s not the first time the Court has steamrolled both civil rights for women and science fact in lieu of misogyny and science fiction.
Let’s rewind. In the brutally misguided Burwell v Hobby Lobby case of 2014, in which the Christian owners of the hobby-store chain disputed on religious grounds the birth control coverage mandate in the Affordable Care Act (ACA), the pre-Trump Supremes decided that religious gibberish superseded actual fetal biology.
Top House Democrats unveiled two articles of impeachment against Donald Trump on Tuesday, laying the foundation for a vote that could see the president become just the third American leader in history to be impeached.
The articles of impeachment relate to two actions by Trump: One is abuse of power linked to his demand that the Ukrainian president investigate a political rival, and the second is obstructing Congress in its effort to investigate the behavior.
House Democrats signaled that they would unveil articles of impeachment on Tuesday morning that charge President Trump with abuse of power and obstruction of Congress for conduct they called a “clear and present danger” to the 2020 election and national security.
The House Judiciary Committee was expected to work through the night on Monday readying the charges, according to multiple senior officials and lawmakers.
The Supreme Court on Monday left in place a Kentucky law, mandating doctors perform ultrasounds and show fetal images to patients before they can perform abortions.
The high court declined, without comment, to hear an appeal brought by the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of the state’s lone abortion clinic.
The FBI mishandled parts of its application to monitor a Trump campaign aide as it was probing possible Russian interference in the 2016 election, but the overall investigation was justified, according to a long-awaited report by the Justice Department’s watchdog that rebuts the president’s depiction of a politically biased plot against him.
Attorney General Bill Barr has reportedly counseled President Donald Trump that Rudy Giuliani has become a “liability” for the administration.
The Washington Post reported Sunday that Trump has been advised by Barr “in general terms” to stop relying on Giuliani, who has made multiple trips to Ukraine to dig up dirt on Joe Biden’s family – including one this week to make a documentary.
House Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) said Sunday that President Donald Trump has shown “a pattern” of seeking foreign interference in U.S. elections but stopped short of saying that obstruction charges would be included in articles of impeachment.
“The central allegation is that the president put himself above his country several times, that he sought foreign interference in our elections several times, both for 2016 and 2020,” Nadler said on “State of the Union“ on CNN. “All this presents a pattern that poses a real and present danger to the integrity of the next election.”
White House national security adviser Robert O’Brien said Sunday that the recent shooting at a naval base in Pensacola, Fla., appears to be an act of terrorism.
“To me, it appears to be a terrorist attack,” O’Brien said on CBS’ “Face the Nation”. “I don’t want to prejudge the investigation, but it appears that this may be someone that was radicalized. … It’s unclear whether he’s got ties to any other organizations.“
Democrats are heading into a momentous impeachment finale as they set the pace and scope of their charges against President Donald Trump — prompting Republicans to escalate their effort to swamp the historic process in disinformation and partisanship.
Extreme times call for extreme measures, but the Beltway press just isn’t willing to make that move in the Trump era. As a consequence, the news media fail to accurately capture the radical changes now underway in the country, and how today’s Republican Party has become purposefully untethered from reality.
Donald Trump remains a resolutely radical player who has eviscerated decades of protocols and traditions. Yet so much of the press refuses to cover him that way, opting instead to cling to Beltway traditions for how presidents are normally covered (i.e. We can’t call him a liar!). But as the high-profile impeachment hearings confirm (along with Trump’s recent disastrous and embarrassing trip to the NATO summit), new and bolder language is needed to accurately describe what’s transpiring.
Former South Carolina governor, former UN ambassador, and the hope of every Republican who believes their party is so much more than Trump (“See? A woman! And she’s not white! We’re not racist or sexist now!”) Nikki Haley was talking to Glenn “Fooled you with that brief bout of sanity” Beck on his internet concern, The Blaze, about her decision to remove the Confederate flag from the grounds of the SC state capital. She did this in the wake of racist Dylann Roof’s mass shooting of the members of the congregation of the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, a traditionally black place of worship, in Charleston in 2015. Roof hoped to start a race war, as he said in his racist manifesto.
Previewing potential articles of impeachment, the House Democrats on Saturday issued a lengthy report drawing on history and the Founding Fathers to lay out the legal argument over the case against President Donald Trump’s actions toward Ukraine.
The findings from the House Judiciary Committee do not spell out the formal charges against the president, which are being drafted ahead of votes, possibly as soon as next week. Instead, the report refutes Trump’s criticism of the impeachment proceedings, arguing that the Constitution created impeachment as a “safety valve” so Americans would not have to wait for the next election to remove a president.
It’s a new beginning for the Peloton woman.
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on Friday put a temporary hold on House subpoenas requesting President Donald Trump’s financial documents from two banks. In a brief order, Ginsburg said a lower court opinion that allowed the subpoenas to proceed would go on hold until December 13.
The suspect in a shooting that killed three people and injured several others at a naval base in Pensacola, Florida, on Friday morning was a member of the Saudi Air Force who was in the U.S. for training, officials said.
Several law enforcement sources identified the gunman, who was killed in the incident, as Mohammed Saeed Alshamrani.
The House on Friday passed a package of bills aimed at restoring protections of the Voting Rights Act rolled back by a key Supreme Court’s 2013 ruling.
The Voting Rights Advancement Act would, among other things, update the formula used to determine which states must preclear their voter registration practices, require public notice for voting registration changes, and allow the attorney general to send federal observers anywhere in the U.S.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) on Thursday night hit back at Donald Trump’s claim on Twitter that she’d “had a nervous fit” reportedly after she rebuked a journalist for asking if she “hated” the president.
Pelosi, who earlier in the day called on House Democratic leaders to begin drafting articles of impeachment against Trump, told a televised CNN town hall hosted by Jake Tapper that “the president is a master of projecting.”
The Washington Post reported on Thursday that President Donald Trump is set to face obstruction and bribery impeachment charges, but not “treason” – though the situation could change at any moment.
Citing unnamed “congressional aides,” the Post reported Democrats in the House of Representatives “are considering articles of impeachment against President Trump that include obstruction and bribery but are unlikely to pursue a treason charge as they weigh how to illustrate that the president’s activities involving Ukraine were part of what they see as a pattern of misconduct.”
With his impeachment now all-but-certain, President Donald Trump and his allies are beginning to look past the House of Representatives, shifting their sights to the Republican-led Senate where the President will face trial.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., announced Thursday that she was asking the House Judiciary Committee and chairmen of other committees to proceed with drafting articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump, saying “the president leaves us no choice but to act.”
“Sadly, but with confidence and humility, with allegiance to our founders and our heart full of love for America, today, I am asking our chairmen to proceed with articles of impeachment,” Pelosi said in a brief televised statement from the Capitol, speaking directly to the American people.
It depends upon what the meaning of the word “us” is .
As the impeachment inquiries against President Donald Trump rocket forward, Trump tried Wednesday night to reframe the context of the phone call that sparked House Democrats’ impeachment investigation. Rather than asking Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to dig up dirt on his domestic political rivals, Trump claimed that he had asked Zelensky to somehow help the nation as a whole.
An armed, active-duty sailor opened fire on three civilian employees, killing two, before he fatally shot himself at the Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard near Honolulu on Wednesday afternoon.
Three civilian Department of Defense workers were found shot in the vicinity of the base’s Dry Dock 2. Two died and a third is in the hospital in stable condition, according to Rear Adm. Robert Chadwick, commander, Navy Region Hawaii.
The prosecutor handpicked by Attorney General William P. Barr to scrutinize how U.S. agencies investigated President Trump’s 2016 campaign said he could not offer evidence to the Justice Department’s inspector general to support the suspicions of some conservatives that the case was a setup by American intelligence, people familiar with the matter said.
There’s no question that President Donald Trump violated the Constitution’s limits on his power or that the House should respond by impeaching him, three legal scholars told the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday.
That’s exactly what majority Democrats were hoping to hear, and it’s the testimony they will cite as the House moves toward drafting articles of impeachment against Trump based on his solicitation of Ukraine to launch investigations with political implications in the U.S. and possibly other matters.
The investigation into President Donald Trump enters a historic next phase on Wednesday as the House Judiciary Committee holds a hearing on the constitutional grounds for drafting articles of impeachment.
The process of drawing up any articles, now becoming increasingly likely, could begin shortly after members question legal and constitutional experts about what the Constitution requires.
World leaders at the NATO summit in London were caught on camera appearing to joke about US President Donald Trump during a reception at Buckingham Palace Tuesday evening.
Who in the White House budget office called Rudy Giuliani on an August afternoon, and what did they have to talk about for 13 minutes?
House impeachment investigators were unable to answer either question in their report released Tuesday by Democrats on the Intelligence Committee. But the call — and more than a dozen others and texts between President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer and White House numbers — showed up in AT&T and Verizon records obtained by the House.
There’s a myth going around that says goldfish only have memories lasting three seconds. The myth was busted long ago, with studies showing goldfish memories last closer to five months. But as we observe Donald Trump’s defense strategy against impeachment, he appears to believe his supporters possess even shorter memories than the mythical fish.
As more and more evidence of impeachable high crimes stack up against Donald Trump, his best defense strategy appears to rest on the assumption that his supporters can only remember one thing at a time.
Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) is dropping her presidential bid. She informed her staff on Tuesday. Harris held a call with her team in Iowa on Tuesday, saying that she had made the decision because of financial struggles experienced by the campaign.
“I don’t think anyone on my team was expecting this,” said one staffer, who said they were completely shocked by the news.
The Democratic-led House Intelligence Committee released a report Tuesday containing a summary of the evidence it has collected in the impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump.
The 300-page report cited two instances of improper conduct: obstruction of the House inquiry and withholding an official White House meeting and military aid from Ukraine on the condition of investigating a Trump political rival.
The House is poised to release a landmark impeachment report outlining evidence of what it calls Donald Trump’s wrongdoing toward Ukraine, findings that will push Congress toward a debate over whether the 45th president should be removed from office.
Democrats on the Intelligence Committee are making the case that Trump engaged in behavior violating his oath of office and, in the course of their investigation, obstructed Congress by stonewalling the proceedings. Republicans are defending the president in a rebuttal claiming Trump never intended to pressure Ukraine when he asked for a “favor” — investigations of Democrats and Joe Biden. They say the military aid the White House was withholding was not being used as leverage, as Democrats claim, and besides the $400 million was ultimately released.
U.S. President Donald Trump said Tuesday that French President Emmanuel Macron had been “very insulting” by describing NATO as “brain dead” as the two leaders prepared to attend a NATO summit.
“It’s a tough statement, though, when you make a statement like that, that is a very, very nasty statement to essentially 28, including them, 28 countries,” Trump told reporters as he met the head of NATO in London.
Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.) on Monday refused to say whether he’s seen evidence that Ukraine interfered in the 2016 presidential election, declining to directly rebut a debunked conspiracy theory floated by some of his fellow GOP lawmakers and President Donald Trump.
Burr, the chairman of the Republican-controlled Senate Intelligence Committee, instead played a game of words with reporters on Capitol Hill who pressed him about an interview with Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.), who suggested the Ukranian government worked “actively” to help elect Trump’s opponent Hillary Clinton. Trump later thanked Kennedy “for the job he did in representing both the Republican Party and myself” on Twitter.
