Tag: UkraineExtortion

Week 155 in Trump

Posted on January 21, 2020 in Politics, Trump

What a week! Iran retaliated for our drone strike on General Soleimani, but then they accidentally shot down a passenger plane in the process. That turns the tens of thousands of Iranian mourners in the streets of Iran into tens of thousands of people protesting the missile strike on the plane. Iraq votes to expel U.S. troops, and then the U.S. sends them a letter saying we’re leaving, but then we say we’re not really leaving and the Iraqi Prime Minister asks Mike Pompeo to come talk about leaving. And we’re still not sure what the imminent threat was that led us to kill Soleimani now or if there even was an imminent threat.

Here’s what happened in politics for the week ending January 12…

Shootings This Week:

  1. This is some kind of record. There were only TWO mass shootings in the U.S. this week (defined as killing and/or injuring 4 or more people). Shooters kill 2 people and injure 7 more.
    • A shooter ambushes a group outside an apartment complex in Bay Saint Louis, MS, killing 2 people and injuring 2 more.
    • A 16-year-old shooter in Aurora, CO (yes, that Aurora), injures 5 people at an apartment complex.
  1. Texas Governor Greg Abbott awards the Medal of Courage to the security force volunteer who shot a gunman in a church in White Settlement, TX, last month.

Russia:

  1. The Vietnam Veterans of America have been warning the Defense, Veterans Affairs, and other agencies—and even Trump—that Russian operatives are targeting vets with online disinformation campaigns on a massive scale. Those agencies have ignored the warnings, despite a report and congressional testimony supporting them.
  2. Federal prosecutors recommend a 6-month prison term for Michael Flynn. That’s up from the zero time they had previously recommended before Flynn stopped cooperating and started lying to prosecutors and changing his testimony.
  3. Newly released evidence from the Mueller investigation shows that:
    • Paul Manafort said he used Sean Hannity as a backchannel to Trump and that he believed Trump was sending him messages through Hannity.
    • Donald Trump Jr. asked for dirt on Hillary during the infamous Trump Tower meeting with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya.
    • Hope Hicks thought George Papadopoulos was a problem child. Fun fact: Papadopoulos is running for the congressional seat vacated by Katie Hill last year.
    • K.T. McFarland, former deputy national security adviser under Mike Flynn, cooperated with the Mueller investigation under a proffer agreement. This is typically used for people under criminal investigation.

Legal Fallout:

  1. The New York City Bar Association asks Congress to investigate Attorney General Bill Barr for his impartial conduct, which they say threatens our faith in our justice system. They cite his speech to the Federalist Society where he accused so-called progressives of trying to cripple the government and said conservatives have more scruples over their political tactics.
  2. According to current and former officials, John Huber, the U.S. attorney in Utah, is wrapping up his investigation into the sale of Uranium One, the Clinton Foundation, and Clinton’s use of a private email server. They say the investigation has ended without finding anything worth pursuing. His final report is yet to be released.
  3. A panel of judges grants Trump’s request to have the New York Court of Appeals hear Summer Zervos’s defamation suit against him. In case you’re wondering how slowly the justice system works, this case is close to three years old.
  4. Betsy DeVos’s brother, Erik Prince, is referred to the Treasury Department for possible violations of U.S. sanctions against Venezuelan entities.

Impeachment:

Including all this info just makes this too long, so I moved it out into its own post. You can skip right over to it if that’s your focus.

Courts/Justice:

  1. Harvard law students aren’t applying to clerk for Trump’s court nominees. This is usually a plum position, but no one wants to clerk for judges who are deemed unqualified by the ABA, or who are ideologically rigid. These are the judges who most need the help of smart grads.
  2. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg announces that blood tests show she is free of cancer after undergoing treatment for pancreatic cancer.

Healthcare:

  1. California’s Governor Gavin Newsom proposes that the state establish its own generic drug label to bring down prices. It would be the first state to do so, and due to the size of the state, it could bring down drug prices nationally.
  2. The American Cancer Society says that the cancer death rate fell 2.2% from 2016 to 2017, the largest decline in one year ever reported. The rate dropped by 29% since 1991.

International:

  1. Netanyahu calls Israel a nuclear power, before correcting himself. Israel is believed to have nuclear weapons, but it’s never been confirmed.
  2. Britain’s House of Commons passes Boris Johnson’s Brexit plan. Now it heads to the House of Lords. If it passes, Brexit is a done deal at the end of the month.
  3. A BMG survey of British citizens shows that a majority want to remain in the EU. They also expect Brexit to be bad for their economy, the health system, and Britain’s place in the world.
  4. Trump’s actions in the Middle East open a rift between the U.S. and the U.K. Britain’s Defense Secretary says the U.K is working on stronger alliances with other countries that share its priorities. He also says Trump threatened to pull out of the intelligence-sharing relationship between the U.S. and U.K.
  5. The U.K. is quick to call the strike on Soleimani a dangerous escalation and to criticize Trump’s threat to target Iranian cultural sites.
  6. National security advisor Robert O’Brien says the conflicts with Iran won’t stop him from cutting around a third of the staff of the National Security Council. This was one of his top responsibilities when he took over in September, a time when NSC staff were beginning to testify about the hold on the aid to Ukraine.
  7. Trump tells Laura Ingraham that Saudi Arabia pays our troops to defend their oil fields from Iran.
  8. The U.S. will expel nearly two dozen Saudi military students who were part of the same programs as the Saudi student who carried out a mass shooting at Pensacola airbase. Bill Barr says the students had jihadist materials and child porn.
  9. The Taal volcano erupts in the Philippines, triggering dozens of earthquakes and dropping ash across the country. Towns near the volcano evacuate, and airports and schools are closed.
  10. Protestors in Chile are back in the streets to protest small pensions, a fragile safety net, and police brutality against protestors.
  11. Protests increase in Lebanon against their crippling economic crisis.
  12. Amid catastrophic fires in Australia, protests spring up there to fight their government’s inaction on climate change.
  13. Protests continue in India against their new anti-Muslim citizenship rules.
  14. The transport workers strike in France is in its 7th week, and this week, thousands more join the protest. They’re striking for pension reform.
  15. After Iranians take to the streets to mourn the death of General Soleimani, Iranians take to the streets again to protest the Iranian military shooting down a passenger jet.

Iran:

Justification for Targeting Soleimani:

  1. In the days since Trump authorized the strike against Iranian General Soleimani, we still don’t have a solid picture of why the decision was made. This leads to doubt over whether there was an imminent threat.
  2. First the Trump administration said the threat was imminent, but they couldn’t say how imminent or where the target was.
  3. Then they said to look at what Soleimani had been doing the days before the strike.
  4. Then Trump says Iran was going to blow up our embassy.
  5. Mike Pompeo says that we don’t know when or where, but the threat was real.
  6. But then, nearly a week after the strike, Trump says Soleimani was planning attacks on four of our embassies. But no U.S. embassy security officials at the State Department were notified of the threat. The State Department did send out a warning to embassies before the attack, but it didn’t mention any specific embassies nor did it mention an imminent threat.
  7. Then Trump says we targeted Soleimani because Iran killed one of our contractors (an Iraqi-American). Where was that outrage when Saudi Arabia killed Jamal Khashoggi, a U.S. citizen? Or when North Korea killed Otto Warmbier?
  8. But then Mike Esper says he saw no evidence that Iran was targeting four embassies. Esper does say that embassies would be a likely target since they’re so prominent.
  9. When officials finally briefed the Gang of Eight, they didn’t mention anything about four embassies.
  10. Members of Congress get a private briefing about the Soleimani strike. Coming out, Senators Mike Lee (R-UT) and Rand Paul (R-KY) rip the administration for what Lee calls the worst briefing he’s ever seen. Lee says they were warned not to debate Trump’s war powers because it would embolden Iran.
    • According to Lee, the officials were “unable or unwilling to identify any point” at which they’d come to Congress for authorization of military force.
    • Both Lee and Paul say they weren’t open to a resolution limiting Trump’s war powers before the briefing, but they are now.
    • Defense Secretary Mark Esper, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, CIA Director Gina Haspel, and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Mark Milley. handle the briefing. They also brief the House.
  1. The administration used the 2002 war authorization, which authorizes the president to use force against terrorists, to justify the killing. But this was never designed to justify killing foreign officials.
  2. After 10 days, we still don’t have a solid answer to why Trump authorized the killing now.

Trump Threatens War Crimes:

  1. The administration can’t keep their stories straight on bombing Iran’s cultural sites. Trump says he’ll do it (that’s a war crime). Pompeo says the U.S. would only look at lawful targets. And then Trump says, “They’re allowed to kill our people. They’re allowed to torture and maim our people. They’re allowed to use roadside bombs and blow up our people, and we’re not allowed to touch their cultural site? It doesn’t work that way.”
  2. But then the next day, Secretary of Defense Mark Esper says we won’t strike cultural targets because it’s a war crime.
  3. Finally Trump relents, and says that he’ll abide by the law.

Should We Stay Or Should We Go Now?

  1. The administration can’t keep their plans for our troops straight. The U.S. commander of coalition forces in Iraq accidentally sends the Iraqi government a letter announcing the repositioning of U.S. forces and preparation to move out of Iraq. He sends both an English and an Arabic version, which don’t match. The letter says, in part, “we respect your sovereign decision to order our departure.”
  2. Esper and Joint Chiefs Chair General Mark Milley scramble to deny that we’re pulling our troops out of Iraq.
  3. Iraq’s Prime Minister says he considers the letter to be the official U.S. position, and he asks Pompeo to send a delegation over to discuss plans for withdrawing our troops.
  4. This is important, along with the Iraqi parliament’s vote to expel U.S. troops, because one of Iran’s primary objectives is to force U.S. troops out of Iraq.

Aftermath:

  1. Hours after the strike against Soleimani, the Trump administration sent a message to Iran telling them not to escalate. The message was sent via the Swiss Embassy in Iran. While Iran and the U.S. kept up a rational correspondence through the Swiss, politicians from both countries fired up the people with their public hyperbole.
  2. Iran retaliates against the Soleimani strike by launching ballistic missiles at two military bases in Iraq that house U.S. troops. Officials say there were no causalities.
  3. Iraq and the U.S. had advance warning of the strikes, and they were intended to let Iran save face by launching strikes but causing minimal casualties.
  4. A senior commander in Iran’s army promises harsher retaliations. Another commander says this is just the beginning.
  5. A Ukraine International Airlines passenger jet crashes on its way out of Tehran, killing all 176 people on board. Initial reports indicate mechanical issues, but Trump says he expects something else.
    • Despite Iran’s repeated denials, U.S. officials suspect the worst—that the plane was accidentally shot down by Iranian missiles. And this does turn out to be the case.
    • As soon as Ayatollah Khamenei announces that, the goodwill the Iranian government gained over the killing of Soleimani was gone and protestors took to the streets to protest the shooting down of the plane. Protestors call for Iranian leadership, including the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, to step down.
    • Side note: I’d hate to be the guy who launched the missile that took down the plane for so many awful reasons.
    • We can keep going around in circles about who’s fault it is, but it’s both Iran’s and the U.S.’s. If we hadn’t killed Soleimani, it never would’ve happened. If Iran wasn’t a bad global neighbor, we wouldn’t have killed Soleimani. But seriously, why didn’t they ground their planes during an airstrike?
    • The downing of the plane brings Canada into the picture, as there were a lot of Canadians on board and Iranian students heading to schools in Canada. And it brings Ukraine into the picture as well, obviously.
    • Ukraine says they knew before Iran announced it that the plane was shot down, but they held off providing their evidence, letting Iran figure it out on their own. Ukraine and Iran have already agreed on full legal cooperation and compensation issues.

What Else Happened:

  1. Trump sends another 2,500 U.S. Marines to the Middle East.
  2. The Trump administration denies a visa to Iran’s top diplomat, who was supposed to address the UN Security Council this week. Iran says that it violates our UN host agreement.
  3. Steven Mnuchin announces sanctions on Iran, but seems to be working toward de-escalation in his public remarks. For its part, Iran says they don’t want any escalation or war.
  4. Trump calls on the other signatories to the JCPOA to withdraw. We can’t have that agreement hanging around that actually suspended Iran’s nuclear development.
  5. Trump thinks he can make another nuclear agreement with Iran. But why would they sign onto another deal with us?
  6. Trump says that as long as he’s president, Iran will never be allowed to have nuclear weapons. Then only reason Iran hasn’t developed nuclear weapons by this point is that they’ve been complying with the JCPOA, which Trump broke. Here’s an in-depth history of Iran’s weapons development.
  7. Mike Pence highlights the distrustful relationship between Trump and Congress when he says that the intelligence was too sensitive to share about the Soleimani killing. That’s what the Gang of Eight is for. Pence repeats the dubious claim that Soleimani was planning an imminent attack.
  8. The House passes a resolution asserting that Trump has to get Congressional approval before using further military action against Iran. It’s a symbolic gesture since the resolution is non-binding.
    • In response, Trump tells rally-goers that he has no obligation to give Congress advance warning. He says they’ll just leak it to the media.
  1. Senator Tim Kaine introduces a similar proposal in the Senate, which faces an uphill battle.
  2. The ongoing conflict in the region holds up humanitarian aid to thousands of refugees in Iraq.
  3. On the same day that the military carried out the strike on Soleimani, they carried out another attack against an Iranian military official in Yemen.
    • It was unsuccessful.
    • It raises questions of whether there really was an imminent attack or if the attack on Soleimani was part of a larger effort to cripple Iran’s Revolutionary Guard.
  1. Trump warns Iraq that the U.S. will cut their access to their central bank account if they expel U.S. forces. The account is held at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
  2. Instagram and Facebook begin removing all posts expressing support for Soleimani, saying they violate the sanctions against Iran.
  3. In April, the U.S. designated the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) a foreign terrorist organization. If it’s allowable under international law to designate a foreign government’s military as a terrorist organization, Trump has an argument for the strike. But I don’t think we’d want other countries designating the Marines as a terrorist organization just so they can take out the leadership. Just thinking out loud here.
  4. Russia offers Iraq an air defense system to help Iraqis ensure their own sovereignty.

