Testimony in the impeachment hearings this week shows how bizarre and far-reaching the operations are to pressure Ukraine and to prove that it was Ukraine, and not Russia, that meddled in our 2016 elections. From Greg Sargent at The Washington Post:

“Two senior U.S. officials seriously discussed a plan in which the attorney general of the United States would publicly coordinate with a foreign government to help Trump absolve Russia of culpability for an attack on our political system, by helping to repudiate our intelligence services’ conclusion about that culpability.”

Here’s what happened on the impeachment front for the week ending October 27…

General Happenings:

1. House Republicans force a floor vote to rebuke Rep. Adam Schiff, Chair of the House Intelligence Committee and leader of the impeachment panel. The resolution is tabled along party lines. Basically, the rebuke accuses Schiff of being a liar.
2. Trump compares impeachment to a lynching. Oyvay… where do I even start with that one?
3. White House budget documents show that Trump repeatedly tried to cut aid to programs that fight corruption abroad, including in Ukraine.
4. The impeachment panel continues to issue subpoenas to the Office of Management and Budget, though they know no one will cooperate.
5. In the middle of Giuliani’s pressure campaign on Ukraine officials, both Putin and Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban were pushing Trump to adopt a hostile stance against Ukraine.

• • Trump met with Orban last May against the advice of National Security Advisor John Bolton.
  • Bolton and Fiona Hill both tried to prevent the meeting, but Mick Mulvaney orchestrated it anyway.

• • Orban, like Russia, is looking to grab a corner of Ukraine.
  • This information, which came up in House testimony last week, implicates both Russia and Hungary with foreign interference. Is it OK for a sitting president to be influenced by known dictators and autocrats?

6. The New York City Bar Association says Attorney General William Barr needs to recuse himself from any Ukraine-related issues, and if he can’t do that, he should resign.
7. In a FOIA case, a federal judge says he’ll order the State Department to start releasing their Ukraine records in 30 days.
8. One line of defense used by the Trump team is that there couldn’t have been any quid pro quo since Ukrainian officials didn’t know their aid was blocked.

• • However, documented communications show that they knew by the first week of August (further corroborating the whistleblower’s report). They were told to reach out to Mick Mulvaney, and that it wasn’t just a bureaucratic snag.
  • Still, they weren’t told explicitly that the aid was contingent upon them publicly opening Trump’s requested investigations until September 1.

9. By the end of the week, we learn that Zelensky met with advisors on May 7 to talk about energy issues. Instead, they spent three hours talking about how to handle requests from Trump and Giuliani to open investigations into the 2016 elections and Burisma/Biden.

• • This means Zelensky was feeling the pressure months before his phone conversation with Trump.

10. In August, the White House delayed a Ukraine trade decision, leading to speculation that the quid pro quo was about more than just withholding aid and that it also extended into other government programs.
11. A federal judge orders the DOJ to release some of Mueller’s grand jury materials to the House Judiciary Committee for the impeachment inquiry. They have until Wednesday to comply.

• • The same federal judge says that the House doesn’t have to hold a vote in order to formalize the impeachment inquiry.
  • In his ruling, the judge says that impeachment factored into Mueller’s report and that Congress is the appropriate entity to take over where Mueller left off.

12. Lindsey Graham says he has 50 co-sponsors for a resolution condemning the House impeachment inquiry.
13. John Bolton’s lawyers are in talks with the House committees handling the impeachment depositions about whether Bolton himself will testify.
14. Last week I mentioned a story about Turkey’s state-run Halkbank helping Iran evade sanctions. One of their officials was convicted in the case. Bloomberg reports that Trump told Turkish President Erdogan last spring that Steve Mnuchin and Attorney General William Barr would take care of the Halkbank issue.
15. Italy’s Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte acknowledges that Barr has met twice with Italian intelligence. Conte says his intelligence services have told Barr that they had nothing to do with the events leading up to the 2016 elections, stymying Barr’s efforts to investigate Trump’s conspiracy theories around Ukraine. Italian officials say that this request from the Trump administration has complicated our relationship with Italy.

• • Australian officials refuse to take part in the investigation as well, despite requests from both Barr and Trump.

16. According to Fiona Hill’s testimony last week, Kashyap Patel, a National Security Council aide tasked with counterterrorism issues, started sending Trump information about Ukraine that could influence U.S. policy in Ukraine.

• • Trump refers to Patel as one of his top experts in Ukraine policy, though Patel lacks experience there.
  • Patel became a hero to Trump and his allies when he was a House staffer and wrote memos aiming to discredit our intelligence communities’ findings in the Russia investigations. And go figure, Patel worked for Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) at the time.
  • This brings to light that Trump ignores the tradition of prepared policy briefings, which are approved by several agencies to verify their content. Instead, Trump obtains unverified information from both inside and outside the administration. To be clear, he’s basing policy and risking lives on unverified information.

More Trouble for Parnas, Fruman, and Giuliani:

1. Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman both plead not guilty to charges of campaign finance law violations.
2. David Correia and Andrey Kukushkin, who were arrested in the same case, also plead not guilty.
3. A lawyer for Parnas says that some of the evidence collected in their case might be protected by attorney-client privilege or executive privilege. Wait, what? I thought Trump said he didn’t know them.

• • This could almost make sense, though, since Giuliani was working both for Trump and for businesses run by Parnas and Fruman. But Giuliani, Parnas, and Fruman never worked for the government.
  • Giuliani has said that Parnas and Fruman helped him with the work Giuliani was doing in Ukraine on Trump’s behalf.

