WTF Community

The Impeachment of President Donald J. Trump

Some legal heavyweights insights and suggestions for Rep Schiff -

What to do, what to do? Can they allowing the Whistleblower’s petition to go to Congressional Intell committee and avoid the DOJ’s assumed position of running interference for the President?

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From CNN reporter Jim Sciutto - that Ukrainian readout says that T did in fact tie the T position (and Guiliani’s) that the discussions involved both Biden investigation and supporting Ukraine.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/09/20/why-trumps-alleged-promise-involving-ukraine-is-particularly-ominous/

We’re not meddling in an election; we’re meddling in an investigation, which we have a right to do,” Giuliani told the New York Times’s Kenneth P. Vogel. Giuliani added: “There’s nothing illegal about it. Somebody could say it’s improper. . . . I’m asking them to do an investigation that they’re doing already and that other people are telling them to stop. And I’m going to give them reasons why they shouldn’t stop it because that information will be very, very helpful to my client, and may turn out to be helpful to my government.”
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It was a remarkable admission at the time — particularly that it could be “very, very helpful to my client” and separating that from the idea that it might also happen to benefit the U.S. government. And it’s even more remarkable in this moment.

When Giuliani canceled the trip, he blamed the Ukrainian government and suggested Democrats had overblown the situation.

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Inside sources have now spoken to the WaPo, NYT, and WSJ. We’re finding out more almost by the hour. I expect additional revelations will be following soon. Stay tuned… :ear:

President Donald Trump pressured Ukraine’s president during a July phone call to investigate Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden’s son Hunter, suggesting roughly eight times that he work with Rudy Giuliani, his personal lawyer, to carry out the probe, according to a new report Friday by The Wall Street Journal citing people familiar with the matter.

The revelation is likely to raise more questions in the ongoing controversy over a mysterious complaint submitted by an intelligence whistleblower that involves Trump’s communications with a foreign leader. The complaint deals at least in part with Ukraine, The New York Times and Washington Post reported Thursday night.

In the phone call, Trump told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky “that he should work with [Mr. Giuliani] on Biden, and that people in Washington wanted to know” whether allegations were true or not, one of the people said, according to the Journal, which noted that $250 million in US military aid to Ukraine did not come up in the call.

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President Donald Trump on Friday did not deny that he discussed former Vice President Joe Biden with a foreign leader during a conversation that is reportedly the subject of a hotly contested whistleblower complaint.

Instead, Trump claimed the allegations against him were lodged by a “partisan” intelligence official — despite acknowledging that he did not know the official’s identity — and asserted that his exchanges with fellow heads of government are “always appropriate.”

He told reporters in the Oval Office that “it doesn’t matter what I discussed” with the foreign leader but went on to say that “somebody ought to look into Joe Biden’s statement” regarding Ukraine.

Watch Trump’s rambling, contradictory, self-incriminating defense:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xcxeM6BkUlE

First he says “it’s a partisan whistleblower,” but then he says he doesn’t know who the whistleblower is. He says he doesn’t know what conversation they’re referring to, but then he says “it was actually a beautiful conversation.”

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Here’s the breaking WSJ article in full - that is mentioned in @Keaton_James posting above The Impeachment of President Donald J. Trump

Infuriating amount of information about continuous out-of-bounds behavior by T.

Trump Repeatedly Pressed Ukraine President to Investigate Biden’s Son

Interactions under focus amid whistleblower complaint on U.S. president’s dealings with a world leader

Alan Cullison,

Rebecca Ballhaus and

Dustin Volz

Updated Sept. 20, 2019 6:49 pm ET

President Trump in a July phone call repeatedly pressured the president of Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden ’s son, according to people familiar with the matter, urging Volodymyr Zelensky about eight times to work with Rudy Giuliani on a probe that could hamper Mr. Trump’s potential 2020 opponent.

“He told him that he should work with [Mr. Giuliani] on Biden, and that people in Washington wanted to know” if his lawyer’s assertions that Mr. Biden acted improperly as vice president were true, one of the people said. Mr. Giuliani has suggested Mr. Biden’s pressure on Ukraine to fight corruption had to do with an investigation of a gas company for which his son was a director. A Ukrainian official this year said he had no evidence of wrongdoing by Mr. Biden or his son Hunter Biden.