Border Wall/Shutdown/National Emergency:

  1. An Arizona state legislator introduces a bill that would allow property owners at the southern border to build sections of the wall on their own property without needing city or county permits. The bill is actually intended to help a group called We Build the Wall, a privately funded group that wants to build the wall themselves.
  2. A panel of federal judges temporarily lifts a block from a lower court on the $3.6 billion Trump took from the Pentagon to build his border wall.

Travel Ban/Immigration/Discrimination:

  1. A Delaware man spray paints “God wills it” in Latin on a Planned Parenthood building and throws a lit Molotov cocktail at it. The man’s social media posts show him to be pro-Christian, anti-abortion, anti-LGBT, anti-refugee, and pro-white supremacy.
  2. Ahead of the upcoming vote in the Virginia state legislature to pass the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), the Justice Department issues a statement saying that the process has expired and it’s too late to ratify it anyway.
    • ERA supporters file a lawsuit about that, saying that because the deadline was included in legislation authorizing ratification of the amendment and not in the amendment itself, the deadline is non-binding. I hope they’re right. I don’t want the rug pulled out from under me again.
  1. Trump is renewing his focus on immigration—both legal and not—and wants to expand the Muslim ban. The affected countries are redacted from documents, so we don’t know who they’re targeting.
  2. Under Trump’s new refugee rules, Texas Governor Greg Abbott announces that the state won’t accept new refugees. Texas is the first state to do so; a county in Minnesota became the first county to do so. Religious groups and other non-profits file a lawsuit against Abbott to fight his decision.
  3. The Trump administration is deporting asylum-seeking Mexicans, El Salvadorans, and Hondurans, but not to their home countries. They’re deporting them to Guatemala! A super safe place for a refugee, right?

Climate:

  1. A 2007 report by the UN’s IPCC predicted the catastrophic 2019/2020 fire season in Australia. To quote from the report:
    “An increase in fire danger in Australia is likely to be associated with a reduced interval between fires, increased fire intensity, a decrease in fire extinguishments and faster fire spread. … In south-east Australia, the frequency of very high and extreme fire danger days is likely to rise 4-25% by 2020.”
  2. 2019 registers as the second hottest year on record, finishing off the hottest decade on record. The past five years averaged 2 to 2.2 degrees higher than the benchmark preindustrial levels and above the Paris Accord’s goals.
  3. On the bright side, greenhouse gas emissions from the U.S. declined a bit in 2019. Data research relates the decrease to a drop in the use of coal. An increase in the use of natural gas somewhat offset the savings made by using less coal.
  4. A new study estimates that shifting from coal to gas prevented about 26,610 deaths related to heart and respiratory problems.
  5. The Keystone XL isn’t the only unpopular pipeline. Activists have been fighting the Atlantic Coast Pipeline, which would deliver shale oil from West Virginia to the North Carolina coast. The status of the pipeline has been in question since 2013, and a federal court just overturned one of the developer’s permits.

Budget/Economy:

  1. The Institute for Supply Management reported an increase in its non-manufacturing index and a continued decrease in the manufacturing index. This indicates that the services sector is strong; the manufacturing sector, not so much.
  2. Tom Donahue, long-time CEO of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce urges bipartisan support for issues like climate change and investing in infrastructure. Interestingly enough, the Chamber under his watch has fought climate change and environmental regulations, along with workplace discrimination regulations and raising the minimum wage.
  3. The New York Fed keeps pumping money into the repo market—so far more than $1 trillion in temporary financing. This means banks don’t have enough liquid assets, and the Fed is helping them out.
    • Normally, this is a quantitative easing move, but right now the back up is caused by the government’s unexpectedly large budget deficits.

Elections:

  1. Mike Pompeo has been toying with running for Senate in Kansas, but this week he says he doesn’t plan to run. That leaves Kris Kobach as the Republican candidate with the highest name recognition. Kobach is extremely popular with the hard right, but extremely unpopular with everybody else.
  2. Representative Duncan Hunter (R-CA) finally resigns from Congress following his December 3 guilty plea. He’s getting off easy because he was charged with 60 felony counts and he only pleaded guilty to one.
    • Several out-of-district Republicans are vying for his seat, including former Representative Darrell Issa.
    • It’s really notable that the district re-elected Hunter despite the fact that he was charged with those 60 felonies BEFORE the 2018 elections.
    • It’s also really notable that he immediately threw his wife under the bus when he was charged, and unsurprisingly she later agreed to cooperate with the prosecution.
    • Despite his plea, he won’t own up to any wrongdoing and continues to excuse his actions.
    • Hunter’s seat will remain empty until 2021.
  1. Steve Mnuchin pushes to delay the disclosure of the money spent on the Secret Service for presidential travel until after the 2020 presidential election.
    • In January 2019, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) reported that it cost federal agencies $13.6 million for four trips to Mar-a-Lago during one month-long period in 2017.

Miscellaneous:

  1. Defense Secretary Mark Esper’s chief of staff, Eric Chewning, resigns. Chewning has worked for three defense secretaries since January 2019.
    • Chewning was a participant in the newly released email threads showing how worried Pentagon officials were over the holdup in aid to Ukraine.
    • He’s the sixth high-level DOD official to resign in the past month; five DOD officials resigned within a one-week period in December 2019.
  1. Trump approves a declaration of emergency for Puerto Rico after the island experiences a series of sizable earthquakes. The island is still struggling to recover from hurricanes Irma and Maria in 2017.
  2. A New York State Supreme Court judge denies Trump’s request to dismiss E. Jean Carroll’s defamation lawsuit against him. Trump’s lawyers say she can’t sue Trump in New York because he made the allegedly defamatory statements in Washington D.C.

Polls:

  1. 56% of Americans disapprove of how Trump is handling Iran. 55% say killing Soleimani has made us less safe. 52% say Trump’s actions were reckless.
  2. 57% of Americans think Trump committed an impeachable offense, and 52% think he should be removed from office.
  3. A Pew Research Center survey shows a median of 64% of adults in 32 countries don’t trust Trump to do the right thing when it comes to world affairs.
    • Confidence in Obama in 2016 was at 74%, compared to Trump’s high of 31%.
    • Trump has pockets of support in the Philippines, Israel, Kenya, Nigeria, India, and Poland.
  1. Mike Pence, Donald Trump Jr., Nikki Halley, and Ivanka are the GOP’s top choices for the presidential nomination in 2020.

Week 155 in Trump – Impeachment News

Posted on January 21, 2020 in Impeachment, Trump

I‘m still catching up from the holidays, so this is my latest impeachment recap from two weeks ago.

Here’s what happened on the impeachment front for the week ending January 12…

General Happenings:

  1. John Bolton says he’ll testify in the impeachment trial if the Senate subpoenas him. He doesn’t respond when asked if he’d testify if the House subpoenas him again. Trump says he’ll invoke executive privilege if the Senate subpoenas Bolton.
  2. The Senate isn’t likely to call any witnesses unless Democrats can get at least four Republicans to agree to it.
  3. Mitch McConnell says he won’t commit to calling new witnesses or admit new evidence. He says he has the votes to approve trial rules without any votes from Democrats.
    • Factcheck: Republicans have been saying that there were no witnesses in the Clinton trial. I don’t know where they got that idea. The Senate voted to table the question of witnesses at the start of the trial (just like now), and then later voted to call witnesses. After deposing three witnesses, the Senate voted to use the depositions instead of having them appear in the Senate.
  1. McConnell signs on to Senator Josh Hawley’s (R-MO) resolution to dismiss the articles of impeachment for failure to prosecute (implying that the House didn’t do its job).
    • Hawley brought up the resolution because Nancy Pelosi still has the articles of impeachment and is waiting to find out the rules of the Senate trial so she can appoint the House managers for the trial.
    • It doesn’t look like the resolution made it to a vote, and it would require a two-thirds vote to pass unless McConnell uses the nuclear option.
  1. A majority of Americans want Trump’s top aides who were involved in the Ukraine issue to testify.
  2. A few Democrats in the Senate call on Pelosi to hand over the articles of impeachment, but Pelosi says she’ll send them to the Senate next week. She asks Jerry Nadler to name the impeachment managers.
  3. The State Department has yet another high-level defection. Michael McKinley, a career diplomat and senior advisor to Mike Pompeo, resigns. McKinley was disappointed in Pompeo’s lack of public support for his diplomats.
  4. Trump and McConnell meet in private to discuss the details of the Senate trial. Their offices have been working together to determine the structure of the trial. So much for a system of checks and balances.

Week 154 in Trump – Impeachment News

Posted on January 16, 2020 in Impeachment, Trump

It was a quiet week for impeachment news this week. But the Washington Post did publish the illustrated Mueller Report, which is pretty impressive. I guess they figured we couldn’t follow the storyline unless they published it as part storybook, part graphic novel. Take a look at it here.

Here’s what happened on the impeachment front for the week ending January 5…

General Happenings:

  1. Newly unredacted emails from a FOIA request show that Office of Management and Budget officials told the Pentagon that the order to keep military aid to Ukraine frozen came directly from Trump. One of those officials, Mike Duffy, even said that the Pentagon would be to blame if the money was not spent (the Pentagon was trying really hard to spend that money).
  2. A judge dismisses a lawsuit brought by a former national security aide over whether he should ignore Trump’s orders not to testify before Congress. The judge says the case is moot since the House withdrew their subpoena.
  3. Despite a judge’s approval of a FOIA request requiring the White House to release documents related to Ukraine’s military aid, the Office of Management and Budget says they won’t turn over 40 emails between high-level officials. Not even with redactions.

More Trouble for Parnas, Fruman, and Giuliani:

  1. Lev Parnas turns over his iPhone data and documentary evidence to the House Intelligence Committee after a court ruling allows it.
  2. It turns out that Ukraine wasn’t Giuliani’s first back-channel rodeo. In September 2018, he called the president of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro. He also worked with then-Rep. Pete Sessions (R-TX) to give their Maduro an exit from power (and open Venezuela to U.S. business interests).

Week 153 in Trump – Impeachment News

Posted on January 12, 2020 in Impeachment, Trump

Thankfully, the holiday break also gave us a little break from the onslaught of impeachment news. But the New York Times pulled together a lot of the information we’ve learned over the past several months and published it in one big article. So I recapped that this week as well. And before you say ‘but the NYT is biased,’ everything in that article is verifiable with other sources.

Here’s what happened on the impeachment front for the week ending December 29…

General Happenings:

  1. Trump retweets a tweet identifying a person alleged to be the whistleblower. The original tweet is from an account that’s been removed several times for being a Russia-backed account. The tweet briefly disappears after a glitch, so people think Trump deleted it. He didn’t—it came back up.
    • Donald Trump Jr. has also spread the name, as have conservative news outlets. Outing a whistleblower is against the law unless you’re the president.
  1. Mitch McConnell says he hasn’t ruled out hearing witness testimony in a Senate trial, but he won’t agree to it in advance.
  2. Pelosi continues to hold on to the articles of impeachment, saying the House needs to know what kind of trial will be conducted to know how many House managers to assign. Republicans say Democrats are delaying because their case is so thin.
  3. The White House floats the argument that Trump isn’t impeached because the House hasn’t sent the articles of impeachment to the Senate.
  4. White House aides say Trump is confident he can win the messaging war via Twitter. What? How is messaging even a part of impeachment? Either he did something wrong or he didn’t.
  5. The House Judiciary Committee says they can add articles of impeachment if Don McGahn provides additional evidence. The committee is trying to get a federal appeals court to force McGahn to testify in their investigation into possible obstruction of justice as laid out in the Mueller report.
  6. A few Republican Senators have been making noises about being “disturbed” by Mitch McConnell’s coordination with the White House on the impeachment trial. That doesn’t mean they’ll do anything about it though.

The New York Times Sums It Up:

The New York Times publishes a summary of interviews with dozens of current and former government officials, newly released emails and documents, and the impeachment transcripts, putting it all together in one place.

  1. Here’s a rough timeline of events around withholding military aid to Ukraine:
    • On May 23, Trump pushed back on assurances from Gordon Sondland, Mick Mulvaney, and senior advisor Richard Blair that Ukraine President Zelensky was committed to combatting corruption. Trump said, “They are all corrupt, they are all terrible people.”
    • Blair told the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) on June 19 “we need to hold it up,” talking about the military aid.
    • Top officials learned about the hold by accident in a July 18 meeting, where a midlevel OMB official spilled the tea. After that meeting, the House Foreign Affairs Committee received four calls asking them to look into the hold.
    • On July 25, Trump and Zelensky have “the” phone call where Trump asked for a favor, though. He wanted Zelensky to look into Biden and into Ukraine interference in the 2016 election. This was the same day the actual request to freeze the aid happened and the same day that Ukraine seized a Russian tanker, a possible escalation in hostilities. A day Ukraine needed our support to be seen as having strong backing.
    • The weekend before the Pentagon’s deadline to spend the budgeted money (August 12), Mulvaney tried to schedule a call with Trump, who was at his New Jersey country club. But he had to hold up that meeting so Trump could golf with golf pro John Daly (on August 12).
    • On August 16, Bolton appealed to Trump to release the aid, bringing him a memo saying that the Nation Security Council, the Pentagon, and the State Department all wanted the aid released.
    • On August 28, Politico published their story about the aid being withheld, making the issue public.
    • On August 31, Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) calls Trump to ask about whether the aid was contingent on getting a commitment to pursue investigations. Johnson says Trump told him it wasn’t. Around this time, Trump also learned about the whistleblower complaint.
    • On September 1, Zelensky asked Mike Pence about the aid being blocked, and Pence told him to talk to Trump. On the same day, Sondland told Zelensky’s aides that they shouldn’t expect to see any aid until they publicly announce the requested investigations.
    • On September 9, three House committees announced they were opening investigations into the freeze on military aid.
    • On September 11, Trump agreed to release the aid.
  1. But while all that was going on, these things also happened:
    • Richard Blair told Mulvaney that he could expect Congress to become “unhinged” if the administration withheld the aid designated by Congress for Ukraine. The same adviser warned that it would also make Trump look even more pro-Russia.
    • Trump’s demands for investigations created conflict and confusion in the State Department, White House, and Pentagon.
    • Opposition to the order to withhold aid from Ukraine was stronger than previously reported. Defense Secretary Mark Esper, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and national security advisor John Bolton met with Trump to try to dissuade him.
    • Trump didn’t announce he was withholding aid publicly, he didn’t tell Congress, and he didn’t tell Ukraine (though Congress and Ukraine figured it out on their own).
    • The OMB spent months trying to come up with a reasonable justification for withholding the aid.
    • The involved officials raised questions about the legality, but those concerns were brushed aside.
    • Some officials claimed ignorance or said they didn’t put it together that there were two different channels working on Ukraine. Bill Taylor took about five minutes to figure it out, so I don’t buy their claims of ignorance.
    • Mick Mulvaney removed himself from meetings so he could legitimately say he didn’t know the whole story. But Sondland’s testimony indicates that Mulvaney was aware of the bigger picture.
    • The OMB and the Pentagon’s top budget official were at odds over this.
    • People who questioned the hold or pushed back on it were told they just had to hold the aid for now until they could revisit the issue with Trump. This indicates to me that most of the people involved knew it was wrong but didn’t know how to say no to Trump.
    • One thing that made it tricky to justify the hold was the Pentagon had already certified that Ukraine met the requirements. The Pentagon had already notified Congress it intended to spend the money as specified.
    • Mark Sandy, who controls the flow of money at the Pentagon, was asked to attach a footnote to his approval noting the hold—something he’d never done in 12 years working there.
    • The White House removed Mark Sandy’s control over the aid freeze and gave it to a political appointee, Mike Duffey, who issued several subsequent temporary holds.
    • Diplomats and foreign officials were working on the issue, as was Giuliani, during the time the aid was being withheld and just prior to it.
    • Throughout this all, officials were talking to a CIA agent who was able to put all the threads together, culminating in the whistleblower report.
    • Disagreements flared through August and September, some OMB officials resigned, John Bolton resigned, the Pentagon continued to fight for the release of aid, and the White House continued to search for legal justification for the hold.
    • Even Republican Senators pushed Trump to release the aid. 