And, right before the holiday season officially begins, the last piece of the puzzle locks into place, and the last alibi falls apart like an overcooked turkey. From The New York Times:
Lawyers from the White House counsel’s office told Mr. Trump in late August about the complaint, explaining that they were trying to determine whether they were legally required to give it to Congress, the people said. The revelation could shed light on Mr. Trump’s thinking at two critical points under scrutiny by impeachment investigators: his decision in early September to release $391 million in security assistance to Ukraine and his denial to a key ambassador around the same time that there was a “quid pro quo” with Kyiv. Mr. Trump used the phrase before it had entered the public lexicon in the Ukraine affair.
With the impeachment inquiry charging forward, President Donald Trump’s allies have defended his demand for political investigations from Ukraine by claiming that the government in Kyiv tried to sabotage his candidacy and boost Hillary Clinton in 2016.
“Russia was very aggressive and they’re much more sophisticated, but the fact that Russia was so aggressive does not exclude the fact that President Poroshenko actively worked for Secretary Clinton,” Republican Sen. John Kennedy claimed on Sunday in an interview with NBC, referring to the former Ukrainian president.
When the House Intelligence Committee held depositions of key witnesses, President Trump’s lawyers cried: “Unfair! Secret hearings!” In fact, a slew of Republicans had the right to ask questions, though some chose not to attend. When the hearings moved to a public phase, the White House hollered: “Unfair! Trump’s lawyer isn’t present!” When the House Judiciary Committee, chaired by Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.), invited Trump’s lawyers to attend, the response was: “Unfair! We’re not coming!”
Read the rest of Jennifer Rubin’s piece at The Washington Post.
Republican Rep. Duncan Hunter says he will leave Congress and will plead guilty to charges that he misused campaign funds.
Hunter said he is pleading guilty to spare his children from a public trial which was scheduled to begin next month. He told KUSI News that “not a single dime of taxpayer money is involved in this … I think it’s important that people know I did make mistakes.”
It turns out the media’s obsession with the superrich isn’t confined to the world of celebrity and entertainment. In politics, the press also seems utterly fascinated with how the 0.1% live, and especially what their political leanings are. For the 2020 campaign, that means a barrage of coverage about what Wall Street bankers and billionaires think about Elizabeth Warren and her populist agenda. They don’t trust her! Some like her! Some won’t donate! On and on it goes, as the press scurries to document the opinions of the superwealthy, but there’s no explanation for why they’re supposed to matter so much.
It’s not often that you interview a subject who has no interest in being famous. But recently, I did just that when I sat down with Lisa Page the week before Thanksgiving in my hotel room in Washington, D.C. Page, of course, is the former FBI lawyer whose text-message exchanges with agent Peter Strzok that belittled Donald Trump and expressed fear at his possible victory became international news. They were hijacked by Trump to fuel his “deep state” conspiracy.
Lawyers for President Trump said on Sunday that they would not participate in the House Judiciary Committee’s first public impeachment hearing on Wednesday, airing a long list of complaints that they said prevented “any semblance of a fair process.”
Representative Jerrold Nadler, Democrat of New York and the chairman of the committee, had given the White House a Sunday deadline for the president or his lawyers to take up the opportunity to appear at the hearing, where a panel of legal experts will offer an assessment of whether Mr. Trump committed impeachable offenses.
The chances just dramatically increased that President Trump will be able to keep his tax records secret through the 2020 election. The Supreme Court’s move Monday to grant a stay in one case involving the president’s returns means that neither members of Congress nor prosecutors — specifically, Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. — may not be able to dislodge them for months.
The stay, which required the votes of five justices, was expected because it was necessary to ensure the government’s ability to argue to the high court that it should hear Trump v. Mazars, regarding a House committee’s subpoena of the president’s tax records from his accounting firm, Mazars USA. A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit had ruled in October that the House Oversight and Reform Committee is entitled to the records. Under the expedited schedule set by the court, the administration’s petition for certiorari — or written argument that the court should take the case — will not be filed until Dec. 5.
Read the rest of Harry Litman’s piece at The Washington Post.
Oh, it would be a shit show of open sewer proportions, for sure. It would be a scuzzy circus on top of a cheap zoo covered with crazy sauce. But House Democrats should call the bluff of the increasingly divorced-from-reality Republicans and hold hearings on all the fuckery they claim has been going on. Like fuckin’ all of it. Like let’s attempt to blow this shit up once and for all.
Just tell Republicans at different committees, “You wanna go? Let’s go, motherfuckers. Call your witnesses. But everyone has to go under oath. Every fucking witness.”
Former Republican congressman Charlie Dent said Thursday some of his former colleagues in the House of Representatives have privately told him they are “absolutely disgusted and exhausted by the President’s behavior.”
The House Intelligence Committee is expected to allow members to review the committee’s impeachment report Monday ahead of a vote scheduled on Tuesday to approve the report, which details the committee’s findings from the impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump and Ukraine, according to two sources familiar with the matter.
A deadly terror attack struck at the heart of the British capital just weeks before a crucial national election, refocusing the campaign on security issues as voters were set to head to the polls.
But two years later London Bridge was again the scene of tragedy, bravery and the center of national debate in the U.K. this weekend.
The chairman of the House Judiciary Committee asked President Trump on Friday whether he intends to mount a defense during the committee’s consideration of impeachment articles, setting a deadline of next Friday for Mr. Trump and his lawyers to decide if they will present evidence or call witnesses.
In a letter to the president, Representative Jerrold Nadler, Democrat of New York and the committee chairman, said Mr. Trump has the right to review the evidence against him, ask questions of his accusers during public hearings that begin next week and present evidence and request witness testimony.
We don’t hear this too often so it bears repeating: The ongoing Russian attack against the United States would’ve ultimately failed were it not for millions of unwitting American foot soldiers who helped it succeed. As accomplices, way too many of us were easily — willingly, in many cases — hoodwinked into sharing and retweeting propaganda designed to elect Donald Trump and, amid the chaos, undermine Western democracy.
In that respect, Russia’s active measures carried Vladimir Putin’s mission up to our doorsteps, but we were the ones who opened our virtual doors, welcoming in all the riffraff, treating the enemy like house guests, while suggesting all of our friends do the same. Putin and his operatives recognized a significant weakness here — the semi-distracted, drive-by gullibility of American social media users. As much as it pains me to say it, Putin was right. We might even be more gullible than he forecasted.
House impeachment investigators released the final closed-door deposition transcripts from the impeachment inquiry on Tuesday with the interviews of State Department official Philip Reeker and Office of Management and Budget official Mark Sandy.
The House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday announced it will hold its first public impeachment hearing next week, and invited President Donald Trump and his lawyers “to participate.”
“I am hopeful that you and your counsel will opt to participate in the Committee’s hearing, consistent with the rules of decorum and with the solemn nature before us,” Judiciary Chairman Jerrold Nadler said in a letter announcing the hearing.
While President Donald Trump and his media surrogates are busy proclaiming that House Democrat impeachment efforts are backfiring and public support is flagging, a new CNN poll reveals that half of Americans are in support of the impeachment and removal from office the embattled commander in chief.
In what is the first poll taken after two weeks of House Intel Committee hearings that kept the impeachment inquiry in the news cycle, the poll conducted by SSRS.
Richard Spencer, the Navy secretary who resigned just a day ago, said Monday that President Donald Trump’s decision to block the Pentagon’s review of convicted war criminal and Navy SEAL Eddie Gallagher sends a message “that you can get away with things.”
Spencer defended his handling of Chief Petty Officer Gallagher’s controversial case in a CBS interview with David Martin, the first time Spencer has spoken out about it since Defense Secretary Mark Esper forced him to step down on Sunday for disapproving of Trump’s intervention in military disciplinary proceedings.
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) defended his move to investigate Joe Biden and his son, days after the former vice president said he was disappointed and angered by his old friend.
“I love Joe Biden as a person but we are not going to give a pass to what is obviously a conflict of interest,” Graham tweeted Monday, claiming Hunter Biden’s past position on the board of Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian energy firm, “doesn’t pass the smell test.”
Rudy Giuliani would like you all to relax. He’s fine. He’s just sailing along. And, despite the evidence of your own senses, he is not at all three sandwiches short of a picnic. From New York:
When reached for comment, Giuliani replied: “Garbage your publication cannot be counted on to report fairly on this salacious stupidity … I am a high functioning human being able to outwork people half my age. Compared to Biden and Pelosi, I’m a phenom.”
And I am the Tsar of all the Russias.
The House of Representatives will not get President Donald Trump’s financial records for now, the Supreme Court said on Monday.
Former Trump White House counsel Donald McGahn must comply with a House subpoena, a federal court ruled Monday, finding that top presidential advisers cannot ignore congressional demands for information and raising the possibility that McGahn could be forced to testify as part of the impeachment inquiry.
U.S. District Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson of Washington, found no basis for a White House claim that the former counsel is “absolutely immune from compelled congressional testimony,” likely setting the stage for a historic separation-of-powers confrontation between the government’s executive and legislative branches.
Wasting untold time and energy, New York Times newsroom leaders continue to struggle with the not-very-difficult question of whether they ought to refer to Donald Trump as a racist. More than four years after Trump entered our national political conversation by announcing his candidacy for president, the Times still can’t figure out if the paper should accurately label him for his obviously racist behavior.
1. At some point in the future, barring democracy’s end, a Democrat will be president. Let’s say for shits and giggles that it’s, oh, hell, how about Alyssa Milano? Sure. Why not. Let’s say that it’s election time and Donald Trump, Jr. decides it’s time to throw his dumpy ass into the mix. And let’s say, and, why not, Junior’s the frontrunner because, hell, Republicans have got no one else. Maybe Junior will have opened a Trump Tower in Jerusalem in the last few years, and that meant doing a lot of business with wealthy people in Israel. Now, as we know, there are politicians (Netanyahu) in Israel who are tits-deep in corruption. We also know that the United States gives a fuck-ton of money in aid to Israel, along with military equipment.
Read the rest of The Rude Pundit’s piece at his blog…
Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) dodged questions on Sunday from a Fox News host asking whether he met with a former Ukrainian official in 2018 to acquire dirt on former Vice President Joe Biden.
The lawyer for Lev Parnas, an indicted associate of Rudy Giuliani and Donald Trump, told CNN that Parnas is prepared to tell Congress that he is aware of a 2018 meeting between Nunes and former Ukrainian prosecutor general Victor Shokin, who was ousted for corruption in 2016; that he learned of this meeting directly from Shokin; and that the express purpose of the meeting was for Nunes to get information on Biden.
Former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg has launched his bid for the Democratic presidential nomination by spending $37 million on television advertising over the next two weeks, more than the entire field has spent on TV ads so far.
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff said Sunday that the two weeks of public hearings produced “overwhelming evidence” that President Donald Trump conditioned official acts for favors from Ukraine that would benefit his re-election bid, arguing that it’s “urgent” for the House to move forward with its impeachment inquiry.
In an interview on “Meet the Press,” Schiff, the California Democrat overseeing the hearings, said that while his committee has no more public testimony scheduled, he doesn’t “foreclose the possibility of others” being added.
Navy Secretary Richard Spencer was fired Sunday by Defense Secretary Mark Esper, who ordered that a Navy SEAL who was acquitted of murder be allowed to remain in the elite commando corps, the Defense Department said.
Esper asked for Spencer’s resignation after President Donald Trump tweeted on Thursday that Chief Petty Officer Eddie Gallagher would retain the gold Trident insignia signifying his status as a member of the Sea, Air, and Land Teams, or SEALs. Spencer told reporters on Friday that he believed the review process over Gallagher’s status should go forward.