Mr. Trump in the call didn’t mention a provision of U.S. aid to Ukraine, said this person, who didn’t believe Mr. Trump offered the Ukrainian president any quid-pro-quo for his cooperation on any investigation.

The interactions between the president, Mr. Giuliani and Ukraine have come under scrutiny in recent days in the wake of a whistleblower complaint that a person familiar with the matter said involves the president’s communications with a foreign leader. The complaint, which the Washington Post reported centers on Ukraine, has prompted a new standoff between Congress and the executive branch.

Separately, lawmakers are investigating any connection between the review of foreign aid to Ukraine and the efforts to pressure Kiev to look into Mr. Biden.

Mr. Giuliani in June and August met with top Ukrainian officials about the prospect of an investigation, he said in an interview. After the July call between the two presidents, the Ukrainian government said Mr. Trump had congratulated Mr. Zelensky on his recent election and expressed hope that his government would push ahead with investigations and corruption probes that had stymied relations between the two countries.

The White House declined to comment.

Mr. Biden, in a statement Friday, called for the White House to release the transcript of the president’s call with Mr. Zelensky.

“Such clear-cut corruption damages and diminishes our institutions of government by making them tools of a personal political vendetta,” he said.

Mr. Trump only recently emerged from the nearly two-year investigation by Robert Mueller into whether his campaign sought help in the 2016 election from a different country: Russia. While Mr. Mueller said in his report this spring that he didn’t establish a conspiracy between Moscow and the Trump campaign, Mr. Trump’s efforts to seek Ukraine’s help in damaging a potential political opponent are certain to revive criticism that the president welcomes campaign help from foreign countries.

Mr. Trump on Friday defended his July call with Mr. Zelensky as “totally appropriate” but declined to say whether he had asked the Ukrainian leader to investigate Mr. Biden. At the same time, he reiterated his call for an investigation into Mr. Biden’s effort as vice president to oust Ukraine’s prosecutor general. “Somebody ought to look into that,” he told reporters.

In recent months, Mr. Giuliani has mounted an extensive effort to pressure Ukraine to do so. He said he met with an official from the Ukrainian prosecutor general’s office in June in Paris, and met with Andriy Yermak, a top aide to Mr. Zelensky, in Madrid in August. Mr. Giuliani said in an interview this month that Mr. Yermak assured him the Ukrainian government would “get to the bottom” of the Biden matter.

The August meeting came weeks before the Trump administration began reviewing the status of $250 million in foreign aid to Ukraine, which the administration released earlier this month. Mr. Giuliani said he wasn’t aware of the issue with the funds to Ukraine at the time of the meeting.

He said his meeting with Mr. Yermak was set up by the State Department, and said he briefed the department on their conversationlater. The State Department had no immediate comment.

In late August, after Mr. Trump canceled a planned trip to Poland where he had been scheduled to meet with Mr. Zelensky, Mr. Giuliani said Mr. Yermak called him to ask whether the cancellation had anything to do with Mr. Zelensky, which Mr. Giuliani assured him it did not. Mr. Trump at the time said he needed to deal with Hurricane Dorian.

Mr. Trump is to meet with Mr. Zelensky in person for the first time next week, at the United Nations General Assembly gathering in New York.

Michael Atkinson, the Trump-appointed inspector general of the intelligence community, met Thursday morning with the House Intelligence Committee in a closed session to discuss the whistleblower complaint. Mr. Atkinson declined to tell lawmakers the substance of the complaint or whether it involves the president, but he did say it involves more than one episode and is based on a series of events, according to several people who attended or were briefed on the meeting.

Joseph Maguire, a retired Navy vice admiral serving as the acting director of national intelligence, is to appear before both the Senate and House intelligence committees next week about the complaint, though it remains unclear if he will be willing to divulge details about its underlying substance.

Stymied Democrats in Congress continued to mull potential avenues to obtain the complaint. Rep. Adam Schiff (D., Calif.), chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said he was considering a lawsuit to obtain the complaint or withholding funding from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Mr. Schiff has accused Mr. Maguire of violating the law by not sending the complaint to Congress, as required under the federal whistleblower statute.