Week 152 in Trump

Posted on January 11, 2020 in Politics, Trump

Trump joins an elite club.

I’m posting some long overdue recaps. Sorry for the delay. This was the month I became overwhelmed by the number of political happenings, and I lost the threads of the stories.

Trump is in a bit of a bind this week, with wanting to call the Democratic members of the House “do-nothing Democrats” and at the same time wanting to brag about all the things he’s accomplishing. He can’t accomplish a lot without working with House Democrats. But his coup de grace this week is this tweet: “IN REALITY THEY’RE NOT AFTER ME. THEY’RE AFTER YOU. I’M JUST IN THE WAY.” This goes beyond partisan politics and is incredibly divisive, even dangerous. I was reading a thread the other day about how Obama was the most divisive president. I welcome any comments pointing out what he ever said that comes close to the things like this that Trump says. The only thing anyone seems to come up with is his comment about clinging to guns and religion. One comment. Trump does this every single day.

Here’s what happened in politics for the week ending December 22…

Missing From Last Week:

  1. Earlier this month, dozens of graves in a Jewish cemetery were vandalized with swastikas and antisemitic graffiti in France. There was a rash of antisemitic activity 2019 in both the U.S. and Europe, to the point where Jewish people go to lengths to conceal themselves.

Shootings This Week:

  1. There were EIGHT mass shootings in the U.S. this week (defined as killing and/or injuring 4 or more people). Shooters kill 7 people and injure 44 more.
    • In Great Falls, MT, a shooter kills 3 people and injures 1 other. Police kill the shooter.
    • In San Antonio, TX, a shooter in a mall injures 4 people.
    • In Tuskegee, AL, a shooter kills 2 people and injures 2 more.
    • In Waynesboro, MS, a drive-by shooter kills 1 teenage boy and injures 6 other people.
    • In Edgard, LA, a shooter injures 4 people at an after-hours party at an elementary school. Weird.
    • In Chicago, IL, a shooter injures 13 people at a memorial celebration in a private home.
    • In Minneapolis, MN, a shooter kills 1 person and injures 7 others in an altercation that broke out in a parking lot.
    • In Baltimore, MD, multiple shooters injure 7 people in what appears to be a drive-by shooting.
  1. Congressional leaders reach a bipartisan deal to fund research into gun violence for the first time in more than two decades. It has yet to pass both chambers.

Russia:

  1. The State Department sends a letter to a Senate leader stating the administration’s opposition to Lindsey Graham’s bill that would impose new sanctions against Russia. The sanctions would punish Russia for targeting Ukraine, interfering in our 2016 elections, their attacks on its own dissidents, and their activities in Syria.
  2. Former White House and government officials say they’re perplexed by Trump’s focus on Ukraine instead of Russia as the party that interfered in our 2016 elections. At one point, Trump told White House officials that he believes Ukraine is the guilty party because “Putin told me.” So if you were wondering whether Putin influences Trump’s thoughts, wonder no more.
    • After Trump met with Putin in July 2017 in Hamburg (at the G20 summit), he became more insistent that it was Ukraine and not Russia. Now we know why.
  1. Here’s the genesis of the Ukraine theories:
    • In the summer of 2016, Paul Manafort suggested to Trump campaign aides that Ukraine was behind the DNC hack. (Multiple investigations by multiple agencies found the culprit was Russia.)
    • In early 2017, Putin claimed that Ukrainians helped Clinton in 2016, specifically Ukraine oligarchs. (One oligarch did donate millions to the Clinton Foundation, but he also donated to the Trump Foundation. There’s no evidence they helped her campaign.)
    • State-run media, Russia Today, pushed the theory that a DNC operative was in Ukraine working for the Clinton campaign to dig up dirt. (She was a DNC consultant working on her own to follow up on a lead she came across while working for another client.)
    • In April 2017, Trump alleged that CrowdStrike is based in Ukraine and is hiding a DNC server from the FBI. (CrowdStrike is the computer security company that investigated the hacking of the DNC computer, the owner isn’t from Ukraine, and there is no physical server.)
    • And that’s how you get a conspiracy theory, folks.
  1. U.S. Attorney John Durham, who is investigating the Russia investigation for Attorney General Bill Barr, requests emails, call logs, and other evidence regarding John Brennan’s role in the investigation.
  2. Rick Gates receives a sentence of 45 days in jail, to be served on weekends. He must also pay a $20,000 fine for conspiracy against the U.S. and for lying to the FBI and Robert Mueller. He’s on three years of probation and must serve 300 hours of community service. Gates cooperated extensively with the investigations, and could have received nearly five years in prison otherwise.
  3. Paul Manafort is sent to the hospital after experiencing a “cardiac event.” He’s released soon after and is back in federal custody. He’s suffered poor health since his arrest.

Legal Fallout:

  1. Cell phone records support Summer Zervos’ account of her allegations of sexual assault against Trump, at least as far as time and location go.
  2. A New York judge dismisses mortgage fraud charges brought by the state against Paul Manafort, saying the case violates double-jeopardy rules. The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office is working to make sure Manafort does his time even if Trump pardons him for federal crimes.
  3. A newly released report finds that a Washington State Representative, Republican Matt Shea, took part in an “act of domestic terrorism” when he helped plan the 2016 takeover of Oregon’s Malheur National Wildlife Refuge.
    • He participated in at least two other armed standoffs against the U.S. government.
    • He has also condoned violence against his political opponents.
    • He is suspended from the House Republican caucus. Shouldn’t he be in jail?
    • He refuses to step down.

Impeachment:

Including all this info just makes this too long, so I moved it out into its own post. You can skip right over to it if that’s your focus.

Courts/Justice:

  1. The Senate confirms 12 more Trump-appointed judges. This brings the total for 2019 to 20 circuit judges and 67 district judges. He’s had over 170 federal judges confirmed so far in his term.

Healthcare:

  1. A U.S. Court of Appeals strikes down the individual mandate of the ACA as unconstitutional and orders a lower court to review the ACA to see how much of the law must go down with the mandate.
    • The lower court previously ruled that the entire ACA should be struck down.
    • This puts people with pre-existing conditions in jeopardy of not being able to obtain health insurance (yet again).
  1. Food inspectors warn that under Trump’s new rules, pork won’t be inspected as closely as normal, if at all. The new rules reduce the number of federal inspectors and allow plant employees to inspect the carcasses themselves. There are no requirements that the employees be federally trained.
    • Multiple inspectors have filed whistleblower reports.
    • This affects about 90% of the pork in the U.S.
  1. Kentucky’s new Democratic governor rescinds the state’s work requirements for Medicaid.

International:

  1. The annual survey by the Council on Foreign Relations shows that foreign policy experts and U.S. government officials consider more scenarios to be in the top tier of security risk than at any time in the past 11 years. The issues mostly center on Trump’s inconsistency in the Middle East, but also include North Korea; migration from El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala; tensions between Russia and Ukraine; and conflicts with China in the South China Sea.
  2. UN climate negotiations fall apart over the uncertainty of American involvement and a rift between developing nations and fast-growing economies (like China and India). Foreign leaders are hesitant to make any moves before finding out whether Trump gets re-elected in 2020.
  3. Britain’s elections all but ensure that Brexit will happen, giving global economies a little more certainty (even if it’s not the certainty they wanted). That, along with an easing of the U.S. trade war with China, bolsters business confidence for now.
  4. Britain’s Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, says his priority is to leave the EU by January 31, 2020. Britain will then need to renegotiate all their trade deals.
  5. After both the House and Senate vote to recognize the Armenian Genocide, the Trump administration says their view on it hasn’t changed from Trump’s previous statements where he didn’t recognize it as genocide. Trump says he’s a big fan of Turkish president Erdogan, and the White House convinced different senators to block the resolution three times.

Legislation/Congress:

  1. Less than two days after the House impeaches Trump, Speaker Pelosi invites Trump to give his State of the Union address on February 4.
  2. The House passes a bill to lower prescription drug prices and allow Medicare to negotiate prices. Medicare can then use those savings to expand other healthcare coverage for seniors.

Border Wall/Shutdown/National Emergency:

  1. File this under “what goes around comes around.” A judge in Texas has been quoting from a legislative provision created by House Republicans in 2014 to stymie Obama’s budgetary authority. The provision requires the president to clear any reduction in funding with Congress.
  2. The top Democratic senator on the Armed Services Committee, Jack Reed, requests an investigation into the contracts to build the border wall in light of the information coming out about North Dakota company Fisher Industries.
    • Aside from Fisher’s own controversial business dealings, ND Senator Kevin Cramer held up the confirmation of a Trump nominee for an Office of Management and Budget position over the Army Corps of Engineers panning the proposal from Fisher.
    • Fisher has a history of tax evasion, pollution citations, and environmental fines, and their previous CEO was charged with child pornography.
    • Fisher ultimately received a contract to build a portion of the wall.
  1. According to a Fox poll, the wall is not a popular issue:
    • 68% of Americans approve of Elizabeth Warren’s wealth tax compared to 44% who approve of the wall.
    • Over 50% of Americans want to see Trump impeached compared to 44% who approve of the wall.
    • Approval for the wall beats approval of a Medicare for All system by only 3 percentage points. This is the only thing on the poll that is less popular than the wall.

Travel Ban/Immigration/Discrimination:

  1. Stephen Miller has been trying to implement a plan to embed iCE agents in the refugee agency that’s responsible for caring for unaccompanied migrant minors. Thankfully, DHHS rejected this, but the department agrees to allow ICE to collect biometric information, like fingerprints, from adults who claim the children. So they’re stepping up their efforts to use migrant children to deport adults.
    • My two cents: If it costs over $700 per day to detain a migrant minor, why wouldn’t we want to release them to their family members, who will then take over the responsibility of supporting them? There are more effective methods of deportation.
    • Also, U.S. law restricts the use of our refugee program to deport undocumented immigrants.
  1. ICE has been reopening deportation cases against Dreamers that have been long since closed. Some cases have been closed for nearly a decade, and don’t involve criminal activity. ICE confirms that they are reopening these cases.
  2. After video at the Army-Navy football game catches West Point cadets and Naval Academy midshipmen flashing hand gestures that appear to be a racist signal, the internal investigations find there was no racist intent. The Army and Navy say the students were playing a silly game. The gesture is similar to an OK signal, and is considered to represent “white power.”
  3. The Senate removes the phrase “white supremacist” from a House amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act. The phrase had been added to address the threat of white nationalists in the military, and was part of the screening process for enlistees.
  4. Outgoing Kentucky governor, Matt Bevin, defends his pardon of a man convicted of raping a 9-year-old girl by saying that the child’s hymen was intact so there couldn’t have been any sexual assault.
    • Medical professionals say Bevin doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
    • The rapist served less than two years of his 23-year sentence. Bevin commuted sentences for other convicted rapists as well.

Climate:

  1. Newly released emails show that a mining company collaborated with Alaska’s governor to lobby the Trump administration to approve a mining project deemed by the EPA to be a danger to the most valuable wild salmon habitat. And by “collaborated,” I mean the mining company told Governor Dunleavy exactly what to say and write to get the project approved.
  2. A crane falls onto a barge near the Galápagos Islands, potentially spilling over 600 gallons of diesel into the water. The islands are a UNESCO World Heritage site.
  3. The Trump administration blocks a rule to require Americans to use energy-efficient light bulbs.
  4. Environmental groups sue the Trump administration over the loosening of rules that regulate chemical plant safety. This comes after an explosion at a Texas plant that injured several people.
  5. Several states file a lawsuit challenging Trump’s release of the Clean Water Rule, an Obama-era regulation that clarified the protections around federal waterways.
  6. Goldman Sachs say they won’t finance new oil exploration and drilling in the Arctic and that they won’t invest in new thermal coal mines anywhere.
  7. A group of Eastern states releases a draft plan for curbing tailpipe emissions with a cap-and-trade program.
  8. NOAA officials announce a $100 million program to restore seven coral reef sites in the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary. They’ll have to raise both public and private funds to do it.
  9. Communities across the country, including some by military bases, are finding extremely high levels of PFAS in their drinking water. The Department of Defense is responsible for cleaning these sites up, but they’ve been slow to do it.
    • PFAS is a family of chemicals defined by carbon-fluoride bonds, which are the strongest bonds in nature. This means the chemicals do not degrade, but they do cause a host of health problems.