After the House Intelligence Committee wraps up a week of dramatic testimony, what happens next?
Joining us: progressive radio talk show host Stephanie Miller & conservative commentator Michael Reagan.
We also discuss the most recent Democratic debate, including insight from our focus group of undecided voters.
From Wednesday Nov. 13 to Thursday Nov. 21, Americans were glued to their televisions, computers and streaming devices, as the House Intelligence Committee held a series of long public hearings as part of a broader Democratic-led impeachment inquiry against President Donald Trump.
An ethics group late Friday published nearly 100 pages of previously unreleased State Department documents that the group says shows “a clear paper trail” between President Donald Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo before a Ukraine ambassador was abruptly recalled.
The documents were published by American Oversight, which calls itself a non-partisan and nonprofit ethics watchdog and Freedom of Information Act litigator investigating the Trump administration.
Rudy Giuliani’s indicted associate Lev Parnas is prepared to tell Congress that Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) met with a former Ukrainian prosecutor who was ousted over corruption concerns in a bid to get dirt on Joe Biden, CNN reported Friday.
A lawyer for Parnas, a Soviet-born American who has been indicted on federal campaign finance violations, said his client found out about the European meeting directly from the Ukrainian official.
Kurt Volker told lawmakers that he drew a “sharp distinction” between Burisma and Biden, but admits that he was wrong to view them separately.
“In hindsight, I now understand that others saw the idea of investigating possible corruption involving the Ukrainian company, “Burisma,” as equivalent to investigating former Vice President Biden. I saw them as very different. The former being appropriate and unremarkable, the latter being unacceptable,” Volker said in his opening statement. “In retrospect, I should have seen that connection differently, and had I done so, I would have raised my own objections.”
White House senior adviser Stephen Miller had more editorial influence over the right-wing news website Breitbart during the 2016 presidential campaign than previously known and attempted to push articles attacking then-presidential candidate Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., according to a new batch of leaked emails shared with NBC News.
Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman and Jennifer Williams — who both listened in on the July 25 call between President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelenskiy at the center of the House’s impeachment inquiry — spent more than four hours testifying before the House Intelligence Committee Tuesday.
Democrats who want to oust President Donald Trump and Republicans battling to save him are braced for the most momentous phase yet in the battle of impeachment that is rocking Washington.
Last week, the Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee shoehorned into the permanent record of the impeachment inquiry a conspiracy theory about the “real” attackers against the 2016 election. This defiant linkage to agitprop of dubious origin was yet another chapter in the GOP’s hopeless descent into complete make-believe.
Before we dig into the madness, there’s a history here that needs to be underscored, since the Republican appetite for crapola didn’t quite begin with Donald Trump.
Milwaukee’s only progressive talk radio station is now available round-the-clock on the FM broadcast band. WRRD announced on its Facebook page the launch of “Talk 101.7 FM” in Milwaukee. Previously, 24-7 programming was available only through the station’s internet audio stream.
Read the rest of the story at The Milwaukee Business Journal.
The U.S. House of Representatives is probing whether President Donald Trump lied in his written testimony submitted to then-U.S. Special Counsel Robert Mueller as part of the completed federal investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election, CNN said on Monday.
A House lawyer told a federal appeals court in Washington on Monday that lawmakers were examining whether Trump’s written answers to federal investigators were untruthful, CNN reported.
A shooting outside a Walmart store in Oklahoma on Monday morning left at least three people dead, including the suspected gunman, officials said.
A woman and a man were fatally shot in a car, and another man was fatally shot outside of the car in the parking lot of the store in Duncan, about 80 miles south of Oklahoma City, according to the Duncan Police Department.
President Donald Trump said Monday that he is “strongly” considering testifying before the impeachment probe in light of recent comments from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., who said he is more than welcome to present his case personally before the House Intelligence Committee.
President Donald Trump’s impeachment angst led him to fire off a new attack on a key witness and threatens to deepen in the frenetic week ahead with crucial testimony scheduled from officials caught in the middle of the Ukraine storm.
The Ukraine impeachment inquiry has created the first rift between President Donald Trump and the Cabinet member who has been his closest ally, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, according to four current and former senior administration officials.
Trump has fumed for weeks that Pompeo is responsible for hiring State Department officials whose congressional testimony threatens to bring down his presidency, the officials said. The president confronted Pompeo about the officials — and what he believed was a lackluster effort by the secretary of state to block their testimony — during lunch at the White House on Oct. 29, those familiar with the matter said.
The White House said there was nothing unusual about President Donald Trump making a surprise trip to Walter Reed Medical Center on Saturday to undergo what he called “phase one” of his annual physical.
But the ordeal was met with skepticism online, where some felt the White House and the president weren’t being upfront about his hospital visit.
“Visited a great family of a young man under major surgery at the amazing Walter Reed Medical Center,” Trump tweeted early Sunday morning. “Those are truly some of the best doctors anywhere in the world. Also began phase one of my yearly physical. Everything very good (great!). Will complete next year.”
Republicans proudly advertised their radical ways during Wednesday’s impeachment hearings into Donald Trump, wallowing in conspiracies and embracing debunked claims. The question now: How does the Beltway media cover a party that has aggressively removed itself from reality? How does the news business describe and treat a political party that routinely echoes the most unbelievable claims from Fox News and the darkest corners of the right-wing media?
Apparently, President Donald Trump, who is just large sack of yams mashed with sadness, decided that he would try to distract from the impeachment hearings today. He first tried by releasing the pseudo-transcript of a phone call between him and Ukrainian President Zelensky that occurred before the one where he pressured Zelensky to investigate Joe Biden’s son.
Of course, it’s a mostly banal congratulatory call, although Zelensky has the air of a desperate fanboy and Trump is his usual lumpen self. At one point, Trump pretty much compliments Zelensky on the hotness of the women in his country: “When I owned Miss Universe, they always had great people. Ukraine was always very well represented.”
Lawyers for President Donald Trump want the Supreme Court to block New York prosecutors from obtaining his tax returns.
“We have filed a petition with the U.S. Supreme Court seeking to overturn the 2nd Circuit decision regarding a subpoena issued by the New York County District Attorney. The 2nd Circuit decision is wrong and should be reversed,” Trump attorney Jay Sekulow told NBC News late Thursday afternoon.
A teenage gunman opened fire at a Southern California high school Thursday morning, killing two students and wounding three others, before shooting himself in the head, officials said.
The suspect, whom authorities described as an Asian male who turned 16 on Thursday, was in critical condition at a hospital, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department said Thursday night. Surveillance video showed the shooter pull a gun from his backpack in the quad area of Saugus High School, shoot five people and then shoot himself, it said.
President Donald Trump suggested Thursday that the impeachment process was taking a personal toll, calling impeachment a “problem” that had been “very hard on my family.”
“I have one problem. And it has been very hard on my family,” he said at a campaign rally in Louisiana, adding that “impeachment, to me, is a dirty word.”
“It’s been very unfair, very hard on my family. Me, it’s my whole life, it’s crazy,” he said. “What a life I lead. You think this is fun, don’t you? But it’s been very hard on my family. Very, very hard.”
Former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch — who is testifying in the House impeachment inquiry on Friday — was derided by President Donald Trump as “bad news” in a phone call with his Ukrainian counterpart.
“She’s going to go through some things,” Trump told President Volodymyr Zelenskiy in a phone conversation that’s at the center of the impeachment probe.
In its effort to sell off the lease to the Trump International Hotel in Washington the Trump Organization has put together a glossy investor brochure complete with pictures showcasing the hotel’s grandiose architecture, its central location and its spa’s Himalayan salt chamber.
An appeals court has denied for the second time President Donald Trump’s attempt to stop an accounting firm from turning over his financial documents to the House, making it the second tax case Trump’s lawyers say they are taking to the Supreme Court.
In a news conference in the Oval Office, President Trump said he and Turkish President Erdogan are “very good friends” and said the ceasefire in Syria is “holding very well.” Trump had faced bipartisan calls to rescind the invitation to Erdogan, from lawmakers who say the Turkish leader should not have been honored with a White House visit after Turkey attacked U.S. Kurdish allies in Syria last month.
The House Intelligence Committee on Wednesday held the first televised hearing of its impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump. Democrats are investigating his attempt to withhold U.S. military aid to Ukraine until the country’s President Volodymyr Zelensky agreed to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden, who is running for the Democratic presidential nomination.
Bill Taylor, the acting U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, and George Kent, the deputy assistant secretary for Europe and Eurasian affairs, were the first two witnesses to publicly testify in the investigation, after they separately testified privately last month.
Ahead of the first round of impeachment hearings tomorrow, House Intel Committee chairman Adam Schiff has announced multiple additional hearings set for next week.
Next Tuesday, the committee will hear from Pence aide Jennifer Williams, Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, former Ukraine special envoy Kurt Volker, and NSC official Tim Morrison.
President Donald Trump has long criticized Democrats for conducting the impeachment inquiry behind closed doors. This week, he and his advisers are bracing for impact as those doors are thrown open and the cameras roll on the first public presidential impeachment hearings in over 20 years.
As the hearings on Wednesday have approached, Trump’s mood has veered between relishing the fight and seething with anger as he focuses heavily on his television defenders, according to one person close to the White House.
Senate Democrats are warning State Department leaders not to retaliate against U.S. diplomats testifying publicly this week as part of the impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump.
In a letter dated Tuesday, the Democratic members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee also demand that the State Department issue statements of support for the diplomats soon to take the stage.
Former national security adviser John Bolton derided President Donald Trump’s daughter and son-in-law during a private speech last week and suggested his former boss’ approach to U.S. policy on Turkey is motivated by personal or financial interests, several people who were present for the remarks told NBC News.
According to six people who were there, Bolton also questioned the merits of Trump applying his business acumen to foreign policy, saying such issues can’t be approached like the win-or-lose edict that drives real estate deals: When one deal doesn’t work, you move on to the next.
The Supreme Court’s conservative majority seems prepared to allow the Trump administration to end a program that allows some immigrants to work legally in the United States and protects them from deportation.
There did not appear to be any support among the five conservatives in extended arguments Tuesday for blocking the administration’s decision to wind down the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. It currently protects 660,000 immigrants who came to the United States as children and are here illegally.
Senior White House adviser Stephen Miller in a series of leaked emails pushed white nationalism, bemoaned opposition to Confederate symbols following a mass shooting at a Black church in South Carolina and embraced immigration policies once lauded by Adolf Hitler.
On Tuesday, the Southern Poverty Law Center, a nonprofit civil rights advocacy group, published an investigative report from its Hatewatch arm, which reviewed more than 900 messages Miller sent to Breitbart editors from March 2015 to June 2016. More than 80% “relate to or appear on threads relating to the subjects of race or immigration,” Hatewatch said.
The impeachment of Donald Trump is not just a matter of holding the president accountable for his confessed plot to extort Ukraine at a time when Russia is engaged in both an invasion of that country and a cyber-invasion of the United States. This impeachment is also a mandatory warning to myriad potential Trump copycats that serving as a carrier of the political disease known as Trumpism is absolutely not a path to more winning, but a political death wish.
Not to overstate the obvious, but the very existence of this whimpering tyrant in the White House, along with his relentless undermining of liberal democracy, should never have occurred in the first place. But now that he’s here, we have no choice but to swiftly oust Trump and quarantine Trumpism, the style of politics Trump co-opted from decades of Fox News, talk radio and far-right agitprop. Too much time has passed already. Trumpism has to be yanked back now, before it’s too late.