“It’s been very hard for the director of national intelligence to explain why he is the first ever in that position to withhold an urgent whistleblower complaint from Congress,” Mr. Schiff said Friday.

Mr. Maguire’s office consulted the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, which determined that the allegation didn’t meet the statutory definition of an “urgent concern” requiring reporting to the intelligence committees, the Justice Department said.

Typically, opinions from the OLC are seen as binding on the executive branch, legal experts said, and it remains unclear how or whether Mr. Maguire could transmit the complaint to lawmakers now.

Even before the debate over the whistleblower complaint, Democratic lawmakers had begun investigating interactions with Ukraine by the president and his lawyer. Earlier this month, the House Foreign Affairs, Intelligence and Oversight committees sent letters to the White House and State Department seeking records of interactions involving the president and Mr. Giuliani and the Ukrainian government.

In the interview this month, Mr. Giuliani said he had sought in the spring to meet with Mr. Zelensky—at the time Ukraine’s president-elect—and planned a trip to Kiev to pressure the Ukrainian government to pursue two investigations: one into whether Ukraine, under its previous leader, had sought in 2016 to hurt the Trump campaign and bolster his opponent; and another into diplomatic efforts in the country by Mr. Biden, who is currently leading the Democratic presidential field.

Mr. Giuliani ultimately canceled that trip after his plan was made public. Mr. Trump was aware of the planned meeting, he said.

Mr. Biden as vice president made several trips to Ukraine to press the government to root out widespread corruption. That included seeking the ouster of former prosecutor general Viktor Shokin, who had investigated a private Ukrainian gas company, Burisma Group, of which Hunter Biden was a board member. Mr. Giuliani has suggested Mr. Biden’s motivation was to protect his son, a lawyer who has been involved in several investment and consulting firms, although Mr. Shokin had already completed his investigation of Burisma Group before he left office.

Yuriy Lutsenko, Ukraine’s prosecutor general at the time, told Bloomberg News in May he had no evidence of wrongdoing by Mr. Biden or his son.

In an interview Thursday evening, Mr. Giuliani said he wasn’t aware whether the whistleblower complaint related to Ukraine. But in a Twitter post later that evening, he defended the possibility that Mr. Trump had urged Mr. Zelensky to investigate his potential campaign opponent.

“A President telling a Pres-elect of a well known corrupt country he better investigate corruption that affects US is doing his job,” Mr. Giuliani wrote.

Mr. Giuliani said earlier this month that Mr. Trump likely would raise the Biden matter with Mr. Zelensky when they meet, saying the matter was “on his mind.” A senior administration official said Friday that the two would discuss how to expand energy cooperation and trade ties.

(mailto:[email protected]) and Dustin Volz at [email protected]

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Cross-posting for the header. I don’t want to leave anything out. :joy:

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T has no allegiance to Ukraine…never did.
Useful tools I would say.

How Trump and Giuliani pressured Ukraine to investigate the president’s rivals

https://wapo.st/2V7vypL

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) told Zelensky this month in a Kiev meeting that the aid was being held back because Trump was concerned about corruption and thought the Europeans should provide Ukraine more assistance, according to Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), who was in attendance, as well as an aide to Johnson.

A former senior administration official who repeatedly discussed the issue with Trump said that the president thought “what we were doing in Ukraine was pointless and just aggravating the Russians.”

The president’s position basically is, we should recognize the fact that the Russians should be our friends, and who cares about the Ukrainians?” said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations.

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This flew under the radar a week ago. Mmmm… could there be more going on here than just a bit of spontaneous generosity from Trump? Also, it’s interesting that we learned about this extra aid, not from the White House (they were mum about it), but from a speech that the Ukrainian President gave at a conference in Kyiv. :thinking:

Ukraine’s president said Friday that the United States hasn’t only released $250 million in military aid to his country but will also extend an additional $140 million.

President Volodymyr Zelenskiy told a conference in the capital Kyiv that Ukraine will get the new money on top of the sum that was announced a day earlier. He said he welcomes the aid and is thankful to the U.S. for its support of economic sanctions against Russia, which annexed Ukraine’s Crimea in 2014 and funded separatists in Ukraine’s east.

The Trump administration said Thursday that it has released $250 million in military aid to Ukraine that had been held up. It didn’t mention additional funds.