Budget/Economy:

  1. Despite a strong national economy, poverty grew in 30% of counties from 2016 to 2018. At least one county in every state saw an increase in poverty. Still, the overall poverty rate dropped by one percentage point, from 13% to 12%. The biggest increases in poverty were in rural and Southern areas.
  2. The House passes the revised version of NAFTA, with the changes they negotiated. The bill now goes to the Senate. The agreement isn’t much changed, but includes some of the provisions outlined in the TPP (which Trump pulled us out of).
    • The revised agreement updates country of origin rules for tariffs, labor provisions, access to Canada‘s dairy market for U.S. farmers, intellectual property rules, and digital trade rules. It also adds a sunset clause, so it expires after 16 years.
  1. The stock market has a strong showing after Trump is impeached. I’m not sure what to take away from that other than that investors seem to be ignoring politics.
  2. Two years into the Trump administration’s tax cuts, they haven’t started to pay for themselves and the deficit hit nearly $1 trillion for FY2019. Corporate tax receipts are down by more than 20% since 2017. Individual income tax receipts are up around 8%.
  3. The tax cuts also didn’t boost economic growth as predicted.
  4. The Supreme Court refuses to hear a homelessness case, which keeps in place a lower court ruling that protects the rights of the homeless to sleep on sidewalks and in public parks if no shelter is available. This thwarts some Western cities in their efforts to clean up their streets.
  5. Trump signs the spending bill passed by the House and Senate after they remove wording requiring the prompt disbursement of future military aid to Ukraine. Trump signs the bill just in time to avoid yet another government shutdown.

Elections:

  1. A federal judge allows Georgia to go ahead with its purge of around 4% of its voters from the rolls, but he also schedules an information hearing. Just a note, in my experience (which isn’t vast), most of the voters removed from the rolls have moved or are deceased, but a handful is surprised to learn they’re no longer registered to vote.
  2. Facebook removes more than 600 accounts related to The Epoch Times for using fake identities created by artificial intelligence to push conspiracy theories in support of Trump.
    • The network was run by Vietnamese people posing as Americans, and had over 55 million followers.
    • Practitioners of Falun Gong run The Epoch Times, and they believe Judgement Day is coming soon and all Communists will be sent to hell.
  1. North Carolina Republican Mark Meadows announces he won’t run for Congress again in 2020. He also implies he’ll be working with the Trump administration.
  2. As the House votes to impeach Trump, he holds a campaign rally in Michigan. He says he’s having a good time, but he speaks for two chaotic hours, criticizing people he views as opponents and denigrating their appearance.
    • He complains about how modern toilets can’t flush and about modern lighting.
    • What Trump speech would be complete without bringing up Lisa Page, Peter Strzok, and James Comey?
    • He still complains about Hillary Clinton, which inspires chants of “Lock her up!” all over again. But then he praises Bill Clinton. Weird.
    • The crowd at least seems uneasy when Trump goes after the widow of former Michigan Rep. John Dingell.
    • He claims credit for us all being able to say Merry Christmas again… to which I can only say https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6d7mTRaUmaE.
  1. A Trump re-election advisor tells a group of Wisconsin Republicans that the GOP has traditionally relied on voter suppression to remain competitive in swing states. He adds that now that election laws have been relaxed, they won’t have to try so hard. He later says he meant that they’ve been falsely accused of voter suppression in the past.
  2. A small group of conservative political operatives launches a super PAC to fight Trump’s re-election. They’ve already raised more than $1 million. It’ll be interesting to see if they stand behind the Democratic nominee, whoever that might be.

Miscellaneous:

  1. Nancy Pelosi invites Trump to deliver his State of the Union speech on the House floor.
  2. Actor Gary Sinise and his foundation take 1,750 family members of fallen troops to Disney World.
  3. Boeing’s CEO steps down over ongoing problems around their Max 737 aircraft.
  4. Trump gets pushback from his own party when he tweets that the media and Democrats are trying to make things difficult for the “United Republican Party.”

Polls:

  1. Trump gets a little boost in approval on the impeachment vote, momentarily hitting its highest level since March of his first year.

Week 152 in Trump – Impeachment News

Posted on January 10, 2020 in Impeachment, Trump

Don't mess with Speaker Pelosi.

Here’s a super late recap of impeachment week.

Trump is working overtime to take the spotlight off impeachment this week. He and House Democrats announce an agreement on the updates to NAFTA, the House passes a package that includes Trump’s Space Force and expands paid parental leave, and Congress announces a spending agreement to avert a government shutdown. Meanwhile, over a dozen major newspaper editorial boards call for Trump’s impeachment.

Here’s what happened on the impeachment front for the week ending December 22…

General Happenings:

  1. Trump sends a letter to Nancy Pelosi blasting the impeachment process. In it, he claims there’s no constitutional basis for the articles of impeachment (there is) and that Democrats are only doing this because they’re still mad about the 2016 election.
    • He even brings up Trump Derangement Syndrome. In official presidential correspondence.
    • He accuses Representative Adam Schiff of lying and cheating. Again, in official presidential correspondence.
    • He repeats so much misinformation about Biden, Ukraine, Zelensky, his accomplishments, Mueller’s investigation, and so on. I don’t have the time to debunk them all, but I did go through his list of accomplishments. Here’s what I found.
    • Word has it that the administration worked for days on this letter, but still it reads like a child with a thesaurus wrote it. You can read it here.
  1. Documents released under a FOIA request show that defense officials and diplomats were worried that the administration was breaking the law by holding up military aid to Ukraine. Unfortunately, the documents are too redacted to get the full story.
    • Emails among the documents show that Trump asked about the Ukraine aid a month before his July 25 call with Zelensky. He had just seen the June 19 article in the Washington Examiner, which triggered the inquiry.
    • After Trump’s inquiry, Michael Duffey requested more information from the Pentagon and told them to keep the inquiry quiet.
    • The documents also show that officials ordered a hold on aid roughly an hour after the call with Zelensky.
  1. Mike Pence refuses to declassify relevant testimony from Jennifer Williams, Pence’s advisor on Russia. Her testimony indicates that Pence might have known about Trump’s plans and activities around Ukraine.
  2. Over 700 historians and legal scholars sign on to an open letter urging the House to impeach. This comes on top of a letter from 500 law professors saying that Trump committed impeachable offenses.
  3. The top U.S. official to Ukraine, Bill Taylor, will leave his post sometime next month. He was a key witness in the impeachment hearings.

House Judiciary Committee:

  1. The House Judiciary Committee releases its report explaining the articles of impeachment.
    • In the report, they accuse Trump of multiple federal crimes and say he betrayed the country by abusing the power of the office.
    • The federal crimes include bribery and wire fraud.
    • The report is long—658 pages—and I’ll just come right out and admit I haven’t read it yet.
  1. The committee recommends two articles of impeachment, which were described in my previous post on impeachment news.

Impeachment Vote:

  1. The night before the impeachment vote, hundreds of thousands of Americans gather in over 500 locations for “Nobody is Above the Law” rallies to call for Trump’s impeachment.

  2. After six hours of debate, the House votes mostly along party lines to impeach Trump on the two articles of impeachment: abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. They call him a national security threat and recommend removing him from office. He’s only the third president in history to be impeached.
  3. Democrats in conservative districts for the most part vote for impeachment. Around three dozen votes were in question, but in the end, only two Democratic Representatives vote against the first article and three vote against the second. (One Democrat, Tulsi Gabbard, votes “Present.”)
    • One of the nay votes, Jeff Van Drew of New Jersey, switched his party affiliation to Republican after polling found that voting against impeachment would make sure his constituents wouldn’t re-elect him.
    • Van Drew blames Democrats for not allowing any differences of opinion in the party, even though his polling was of the people who put him in office.
    • He appears with Trump in a televised meeting and pledges his undying loyalty to Trump.
    • Six of his aides resign on the announcement.
    • I’m not sure how he’s going to do with his newfound conservatism; he’s voted Democratic pretty much all of his career and voted against Trump policies around 90% of the time.
  1. You can read the articles of impeachment here. They aren’t that long.
  2. During the impeachment debate, Rep. Chris Stewart (R-UT) says that Democrats just want to make Hillary Clinton president and warns that they (meaning Republicans) would just impeach the next president.
    • Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY) points out that if Trump is removed, Pence becomes president, not Hillary Clinton. Seriously. Who doesn’t know this?
    • In response, a group of Republicans on the floor starts clapping and cheering. I’m confused. Were they cheering for impeachment? Cheering for Pence getting impeached? It was a weird moment.
  1. Also during the debate, Rep. Barry Loudermilk (R-GA) compares Trump to Jesus, and says, “When Jesus was falsely accused of treason, Pontius Pilate gave Jesus the opportunity to face his accusers. During that sham trial, Pontius Pilate afforded more rights to Jesus than the Democrats have afforded this president in this process.”
    • It’s important to remember that Trump has had opportunities to participate in the impeachment process, but has refused (not just for himself but for his senior aides as well).
  1. Rep. Mike Kelly (R-PA) compares the impeachment to Pearl Harbor.

  2. The debate was such a rumble, that Jennifer Rubin tweets: “The gap in character and intellect between the two parties is stunning.”

Post-Impeachment:

  1. The articles of impeachment now need to be sent to the Senate, but Nancy Pelosi won’t say when she’ll do that.

  2. Mitch McConnell has already said there won’t be a fair trial, so Pelosi is holding on to the articles for now while the Senate decides the rules of the trial.
  3. A group of Democrats wants Nancy Pelosi to hold on to the articles of impeachment to prevent the Senate from discarding the case.
  4. McConnell raises himself to some unexpected hyperbole, calling Pelosi too afraid to transmit “their shoddy work product” and calling the impeachment inquiry “the most rushed, least thorough, and most unfair” in modern history.
  5. McConnell also says Pelosi can keep her articles of impeachment because he doesn’t want a trial.
  6. After Trump is impeached, Putin says the charges against Trump are completely made up and adds:
    • “The Democratic Party, which lost the elections, is now trying to revise this history through the means that they have at their disposal — first by accusing Trump of collusion with Russia. But then it turned out there was no collusion.”
  1. The House tells a federal appeals court that they still need access to the grand jury information that was redacted from the Mueller report. They’re specifically looking for information about Ukraine.
  2. Trump administration officials threaten to veto the spending bill if Congress doesn’t remove language that would require future military aid to Ukraine to be released promptly. The language is ultimately removed, but a veto would’ve caused a government shutdown.
  3. The White House wants to feature Trump’s biggest House allies in the Senate impeachment trial. They’re looking for ways to include Jim Jordan, John Ratcliffe, Mike Johnson, and Mark Meadows. Personally, I’ve had enough of Jim Jordan’s wailing. The first three meet with White House Counsel Pat Cipollone to discuss it.
  4. Senate Democrats want the following to testify in a Senate impeachment hearing, but Mitch McConnell says there will be no witnesses:
    • Mick Mulvaney, White House acting chief of staff
    • Robert Blair, advisor to Mulvaney
    • John Bolton, former national security advisor
    • Michael Duffey, Office of Management and Budget official who took over approving the delays in distributing the aid to Ukraine
  1. McConnell seems to have convinced Trump that a short, two-week trial with no witnesses is in his best interest.
  2. The Evangelical publication Christianity Today starts a small shit storm when it publishes an editorial calling for Trump to be impeached.
    • Christianity Today previously called for Clinton’s and Nixon’s impeachments over their moral failures.
    • While the editorial does concede certain things to Trump, it also says that Trump did abuse the powers of his office and that he’s dumbed down the idea of morality. The editorial includes this warning to evangelical Christians:
    • “Consider how your justification of Mr. Trump influences your witness to your Lord and Savior. Consider what an unbelieving world will say if you continue to brush off Mr. Trump’s immoral words and behavior in the cause of political expediency. If we don’t reverse course now, will anyone take anything we say about justice and righteousness with any seriousness for decades to come? Can we say with a straight face that abortion is a great evil that cannot be tolerated and, with the same straight face, say that the bent and broken character of our nation’s leader doesn’t really matter in the end?”
    • Also, the editor gets called “Christian elite” by critics who take earlier comments by him out of context.
    • In response, the Christian Post publishes a rebuttal, which causes one of their editors to resign.

    • If you have time, this is a great listen. On Point talks to both the author of the editorial and the editor of the Christian Post defending evangelicals.

More Trouble for Giuliani:

  1. The night before the impeachment vote, Giuliani calls New York Times reporter Kenneth Vogel to let him know that both Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo were aware of the smear campaign against former Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch and that they were instrumental in having her removed from her post.
    • Giuliani also told the New Yorker that he needed Yovanovitch out of the way and she was making the investigations difficult for everybody.
    • Even though there’s no evidence of any of this (or if there is, it’s being withheld by the administration for some strange reason), Trump and Pompeo acted on it.
    • He later walks it back and says he didn’t need her out of the way, but she had to be removed because she’s corrupt (again, with no evidence).
  1. Giuliani says he has proof that the impeachment is a coverup for malfeasance by Democrats, but doesn’t explain what he means.
  2. Giuliani suggests that Biden orchestrated the poisoning of Shokin, the former Ukraine prosecutor who was ousted for corruption. Shokin claims he died and then was brought back to life and then was poisoned again and brought back to life again.
  3. Lindsey Graham invites Giuliani to testify to the Senate Judiciary Committee about what he learned on his trip to Ukraine earlier this month.
  4. Giuliani says that Trump is very supportive of him continuing to look in Ukraine for dirt on Democrats.

Week 151 in Trump

Posted on December 19, 2019 in Politics, Trump

This week, we learn that Republican leadership doesn’t care whether Trump is guilty of any misconduct, as Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham openly admit as much. Mitch McConnell tells us more than we should know about how the sausage is made:

  • He made up that whole thing about letting voters decide just so he could block Merrick Garland’s nomination to the Supreme Court in 2016. He also says he wouldn’t do the same to Trump should an opening on the Supreme Court come up next year.
  • He brags about blocking Obama’s nominees for lower courts.
  • He’s aligning and coordinating the Senate impeachment trial with White House lawyers.
  • He doesn’t care about the separation of powers.

Here’s what else happened in politics for the week ending December 15…

Missing From Last Week:

  1. Dozens of graves in a Jewish cemetery near Strasbourg, France, were vandalized with swastikas and antisemitic graffiti. This is the latest in a series of antisemitic vandalism.