Former President Jimmy Carter was hospitalized in Atlanta on Monday night to undergo a procedure intended to relieve pressure on his brain caused by bleeding from recent falls, his office said.
Mr. Carter will have the procedure performed on Tuesday morning. “President Carter is resting comfortably and his wife, Rosalynn, is with him,” Deanna Congileo, his spokeswoman, said in a statement. Ms. Congileo provided no elaboration on what prompted the trip to the Emory University Hospital or any further details on the procedure.
The public couldn’t listen to a public court hearing Monday night over acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney’s House impeachment subpoena, a federal judge in Washington said.
Laura Cooper, the top Pentagon official overseeing U.S. policy regarding Ukraine, told House impeachment investigators last month that President Donald Trump directed the relevant agencies to freeze aid to Ukraine over the summer, according to a transcript of her testimony released Monday.
Cooper, during Oct. 23 testimony before the three House committees leading the impeachment inquiry into Trump’s Ukraine dealings, testified that she and other Pentagon officials had answered questions about the Ukraine assistance in the middle of June — so she was surprised when one of her subordinates told her that a hold had been placed on the funds after an interagency meeting in July.
I am carrying a bottle of 2012 Trump Winery Sparkling Blanc de Blanc. I received the bottle ironically, and I am regifting it even more ironically to liberal radio talk-show host Stephanie Miller for the election party she’s throwing four houses up from mine in the Hollywood Hills. We shall toast Donald Trump’s concession speech with glasses of his own sorry attempt to mimic the elite he tried to bring down. It shall taste sweet. Slightly too sweet, maybe due to the low acid levels in the Virginia grapes.
Read the rest of Joel Stein’s piece in The Washingtonian and be sure to pick up his book “In Defense of Elitism: Why I’m Better Than You and You’re Better Than Someone Who Didn’t Buy This Book”
A Trump-appointed federal judge decided Monday that President Donald Trump can’t sue New York state officials in a Washington, DC, court at this time to stop the release of his tax returns to Congress.
The case is one of many where the President or his administration have asked federal judges to intervene before House Democrats obtain Trump’s financial records.
Effectively, the ruling is a loss for Trump but a less significant one then the blows other courts have dealt him in cases involving Democrats’ pursuits of his financial records. Courts have sided with the House multiple times in cases where its committees have subpoenaed Trump’s financial records. Trump is still appealing those rulings, keeping the House subpoenas on hold.
President Donald Trump may have been a lifelong New Yorker until recently, but the city he once called home didn’t quite welcome him with open arms on Monday.
For the first few minutes of Trump’s speech in Manhattan’s Madison Square Park ahead of the 100th annual Veterans Day Parade, attendees could hear protesters outside the ceremony chanting “lock him up” and “traitor.”
To his left, luxury high-rise condominiums towered over the park with signs on some windows spelling out “IMPEACH” and “CONVICT” in massive black letters.
Trump, the first sitting president to attend the Veterans Day Parade in New York City, did not acknowledge the protests.
Friday’s Transcripts of the Day were those of Fiona Hill and Colonel Alexander Vindland, and, yes, they pretty much prove that the president* is as guilty as sin, even as his own sins, which are considerable. But the most entertaining parts of the new transcripts, and the sections that give us some kind of indication as to where the open hearings might go, are those featuring the floundering attempts by various Republicans to derail the proceedings in one way or another. And when it comes to Republican Flounders, there’s no flounder more floundering than Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Breathalyzer), Republican of Florida.
Will playing whac-a-mole help save the Trump presidency?
That’s what Fox News and Donald Trump defenders have been reduced to in recent weeks as the White House and its media allies scramble to try to find a coherent defense for his admitted campaign collusion with a foreign power. (This time, it’s attempted collusion with Ukraine.) More than a month into this unraveling story, Fox News is trying its best to protect Trump by attacking key players from within the administration who have come forward with damaging information during the impeachment inquiry. Going on the offensive and smearing honorable people is one of Fox News’ favorite pastimes: It’s the engine that fuels the whole propaganda enterprise. But this time it’s not going to work, simply because there are too many witnesses offering up too much damaging information for Fox News and the conservative media to combat.
Lev Parnas, one of Rudy Giuliani’s two indicted business associates, reportedly said that he told incoming Ukrainian leadership earlier this year to announce an investigation into the Bidens in exchange for U.S. military aid.
Parnas allegedly traveled to Kyiv just before Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was inaugurated in May and told the incoming government to announce an investigation into President Donald Trump’s political rival Joe Biden, otherwise the U.S. would freeze military aid to the country, the Ukrainian-American businessman’s attorney Joseph A. Bondy told The New York Times in a report published Sunday.
Read the story at The New York Times and HuffPost.
Donald Trump Jr ventured on to the University of California’s overwhelmingly liberal Los Angeles campus on Sunday, hoping to prove what he had just argued in his book – that a hate-filled American left was hell-bent on silencing him and anyone else who supported the Trump presidency.
But the appearance backfired when his own supporters, diehard Make America Great Again conservatives, raised their voices most loudly in protest and ended up drowning him out barely 20 minutes into an event scheduled to last two hours.
Nikki Haley, President Donald Trump’s former ambassador to the United Nations, claims in a new book that two of his top advisers tried to “undermine” the president to “save the country.”
Haley, the former governor of South Carolina, was asked by “CBS Evening News” about a passage from her new book, “With All Due Respect,” in which she claims that former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and former White House chief of staff John Kelly tried to recruit her into that effort. She says she refused. The Washington Post also reported on the exchange. NBC News has not independently verified the passage.
Some Republicans have started defending President Donald Trump on the impeachment issue by gravitating towards the “bad but not impeachable” argument. A GOP congressman said this morning, for example, his call with the president of Ukraine was “inappropriate” but not impeachable.
But the president is clearly frustrated and would like Republicans to stop criticizing his “PERFECT” call, even for the purposes of ultimately defending him.
It’s gone from bad to worse: After spending years refusing to call Donald Trump a liar, the press is now toasting his reelection campaign, which is built on lies.
“That campaigns are now being fought largely online is hardly a revelation, yet only one political party seems to have gotten the message,” The New York Times recently reported in a major story on Trump’s reelection run. “While the Trump campaign has put its digital operation firmly at the center of the president’s re-election effort, Democrats are struggling to internalize the lessons of the 2016 race and adapt to a political landscape shaped by social media.” The message the Times presented was unmistakable: Trump’s reelection campaign is trouncing Democrats online. (Trump had gotten “the message.”) Separately, the Times in another piece announced, “The technical superiority and sophistication of the president’s digital campaign is a hidden advantage of incumbency.”
Yes, there are a whole bunch of fascinating things in the transcripts of witness testimony that have been released by the House joint committee looking into whether or not to impeach President Trump. From the unending obsession with Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden to the mistreatment of people who gave their entire careers to serving the United States, only to see themselves treated like shit when this orange creep got into office, you can find nugget after nugget of pure impeachable gold.
Something else that comes through loud and clear is just how dickish Republicans are. Remember: these hearings were done behind closed doors in order to investigate the alleged crimes, with the knowledge that there would be a transcript. So Republicans on the committee aren’t performing for the cameras. They want to go down in history as vigorous nuzzlers of Donald Trump’s balls, and they like to do it from behind so they get a face full of taint while rubbing themselves on his walnut scrotum, getting that scent all over them.
House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff made clear on Saturday that the Ukraine whistleblower won’t be testifying in the impeachment inquiry, arguing that the individual’s testimony would be “redundant and unnecessary.”
Acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney is attempting to join a lawsuit testing House subpoena power, which, if allowed, could effectively derail him from giving testimony in the impeachment inquiry until a federal court decides the case.
Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, the top Ukraine expert on the National Security Council, told House impeachment investigators “there was no doubt” what President Donald Trump was demanding during his July 25 call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy.
During that conversation, now central to House Democrats’ impeachment inquiry, Trump pressed Zelenskiy to launch investigations involving former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden as well as a conspiracy related to the 2016 U.S. election, according to the record of the call released by the White House.
President Donald Trump’s former National Security Adviser John Bolton knows about “many relevant meetings and conversations” surrounding Trump’s communications with Ukraine, Bolton’s lawyer told lawmakers Friday.
Bolton has information that House impeachment investigators do not know about yet, his lawyer Charles Cooper said in a letter to the chief House lawyer, which was first reported by The New York Times. Lawmakers have called on Bolton to testify as part of the impeachment inquiry, but his lawyer first wants a court to rule on whether he should be made to do so, given that the White House has chosen not to cooperate with the inquiry.
Senior Trump administration officials considered resigning en masse last year in a “midnight self-massacre” to sound a public alarm about President Trump’s conduct, but rejected the idea because they believed it would further destabilize an already teetering government, according to a new book by an unnamed author.
In “A Warning” by Anonymous, obtained by The Washington Post ahead of its release, a writer described only as “a senior official in the Trump administration” paints a chilling portrait of the president as cruel, inept and a danger to the nation he was elected to lead.
Former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg is positioning himself to enter the Democratic presidential primary, a longtime Bloomberg adviser confirmed to NBC News Thursday, though he has not yet made a final decision.
“Yes and yes,” Kevin Sheekey wrote in an email responding to the questions about whether Bloomberg, 77, a billionaire businessman, was preparing to run and collecting signatures in Alabama, moves first reported by The New York Times on Thursday afternoon.
State Department official George Kent, a key witness in the impeachment inquiry of President Donald Trump, told House investigators last month he created contemporaneous memos of specific conversations he’d witnessed related to the White House’s attempted quid pro quo that he said were “injurious to the rule of law, both in Ukraine and the U.S,” according to a transcript of his testimony made public Thursday.
A new report says that if former White House National Security Adviser John Bolton can get clearance from a federal court, he’ll be prepared to defy the Donald Trump administration’s orders and testify before the Ukraine impeachment inquiry.
Washington Post reports that Bolton wants a court ruling on the dispute between the Trump administration and Congress about the impeachment investigation’s subpoenas. The Post notes that it’s unclear whether that can be arranged in time for Bolton to be called as a witness, but sources say he’s expected to describe his conversations with Trump and confirm the testimony from other witnesses about the president’s Ukraine quid pro quo.
A New York judge has ruled that President Donald Trump must pay a $2 million settlement for using his charity organization to advance his 2016 campaign.
The settlement brings an end to the lawsuit the New York attorney general’s office filed against the Trump Foundation, claiming the president and his children repeatedly used the charity’s funds to break campaign finance laws, abused its tax-exempt status, and engaged in a pattern of “illegal conduct.” The Trump Foundation was dissolved last year and the organization’s remaining money has been redistributed to other charitable groups
President Trump asked that Attorney General William P. Barr hold a news conference to declare that he had broken no laws in a telephone call with Ukraine’s president that is now at the heart of the Democratic impeachment inquiry, but Mr. Barr declined, according to two people with knowledge of the matter.
Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin on Wednesday filed a formal request for a recanvass of the vote in his bid for re-election, a day after he appeared to come up roughly 5,150 votes short. NBC News declared his Democratic opponent, Andy Beshear, the state attorney general, the apparent winner of the race.
“The people of Kentucky deserve a fair and honest election,” Bevin campaign manager Davis Paine said in a statement Wednesday afternoon. “With reports of irregularities, we are exercising the right to ensure that every lawful vote was counted.”