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Why isn’t this the banner headline on every news site today! Trump admits that he discussed Biden with the Ukranian President. Trump even admits he told the leader that Biden should be investigated! How are we to believe Trump wasn’t pressuring him? In this same time-frame Trump first holds up $250 million in aid to Ukraine, then suddenly releases it and kicks in an additional $140 million. And his head of DoJ blocks us from finding out what was really said on the call. This just stinks, stinks, stinks. Yet the big headline today is that Trump meets with Modi.

If you watch the video, you just know that Trump is lying through his teeth. He’s trying to make it perfectly OK for a U.S. President to pressure a foreign government to interfere in our elections! Please watch this – I believe it’s historic, but the media is just treating it like yet another off-kilter Trump sound bite. No it isn’t – he’s confessing to a treasonous crime!

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Pelosi is getting a bit more driven to take some actions, ie impeachment, according to this Axios piece. It is another instance of total obstruction from T, to DOJ to protect the president, so to do nothing is not an option. Would she get more consensus from her House Dems…?

Pelosi is calling on R’s to do something. Will any R’s stand up to this? All I hear from administration types on the talk shows, ie Mnunchin is the ‘whataboutism’ - if T did this, well, what did Biden do?

In a letter to lawmakers Sunday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) issued a warning about the Trump administration’s continued efforts to block acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire from turning over a whistleblower complaint that reportedly involves the president.

“If the Administration persists in blocking this whistleblower from disclosing to Congress a serious possible breach of constitutional duties by the President, they will be entering a grave new chapter of lawlessness which will take us into a whole new stage of investigation.”

Between the lines: It’s likely that the “new stage of investigation” that Pelosi is referring to is impeachment. House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) — who along with Pelosi has refrained from endorsing impeachment until there’s enough public support — said Sunday that the whistleblower controversy could leave Democrats with no other choice.

Context: Trump confirmed on Sunday that he spoke to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in July about possibly investigating Joe Biden and his son, Hunter. It’s not clear if this conversation is at the heart of the whistleblower complaint, but the Washington Post and others have reported that the complaint does involve Ukraine.

  • The Trump administration has been blocking Maguire from providing the full complaint to Congress, arguing that it’s not a matter of “urgent concern” and that it falls outside the scope of the intelligence community.
  • Maguire will appear before the House Intelligence Committee on Thursday, where Pelosi said she expects him to turn over the full complaint.
  • Pelosi is also calling on Republicans to “join us in insisting that the Acting DNI obey the law as we seek the truth to protect the American people and our Constitution.”
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Who do you think the Whistleblower is???

Pure speculation…(from my readings)

The two separate groups who have been suggested are:

  1. Dan Coats and Sue Gordon - the head of DNI who was fired and Sue Former Principal Deputy Director of DNI who was asked to resign by Coats. Their timeline fits…as they were still employed by Aug 12th, and had been let go/resigned before that Aug 8 I believe.

  2. Fiona Hill - who left within that week as well. (The Impeachment of President Donald J. Trump)
    The WSJ article * has been questioned…in that it does confirm that the conversations went on between T and Zelenski (Ukrainian head) but that no quid pro quo was offered. If this was a ‘soft’ leak, and perhaps meant to protect the president…this was very much in favor for T.

Leading leakers - Bolton and perhaps Dan Coats/Sue Gordon

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Trump’s public admission of a treasonous crime (I don’t see how it can be interpreted any other way) is finally getting some traction in this news cycle.

Schiff is now saying “impeachment may be the only remedy” – this is huge – he did not previously support impeachment so now we can add him to the list! He becomes one of the most powerful voices supporting the impeachment process. And as @dragonfly9 has posted above, Pelosi is leaning ever closer to the impeachment option as well.

Here’s the list of House Democrats supporting impeachment (and Schiff makes it 138):

Just watch this list grow next week. :chart_with_upwards_trend:

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Romney is sticking his neck out…let’s see if other R’s can do the same.

A bit cautionary…but hey, he made his displeasure known.

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Shame on CNN for glossing over Trump’s word salad of lies. In the above article, they quote him as follows:

“We had a great conversation. The conversation I had was largely congratulatory, was largely corruption – all of the corruption taking place, was largely the fact that we don’t want our people like Vice President Biden and his son (adding to the corruption),” Trump told reporters.