Shootings This Week:

  1. There were FOUR mass shootings in the U.S. this week (defined as killing and/or injuring 4 or more people). Shooters kill 8 people and injure 14 more.
    • Two shooters open fire on a Kosher market. Six people are dead, including a police officer and the two shooters, and 3 people are injured. They’re still trying to figure out if this was a hate crime.
    • A shooter kills 1 person and injures 3 others in Saint Louis.
    • A shooter injures 4 teenagers in Ivanhoe, CA.
    • A drive-by shooter in Columbus, GA, kills 1 person and injures 4 others.

Russia:

  1. Amid the impeachment hearings and the release of the inspector general’s report (and just a few hours after the articles of impeachment are announced), Trump meets behind closed doors with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.
    • Trump says he warned Lavrov against any Russian meddling in our elections, but Lavrov says they didn’t even discuss elections. There’s one way Trump could avoid these conflicts of account, and that’s by maintaining transcripts of these meetings.
    • Ironically, this is Lavrov’s second White House meeting with Trump, while Ukraine President Zelensky has yet to get just one White House meeting.
  1. A federal judge rejects Trump’s request to throw out a lawsuit that could require Mike Pompeo to turn over the records of a Trump meeting with Putin. The suit says Pompeo violated the Federal Records Act by allowing Trump to confiscate State Department notes about the meeting. Pompeo failed to preserve those notes.

Inspector General’s Report:

  1. Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz releases his report on his investigation into the investigation of Russia’s meddling in our elections. Here are a few findings from the report:
    • The FBI’s opening of the investigation into campaign associates was not influenced by ”political bias or improper motivation.” Horowitz finds multiple instances of FBI agents both supporting and opposing Trump, but says neither preference caused investigators to bring those views into their work.
    • While Horowitz finds the FBI acted properly in opening the investigation, he also found issues with the FISA process in general and thinks the guidelines need to be revisited.
    • There were significant inaccuracies in the warrant for the surveillance of Carter Page. There were also omissions that undercut the probable cause for a warrant.
    • The Steele Dossier didn’t play a role in the FBI opening the investigation, but it did play a role in FBI lawyers deciding to support the surveillance request. It didn’t play a major role in the FISA warrant approval.
    • A low-level FBI lawyer altered the substance of an email thread relevant to the Carter Page FISA warrant. He added the words “not a source” making it look like the author of the forwarded thread had written that, but it was information the lawyer had received after receiving the thread. This is being investigated as a possible crime by Attorney General William Barr‘s criminal investigation into the opening of the Russia investigation.
    • Language was changed in the FISA report that dropped a description of Christopher Steele as a “well-placed intelligence source.”
    • And speaking of Steele, he was friends with Ivanka Trump, though it seems like more of a working relationship. Before starting his research, he was “favorably disposed” toward the Trump family.
    • The FBI didn’t try to get warrants for Manafort, Flynn, or Papadopoulos. Ironic, since those three all pleaded guilty and Page was never even charged.
    • There were no FBI plants in the Trump campaign.
    • Manafort and Page were already targets of investigations by the time the Russia investigation started; Manafort for money laundering and Page for counterintelligence reasons.
    • When the FBI briefed the Trump and Clinton campaigns on Russian interference in August of 2016, they placed an agent in the meeting with Trump’s campaign to assess Michael Flynn’s responses. This undermines the trust around intelligence briefings.
  1. Horowitz testifies about his report before Congress. A few highlights:
    • He says his report doesn’t vindicate anybody—not Trump, not Comey, not McCabe. Nobody.
    • Lindsey Graham says some people at the FBI took the law into their own hands, despite the report stating the contrary. But he also says that it’s clear that Russia, not Ukraine, meddled in our elections.
    • Horowitz couldn’t find any evidence that Obama asked agencies to investigate Trump, nor that Obama had Trump’s phones tapped.
    • He reaffirms that the Steele dossier didn’t impact the decision to open the investigation.
    • They’re still looking into the leaks from the FBI’s New York field office, which was alleged to have leaked information to Rudy Giuliani about the Clinton email investigation.
  1. Here are the errors made by the FBI that are highlighted in the report’s executive summary:
    • They omitted information about Page’s previous CIA interactions in the FISA warrant.
    • They said that Steele’s prior reporting was “corroborated and used in criminal proceedings,” a statement that wasn’t approved by Steele’s handler.
    • They didn’t reveal that Steele said one of his sources has a tendency to boast, nor that the FBI had recently opened an investigation into that source.
    • They said the FBI had found that Steele didn’t leak information to the press based on Steele’s claim he only told the FBI and Fusion GPS about it. Steele also reported the information to the State Department.
    • They didn’t include statements by George Papadopoulos that no one associated with the Trump campaign was collaborating with Russia or WikiLeaks on the DNC email releases.
    • They left out Page’s claims that he had never met or spoken to Paul Manafort. If true, those claims would undercut the theory that Page participated in a conspiracy with Russia for Manafort.
They cherry-picked Page’s statements to make their case, using statements that supported their case and omitting those that didn’t.

    • They left out information about one of Steele’s main sources, whose subsequent comments raised questions about certain allegations in the FISA applications.
    • They omitted statements about Steele made by former professional contacts.
    • They didn’t say that Steele was giving info to the Clinton campaign and others; that Fusion GPS was paying Steele to talk to the media; and that Steele didn’t want Trump elected.
    • They failed to make corrections to information about Steele on subsequent FISA applications.
    • They didn’t include Joseph Mifsud’s denials that he gave Papadopoulos information.
    • They didn’t include information that suggested Page didn’t have a role in the Republican party changing their stance on Ukraine in their party platform.
  1. Horowitz finds no misconduct around these errors, found some of them to be serious, and said some could just have been overlooked. Horowitz makes several suggestions for the FBI to improve their processes in order to avoid some of these mistakes.

Response to the Inspector General Report:

  1. Trump says the Russia investigation was an attempted overthrow of the government (the investigation began before he was even elected).
  2. Trump calls the FBI “scum” at a campaign rally.
  3. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, who Trump had over for a little White House visit, says that there are no facts to support Russian interference in U.S. elections.
    • At least Pompeo pushes back a little. He says, “We think we’ve shared plenty of facts to show what happened in the 2016 election with our Russian counterparts. We don’t think there’s any mistake about what really transpired there.”
  1. Bill Barr interprets the report to say it makes clear that “the FBI launched an intrusive investigation of a U.S. presidential campaign on the thinnest of suspicions that, in my view, were insufficient to justify the steps taken. It is also clear that, from its inception, the evidence produced by the investigation was consistently exculpatory.”
    • I’m beginning to wonder if Barr can read.
    • Barr says he still thinks the FBI “may have” operated in bad faith, and says it was improper of the FBI to continue investigating after Trump took office (because POTUS is above the law?).
    • Also, he says the nation was turned on its head for a bogus narrative. Tell that to the eight people associated with the probe who were convicted or found guilty.
  1. Attorney General Bill Barr goes on a press tour, giving interviews where he criticizes his own inspector general’s findings and basically says Horowitz is wrong.
    • Barr says the FBI’s investigation had a “very flimsy” basis and there was no evidence of collusion (which Barr knows is not a legal term).
    • He says Horowitz’s analysis was very limited.
    • Barr again asserts that Obama spied on political opponents and that the FBI operated in bad faith.
    • Barr leaves out the fact that the FBI was already aware of Russian efforts to meddle in our elections by the time they opened their investigation, and that they were aware that Russia was trying to cultivate American assets.
    • His harsh criticism of his own department is affecting morale, and officials worry that this will cause our intelligence agencies to be less likely to pursue wrongdoing by our elected officials.
  1. U.S. Attorney John Durham, who Barr picked to run a second, criminal investigation into the origins of the Russia investigations, says that even though he advised the inspector general last month, he doesn’t agree with some of the conclusions of the report.
    • When he met with Horowitz last month, Durham said that the tip from the Australian official, which started the Russia investigation, was sufficient to start a preliminary investigation, a narrow distinction.
  1. FBI Director Chris Wray says the inspector general didn’t find bias or improper motivation in the opening of the Russia investigation, nor did he find that the FISA request was unwarranted. Wray does say that he’ll begin immediately correcting the issues that Horowitz uncovered with processes and procedures.
    • Wray also says not to listen to Trump’s conspiracy theories on Ukraine, adding that Americans need to be savvier consumers of news.
  1. During Horowitz’s hearing, Lindsey Graham says, “It was the Russians, ladies and gentleman, who stole the Democratic National Committee emails, Podesta’s emails, and screwed around with Hillary Clinton. It wasn’t the Ukrainians. it was the Russians.”

Legal Fallout:

  1. Following the release of the inspector general’s report, Andrew McCabe says that being accused of treason by the president was revolting and terrifying.
  2. The Supreme Court agrees to hear three separate cases over whether Trump needs to release his financial records.
  3. Lisa Page, the former FBI lawyer whose private texts with Peter Strzok were publicized as part of the investigation into the Russia investigation, sues the FBI and DOJ for violating the Privacy Act. She was told throughout that none of her private messages would be made public, but then they showed those messages to reporters.
    • Trump attacks Page yet again at a political rally, saying she had to get a restraining order against Strzok (among other things). She says that’s a lie.
    • Page says that the release of those messages, along with Trump’s continued attacks against her, has radically altered her everyday life.

Impeachment:

Including all this info just makes this too long, so I moved it out into its own post. You can skip right over to it if that’s your focus.

Courts/Justice:

  1. The Senate confirms yet another judge who was rated “not qualified” by the ABA. Lawrence VanDyke will take a seat on the 9th Circuit Court of Appeal.

Healthcare:

  1. The Supreme Court refuses to hear an appeal of Kentucky’s abortion law that requires doctors to perform medically unnecessary procedures before performing an abortion. So now we all will spend millions in insurance dollars for procedures that are solely designed to make women feel guilty.
  2. A study published this week supports the medical opinion that attempting to reverse medication abortions is dangerous to the health of the mother.
    • The study was designed to find out if a medication abortion could be halted with hormone treatment, but they had to stop the study when three of the women hemorrhaged so much blood they had to go to the ER.
    • Still, six states require providers to tell their patients it can be reversed, and lawmakers stand by their bills despite evidence to the contrary.

International:

  1. Benjamin Netanyahu resigns from all his ministerial positions (health, welfare, agriculture, and diaspora affairs), but remains as Prime Minister despite being under indictment for corruption and fraud.
  2. The Washington Post obtains a trove of government documents about the war in Afghanistan showing that U.S. officials haven’t been telling the truth about the situation in Afghanistan for 18 years and that they hid evidence that the war was unwinnable.
    • The war and attempt at rebuilding have cost us at least $1 trillion.
    • U.S. officials continually tried to paint a rosier picture than reality.
    • In 2008, Congress created SIGAR, a group to investigate waste and fraud.
    • In 2015, the mission of SIGAR changed to gather lessons learned from the debacle.
    • This war is now 18 years old.
  1. The Trump administration plans to withdraw 4,000 U.S. troops from Afghanistan.
  2. Brits give the Tories a landslide victory in the elections called by Boris Johnson. This makes Brexit all but a done deal and gives the markets a little certainty. It also renews calls in Scotland for the country to leave the U.K. and rejoin the European Union.
  3. China’s foreign minister calls the U.S. the “troublemaker of the world.” Chinese leaders are angry about U.S. support of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy protests.
  4. The Senate confirms the current Deputy Secretary of State, John Sullivan, to be U.S. Ambassador to Russia.
  5. After being delayed by the White House three times, the Senate finally passes a resolution recognizing the Armenian genocide.
  6. Trump’s senior aides further restrict who can listen in on his calls with foreign leaders. Fewer people also receive the transcripts of those calls.
  7. Dozens are injured when protests in Beirut, Lebanon, grow violent. Anti-Government demonstrations have been ongoing since October.
  8. Hong Kong’s pro-democracy protests have been going on for six months.
  9. India’s new citizenship law sets off destructive protests. The law offers Hindus and Christians in neighboring countries a path to citizenship, but doesn’t make the same offer to Muslims.

Border Wall/Shutdown/National Emergency:

  1. A federal judge in Texas says Trump can’t use $3.6 billion in military funds to pay for his border wall. He says Trump’s emergency proclamation isn’t justified. The suit was brought by El Paso County, which doesn’t want the border wall in their section of the border.

Family Separation:

  1. Since the Trump administration ended its family separation policy at the southern border, the government has taken more than 1,100 children from their families.

Travel Ban/Immigration/Discrimination:

  1. Thousands of protestors march in Glasgow, Scotland, to protest the re-election of Boris Johnson, which many think was based on anti-immigration and protectionist sentiments.
  2. Ukraine’s in the news for a completely different reason. Kyiv hosts a “militant black metal” music festival, Asgardsrei, which has become a major networking center for international neo-Nazis. Asgardsrei was founded by a far-right Russian dissident.
  3. Trump signs a much-maligned executive order that extends protections to Jews under the Civil Rights Act. At first, the EO appears to redefine the Jewish religion as the Jewish ethnicity, but it actually spells out that since so many hate groups don’t differentiate the two, this is required to give needed protections from antisemitism.
  4. A federal judge rejects the Trump administration’s request to delay a case related to the handling of adding a citizenship question to the 2020 Census. The lawsuit is against Barr and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross for ignoring subpoenas.

Climate:

  1. Smoke has covered Sidney, Australia, for a month due to the high volume of wildfires burning there. The air at some points measured at 11 times the level considered hazardous.
  2. Greenland’s ice sheet is now losing about seven times the amount it was losing per year in the 1990s. The losses have doubled each decade.
  3. The percent of Americans calling climate change “a crisis” has jumped from 23% to 38% over the past five years. Over 75% of U.S. adults and teenagers think humans influence the climate. But they aren’t quite clear on the science or what human activities are the biggest contributors.
  4. This is more environmental than climate related, but a volcano erupts in New Zealand, killing at least eight people an injuring more. Seismologists had raised the alert level for volcanic activity, but tourists were still allowed on the island.
  5. Time Magazine names 16-year-old climate activist Greta Thunberg as its 2019 person of the year. Cue the social media bullying of a teenage activist. Trump joins in to mock her on Twitter. #BeBest
  6. The two-week UN Climate Summit in Madrid ends with disputes over implementing the Paris agreement. Countries are supposed to ratchet up implementation in 2020.