The top U.S. diplomat in Ukraine, Bill Taylor, told House impeachment investigators last month that President Donald Trump directed officials to tie military aid to Ukraine to demands that the country open political advantageous probes, according to a transcript of his testimony made public Wednesday.
The transcript of Taylor’s closed-door testimony before the three House committees leading the impeachment inquiry into Trump — the latest in a series of witness transcripts made public — confirms NBC News’ reporting about his more than nine hours of testimony last month. It also contains new details about the language he used in describing the White House’s attempted quid pro quo with Ukraine that shed light on his level of concern about the matter.
The House Intelligence Committee will hold the first of a series of public impeachment hearings next week, Democrats announced on Wednesday, calling three senior State Department officials to testify as they begin laying out their case against President Trump.
In the debut of the sessions expected to be televised live from Capitol Hill, lawmakers plan to question William B. Taylor Jr., the top American envoy in Ukraine, and George P. Kent, a senior American diplomat who oversees policy in the region, during a joint hearing on Wednesday. Then on Friday, they will take public testimony from Marie L. Yovanovitch, the former American ambassador to Ukraine, about her abrupt recall to Washington this spring amid a campaign by Mr. Trump and his inner circle to smear her as disloyal.
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) told CBS News that he won’t be reading the transcripts House impeachment investigators released Tuesday, even though a witness revised his testimony to indicate that a quid pro quo deal was pushed on Ukraine. When asked if he planned on reading the testimony of U.S. Ambassador to the E.U. Gordon Sondland and former special envoy Kurt Volker on Tuesday, he said he would not. “I’ve written the whole process off… I think this is a bunch of B.S.,” Graham, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said.
The closely watched governor’s race in Kentucky between incumbent GOP Gov. Matt Bevin and Democratic challenger Andy Beshear remains too close to call, according to The Associated Press, despite a celebratory speech by Beshear.
Beshear, the Democratic attorney general and a Kentucky political heir, held a slim lead over Bevin, 49.2% to 48.8%, according to unofficial results from Kentucky’s state board of elections at the time of the call.
Given how the year started out, the Virginia Democratic Party didn’t need another bombshell news story to collapse on its head so close to the state and local elections this week. But it appears as though Gov. Ralph Northam executed a baby. Sure, Virginia is a death penalty state, and even though Northam is personally opposed to capital punishment — a baby? How barbaric, how heartless, how … completely untrue.
No, Northam didn’t really execute a baby. But that didn’t stop Donald Trump from telling his Red Hat cult in Tupelo, Mississippi, over the weekend that the governor had done exactly that.
About 75 minutes into his latest pathologically unspooled campaign rally, the president said, “The governor of Virginia executed a baby, remember that whole thing?”
U.S. Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland told House impeachment investigators this week that he now remembers telling a top aide to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy that Ukraine would not receive U.S. military assistance until it committed to investigating the 2016 election and former Vice President Joe Biden, according to a person with knowledge of Sondland’s testimony.
Sondland’s latest testimony — stated in a three-page declaration to the House committees leading the impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump — represents an update to the testimony he gave in October and contains significant new details. That includes a fuller accounting of the role he played in personally telling the Ukrainians they needed to cooperate with the demands of Trump’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, if they wanted the aid money.
Republican Sen. Rand Paul, before a raucous crowd on Monday, demanded members of the media print the identity of the anonymous whistleblower at the heart of the House impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump’s dealings with Ukraine.
Jury selection in the trial of Roger Stone, the longtime confidant and adviser to President Donald Trump, got off to a bizarre start on Tuesday as Stone left the proceedings due to what he said was food poisoning shortly after an observer was taken out of the courtroom on a stretcher after appearing to have a seizure.
The selection of the jury continued without Stone present, but because of the earlier delay stemming from the separate medical emergency, it is unlikely jury selection will be completed Tuesday. More than 80 prospective jurors arrived at federal district court in Washington, D.C., to potentially take part in the trial.
Once upon a time, there was a king of France who believed he was made of glass. Apparently, this was A Thing at the time. People thought they were made of glass. Literally. It was a sort of advanced, funky hypochondria, I guess. Some cases were more advanced than others, too.
President Donald Trump will face strong headwinds in asking the Supreme Court to stop prosecutors in New York from getting his tax returns.
Past Supreme Court rulings have upheld subpoenas directed at presidents, and this time the local prosecutors are seeking documents from the Trump Organization and Trump’s accountants — not directly from the president himself.
House investigators on Monday released transcripts from the closed-door interviews with two former State Department officials as part of their impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump.
These are the first depositions the Democrat-controlled House has made public as they investigate Trump pressuring Ukrainian officials to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter while also withholding U.S. military aid from the country.
An associate of Rudy Giuliani — Lev Parnas — has initiated talks with impeachment investigators through his attorney.
Marie Yovanovitch, the ousted U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, told House impeachment investigators last month that U.S. Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland told her she should tweet out support or praise for President Donald Trump if she wanted to save her job, according to a transcript of her testimony made public Monday.
The three House committees leading the impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump released two transcripts — including of Yovanovitch’s testimony — of the behind-closed-doors interviews they have conducted so far as their investigation moves to a more public phase.
The U.S. official whose whistleblower complaint led to the impeachment inquiry against President Donald Trump offered to answer questions directly to Republicans on the intelligence committee leading the inquiry, one of his lawyers said on Sunday.
Mark Zaid said the action was taken to counter Republican efforts, led by Trump, to unmask the whistleblower, a member of the U.S. intelligence community whose identity has not been released.
News of the offer came as Trump on Sunday called on the whistleblower to come forward, in a stark departure from norms in such cases.
Republicans have “sought to expose our client’s identity which could jeopardize their safety, as well as that of their family,” Zaid wrote on Twitter.
Donald Trump’s former personal attorney Michael Cohen was told that if he stuck to his account of Trump’s relationship with Moscow, the president “loves you,” according to a bombshell document from the Robert Mueller investigation obtained by BuzzFeed.
The glimpse into attempts to influence the convicted attorney who worked for Trump for years was in 500 pages of summaries of FBI interviews with investigation witnesses that BuzzFeed obtained through five separate Freedom of Information Act requests. The records were released Saturday by the Department of Justice.
Rep. Jackie Speier (D-Calif.) set a five-day timeline on Sunday for the release of deposition transcripts that are part of the House’s impeachment probe into President Donald Trump.
“I think you’re going to see all of the transcripts that are going to be released probably within the next five days,” Speier, a member of the House Intelligence Committee, said on CBS’ “Face the Nation.”
All four White House officials who are scheduled to give depositions on Monday during the House’s impeachment inquiry won’t show up, as a source with knowledge of the situation tells CNN that National Security Council lawyers John Eisenberg and Michael Ellis will not testify.
In January 2016, Catherine Herridge, Fox News’ longtime chief intelligence correspondent, reported a huge scoop: No fewer than 150 FBI agents were investigating Hillary Clinton’s emails and the private server she used while serving as secretary of state. The number, as part of Herridge’s exclusive report based on anonymous sources, was shocking. If the FBI had assigned 150 agents to fan out across the country and were treating the Clinton email case as one of the most pressing crime probes in the country, akin to a terrorist attack investigation, then of course Fox News’ favorite controversy at the time must represent a truly blockbuster scandal, right? I mean, 150 agents.
One of the things we know about President Crimey McPantsshitter is that he brooks no insults (unless he’s in on the joke, a la his Comedy Central roast, which, yes, is a thing the president of the goddamn United States has done). You could make a strong case that one reason he ran for president is because Barack Obama said some mean shit about him at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in 2011 and he wanted to destroy Obama’s legacy for it. We know that Obama had other things on his mind that night, like the operation to get Osama bin Laden. We know that Trump was mightily pissed off at all the jokes at his expense all evening. A rational, real billionaire might be able to brush it off, in a kind of “Laugh all you want, peasants. I’m still rich enough to buy your companies and have you fired” way.
Let us get the requisite hunk of cynical reality out of the way right here at the top. Absent the kind of national landslide that killed off the Whigs and Federalists, or a sudden discovery within the Republicans of a vestigial collective conscience, no Democrat’s healthcare plan will get through to the president’s desk out of a Senate led by Mitch McConnell. Therefore, any debate on the topic within the Democratic primary process is largely aspirational. (After all, only Joe Biden has publicly endorsed the actual existence of that mythical beast: The Republican Who Can Be Reasoned With.)
President Donald Trump was greeted by a mix of boos and cheers Saturday night as he walked into Madison Square Garden to attend an Ultimate Fighting Championship mixed martial arts bout.
The appearance was his first in New York City since announcing he was changing his permanent residence to Florida and also marked the first time a sitting president attended an MMA event.
Donald Trump wanted a wall because his brain can only spit out simple solutions to complex problems. So, away America went building a “big beautiful wall” on the southern border, which amounted to plastering a steel and cement bandage on a broken bone. There are real solutions, hard solutions, to balancing effective border security and our collective humanity, but let’s build a thousand-mile wall through the desert for billions and billions of dollars instead. Why? “Walls work,” they said. So did fax machines.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., released a detailed plan Friday that she says would fully fund a “Medicare for All” bill and cover every American without premiums or deductibles, all with “not one penny in middle-class tax increases.”
Warren’s campaign estimates her plan would keep combined public and private health spending “just under” $52 trillion over the next 10 years, in line with projections under existing law, but would require the federal government to absorb $20.5 trillion in new spending. It seeks to use efficiency savings generated by Medicare for All to cover the uninsured at a similar total cost and add new benefits for dental, vision and long-term care.
Former Rep. Beto O’Rourke dropped out of the 2020 presidential race on Friday after a disappointing campaign that failed to build off the momentum generated from his longshot Texas Senate run.
“Though today we are suspending this campaign, let us each continue our commitment to the country in whatever capacity we can,” he wrote in an email to supporters. “Though it is difficult to accept, it is clear to me now that this campaign does not have the means to move forward successfully.”
President Donald Trump, a native New Yorker, has now declared himself a Florida resident, according to court documents.
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In her final speech on the House floor, Rep. Katie Hill tore into what she called a “double standard” in a “misogynistic culture.” The resigning congresswoman explained that she didn’t want to be a distraction into the impeachment inquiry.
“I am leaving now because of a double standard. I’m leaving because I no longer want to be used as a bargaining chip,” Hill said in the speech on Thursday. “I’m leaving because I didn’t want to be peddled by papers and blogs and websites used by shameless operatives for the dirtiest gutter politics that I’ve ever seen.”
The House on Thursday took a historic vote to set ground rules for its fast-moving impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump — a move that essentially starts the clock for an eventual decision on whether to oust the president.
Thursday’s vote — roughly along party lines — was partly intended to neutralize a frequent GOP attack line that Democrats hadn’t formalized the probe.
How do you solve a problem like Sean Duffy? The former Republican congressman, who was hired by CNN to blindly defend Donald Trump while the impeachment process unfolds, is creating problems for the network by constantly fabricating facts and spreading reckless and dangerous conspiracy theories. And yes, he’s only been on the CNN payroll for 10 days.
President Donald Trump is rewarding senators who have his back on impeachment — and sending a message to those who don’t to get on board.
Trump is tapping his vast fundraising network for a handful of loyal senators facing tough reelection bids in 2020. Each of them has signed onto a Republican-backed resolution condemning the inquiry as “unprecedented and undemocratic.”