Note that CNN inserted the phrase “(adding to the corruption)” at the end. Trump did not say that. He said, “creating to the the corruption already in the Ukraine and Ukraine Ukraine’s got a lot of problems.” See it here.

It should not be CNN’s role to make sense out of Trump’s gibberish. The fact that Trump is floundering as he speaks adds additional weight to the sense that he is lying. That’s what a lying person does as they struggle to get their lies straight.

Here’s the entire disjointed mess of yet another “press conference” shouted over the roar of a helicopter engine (he dishes up his word salad on the phone conversation starting at about the 2 minute mark):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGNk5EjumRE

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Trump continues to babble about his phone call with the Ukrainian President. This time during a talk at a Coast Guard base in Houston. Trump’s rambling remarks amount to an admission (his second today) that he asked Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden and his son. Here’s the clip:

And if you’d like context, here’s his full talk (the above excerpt starts at 12:50).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOyvA2qpWe4

Here’s a transcription. Believe it or not, this is word for word. For the most part, Trump is incoherent here – just tossing out phrases. You can decipher just enough of what he’s saying to determine that he did indeed commit the impeachable offense of asking a foreign government to investigate his political opponent.

Q.: On this call did you raise Joe Biden or his son’s name with Ukraine?

Trump: Well I don’t even want to mention it, but certainly I’d have every right to if there’s corruption and we’re paying lots of money to a country, we don’t want a country that we’re giving massive aid to to be corrupting our system and we don’t want it to be corrupt in any way, but we certainly don’t want it to be corrupting our system. I’ve been hearing about the Ukraine all during this Russian hoax the witch hunt that they went through that now turned out to be a zero, but after two years, all through I’ve been hearing the name, “Ukraine, Ukraine, Ukraine. A lot of things came out of Ukraine.” So we don’t want to let anything having to do with any of that really, you know, hurt our country so it would be fine to do it but you will see one of the finest one of the nicest if we do that or I’ll have somebody, I’ll give it to a respected source. They could look at it, but what I said was so good. It was a great conversation. It was a really great conversation and everybody will say that.

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Even the right-leaning WSJ is calling out Trump on his highly suspicious actions surrounding the whistleblower scandal. Congressional Republicans and Democrats alike were mystified as to why Trump was withholding aid to Ukraine. They repeatedly were stonewalled (sound familiar?) when trying to get answers from the Administration. The one key piece of information they lacked was that Trump was asking Ukraine to investigate his political rival.

For weeks, lawmakers of both parties struggled to get answers over why the Trump administration delayed money Congress had appropriated to help Ukraine defend itself from the threat of Russian aggression.

The story of how Congress was left largely in the dark—and how it intervened to get the military aid back on track—has become another focal point amid revelations of a pressure campaign aimed at the Ukrainian government by President Trump and his personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani. On Monday, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) called on Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) to launch a broad investigation touching on who directed the suspension of aid, saying it should be part of a broader probe.

The Wall Street Journal reported last week that Mr. Trump in a July phone call repeatedly pressed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate Joe Biden ’s anticorruption efforts in the country while he was vice president and while his son Hunter Biden was working there. Neither Biden has been accused of wrongdoing over their work in Ukraine. Democrats have said the president was wrongfully pressuring a foreign leader to investigate a potential 2020 opponent, and part of a whistleblower complaint concerning Mr. Trump involves the Ukraine call, according to a person familiar with the matter.

That July conversation wasn’t known to lawmakers trying to get to the bottom of Mr. Trump’s opposition to a Ukraine aid package. As lawmakers lobbied Mr. Trump to release the money personally and called officials across his administration, they kept getting shifting responses, according to multiple interviews over the past few weeks.

“It’s not uncommon for foreign aid to be somewhat conditional; we don’t just give aid away under any and all circumstances,” said Steven Smith, a political-science professor at Washington University in St. Louis. But “if the money then is somehow withheld and [lawmakers aren’t] privy to the reason for it, then it’s a pretty serious situation.”

The Trump administration said that with the Ukraine money, it sought to more closely scrutinize how it was going to be used. The administration has sought to restrict foreign-aid disbursements several times, repeatedly drawing the ire of lawmakers who have insisted on the importance of the funds.