Budget/Economy:

  1. Trump has blocked appointments to the World Trade Organization’s dispute resolution court long enough to make the global watchdog ineffective.
    • The U.S. has been one of the biggest benefactors of a functioning WTO.
    • Trump has reduced the number on the court from 7 to 3, which means they don’t have enough members to issue a binding ruling. He’s doing with the FEC.
  1. Internal documents show that Betsy DeVos overrode career staff in the Department of Education’s Borrower Defense Unit when she decided that defrauded students should only get partial debt relief.
  2. House Democrats have been working on amendments to the updated NAFTA deal on workers’ rights, environmental protections, and prescription drug costs. Representatives of each country agree to the amendments.
    • This is one of Trump’s top priorities, but it still cracks me up that it’s basically NAFTA (the worst trade deal ever made, according to Trump) plus parts of the TPP (really the worst trade deal ever made, according to Trump) plus a few tweaks here and there. It needed to be modernized, but this is not groundbreaking.
  1. The U.S. and China reach a tentative phase 1 agreement to start winding down the trade war.
    • The U.S. suspends the tariffs slated to go into effect this week.
    • China cancels its retaliatory tariffs.
    • China agrees to increase purchases of U.S. goods by $200 billion over the next two years, including $32 billion in agriculture (that’ll almost make up the amount we’ll have paid in farm bailouts).
    • The deal also includes stronger protections for patents, copyrights, and trademarks.
  1. U.S. companies and consumers have been paying around $40 billion per year for Trump’s trade war with China.
  2. Congress reaches an agreement on a spending bill for 2020, averting a government shutdown.

Elections:

  1. A federal judge orders Georgia’s Governor Brian Kemp to submit to two hours of questioning for a lawsuit around irregularities in last year’s state elections. Kemp was the Secretary of State overseeing his own election in the race for governor.
  2. Trump threatens to not participate in the 2020 presidential debates because they aren’t fair.

Miscellaneous:

  1. Sinclair Broadcasting drops commentator Boris Epshteyn’s segments. Sinclair has been forcing its local stations to air his “news” segments that were actually right-wing propaganda pieces.
  2. Four months before the Mongolian government gave Donald Trump Jr. special treatment to obtain a hunting permit, Mongolian officials visited Mar-a-Lago.

Polls:

  1. A Fox News poll shows that 54% of U.S. adults think Trump should be impeached.
  2. 50% think he should be impeached and removed.
  3. 22% say what Trump did to Zelensky was OK.
  4. 52% say Trump hasn’t cooperated enough.

Week 151 in Trump – Impeachment News

Posted on December 19, 2019 in Impeachment, Trump

We’re getting down to the wire on impeachment this week, with the final Judiciary Committee hearings and drawing up the articles of impeachment. And by the time I publish this, all the suspense will be over, I’m sure.

Here’s what happened on the impeachment front for the week ending December 15…

General Happenings:

  1. Mike Pence refuses to release information to Adam Schiff about Pence’s call with Zelensky.
  2. A group of moderate Democrats brings up the idea of censure instead of impeachment. They’re mostly in risky districts where their re-election chances could hinge on this vote.
  3. In the middle of the impeachment hearings, a handful of House Democrats attend the White House Congressional Ball.
  4. Representative Jeff Van Drew says he’ll vote against impeachment and then switch parties to the Republican party.
    • Van Drew has a solid Democratic voting record and has only voted with Trump about 9% of the time.
    • He represents a Republican-leaning district where Trump won in 2016.
    • He spoke about this with Trump.
    • Last month, he swore he would remain a Democrat.
    • Six of his aides resign at the news, including his legislative director, communications director, and scheduler.
  1. Zelensky and Putin meet with other world leaders in Paris to discuss a peace agreement. There was no breakthrough in the meeting, which was sponsored by France and Germany.
    • They agree to a prisoner exchange and a cease-fire.
    • They don’t agree on a timeline for local elections nor on control of the borders.
  1. A coalition of veterans and national security groups call on Congress to “put country over politics” and support impeachment.
  2. In case you’re wondering whether impeachment will get a fair hearing in the Senate, Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham put that to rest this week.
    • In a Fox News interview with Sean Hannity, Mitch McConnell says:
      • “Everything I do during this, I’m coordinating with the White House counsel. There will be no difference between the president’s position and our position as to how to handle this.”
      • “We’ll be working through this process … in total coordination with the White House counsel’s office and the people representing the president in the well of the Senate.”
      • “I’m going to take my cues from the president’s lawyers.”
      • “I’m going to coordinate with the president’s lawyers.”
      • “There’s no chance the president will be removed from office.”
    • Lindsey Graham says:
      • “I think what’s best for the country is to get this thing over with. I have clearly made up my mind. I’m not trying to hide the fact that I have disdain for the accusations in the process. So I don’t need any witnesses. … I am ready to vote on the underlying articles. I don’t really need to hear a lot of witnesses.”
      • “I have made up my mind. I’m not trying to pretend to be a fair juror here.”
  1. Representative Val Demings calls on Mitch McConnell to recuse himself because a member of a jury cannot also serve as the defense attorney.
  2. McConnell and Graham want the trial over quickly and quietly, but Trump wants a spectacle.
  3. Chuck Schumer sends a letter to Mitch McConnell listing the witnesses they want to call for an impeachment trial in the Senate. His witness list includes administration officials that Trump previously prevented from testifying. McConnell rejects the request.
  4. Because of the delay in disbursing the military aid, Trump and Congress had to pass an extension; otherwise, the deadline would’ve passed and the funds would no longer be available. Around $20 million still hasn’t been disbursed.
  5. The Office of Management and Budget is now claiming that they withheld aid to study whether the spending complied with U.S. policy. They extended the hold on aid eight times in August and September.
  6. Trump goes on a Twitter tear mostly over impeachment, putting out 80 tweets in three hours, and then adding 20 more tweets for good measure. This is after he tweeted 105 times the previous Sunday.
  7. As the result of a FOIA request, the Trump administration releases heavily redacted communications from the Department of Defense and Office of Management and Budget that discuss the withholding of aid to Ukraine. Unfortunately, they’re so redacted there’s not much info to glean. The Center for Public Integrity is asking the judge to enforce greater transparency.

House Judiciary Committee Hearing:

The House Judiciary Committee holds a second hearing, this time to let the legal counsel from the majority and minority in the House Intelligence Committee present their cases.

  1. Barry Berke, counsel for the majority on the House Judiciary Committee, lays out how we got to impeachment:
    • The president abused his power by pressuring Zelensky to investigate a political opponent.
    • He then abused his power by ramping up that pressure and conditioning a wanted White House meeting and needed military aid.
    • He put his own political prospects over our national security.
    • This is supported by documents, actions, and sworn testimony, and is uncontradicted by contemporaneous records.
    • These are the uncontested facts he’s talking about:

      • Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, pushed Ukraine to open an investigation into Trump’s political rival, Joe Biden.
      • Trump told his Ukraine advisors to talk to Rudy.
      • Trump’s Ukraine advisors told Ukraine officials there would be no White House meeting unless they announced investigations into Biden.
      • Trump then ordered that the military aid approved by Congress be withheld against the wishes of every government agency involved.
      • On the July 25th call, Trump told Zelensky to investigate Joe Biden and to investigate Ukraine interference in the 2016 election. Both would help Trump politically.
      • Trump released the military aid after two things: 1) Ukraine passed anti-corruption legislation, and 2) he learned about the whistleblower’s complaint.
  1. Republicans’ counsel counters with these points:
    • Democrats can’t get over that Trump is the president and they just disagree with Trump’s policies. They’re just afraid he’ll be re-elected.
    • Trump’s conduct doesn’t meet the level of high crimes and misdemeanors.
    • 63 million people voted for Trump, so we can’t impeach him.
    • Democrats have just been searching for a reason to impeach, and they’ve introduced several articles of impeachment. (They neglect to say that Democrats also voted against those articles.)
    • Democrats requested and subpoenaed Trump’s financial information.
    • The process has been too rushed.
    • Democrats should’ve allowed White House staff to testify with White House counsel present.
    • He talks about how the White House cooperated once with one investigation earlier this year as proof that they’re cooperative. (The White House has instructed zero cooperation with the impeachment inquiry.)
    • Zelensky has said there was no pressure, as have other Ukrainian officials. And they didn’t know that aid was withheld until it was published in the media.
    • Trump is skeptical of Ukraine and always has been. He also doesn’t think Europe is doing enough to help Ukraine.
    • The voters can decide in the next elections. (This is the most disingenuous argument to me. Voters don’t judge the president on legalities; that’s the job of Congress. It’s why we have impeachment in the constitution.)
  1. I don’t see anything here that supports the Republican case except Ukraine officials not knowing about the aid being suspended. But that is contradicted by multiple witnesses who were fielding earlier calls from those officials. Even Zelensky now says that withholding aid was wrong.
  2. This is how seriously the Republicans’ lawyer is taking this:
    • He says the chief allegation that the impeachment query has been trying to assess over the past several days is this — whether Trump abused the power of his office through quid pro quo, extortion, or “whatever”. Whatever. He brushed it off as “whatever.”
  1. Republicans put up posters in the hearing that attack and mock Democrats. The posters are strategically placed to be caught on television cameras.

Article of Impeachment:

After a marathon debate and an overnight postponement, the House Judiciary Committee approves two articles of impeachment in a 100% party-line vote. They do not include any obstructive acts related to the Mueller investigation. Democrats felt that they were too complicated to include at this time. Here‘s the substance of the articles (read the full text here):

Abuse of Power:

  1. Trump solicited a foreign government to interfere in the 2020 elections to his advantage and compromised our national security in so doing.
  2. He pressured Ukraine to do this by conditioning official U.S. government acts of significant value to Ukraine on investigations into Joe Biden and a discredited Russian theory that Ukraine interfered in the 2016 elections.
  3. Trump conditioned military aid and a head of state meeting on getting those investigations.
  4. Even though the aid was eventually released, Trump has continued to pressure Ukraine for the investigations.
  5. He will continue this pattern of corruption.

Obstruction of Congress:

  1. Trump directed ultimate defiance of House subpoenas, a right accorded to the House by their “sole Power of Impeachment.”
  2. He ordered the White House to defy a lawful subpoena of documents.
  3. He ordered the State Department, Office of Management and Budget, Department of Energy, and Department of Defense to also defy their subpoenas.
  4. He ordered John Michael “Mick” Mulvaney, Robert B. Blair, John A. Eisenberg, Michael Ellis, Preston Wells Griffith, Russell T. Vought, Michael Duffey, Brian McCormack, and T. Ulrich Brechbuhl not to comply with the inquiry.
  5. The purpose of the obstruction was to cover up his own repeated misconduct.

More Trouble for Parnas, Fruman, and Giuliani… And Now Nunes:

  1. Prosecutors ask a judge to revoke Lev Parnas’ bail. They discovered that Parnas had received an unreported $1 million payment from a Ukrainian oligarch suspected to be Dmytro Firtash.
  2. As Giuliani taxis down the runway on his return from Kyiv (where he met with former Ukraine prosecutors in an effort to clear Trump of the impeachment charges), Trump calls him to ask “What did you get?”
    • Giuliani replies, “More than you can imagine.”
    • Trump says Giuliani wants to testify in the impeachment inquiry about what he’s learned. Oh lordy, I hope they let him.
  1. Bill Barr tells Trump that Giuliani is a liability and a problem for the administration.

Week 150 in Trump

Posted on December 12, 2019 in Politics, Trump

I'm thinking you just shouldn't mess with her. Just don't do it.

You just can’t make up all the things that get uncovered by investigations surrounding this administration. This week, the guy who was trying to facilitate back-channel meetings between Trump transition staff and foreign officials was also behind a scheme to funnel money from the UAE into Democratic campaigns and PACs in 2016, including millions to Hillary Clinton’s campaign and PACs. And then when Hillary didn’t win, he and his cohorts started funneling money to Trump. This guy is an equal opportunity grifter. I can’t wait to see how this story develops.

Here’s what happened in politics for the week ending December 8…

Shootings This Week:

There were FOUR mass shootings in the U.S. this week (defined as killing and/or injuring 4 or more people). Shooters kill 9 people and injure 17 more. Unfortunately, one is being investigated as an international terrorist attack.

  1. A shooter kills 2 people and injures 2 people in Montgomery AL, in what seems to be a drug-related shooting.
  2. A shooter kills 2 people and injures 3 more in a home in DeSoto, TX.
  3. A shooter kills 1 person and injures 4 outside a bar in New Orleans.
  4. A Saudi national who was here for flight training kills 3 people on a Pensacola, Fl, base and injures 8 more. He was in the U.S. as part of a training program that included aviation and English training, and he’d been here since August 2017. He was killed during the shooting. Trump speaks with the King of Saudi Arabia, who expresses his condolences. The program that brings Saudi soldiers here for training is facing heavy scrutiny.

Russia:

  1. Lisa Page, the FBI agent whose text messages with Peter Strzok were released as part of the investigation into the Russia investigation, opens up about what it’s been like to stay silent while Trump bullies her over and over again.
  1. Even before the DOJ’s inspector general releases his findings on the FISA warrants for surveilling Carter Page, Attorney General Bill Barr says he disagrees with the findings. The report is expected to state that the FBI was justified in opening the investigation, but that FBI personnel made some missteps.
    • IMO, Barr has kind of backed himself into a corner here by going all-in on conspiracy theories being spread by the administration. If he accepts his IG’s findings, he’s basically saying that everything he’s been saying and pushing for during his time as attorney general is wrong.
    • I’m sure we’ll get a repeat of Barr’s disinformation about the Mueller report when the report is released.
    • One thing the report is expected to show is that Josef Mifsud, the Maltese professor who told George Papadopoulos that Russians had dirt on Hillary, is not a U.S. intelligence asset who was planted as part of a sting operation. U.S. Attorney John Durham, who’s running a second investigation for Barr, says his findings so far back that up.
  1. The DOJ releases additional documents from the Mueller investigation as part of a FOIA request. Here are a few things we learn in this week’s release:
    • Rob Rosenstein and Jeff Sessions considered replacing James Comey during the transition. Rosenstein thought Comey’s public comments about the investigation into Hillary’s emails violated DOJ rules.
    • However, Rosenstein was “angry, ashamed, horrified, and embarrassed” by how Comey’s firing went down. He also knew the White House was lying about it.
    • Pence was the one who pushed Trump to fire Michael Flynn for lying to him.
    • Rudy Giuliani turned down the Attorney General position because he wanted to be Secretary of State instead.
    • Jay Sekulow, White House lawyer, told Michael Cohen not to testify about certain details of the Trump Tower meeting set up by Donald Trump Jr. with Russians who said they had dirt on Hillary.
    • Paul Manafort tried to convince Rick Gates not to cooperate with the investigation, saying that Trump was supported Gates. Remember that after being convicted on several counts, Manafort agreed to cooperate, but then lied to Mueller and fed information about the investigation to the White House.
    • John Kelly backs up Don McGahn’s testimony that Trump asked him to fire Mueller. Much of this is redacted, so I don’t know if this is part of an ongoing case.
  1. Last summer, Russia state TV ran a special report titled “Ukrainian Interference.” Just in case you’re wondering where that particular conspiracy theory came from. What does Putin have to say about all this?