Key Republican senators told CNN the Senate should conduct a fulsome trial of President Donald Trump — assuming the House soon sends over articles of impeachment, as expected — and not try to jam through a motion that would allow them to dismiss the case quickly on a partisan vote.
Twitter announced Wednesday that it will no longer take political ads, a major step as tech companies work to deal with misinformation ahead of the 2020 election.
The ban will go into place in November.
In a series of tweets, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey laid out the company’s reasoning, focusing on the downside of political advertising when combined with digital advertising.
The House is set to vote Thursday morning on how to proceed with its impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump — a move that will put lawmakers on record about where they stand and that Republicans are decrying as a sham.
Debate on the procedures — which include beginning public hearings and the release of some of the information gathered in the ongoing inquiry over the last few weeks — is expected to begin around 9am ET / 6am PT.
Former Vice President Joe Biden was denied communion at a South Carolina church on Sunday because of his views on abortion, a local priest confirmed in a statement to ABC News on Wednesday.
“Sadly, this past Sunday, I had to refuse Holy Communion to former Vice President Joe Biden. Holy Communion signifies we are one with God, each other and the Church. Our actions should reflect that,” Father Robert Morey of Saint Anthony Catholic Church in Florence, South Carolina wrote in a statement explaining his decision.
A top State Department official told senators on Wednesday that attempts by a U.S. president to solicit foreign investigations into his domestic political opponents would not agree with American values.
During his confirmation hearing to become U.S. ambassador to Russia, Deputy Secretary of State John Sullivan said he doesn’t believe such behavior would “be in accord with our values,” adding to a chorus of State Department officials who have spoken critically of the misconduct at the heart of the House impeachment inquiry.
Lt. Col. Alexander S. Vindman, the top Ukraine expert on the National Security Council, told House impeachment investigators on Tuesday that the White House transcript of a July call between President Trump and Ukraine’s president omitted crucial words and phrases, and that his attempts to include them failed, according to three people familiar with the testimony.
Former national security adviser John Bolton cautioned about the influence Rudy Giuliani had on US-Ukraine policymaking during a meeting in mid-June with top US officials, a career foreign service officer plans to tell Congress on Wednesday, according to a copy of his opening statement obtained by CNN.
The last 36 hours have illustrated two horrible truths about this era. First, there are way too many Americans who still accept Donald Trump’s word as truth. Second, too many of us believe Trump deserves the presidential deference we usually reserve for normal times and normal chief executives.
Neither of those things is remotely acceptable.
A Republican House member who sits on a committee that is participating in the impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump said the Democratic-led proceedings are a “sideshow” — but he hasn’t attended any depositions of key witnesses because he has “other responsibilities” in Congress.
Top Democrats at the deposition of Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, the top Ukraine expert on the National Security Council, said his testimony Tuesday was “extremely disturbing” and praised him for appearing despite attacks from the White House.
Acting House Oversight Chairwoman Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y, told NBC News she found Vindman’s remarks “extremely, extremely, extremely disturbing” as she left the deposition. Maloney refused to answer any other questions about Vindman’s testimony.
House Democrats released on Tuesday text of the resolution that will detail their procedures as they move forward with the impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump.
The full House is expected to vote Thursday on the resolution after the House Rules Committee debates and marks it up on Wednesday.
Expect sexist treatment and discrimination in the workplace so that you will see it and take the necessary steps to stop it. If you don’t expect it, you don’t see it and that delays your dealing with it. I didn’t get my first trial for a year after I started in the Organized Crime and Racketeering Section of the Department of Justice although my male colleagues got them sooner. Until I realized I was being treated differently, I took no action. As soon as I confronted the issue, I got my first trial, and once that was over, I got assigned like all my colleagues. That lesson also helped me during the Watergate case.
Read the rest of the interview with Jill Wine-Banks at Thrive Global.
Shit continues to get real, Constitution-wise. From Politico:
The resolution — which “establishes the procedure for hearings,” according to a statement by Speaker Nancy Pelosi — will mark the first floor vote on impeachment since Democrats formally launched their inquiry a month ago.
“We are taking this step to eliminate any doubt as to whether the Trump Administration may withhold documents, prevent witness testimony, disregard duly authorized subpoenas, or continue obstructing the House of Representatives,” Pelosi said in a letter to Democrats obtained by POLITICO.
This is the way it works. The more votes they take, and the more procedures and details they authorize, impeachment moves inexorably away from having been merely something people talked about to a real part of the daily business of the House of Representatives and, as such, a real part of the daily work of the Congress as well, as though recommending the removal of the president* is just another bit of legislative business.
Read the rest of Charlie Pierce’s piece at Esquire Politics.
A federal judge hearing arguments in a potentially critical impeachment inquiry case wants to hear from lawyers for the Trump White House, the House of Representatives and from impeachment witness Charles Kupperman on Thursday after Kupperman filed a lawsuit asking the federal court to decide whether he would need to testify.
A U.S. Army official and White House national security official plans to tell members of Congress conducting an impeachment inquiry that he was on the phone call between President Donald Trump and Ukraine’s leader in which Trump asked for an investigation into the Bidens, and that he raised concerns about it.
Lt. Col. Alexander S. Vindman, who is the top Ukraine expert on the National Security Council, considered the request so damaging to American national security that he reported it to a superior, according to his opening statement obtained by NBC News. The New York Times first reported the contents of his written statement.
President Trump made his way to Chicago today to speak at a police conference where he bashed the city’s head of police and attacked the city as a worse place to live than Afghanistan.
Chicago Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson had opted out of attending Trump’s speech at the International Association of Chiefs of Police conference, saying it “doesn’t line up with our city’s core values, along with my personal values.”
The House is expected to vote Thursday on a Democratic resolution that will lay out the next steps in the impeachment inquiry, according to a senior congressional source.
The language of the resolution has not been released, but it is expected to detail procedures going forward in the investigation, not formalize it.
Iam walking up my block to a party, this time with a bottle of wine that isn’t even from America. In the three months since the election, Stephanie’s house has become busier than ever, a center of revolutionary fervor. Democratic representatives Nancy Pelosi, Maxine Waters, Ted Lieu, and Adam Schiff show up for her “Stephanie Miller Resistance Dinner Parties.”
Read the rest of Joel Stein’s story at Los Angeles Magazine.
Bullying works.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been on a GOP charm offensive, and it seems to be working for the social media behemoth as it makes its allegiance to the Republican Party more open. In the days preceding his latest testimony before Congress, Zuckerberg had been “hosting a series of dinners with conservative journalists, right-wing celebrities, and at least one Republican lawmaker, Sen. Lindsey Graham, who grilled Zuckerberg about Facebook’s market dominance when he testified in a Senate hearing last year,” Politico reported. Among those who attended the conservative-only dinners at Zuckerberg’s home were Fox News’ Tucker Carlson, the Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro, radio host Hugh Hewitt, Guy Benson of Townhall, and Byron York of the Washington Examiner. All of them function as public apologists for Donald Trump, who has spent years bullying Facebook for supposedly trying to “censor” conservative voices.
Even in the realm of political and legal norms that the Trump administration is forcibly bending over the desk in the Oval Office and reaming out with George Washington’s femur, yesterday was a pretty fucking stunning attempt to lay waste to the foundations of the country. For that was when a judge in New York City asked William S. Consovoy, a lawyer for President Donald Trump, if Trump shot someone on Fifth Avenue, “Local authorities couldn’t investigate? They couldn’t do anything about it? Nothing could be done? That’s your position?”
President Donald Trump’s former chief of staff, John Kelly, says he advised the president not to fill the job with someone who wouldn’t be honest with him and provide a check on his impulses because he would end up being impeached.
“That was almost 11 months ago, and I have an awful lot of, to say the least, second thoughts about leaving,” Kelly told the Washington Examiner. “It pains me to see what’s going on because I believe if I was still there or someone like me was there, he would not be kind of, all over the place.”
Former Rep. John Conyers, a longtime Michigan Democrat who represented parts of Detroit for more than 50 years before his resignation in 2017, died Sunday at age 90, his son, John Conyers III, told CNN.
The 2020 Democrat presidential candidates are praising U.S. Special Forces and the intelligence community after news that ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was killed in a raid on Sunday morning.
South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg, who served in Afghanistan, said at a campaign stop in South Carolina that everyone involved deserves credit for the success of the raid. When asked if President Trump deserves credit, he repeated that all deserve credit but those who were “at the tip of the spear” deserved the most credit.
President Donald Trump was greeted with a chorus of boos and chants of “Lock him up!” along with some cheers on Sunday night as he was introduced at Nationals Park in Washington, D.C., during the team’s third World Series home game against the Houston Astros.
For the first time, season-five Apprentice contestant Summer Zervos has laid out some of her evidence supporting claims that Donald Trump attacked her in a hotel room in 2007.
Zervos is suing Trump for allegedly defaming her by denying a sexual assault. During the last presidential election, as Trump was under fire for boasting to Access Hollywood‘s Billy Bush about grabbing women’s genitals, Zervos was one of many women to come forward to accuse him of repeatedly touching her, groping her and kissing her against her will. “I never met her at a hotel,” responded Trump, who added that allegations from his accusers were “100 percent fabricated and made-up charges, pushed strongly by the media and the Clinton campaign.”
WASHINGTON — For more than two years, President Trump has repeatedly attacked the Russia investigation, portraying it as a hoax and illegal even months after the special counsel closed it. Now, Mr. Trump’s own Justice Department has opened a criminal investigation into how it all began.
Justice Department officials have shifted an administrative review of the Russia investigation closely overseen by Attorney General William P. Barr to a criminal inquiry, according to two people familiar with the matter. The move gives the prosecutor running it, John H. Durham, the power to subpoena for witness testimony and documents, to impanel a grand jury and to file criminal charges.
WASHINGTON – GOP Senator Lindsey Graham introduced a resolution to condemn how House Democrats have been conducting the impeachment investigation into President Donald Trump.
During a press conference Thursday, Graham, the Senate Judiciary Chairman, called the inquiry “out of bounds” and “inconsistent with due process as we know it,” stating that how the inquiry is being conducted is a threat to future presidencies.
The inquiry is investigating the President pressuring Ukraine to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden, one of Trump’s 2020 democratic rivals, and his son Hunter, while United States withheld substantial military aid to the country.
The White House’s trade representative in late August withdrew a recommendation to restore some of Ukraine’s trade privileges after John Bolton, then-national security adviser, warned him that President Trump probably would oppose any action that benefited the government in Kyiv, according to people briefed on the matter.
The warning to Robert E. Lighthizer came as Trump was withholding $391 million in military aid and security assistance from Ukraine. House Democrats have launched an impeachment inquiry into allegations that the president did so to pressure Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate the business activities of former vice president Joe Biden’s son Hunter. As part of the inquiry, lawmakers are closely scrutinizing the White House’s actions between July and September.
WASHINGTON — House Republicans ground the impeachment inquiry to a halt for hours on Wednesday, staging an attention-grabbing protest at the Capitol that sowed chaos and delayed a crucial deposition as they sought to insulate President Trump against mounting evidence of misconduct.
The day after the most damning testimony yet about Mr. Trump’s pressure campaign to enlist Ukraine to smear his political rivals, House Republicans stormed into the secure office suite where impeachment investigators have been conducting private interviews that have painted a damaging picture of the president’s behavior — and refused to leave.