4. Giuliani accidentally butt-dials a reporter and leaves a three-minute voicemail of a conversation he’s having with someone in the room. He talks about needing cash and about overseas dealings, specifically in Bahrain.
5. This is the second time Giuliani has done this to the same reporter.

• • The first time, on September 28, Giuliani can be heard railing against the Bidens and complaining about how Democratsn are attacking him.
  • He repeats his unfounded allegations about the Bidens and Burisma.
  • He talks about how Hunter Biden used Joe’s position in government to earn $1.5 billion from Chinese investors (which he didn’t). 
He accuses John Kerry’s son of working with Biden at the same foreign businesses (which he didn’t).

6. After saying last week that he doesn’t need a lawyer, Giuliani is looking for a defense attorney.

Bill Taylor Deposition:

1. Bill Taylor testifies before the impeachment panel. Taylor is the top U.S. diplomat in Ukraine, he’s the one who spelled out the quid pro quo in the text messages (I’m guessing to make sure it was on record), and he’s ignoring a State Department order not to comply. He says:

• • Trump conditioned the release of military aid for Ukraine on their willingness to investigation Burisma (where Hunter Biden worked) and Ukraine interference in the 2016 election. It was also predicated on Zelensky making a public statement that they were opening investigations into those things.
  • He was concerned that there were two US. policy channels with Ukraine—one formal and public channel, and one informal backchannel run by Giuliani, Kurt Volker, Gordon Sondland, and Rick Perry. (Volker, Sondland, and Perry called themselves the three amigos… so funny/not funny.)
  • Sondland told him that both military assistance to Ukraine and a White House visit between the two presidents were contingent upon Ukraine publicly announcing investigations into Burisma and alleged interference in the 2016 elections. Trump wanted to box Zelensky in.
  • John Bolton was alarmed by what was going on in Ukraine and tried to prevent the bypassing of official policies and procedures. Bolton called the whole thing a drug deal. Bolton also opposed the phone call between Trump and Zelensky, concerned that it would be a disaster.
  • Sondland didn’t include the standard group in the phone call because he wanted to make sure no one was monitoring or transcribing it.
  • The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) said that the president directed the OMB not to release any funds for Ukraine.

2. A series of security meetings up to the Cabinet level showed nearly unanimous support for releasing the funds.
3. Just a quick reminder, Congress approved those funds with no conditions in a bipartisan vote. The funds are to be used to counter Russian aggression.
4. Following Taylor’s testimony, some Democrats on the panel suggest Gordon Sondland might want to return to correct his statements. Sondland told the panel that he didn’t understand that when Trump talked about “Burisma,” that was code for “Biden.”
5. The White House refuses to release Taylor’s detailed records to Congress.

Laura Cooper Deposition:

1. Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Laura Cooper’s testimony unexpectedly becomes the highlight of the week when Republican Members of Congress storm the castle in protest of private depositions. They stream into the SCIF with their cell phones in hand, taking photos and tweeting. All against security regulations regarding SCIFs.

• • When Schiff notifies them that they’re compromising the SCIF with their phones, one Republican Intelligence Committee member starts collecting everyone’s phones. He wasn’t the only one on the Intelligence Committee, and they all should’ve known better.
  • They’re lucky they didn’t all get arrested. They asked to be arrested, but Democrats declined to push it.
  • The room will need to be sanitized to make sure House Republicans didn’t bring in any security breaches with them.
  • The dumbest part of this is that they were protesting nothing. Half the members who were there to protest are already allowed into the impeachment depositions because they serve on the committees. They’re allowed to participate.
    • 47 Republicans on three committees (Intelligence, Foreign Affairs, and Oversight) are allowed into the depositions, along with the 57 Democrats from those committees.
  • They do all this as the Pentagon official overseeing Ukraine policy, Laura Cooper, is about to testify. They delay her testimony by five hours.
  • Steve Scalise says that when they entered the SCIF, Adam Schiff left with the witness (Cooper). Other accounts say Schiff left to consult with the Sergeant at Arms. Either way, Cooper was waiting in a private room when all this went down.
  • At first, even Lindsey Graham criticizes the move, but then he backpedals.
  • It turns out that Trump knew about and approved of the plan to storm the SCIF beforehand.

2. After Cooper is finally allowed to testify, Rep. Mark Meadows (R-NC) says there were no groundbreaking revelations in her testimony and that some things she said conflict with Bill Taylor’s testimony.

• • It seems she mostly gave a technical testimony on how aid is supposed to occur, though, and it’s not clear (to the public anyway) what the conflicts are if any.
  • Other reports are that her testimony showed that the administration deviated from the normal process with their handling of Ukraine aid.

Philip Reeker Deposition:

1. Acting Assistant Secretary of State Philip Reeker testifies before the impeachment panel. He says:

• • He didn’t know about the Trump administration’s efforts to push Zelensky to publicly announce investigations into Biden and the 2016 elections until the whistleblower complaint was published.
  • When Reeker took his position in March, it was obvious to him that Kurt Volker and Gordon Sondland were the leads on Ukraine.
  • It was around the end of July when he learned that aid to Ukraine was being withheld.
  • The DoD wanted the funds for Ukraine released.
  • He had wanted to issue a defense of former Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch when he saw the smear campaign against her, but he was overruled at the State Department.