“Thank God nobody is accusing us any more of interfering in U.S. elections… Now they’re accusing Ukraine. Well, let them sort this out among themselves.”

  1. The World Anti-Doping Agency once again bans Russia from competing in the Olympics. Clean Russian athletes can still compete as unaffiliated athletes.

Legal Fallout:

  1. Representative Duncan Hunter (R-CA) pleads guilty to conspiracy to use campaign funds for personal use. Hunter has maintained his innocence for a year and a half, and he continued his run for Congress even after he was indicted on 60 counts.
    • If you don’t know what he was indicted on, the court filing is worth the read. Charges include using campaign funds to fly their pet bunny in an airplane seat, falsely claiming donations to veterans organizations, using campaign funds for family vacations (to Italy, Hawaii, Las Vegas, and others), concealing their campaign fund spending, spending campaign funds to date his mistresses, and so much more.
    • He says he’s just taking a plea deal for his family, though he didn’t hesitate to throw his wife under the bus when the indictments dropped.
    • He resigns from Congress, date TBD. The House Ethics Committee instructs him to stop voting in the House. What took so long? He’s been under 60 indictments all year.
    • Hunter appealed his case in July even though his trial hadn’t even begun.
  1. A federal appeals court again rules that Congress can see Trump’s banking records as part of their investigations into potential foreign influence and other misconduct. Trump asks the Supreme Court to block the subpoena.
  2. George Nader is in the news again (he was a figure in the Mueller investigation). He was part of a scheme with Ahmad Khawaja and others to funnel foreign money into mostly democratic campaigns and organizations during the 2016 elections.
    • They hid the source of $3.5 million in campaign donations (the money came from the United Arab Emirates).
    • But lest you think these guys aren’t mercenaries, they also cultivated Trump campaign contacts and funneled money to Trump and his political organizations. After the election, they made a major pivot from donating to Democratic causes to donating to Republican causes.
    • The indictment implies that Khawaja hosted a fundraiser for Hillary Clinton, but doesn’t say that outright. Khawaja also hosted a reception for an elected official in 2018. There’s also no evidence that the recipients of the funds, Republican or Democrat, were aware of the source.
    • Nader is already in federal custody for other charges. That guy’s bad news.
    • Khawaja has previously been charged with helping other websites launder money. He’s also bad news.
  1. Trump is making money off his campaign by renting office space to re-election committees. $1.7 million so far.

Impeachment:

Including all this info just makes this too long, so I moved it out into its own post. You can skip right over to it if that’s your focus.

Courts/Justice:

  1. For the first time in over ten years, the Supreme Court hears arguments on a gun rights case. Gun owners are fighting New York’s strict rules for having a handgun at home. However, this is moot because New York already loosened up the rules.
  2. Republicans confirm yet another judge who’s rated as ‘not qualified’ to a permanent seat on a federal court.

Healthcare:

  1. State lawmakers from both sides of the aisle got assistance from lobbyists in writing op-eds opposing Medicare for All.
    • I get that we need issues experts to help craft our policies and our laws, but it’s out-of-control, with a handful of groups crafting so much of what goes on at the state level. You can tell by the cookie-cutter legislation that gets passed.
  1. With a new Democratic majority in the state House and Senate, Virginia begins to remove the work requirements for Medicaid.

International:

  1. A bipartisan group of Senators asks Trump to sanction Turkey before the upcoming NATO meetings. After Turkey purchased Russian technologies that could be used to gather intelligence on our F-35 stealth fighter jets, we removed Turkey from our F-35 program.
  2. Trump has a closed-door meeting with Turkish President Erdogan at the NATO leaders meeting.
  3. Wow. I guess all you need to do to get Trump to defend your interests is to argue against your own interests. In a sit-down before the NATO leaders meeting, French President Emmanuel Macron gets Trump to defend NATO by criticizing it. It was a pretty amazing thing.
    • Trump is likely still smarting from Macron’s earlier statement about NATO suffering brain death because of American leadership.
  1. And speaking of the NATO meetings, it’s not an awesome couple of days for Trump:
    • A group of foreign leaders — Emmanuel Macron, Justin Trudeau, Boris Johnson, Princess Anne, and Mark Rutte — get caught on video at a reception kvetching about Trump and making a little fun of him.
    • Trudeau was defending himself being late for something, and said it was because Trump turned a 10-minute press conference into a 40-minute one (he did that with three press conferences that day).
    • Upon learning of this, Trump calls Trudeau two-faced, cancels a press conference, and leaves the summit early. Then Trump gets caught on audio saying, “That was funny when I said that guy was two-faced.”
  1. Iranian President Rouhani calls for the release of innocent, unarmed protestors who were detained during the recent protests.
  2. North Korea says that our earlier negotiations were just a “foolish trick,” and we should expect a Christmas present from them, likely in the form of a missile test.
  3. After North Korea launches a “successful test of great significance,” Trump warns that Kim Jong Un risks losing everything if they resume hostilities.
  4. A gun battle between Mexican law enforcement and cartel members near the southern border leaves 21 people dead. Most of the dead were cartel members.
  5. At the request of the White House, Senator Kevin Cramer (R-ND) blocks an effort to pass a resolution recognizing the Armenian genocide.
    • He’s the third Republican tasked by the White House to block the resolution, so it’s been blocked three times. They all use the same reason… it’s not the right time.
    • Two years ago, Cramer expressed his appreciation to Dean Cain (former Superman) for raising awareness of the Armenian genocide. He was also the sponsor of a similar resolution when he was in the House.
  1. China warns the U.S. against passing legislation criticizing their treatment of Uighur Muslims, especially during a trade war.
  2. Even though he’s under indictment, Benjamin Netanyahu is gearing up for his next campaign for Prime Minister of Israel. He recently met with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to discuss Iran, the Israeli annexation of the Jordan Valley in the West Bank, and a U.S.-Israel defense treaty.
  3. Trump considers sending an additional 14,000 troops to the Mideast to counter Iran. He’s already sent 14,000 troops to the Mideast since May.
  4. Hundreds of thousands of demonstrators turn out to march in Hong Kong for Human Rights Day. The march is mostly peaceful, but peppered with some vandalism.
  5. Worker protests continue in France, while anti-government protests continue in Chile. I can’t even stay on top of all the global protests anymore. Even Haitians are protesting systemic corruption in their country.
  6. Youth activists fill the street of Madrid as part of a global climate protest during the UN’s COP25 climate change conference.

Legislation/Congress:

  1. The Senate passes a bill to permanently fund historically black colleges and universities and other minority-serving institutions. The House has already passed it, so it’ll go to Trump for a signature.

Border Wall/Shutdown/National Emergency:

  1. Trump pressured the Army Corps of Engineers to award a contract to a North Dakota company, Fisher Sand and Gravel, whose owner is a frequent Fox News guest. Officials argued against it because the bid did not meet the standards. Fisher got the contract.
    • Fisher was also hired by Build the Wall, the private organization that fundraised to help Trump build his wall.
    • Fisher has a record of environmental and tax violations.

Travel Ban/Immigration/Discrimination:

  1. Trump is the first president since before Reagan who works to decrease the number of refugees we accept rather than expand our very successful programs for resettling refugees. Trump wants to reverse our progress, but the sentiment is different at a local level:
    • After Trump gave states the ability to decline to accept refugees, the Republican governor of Utah wrote to Trump asking for more. He said people in Utah “love giving them a new home and a new life.” He also says refugees become productive and responsible members of their communities.
    • On the flip side, Burleigh County, North Dakota is considering a vote on whether to become the first county in the U.S. to refuse resettled refugees.
  1. Attorney General Bill Barr has given some wacky speeches lately. This week he says that if some communities don’t start showing law enforcement a little respect, maybe they won’t get any police protection.
  2. George Zimmerman sues the family of Trayvon Martin for defamation. Huh? Zimmerman killed Trayvon as he was walking home one night, and got off on Florida’s Stand Your Ground law (thank you ALEC). Zimmerman’s suing for more than $100 million. Oh, and his lawyer thinks Obama is a secret Muslim who was born in Kenya. Hoo boy.
  3. Officials at the southern border confiscate migrant children’s medications, including life-saving ones like asthma inhalers.
  4. Video of a boy who died in ICE custody last May shows that he was in pain and distress for hours before dying from the flu. The video also shows that agents lied about some of the facts involved, including who found the body and whether they checked on him.
  5. Outside lawyers find that Medicare chief Seema Veerma‘s allegations of sexual discrimination in DHHS are unsubstantiated. They also uncovered a super contentious work relationship between her and her boss, DHHS Secretary Alex Azar.
  6. In a speech to the Israeli American Council, Trump lets his antisemite flag fly:

“You’re not nice people at all, but you have to vote for me. You have no choice. You’re not going to vote for Pocahontas, I can tell you that. You’re not going to vote for the wealth tax!”

  1. DHS is considering taking pictures of everyone who enters and leaves the country as part of a facial recognition program. This includes U.S. citizens.

Climate:

  1. Trump skips the 2019 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Madrid, but Nancy Pelosi brings a delegation in his place. Fourteen Democrats accompany her, but none of the Republican lawmakers they invited agreed to come.
  2. In a complaint about water conservation bathroom fixtures, Trump says this:

“You turn on the faucet and you don’t get any water. They take a shower and water comes dripping out. Just dripping out, very quietly dripping out. People are flushing toilets 10 times, 15 times, as opposed to once.”

  1. And he says this:

“There may be some areas where we’ll go the other route — desert areas — but for the most part you have many states where they have so much water — it comes down, it’s called rain. They don’t know what to do with it.”

  1. He says the EPA is looking into this. I’m sorry, but if you have to flush 15 times, either you’re broken or your toilet is.
  2. Months after receiving a huge backlash for proposing to authorize the use of “cyanide bombs” to poison coyotes, foxes, and feral dogs, the EPA announces that they’re going forward with their proposal.
  3. Spain’s biggest gas and oil company makes a promise to become a net-zero carbon emitter by 2050.

Budget/Economy:

  1. AK Steel agrees to be purchased by a mining company in a deal worth around $1 billion. That’s less than half what AK Steel’s value was before the trade wars began.
  2. The Dow Jones drops three days in a row after Trump warns that the trade deal with China might not happen until after the elections next year. He says that tariffs will remain until the deal is done.
  3. Trump announces tariffs on metals from Brazil and Argentina, and threatens harsher tariffs on French goods. The reason is, unsurprisingly, that he doesn’t think they’re being fair to us (everything’s so unfair!).
    • The unexpected announcement goes against their 2018 agreement, where Brazil and Argentina would accept quotas on their shipments instead of having tariffs imposed.
  1. Manufacturing jobs have not only stalled, but are moving into the negative, after receiving a big boost when Trump was elected. The trade war with China undid much of that progress.
    • Typically trade policies pinch either farmers or manufacturing, but current policies are hitting both sectors.
    • The effects of the trade wars are just starting to be seen, so companies are bracing for harder times.
  1. Nancy Pelosi is pushing to modify Trump’s updated NAFTA agreement by removing certain legal protections for online content because it prevents Congress from making future changes. Pelosi questions whether that should be in our trade pacts or enshrined in U.S. law. The House is finalizing their changes to Trump’s updated NAFTA agreement (USMCA), and expects a vote next week.
  2. Job growth in November was 266,000, getting a little boost from the end of the GM worker strike. The unemployment rate and the numbers of unemployed were little changed.
  3. The number of people applying for unemployment benefits decreased to its lowest level in seven months—close to a 50-year low. It’s partly attributable to Thanksgiving.
  4. The Trump administration formalizes a new rule for work requirements for SNAP recipients, which could cause up to 700,000 people to lose food assistance.

Elections:

  1. After Mike Bloomberg enters the Democratic presidential primary race, his media outlet, Bloomberg News, announces they won’t do any investigative journalism into any of the Democratic primary candidates. Trump’s 2020 campaign then announces that they won’t give Bloomberg News press credentials to cover Trump’s campaign events.
  2. I’m sure you noticed that I haven’t been reporting on any Democratic presidential campaign activities. I’m waiting for things to shake out a bit and hopefully narrow down, and then I’ll dive in.
  3. The House votes to restore those parts of the Voting Rights Act that were struck down by the Supreme Court. The court’s argument was that we’re in a post-racial society so we don’t need those kinds of rules anymore. The vote was along party lines, and it likely won’t pass the Senate.
  4. North Carolina judges rule that the latest version of electoral maps will be used in the 2020 elections. The judges also say there’s not enough time between now and the primaries to determine whether they’re still gerrymandered, so that’s weird.

Miscellaneous:

  1. Trump makes an unannounced visit to Dover Air Force Base to receive the remains of two slain soldiers who were killed in Afghanistan.
  2. Trump further strains relations with the Pentagon when he brings two of the soldiers he pardoned onto the stage with him at a fundraiser. These guys were convicted of war crimes. Military leaders fear the pardons undermine the rules of military conduct.

Week 150 in Trump – Impeachment News

Posted on December 12, 2019 in Impeachment, Trump

Doug Collins, acting like a grown up and taking the hearings seriously.

This week, both the Democrats and Republicans on the impeachment committees release their reports on the hearings for their handoff to the Judiciary Committee. I know it’s a lot to read, but if you didn’t watch the hearings, you should at least read both executive summaries and conclusions. And if you don’t have time for that, read through the tables of contents. You’ll get the gist, if not the full story.