“That good-government process was run by the President’s policy team on this account to ensure that those goals were met,” a senior administration official said.

Politico reported on Aug. 28 that Mr. Trump had asked his national security team to review the $250 million in aid, which had been appropriated as part of the fiscal 2019 spending package.

Over a congressional recess, while the country was focused on mass shootings in Texas and Ohio, a handful of lawmakers engaged in a campaign to release the military aid.

Sen. Chris Murphy (D., Conn.) wrote that cutting off aid would be “an absolute gift” to the Russians. The co-chairs of the House Ukraine Caucus issued a statement saying the aid shouldn’t be delayed. On Sept. 3, Sens. Jeanne Shaheen (D., N.H.), Rob Portman (R., Ohio), Ron Johnson (R., Wis.), Dick Durbin (D., Ill.) and Richard Blumenthal (D., Conn.) wrote to acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney and the Office of Management and Budget and pointedly underscored their congressional prerogatives.

“This funding is crucial to the long term stability of Ukraine and has the continued backing and approval of the U.S. Congress which appropriated these funds,” they wrote. “We strongly urge you to direct the Department of Defense to obligate these funds immediately,” they said.

“We got nowhere,” Ms. Shaheen later said.

Part of the complication was that lawmakers couldn’t get clear answers from the administration on its rationale for holding up the military aid, making it nearly impossible to work through issues.

When some lawmakers spoke with Mr. Trump, the president told them that he was upset that other countries weren’t spending enough to bolster Ukraine, according to a person familiar with the matter.

That was the same explanation Mr. Trump gave to reporters on Sunday, when asked about Ukraine: “Germany should be spending much more, France, all of the European Union should be spending money. Why are we spending money and they’re not?”

But on Sept. 3, Vice President Mike Pence, who had met a day earlier with Mr. Zelensky, said that in the meeting, “as President Trump had me make clear, we have great concerns about issues of corruption.”

Mr. Pence said that “to invest additional taxpayer [money] in Ukraine, the president wants to be assured that those resources are truly making their way to the kind of investments that will contribute to security and stability in Ukraine.”

But military officials seemed less wary, lawmakers said.

“We were repeatedly promised by the military leaders when we pushed that the money was going to be released,” said Mr. Blumenthal, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee. “We were assured repeatedly that they saw not only the need for it militarily, but also a clear path forward.”

Meanwhile, Senate Foreign Relations Committee members were also receiving muddled answers.

“There was a lot of consternation about why this was held up and what was going on,” said Sen. Chris Coons (D., Del.), a member of the panel. “I don’t remember ever hearing a clear response about what the holdup was.”

Sen. John Kennedy (R., La.) tried to find out by asking Mr. Durbin, a co-chair of the Senate’s Ukraine Caucus, and Mr. Murphy why they thought funds had been held up. “We don’t know,” Mr. Durbin said.

Fed up, senators coalesced around an amendment that Mr. Durbin had sought to attach to a fiscal 2020 defense-spending bill to force the release of funds to Ukraine. The day before the Senate Appropriations Committee was scheduled to vote, the White House released the military aid, along with $142 million in State Department funds.

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:clap::clap::clap: brilliant

Cross-posting for reference :pray:

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House Democrats may vote this week on a resolution condemning President Donald Trump’s efforts to pressure Ukrainian officials to investigate Joe Biden, as Speaker Nancy Pelosi and party leaders consider ramping up impeachment proceedings against the president, according to lawmakers and aides.

Pelosi is expected to meet with the six committee chairmen investigating Trump on Tuesday afternoon to discuss Democrats’ next steps and may even issue a forceful statement endorsing the impeachment investigation.

Democratic leaders have also called a full caucus meeting for Tuesday afternoon, where the discussion is expected to center on their response to the episode.

Democratic leaders now view a House Intelligence Committee hearing on Thursday featuring Trump’s top intelligence official — as well as a deadline that day for the State Department to turn over related documents potentially implicating the president and his personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani — as the deciding factor over whether to move forward with impeachment proceedings.

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Cross-posting

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And another Impeachment inquiry supporter - Rep Debbie Dingell

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