WASHINGTON — A judge on Wednesday ordered the State Department to begin producing within 30 days documents related to the Trump administration’s dealings with Ukraine, saying the records were of obvious public interest.
The documents were sought under a Freedom of Information Act request by American Oversight, an ethics watchdog that investigates the administration. Any release of government documents could shed new light on President Donald Trump’s efforts to prod his Ukrainian counterpart to investigate Democratic rival Joe Biden, the matter at the heart of the Democrat-led House impeachment inquiry.
Two associates of Rudy Giuliani linked to the Ukraine scandal pleaded not guilty Wednesday to charges of funneling money from foreign entities to U.S. candidates in a plot to buy political influence.
Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman were carrying one-way tickets to Vienna when they were arrested at Dulles Airport outside of Washington, D.C., on Oct. 9.
“Many false things have been said about me and my family,” Parnas said outside Manhattan Federal Court after he and Fruman pleaded not guilty to four counts related to violating campaign finance laws.
President Trump announced Wednesday that the United States will lift sanctions on Turkey, saying that the Turkish government has informed the White House that it will abide by what he characterized as a “permanent” cease-fire along the border with Syria.
At a hastily organized event in the Diplomatic Reception Room of the White House, Trump also used the occasion to justify his “America First” foreign policy agenda, pushing back against critics by arguing that he is removing U.S. troops from a region where they should not be involved.
Senator Mitch McConnell pushed back on President Donald Trump’s claim that the Senate Majority Leader described a phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelinsky that lays at the center of the current impeachment inquiry unfolding in the nation’s capital.
During a Capitol Hill briefing, an unidentified reporter noted to McConnell that “the president has said that you told him that his phone call with Ukrainian president was ‘perfect and innocent.’” Then asked if Senator McConnell believes that President Trump has handled the situation perfectly.
A federal grand jury investigating activities surrounding Rudy Giuliani’s back-channel campaign in Ukraine has demanded legal documents that include records of extravagant spending at Trump hotels and millions of dollars in financial transfers by Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, two key operatives who carried out the plan, according to a source familiar with the demand.
The documents requested by a subpoena that was issued in Florida last week could shed light on whether other people, including foreign nationals, were trying to influence the top levels of government and impact the 2020 presidential campaign.
Ambassador William B. Taylor Jr. looked out over the front lines of Ukraine’s long war with Russian-backed separatists last July, taking in a damaged bridge and then farther in the distance, an “armed and hostile” enemy.
Taylor had taken the job of acting U.S. ambassador to Ukraine reluctantly, he said in congressional testimony Tuesday. His decision came only after assurances from Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in late May that President Trump was committed to helping Kyiv hold off forces, armed and funded by Moscow, that had besieged the country for nearly five years.
Found: deep in the A-section of Friday’s New York Times.Did you miss this story? I did.
The House of Representatives rejected a motion to censure House Intelligence chair Adam Schiff after Republican criticism that Schiff lied to Congress during a September 27th hearing.
WASHINGTON — House Democrats are zeroing in on a framework for their impeachment case against President Donald Trump that will center on a simple “abuse of power” narrative involving the president’s actions regarding Ukraine, according to multiple people familiar with the deliberations.
Enough is enough.If there was a tipping point for Donald Trump’s blatant abuse of Twitter with his hate speech, it may have come when he recently posted a series of tweets warning of a second Civil War if he were to be impeached and removed, quoting Pastor Robert Jeffress on Fox & Friends. Even one Republican lawmaker called the remark “beyond repugnant.” Since then, Trump has used Twitter to further hype possible civil unrest, demand the arrest of Democratic leaders, and publicly target the whistleblower who came forward to detail the Ukraine collusion scandal which led to the House’s impeachment inquiry.
It’s definitely new to be living in a country led by someone who is, at the very least, quickly deteriorating mentally. Hell, at least Ronald Reagan had the sense to let others do his job when his faculties were fading. But that’s the kindest reading of President Donald Trump. More likely, Trump is someone who has never had whatever part of the brain allows for empathy and human decency, and the vicissitudes of time, as well as the weight of decades of extravagant criminality and the exertion of keeping all of that hidden, not to mention being, you know, president, have worn out any stability that remained. For lack of an elegant phrase, he’s a fucking madman.
If U.S. Attorney John Durham is conducting a criminal investigation, it’s not clear what allegations of wrongdoing are being examined.A review launched by Attorney General William Barr into the origins of the Russia investigation has expanded significantly amid concerns about whether the probe has any legal or factual basis, multiple current and former officials told NBC News.The prosecutor conducting the review, Connecticut U.S. Attorney John Durham, has expressed his intent to interview a number of current and former intelligence officials involved in examining Russia’s effort to interfere in the 2016 presidential election, including former CIA Director John Brennan and former director of national intelligence James Clapper, Brennan told NBC News.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi has traveled to Jordan to meet with the Jordanian king for “vital” discussions about the Turkish incursion into Syria and other regional challenges, amid uncertainty about whether an American-brokered cease-fire with Turkey in northern Syria was holding.
The visit by senior United States officials came as sporadic clashes continued on Sunday morning along the Turkish-Syrian border, where, according to the Turkish Defense Ministry, a Turkish soldier was killed by Kurdish fighters in the Syrian border town of Tel Abyad.
Following widespread bipartisan criticism, President Donald Trump said Saturday his Doral resort in Florida would not host next year’s Group of Seven summit of world leaders after all.
“Based on both Media & Democrat Crazed and Irrational Hostility, we will no longer consider Trump National Doral, Miami, as the Host Site for the G-7 in 2020,” he tweeted. “We will begin the search for another site, including the possibility of Camp David, immediately.”
The shifting White House explanation for President Donald Trump‘s decision to withhold military aid from Ukraine drew alarm Friday from Republicans as the impeachment inquiry brought a new test of their alliance.
Trump, in remarks at the White House, stood by his acting chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, whose earlier comments undermined the administration’s defense in the impeachment probe. Speaking Thursday at a news conference, Mulvaney essentially acknowledged a quid pro quo with Ukraine that Trump has long denied, saying U.S. aid was withheld from Kyiv to push for an investigation of the Democratic National Committee and the 2016 election. He later clarified his remarks.
Hillary Clinton says she believes that the Russians have “got their eye on somebody who’s currently in the Democratic primary and are grooming her to be the third-party candidate.”
In a recent interview, Clinton didn’t mention Democratic presidential candidate Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii by name, but said she believes one candidate is “the favorite of the Russians.” Asked if the former secretary of state was referring to Gabbard, Clinton spokesman Nick Merrill said, “If the nesting doll fits…”
One day after President Donald Trump reportedly dubbed him “the world’s most overrated general,” James Mattis got his revenge.
Trump, according to multiple reports, trashed Mattis during a meeting with lawmakers on both sides Wednesday at the White House. In addition to calling him overrated, Trump reportedly said that Mattis “wasn’t tough enough.”
On Thursday night in New York, Mattis fired back. Speaking at the Al Smith dinner — which is known for hosting political dignitaries roasting one another — Mattis poked fun at the comment.
President Donald Trump raged against Democrats and the House impeachment inquiry during his campaign rally Thursday in Dallas, arguing that the Democratic Party, including 2020 presidential rival Joe Biden, had “betrayed our country.”
“At stake in this fight is the survival of American democracy itself. Don’t kid yourself,” Trump, largely going off-script, told supporters at American Airlines Arena. “They are destroying this country, but we will never let it happen, not even close. For three straight years, radical Democrats have been trying to overthrow the results of a great, great election.”
Energy Secretary Rick Perry, who has emerged as a central figure in the Trump administration’s quickly expanding Ukraine affair, has resigned and will leave his job by the end of the year.
“It’s with profound emotion and gratitude that I am announcing my resignation effective later this year as your Energy Secretary,” he said in a video to staffers posted Thursday. “There is much work to be done in these upcoming weeks and I remain fully committed to accomplishing the goals that I set out to accomplish at the beginning of my tenure. And then, I will return to my favorite place in the world— Texas— but I’ll treasure the memories of what we’ve accomplished together.”
Hours after saying Thursday that President Donald Trump withheld foreign aid in order to get Ukraine’s help in the U.S. election, acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney walked back his remarks.
He released a lengthy statement wrongly blaming the press for putting a spin on his comments.
“Once again, the media has decided to misconstrue my comments to advance a biased and political witch hunt against President Trump,” he said. “Let me be clear, there was absolutely no quid pro quo between Ukrainian military aid and any investigation into the 2016 election.”
US Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland was directed by President Donald Trump to work with Rudy Giuliani on Ukraine, he told Congress on Thursday, and was left with a choice: Abandon efforts to bolster a key strategic alliance or work to satisfy the demands of the President’s personal lawyer.
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) reacted to acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney’s indication that the Trump administration made aid to Ukraine conditional on investigations into the 2016 election Thursday.
“I think Mr. Mulvaney’s acknowledgment means that things have gone from very, very bad to much, much worse,” Schiff told reporters Thursday, demurring when asked how Mulvaney’s comments would affect the pace of the House’s impeachment inquiry.
Vice President Mike Pence and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo held a press conference following their meeting with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, announcing a temporary suspension of Turkey’s invasion of Syria.
Pence announced that Turkey and the United States have agreed to a 120-hour ceasefire in Syria. Pence said this will allow YPG and Kurdish forces to withdraw from 20 miles of the safe zone area. Pence said the administration was working to facilitate the safe withdrawal of Kurdish forces, that the arrangement will “allow for withdrawal of YPG forces from the safe zone,” and also that Turkey has promised to not engage in any military action against the community.
White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney admitted to a quid pro quo between President Donald Trump and Ukraine to force an investigation into the Democratic National Committee, telling ABC News’ Jon Karl “We do that all the time.”
Mulvaney took questions at a rare White House press briefing Thursday, where Karl asked Mulvaney “You were directly involved in a decision to withhold funding from Ukraine. Can you explain to us now differently why, why was funding withheld?”
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Wednesday redirected an attack from President Donald Trump on Twitter, turning a photo he had tweeted of her during a contentious White House meeting with the caption “Nervous Nancy’s unhinged meltdown!” into her Twitter cover shot.
U.S. Rep. Elijah Cummings, a Baltimore Democrat, has died from complications of longstanding health problems early Thursday morning, his office said. He was 68 years old.
The Democrat, known for his devotion to Baltimore and civil rights, and for blunt and passionate speechmaking, died at Johns Hopkins Hospital.
Fox Business anchor Trish Regan tweeted out an eyebrow-raising exclusive this afternoon: President Donald Trump‘s letter to Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.
The letter, however, has some baffled and others questioning if this is real.
The letter from Trump shared by Regan reads, “Let’s work out a good deal! You don’t want to be responsible for slaughtering thousands of people, and I don’t want to be responsible for destroying the Turkish economy — and I will.”
The Senate majority leader told Republicans he hoped to wrap up any impeachment trial for Trump by the end of the year.
“He thinks Democrats are of the same mind: let’s not drag this out for five weeks,” said one attendee of the lunch.
McConnell’s comments and PowerPoint presentation on Wednesday were in part an acknowledgment that impeachment is exceedingly likely to come to the Senate, and much of the discussion centered on the ins and outs of Senate procedure.
Democratic leaders in Congress on Wednesday angrily walked out of a White House meeting with President Donald Trump after he had a “meltdown,” according to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.
“What we witnessed on the part of the President was a meltdown. Sad to say,” Pelosi told reporters outside the White House standing with House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md., and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y.