Here’s what happened on the impeachment front for the week ending December 8…

General Happenings:

  1. In an interview, Ukraine President Zelensky says he’s learned not to trust anyone at all, and he’s lowered his expectations with both Russia in terms of the peace talks and the U.S. in terms of support.
    • He says Ukraine doesn’t stand a chance against Russia without the support of the U.S.
    • Trump is continually indicating to other countries that Ukraine is corrupt, which makes Zelensky concerned about future support.
    • He says he and Trump never discussed the hold on military aid, but he does question the fairness of it.
    • Kurt Volker was trying to get the U.S. to play a larger role in the peace process.
    • Zelensky doesn’t want Ukraine to be seen as just a pawn in the global game. They won’t be used as a bargaining chip.
  1. House Democrats consider adding the items of obstruction listed in Mueller’s report to their articles of impeachment.
  2. In a tweet, Trump praises Senator John Kennedy (R-LA) for defending Trump on Meet the Press by pushing the debunked theories about Ukrainian officials meddling in the 2016 elections to help Clinton.
    • Kennedy brings up a court ruling in Ukraine that said releasing the black ledger constituted interference, but neglects to mention that the ruling has since been overturned.
    • He also says he got some of his information from the Financial Times, but no one at FT can figure out what he’s talking about.
    • Kennedy says he missed the Senate intelligence briefing where officials warned Senators that this was all Russian propaganda and that Russia has been engaged in a years-long campaign to frame Ukraine as being responsible for election meddling in 2016. With intelligence agencies warning that Russia will step up their efforts in 2020, we are screwed if an entire party believes Russian propaganda.
  1. Nancy Pelosi calls for the House to draw up articles of impeachment.
    • During the Judiciary Committee hearing, House Democrats indicate three areas of impeachment: abuse of power and bribery, obstruction of Congress, and obstruction of justice. This indicates they might be including Robert Mueller’s findings of obstruction into the impeachment articles.
  1. Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Richard Burr (R-NC) says that Ukraine meets the standard for election meddling that people first held Russia to. By that, he means that Russia preferred Trump, and Ukraine preferred Clinton.
    • That’s muddying the waters a bit because he doesn’t compare what Russia actually did to what Ukraine actually did (probably because they aren’t comparable).
    • Burr refuses to directly answer whether what Ukraine did could be considered meddling.
    • Also, most foreign leaders had a preference for one over the other. Were they all meddling?
  1. The White House disputes some of the calls recorded in the call logs and listed in the impeachment report, but those came directly from the provider, so it’s not clear what they’re disputing.
  2. Nancy Pelosi dresses down a reporter who asks if she hates Trump. The essence of it all is that no, she doesn’t. She has policy disagreements with him, but impeachment is a separate thing about the constitution and violations of the oath of office.
    • Trump then describes her response has her having a nervous fit.
    • Kevin McCarthy backtracks three times when asked about whether he thinks Pelosi hates Trump, as he often claims.
  1. Trump frequently used an unsecured cell phone to have discussions with Giuliani and others involved in the Ukraine affair.
  2. 500 legal experts sign on to a letter saying Trump committed impeachment offenses. They write: “Put simply, if a President cheats in his effort at re-election, trusting the democratic process to serve as a check through that election is no remedy at all. That is what impeachment is for.”

Democrat Majority Report:

The Democrats’ report tries to lay out the evidence for their assertions that Trump abused the power of his office by orchestrating a pressure campaign to get Ukraine President Zelensky to open investigations into a potential 2020 election rival and into theories that Ukraine meddled in our 2016 elections. In return, Trump would give Zelensky a White House meeting, and he later withheld military aid on those conditions as well.

Here are some highlights. Again, if you’ve been watching the hearings, there won’t be much that’s new here.

  1. The report says Trump “placed his own personal and political interests” ahead of U.S. national interests, “subverted U.S. foreign policy toward Ukraine and undermined our national security in favor of two politically motivated investigations that would help his presidential re-election campaign.”
  2. Trump tried to hide his actions from Congress and the public by blocking subpoenas for documents and witnesses. He also tried to intimidate witnesses, some while they were actually testifying.
  3. The report alleges that:
    • Trump forced out U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch.
    • He put four people in charge of Ukraine affairs: Rudy Giuliani, Rick Perry, Kurt Volker, and Gordon Sondland.
    • He froze military aid to Ukraine against the advice of state and foreign officials and over their objections. Democrats say the release was conditioned on an announcement of the investigations.
    • A White House meeting between Trump and Ukraine was conditioned on a public announcement of the investigations, which Democrats say constitutes using the power of the office to pressure a foreign government to interfere in our elections for his own benefit.
  1. Democrats say the call was improper. After Zelensky brought up military aid, Trump responded by asking for a favor. Here are the relevant passages:

Zelensky: I would also like to thank you for your great support in the area of defense. We are ready to continue to cooperate for the next steps specifically we are almost ready to buy more Javelins from the United States for defense purposes.

Trump: I would like you to do us a favor though because our country has been through a lot and Ukraine knows a lot about it. I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine, they say Crowdstrike …” (This is about his notion that there’s a physical DNC server somewhere in Ukraine.)

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

  1. The call is only a part of the pressure campaign, which was actually months long and started with the previous Ukraine president.
  2. The scheme undermined our own national security, as well as Ukraine’s.
  3. The Vice President, Secretary of State, Secretary of Energy, Acting Chief of Staff, and others all knew about the campaign. This jibes with Gordon Sondland’s testimony.
  4. Along with all the other testimony, Mick Mulvaney, Acting Chief of Staff and head of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), admitted on television that military aid was tied to the public announcement of investigations into the Bidens and said we should all just get over it.
  5. The testimony was very consistent across all witnesses and showed very little discrepancy. It also corroborated the whistleblower complaint for the most part.
  6. The investigation is still ongoing because of the White House’s and State Department’s lack of response to subpoenas.
  7. The report gives reasons for not waiting for the 2020 elections to decide this issue.
    • If this is all true, the president of the United States solicited foreign interference in the 2020 elections, so how can we be assured of a free and fair election?
    • Future presidents have to know they can’t get away with this kind of abuse of power.
    • Trump saw first hand the damage foreign interference did to the country in 2016, yet he continues to invite it. Even as this investigation was getting underway, Trump invited China to open investigations that would interfere in our 2020 elections. So it’s not like he’s learned from any of this.
  1. The report includes new call-log evidence showing calls Giuliani had with the White House, Mike Pompeo, John Bolton, Devin Nunes, Sean Hannity, and Lev Parnas. The calls with administration officials happened while Giuliani was smearing Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch.
  2. Call logs also show phone calls between Devin Nunes and Lev Parnas, which might explain why Nunes has been pushing Ukraine conspiracy theories so hard during the hearings.
  3. Pete Sessions, who was a Representative for Texas at the time, sent Mike Pompeo a letter claiming that Yovanovitch was disparaging Trump. This was reported by John Solomon, and Trump, Donald Trump Jr, and Rudy Giuliani amplified the message on social media.
  4. Call logs show that journalist John Solomon was also in contact with Lev Parnas.
  5. There’s a lack of call logs supporting the phone call Gordon Sondland testified to where he says Trump told him there was no quid pro quo (but then went on to ask for the announcement of the investigations). That doesn’t mean the call didn’t happen, but now it’s in question.

Republican Minority Report:

Republicans try to get out ahead of the majority report on impeachment hearings and issue their own report the day before. Here are some highlights. It’s mostly what they’ve been saying all along, including debunked conspiracy theories and ignored evidence. IMO, these just get in the way of their arguments that actually do have merit. I’m not correcting the debunked claims in their report; I’m just letting you know what they said.

  1. The Democrats are just trying to undo the will of 63 million Americans and overturn an election. They’ve already introduced four articles of impeachment since Trump was elected.
  2. None of the witnesses “testified to having evidence of bribery, extortion, or any high crime or misdemeanor.”
  3. The evidence doesn’t support the allegations of obstruction of justice from the White House.
  4. The “do us a favor though…” part of the call doesn’t indicate a quid pro quo.
  5. Trump thinks Ukraine is corrupt.
  6. They dismiss the pressure for investigations by saying the call summary only mentions the Bidens in passing. Here’s the passage:

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

  1. Trump extended an invitation to Zelensky for a White House meeting three times.
  2. Trump and Zelensky met at the UN General Assembly, so they did have the requested meeting.
  3. Ukrainian officials didn’t know anything about the hold in military aid until the media published a story about it in August.
  4. There was nothing improper about the call. National Security Council leadership didn’t see the call as improper.
  5. Trump just wanted the rest of Europe to help shoulder the burden.
  6. Ukrainian officials were pro-Hillary and anti-Trump in the 2016 elections.
  7. The op-ed written by the Ukraine Ambassador to the U.S. in response to Trump saying Putin wouldn’t go into Ukraine was an attack against Trump.
  8. Trump only released aid after Zelensky proved his anti-corruption chops. Zelensky didn’t even announce investigations.
  9. We should take Ukrainian officials at their word when they say there was no pressure, that they were feeling good.
  10. Also, even if Trump pressured him, it wouldn’t be improper.
  11. Trump gave Ukraine javelin missiles—way better than the night goggles and blankets Obama gave them.
  12. The Democrat’s accusations are based on speculation.
  13. According to this report, Republicans have no regard for our long-serving diplomatic and foreign officials, calling them “unelected bureaucrats.”
  14. There was nothing illicit about having a shadow policy with Ukraine run by Volker, Perry, Sondland, and Giuliani.
  15. There’s nothing wrong with asking for an investigation into the Bidens.
  16. They accuse Democrats of not being transparent, of deception, and of selective leaking.
  17. The private hearings weren’t fair, the public hearings weren’t fair, and it wasn’t fair that Trump couldn’t defend himself.
  18. A DNC operative worked with Ukrainian officials to dig up dirt on Trump in the 2016 elections.

House Judiciary Committee Hearing:

  1. Four constitutional scholars testify before the House Judiciary Committee—three called by the Democratic majority (Noah Feldman, Michael Gerhardt, and Pamela Karlan), and one by the Republican minority (Jonathon Turley). The purpose here is not to question the facts of the case; the purpose is to learn about the constitutional law surrounding impeachment and how the facts learned so far fit into that framework.
  2. Trump and his lawyers were invited to participate, but they decline, accusing Nadler of purposely scheduling the hearing while Trump is at the NATO leaders meeting. I doubt they expected Trump to appear, but his lawyers could have shown up.
  3. The three called by Democrats say that by pressuring Ukraine for political gain, Trump clearly committed impeachable offenses.
  4. Feldman spells out that the impeachable offenses include withholding military aid and a White House meeting (which still hasn’t happened, by the way) as leverage for political favors, as well as soliciting foreign assistance (which Trump did on the phone call). Specifically, Trump “corruptly” solicited “Zelensky to announce investigations of his political rivals in order to gain personal advantage, including in the 2020 presidential election.”
  5. Gerhardt says Trump committed several impeachable acts and that his actions were worse than Richard Nixon in Watergate. He also warns that Trump will continue this behavior if left unchecked.
  6. Karlan says that strong-arming a foreign leader in that way is not politics as usual by any historical standards.
  7. Turley says that the process shouldn’t be rushed and that more evidence is needed, but doesn’t dispute that asking a foreign government to interfere in our elections is impeachable.
    • He compares this to Clinton’s impeachment hearings, which lasted 72 days. This one’s lasted that long as well.
    • He puts forth the size of the documentation against Clinton during his impeachment. Remember that Clinton had been investigated for more than five years before his impeachment.
    • If the White House were to comply with all subpoenas, the evidence in this case would also be more sizable.
  1. Turley does agree that if the quid pro quo can be proven, then it is indeed impeachable. He never says there’s no impeachable offense here.
  2. Turley was also a constitutional scholar witness for Bill Clinton’s impeachment hearings.
  3. Karlan takes Representative Doug Collins (R-GA) to task for accusing the scholars of failing to have knowledge of any of the facts. She responds that she read the transcript of every single fact witness, because that’s what lawyers do.
  4. Karlan also catches flack for saying, “The Constitution says there can be no titles of nobility. While the president can name his son Barron, he can’t make him a baron.” She later apologizes for the remark.
  5. Feldman argues that the essential definition of high crimes and misdemeanors is abuse of office. He also says that it’s OK to ask a foreign power for something for the benefit of the United States, but not for your own personal or political benefit.
  6. Gerhardt warns that if left unchecked, Trump will continue his pattern of soliciting foreign interference (off the top of my head, he’s asked Russia, pressured Ukraine, and said China should do it, too).
  7. Questioners from each party focus on the witness that their party called up. That’s too bad, because we would’ve had a much more robust discussion had they mixed it up.
  8. Several Republican lawmakers accuse the three scholars called by Republicans of having an anti-Trump bias (as they do with every expert that doesn’t agree with them). Tom McClintock even asks them to raise their hands if they voted for Trump. We all have a right to a private ballot, and when no one raises their hand, one of the lawyers reminds McClintock that this shouldn’t be misconstrued as an answer.
  9. The scholars had an interesting discussion on what constitutes bribery, some arguing the definition should be narrow and some arguing that for impeachment purposes the definition is broader than other federal statutes. Karlan argues that the framers of the constitution would consider what Trump did to be bribery, but Turley argues that Trump did not commit federal crimes (a Republican staff lawyer helpfully suggests his actions could be misdemeanors).
  10. Lest you think the hearings weren’t filled with partisan fighting, it started within the first hour, with Republicans interrupting the proceedings with motions designed to delay the proceedings (we were told the day before that this would happen). They also called on Adam Schiff, who is not a relevant witness in this particular hearing, to testify.
  11. Throughout the hearing, Representative Doug Collins (R-GA) squeezes a stress ball. I don’t think it was working…

More Trouble for Parnas, Fruman, and Giuliani… And Now Nunes:

  1. Nunes, the top Republican on the impeachment committee, appears in the majority report. Nunes has been having multiple conversations with Giuliani this whole time.
  2. Prosecutors say the House Judiciary Committee is likely to issue a superseding indictment against Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, and charges could be added or changed soon.
  3. Ever unaware of optics, Giuliani travels to Kyiv and Budapest to meet with former Ukrainian prosecutors about a documentary series that he thinks will exonerate Trump in the impeachment case.
    • All three of the prosecutors he met with have faced allegations of corruption.
    • It was Giuliani’s initial interactions with this cast of characters that set the wheels in motion for impeachment.
    • The documentary will be aired on OAN, so he’s just preaching to the choir.