Schumer said the dramatic moment unfolded after Trump referred to Pelosi as a “third-rate politician.”
A large majority in the House of Representatives voted to condemn President Donald Trump for pulling troops out of northern Syria to allow for Turkey’s invasion.
The vote was a rare bipartisan retort to Trump since 354 members approved the resolution against withdrawal, while 60 voted to oppose it. Trump’s decision has drawn significant fire from his own party over the last few days, and 129 Republicans — more than two-thirds of the conservatives in the House — joined the Democrats to condemn the pullout.
Donald Trump might be the weakest incumbent in decades. Don’t get happy — anything can happen next year. But his vast impotency, in terms of his character and, especially, his political future, seem obvious to me. Yet he’s too often regarded as a tough guy, a poseur Mafia don who’s osmotically absorbed too many gangster movies. Trump perpetually mistakes the appearance of toughness for actual fortitude, and every sobbing tweet betrays his brittle ego.
More specifically, the president’s conspiracy to exploit federal military aid, your taxpayer dollars, in exchange for foreign help with his re-election is all the proof we need of Trump’s pathetic weakness.
Vice President Mike Pence’s office said Tuesday it will not comply with a request from the House to turn over documents related to President Donald Trump’s July 25 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy.
In a letter to the chairmen of the House Intelligence, Foreign Affairs and Oversight committees, Pence counsel Matthew Morgan called the request part of a “self-proclaimed impeachment inquiry,” noting that the House of Representatives has not yet taken a vote to open the inquiry and asserting that the request was part of a process that “calls into question your commitment to fundamental fairness and due process rights.”
Signaling that Democrats won’t cave to GOP demands, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Tuesday that the House will not hold a formal floor vote on their impeachment inquiry into President Donald trump “at this time.”
“There is no requirement that we have a vote. So at this time, we will not be having a vote,” Pelosi told reporters on Capitol Hill after a brief closed-door Democratic caucus meeting. “And I’m very pleased with the thoughtfulness of our caucus in terms of being supportive of the path that we are on in terms of fairness, in terms of seeking the truth, in terms of upholding the Constitution of the United States.”
State Department official George Kent told lawmakers in a closed-door deposition Tuesday that acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney appointed three other Trump administration officials to spearhead the president’s efforts in Ukraine.
According to Rep. Gerry Connolly, D-Va., who was present for the deposition, Kent testified that Mulvaney oversaw a meeting where he sidelined State Department officials and tapped three political appointees — Energy Secretary Rick Perry, European Ambassador Gordon Sondland and special envoy Kurt Volker — to oversee Ukraine policy for the United States.
The Democratic presidential contenders faced off for their fourth debate on Tuesday night, and the divide between the moderates and progressives sharpened over the course of the evening.
The biggest rift between the 12 candidates on stage in Ohio was once again over health care and the cost of their various proposals and whether it’s proper to eliminate private health insurance. But splits were also evident over how far to push for an assault weapons ban and taxes on the wealthy.
I stopped by Joy Reid’s show on Saturday and, in the course of our discussion, Malcolm Nance made a very important point. The betrayal of the Kurds doesn’t just fall on El Caudillo del Mar-a-Lago, and it doesn’t just fall on the people who carry out his whims. (To call them “orders” is to dignify them beyond all reason.) It doesn’t just fall on his idiot enablers in Congress. It falls on this country. Period. It falls on you and me and every American citizen, in or out of uniform. It falls on every president, every administration, and every American government for the foreseeable future. And so, because we are a self-governing republic, we will have to carry our president*’s treachery and ignorance for the foreseeable future, too.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said Monday that he was “gravely concerned” about the U.S. response to the escalating conflict in Syria.
In a statement, McConnell pledged to work toward avoiding “a strategic calamity” when the Senate returns this week and warned that Turkey’s latest attacks on Kurdish allies in Syria was hurting progress in the fight against the Islamic State.
Former Vice President Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden said he used “poor judgment” in serving on the board of a Ukrainian gas company because it has become a political liability for his father.
Fiona Hill, President Donald Trump’s former top Russia adviser, raised concerns about Rudy Giuliani’s role in US foreign policy toward Ukraine, telling lawmakers on Monday that she saw “wrongdoing” in the American foreign policy and tried to report it to officials including the National Security Council’s attorney, according to multiple sources.
Twelve Democrats will line up in swing state Ohio on Tuesday for a crucial debate in their White House battle, which will unfold as their party gears up to consider impeachment — the ultimate political sanction — against President Donald Trump.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA on Monday announced that she and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) agreed to “
Syrian government troops have began advancing north following a deal struck with Kurdish-led forces to hold off Turkey’s military offensive, as Kurdish authorities reported the escape of hundreds of people with links to ISIS from a detention camp in the area.
After being questioned about his son Hunter Biden, former Vice President Joe Biden took a shot at the Trump family’s involvement in President Donald Trump’s administration, while also assuring voters that his children will not be awarded White House positions.
“No one in my family will have an office in the White House, will sit in meetings as if they are a cabinet member, will have any business relationship with anyone that relates to foreign corporation or government. Period,” Biden said on Sunday after being asked about comments Hunter Biden’s attorney made regarding ethical guidelines dividing family and presidential work.
A video depicting a macabre scene of a fake President Trump shooting, stabbing and brutally assaulting members of the news media and his political opponents was shown at a conference for his supporters at his Miami resort last week, according to footage obtained by The New York Times.
We, former members of the Watergate special prosecutor force, believe there exists compelling prima facie evidence that President Trump has committed impeachable offenses. This evidence can be accepted as sufficient for impeachment, unless disproved by any contrary evidence that the president may choose to offer.
The ultimate judgment on whether to impeach the president is for members of the House of Representatives to make. The Constitution establishes impeachment as the proper mechanism for addressing these abuses; therefore, the House should proceed with the impeachment process, fairly, openly and promptly. The president’s refusal to cooperate in confirming (or disputing) the facts already on the public record should not delay or frustrate the House’s performance of its constitutional duty.
Senate Judiciary Chair Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said during a Sunday interview with Fox News that the whistleblowers who have come forward as part of Donald Trump’s impeachment inquiry should be made to testify in public.
“If the whistleblower’s allegations are turned into an impeachment article, it’s imperative that the whistleblower be interviewed in public, under oath and cross-examined,” Graham said on Sunday Morning Futures. “Nobody in America goes to jail or has anything done to them without confronting their accuser.”
1. At his campaign rallies of the damned the last two nights, in Minneapolis on Thursday and in Lake Charles, Louisiana, on Friday, President Donald Trump repeated one word like it was a tic or, more likely, the result of having the vocabulary of an Adderall-popping 8-year-old. That word? “Great.” Like when he was blowing Fox “news”:
– “What a great group, Ainsley and Steve, and by the way, Brian has gotten a lot better, right? Brian was a seven and he’s getting close to ten territories, and Steve has been so great, and Ainsley is just incredible.”
And then immediately:
– “There’s some really great people, and again, Tucker has been very good. I have to say he’s been very good. Smart, he’s been great, Tucker. And the legendary Sean Hannity, great, number one, number one show.”
U.S. troops were preparing to withdraw from northern Syria Sunday as Turkish forces continued their advance.
Hundreds of Islamic State group supporters escaped from a displacement camp in the area and there were reports of alleged atrocities amid growing international alarm.
About 1,000 troops will leave the area “as safely and quickly as possible,” Defense Secretary Mark Esper told CBS’ “Face the Nation” in an interview Sunday.
Democrats running for president have a new message for the news media: We’re not going to take it anymore.
No longer willing to stoically suffer through bad, misleading press coverage, Democrats are borrowing a page from Republicans by going public with their complaints and demanding journalists do better. But unlike Republicans who often “work the refs” by griping about imaginary slights in hopes of better treatment in the future, Democrats are calling out the press with wholly accurate claims of media malpractice.
Last week, Joe Biden’s presidential campaign sent a blistering letter to New York Timeseditor Dean Baquet, reprimanding the paper for helping spread Donald Trump’s debunked conspiracy theory about Joe Biden and his son’s business dealings in Ukraine. It’s “part of a larger strategy not to let the same coverage that corrupted the 2016 election happen this time around,” a campaign source told CNN’s Brian Stelter.
The “Hal Sparks Radio Podcast Megaworldwide” is the podcast version of Hal Sparks weekend show on WCPT in Chicago and it’s now available!! Listen at SexyLiberal.com or subscribe on your favorite podcast app!
Five federal courts dealt blows to President Donald Trump on Friday just as the limits of his legal strategy to block an impeachment inquiry became clear.
The acting secretary of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security is exiting, President Donald Trump tweeted Friday evening.
“Kevin McAleenan has done an outstanding job as Acting Secretary of Homeland Security,” Trump said on Twitter. “We have worked well together with Border Crossings being way down. Kevin now, after many years in Government, wants to spend more time with his family and go to the private sector….”
…Congratulations Kevin, on a job well done!” Trump tweeted. “I will be announcing the new Acting Secretary next week. Many wonderful candidates!”
Federal prosecutors in Manhattan are investigating whether President Trump’s personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani broke lobbying laws in his dealings in Ukraine, according to two people familiar with the inquiry.
The investigators are examining Mr. Giuliani’s efforts to undermine the American ambassador to Ukraine, Marie L. Yovanovitch, one of the people said. She was recalled in the spring as part of Mr. Trump’s broader campaign to pressure Ukraine into helping his political prospects.
Read the rest of the story at The New York Times.
To critics who accuse Fox News of being uniformly pro-Trump, the network often points to the blunt-truth reporting of Shepard Smith, its veteran chief news anchor, whose coverage of the Trump White House stood out on a channel known best for conservative opinion.
Starting now, Fox News will need to point to somebody else.
In an announcement that stunned colleagues, Mr. Smith concluded his Friday newscast by signing off from Fox News — for good. “Recently, I asked the company to allow me to leave,” Mr. Smith said calmly. “After requesting that I stay, they obliged.”
House Democrats on Thursday issued subpoenas to two Florida businessmen who worked with President Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, on his efforts to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden.
The subpoenas to Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman for documents by Oct. 16 came hours after reports emerged that the two were arrested on campaign finance charges.
Parnas and Fruman were expected to appear in a Virginia court later Thursday.
Read the rest of the story at The Hill.
Rudy Giuliani was reportedly planning to leave Thursday for Vienna, Austria, a day after two business associates who helped him with his dealings with Ukraine officials were arrested as they were headed to the same destination.
The Atlantic’s Elaina Plott reported that Giuliani, President Donald Trump’s personal attorney, told her he would not be able to meet Thursday evening for an interview because he was planning to fly to Vienna in the evening. Giuliani told that to the reporter around the same time that his associates Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman were arrested at Dulles International Airport while waiting to board a flight to Vienna with one-way international tickets Wednesday night, Plott wrote.
President Donald Trump used his rally in Minneapolis Thursday night to hit some of his favorite campaign trail targets — railing against Democrats, reasserting his support for law enforcement and criticizing immigration policies. He also responded to the latest news in the impeachment inquiry, taking aim the Bidens and insisting that he has done nothing wrong.
The House of Representatives has subpoenaed Secretary of Energy Rick Perry for documents related to the Ukraine matter.
President Donald Trump and his allies’ interactions with Ukraine are the subject of an ongoing impeachment inquiry. According to Politico, the subpoena demands Perry submit “a series of documents related to Perry’s knowledge of President Donald Trump’s July 25 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.”
