Many career diplomats and civil servants have been bucking the Trump regime’s orders to not testify. Much of this centers on the rampant abuse Trump, Pompeo, and their cadre have visited upon the State Department:
Trump faces furious State Dept. revolt for trashing career diplomats on Ukraine: ‘People are fed up’
Mulvaney again denies Trump-Ukraine quid pro quo
A small analysis: Trump sees any sort of admission of error or apology as weakness. So he’d rather have Mulvaney blatantly lying about something he can’t possibly walk back than come up with a plausible alternative. That almost pathological position is definitely playing against him here.
The private Instagram account of Lev Parnas—one of two Rudy Giuliani associates charged with campaign-finance violations—reveals a personal note to him apparently from Donald Trump. The Wall Street Journal gained access to the locked account which shows Parnas at events with Giuliani, Donald Jr., Eric, President Trump, and his ex-wife Ivana. One photograph shows a note apparently signed by Trump and first lady Melania Trump, which reads: “To Lev Parnas, Thank you for your friendship and dedication to our cause. Leaders like you in Florida are key to fulfilling our bold agenda to Make America Great Again!”
The photos also show Parnas in the leadup to the midterm elections flying around on a private jet with Giuliani. The day after Barr released a summary of the Mueller Report, he posted photos from a “celebration dinner” with Trump’s legal team. After Parnas was indicted, Trump said of him and fellow Giuliani associate Igor Fruman: “I don’t know them. I don’t know about them. I don’t know what they do.”
Shelby Holliday@shelbyholliday
· 4h
Replying to @shelbyholliday and 3 others
In August of 2015, Parnas posted four photos and a video from a Trump campaign event at Doral, including this picture with Trump and his son. https://www.wsj.com/video/private-photos-of-indicted-donor-depict-ties-to-trump-giuliani/7EED4946-5201-4D70-A8FF-0516DCC1488E.html …
Shelby Holliday
Then, his account jumps from 2015 to 2018. In Aug '18, Parnas posted a pic of a personalized thank-you note from POTUS & FLOTUS. “Lev Parnas, Thank you for your friendship and dedication to our cause,” it reads. WH didn’t respond to request for comment. https://www.wsj.com/video/private-photos-of-indicted-donor-depict-ties-to-trump-giuliani/7EED4946-5201-4D70-A8FF-0516DCC1488E.html …
Not sure if the video below is viewable without a WSJ subscription, but it provides an in-depth and fascinating look at Parnas’s leaked Instagram account that was locked – somehow WSJ must have gained access. It reveals a web of connections between Giuliani and the indicted Parnas that encompass Trump and his campaign.
New York Congresswoman Seeks Disbarment of Giuliani
President Trump’s personal lawyer calls effort by Rep. Kathleen Rice ‘harassment’
For people who like pods
House Republicans are expected to push a vote on Monday on a resolution to censure House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff. Republicans are taking issue with how Schiff is conducting the impeachment investigation. The House votes at 6:30PM ET.
This will probably fail. House Republicans seem like they’re just trying to move the needle on a full House vote on the Impeachment Inquiry. 
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff, a California Democrat who is leading the probe, both have refused to put a specific timeframe on the investigation.
"The timeline will depend on the truth line, and that’s what we’re looking for," Pelosi told reporters late last week.
Yet Democrats involved in the investigation say that the initial hope among some in their party that the matter could be wrapped up before the end of the fall now seems overly ambitious.
"I think it’s more like between Thanksgiving and Christmas" for the end of the investigation, said one Democratic member involved in the probe. "After that, it’s a strategic decision about when to bring it to the floor."
A committee source said that "putting an artificial time limit is the wrong way to run a credible investigation."
"We are committed to moving as methodically but expeditiously as possible – but we will interview witnesses, release transcripts and hold open hearings at time appropriate given the collection of facts," the source said.
OCT. 22
CLOSED-DOOR DEPOSITION
State Department official to be deposed
Chairmen of the House Oversight, Intelligence and Foreign Affairs committees requested that William “Bill” Taylor appear for a deposition on Capitol Hill on Oct. 22. In text messages provided to impeachment investigators by Kurt Volker, Taylor expressed a belief that U.S. defense aid and a meeting at the White House between Trump and Zelensky were conditioned on Ukraine’s agreeing to launch investigations that could benefit Trump politically. View the document
EXPECTED TO APPEAR
Taylor is expected to appear, despite White House counsel Pat Cipollone’s Oct. 8 letter to House leaders saying the administration would not cooperate with requests.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/politics/impeachment-calendar/
@anon95374541 called it: “This will probably fail. House Republicans seem like they’re just trying to move the needle on a full House vote on the Impeachment Inquiry. ”
… A Republican effort to censure House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.) for his handling of the inquiry failed Monday…
Yeah, I never expected that to pass. It’s the GOP trying to frame this to their liking, and the Dems are having none of that.
Yale prof. Timothy Snyder: “Mulvaney’s comment ‘get over it’ is a very economical way of saying get over the facts, get over the particular laws that make this illegal; get over the rule of law.”
Quid Pro Quo is a Misdirection
The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) is the office that, on Trump’s orders, withheld aid to Ukraine. Russell Vought, its Deputy Director, announced that it was “fake news” that his office would comply with the Congressional impeachment inquiry. This is significant because *it means that the OMB is helping Trump try to pull the “No Collusion” trick again.
Trump’s Trick Won’t Work Again
Nancy Pelosi’s office has a “fact sheet” laying out the most compelling evidence to date against Trump in the investigation of his efforts to pressure Ukraine to investigate Biden with 3 main headers:
➞The Shakedown
➞The Pressure Campaign
➞The Cover Up
https://www.yahoo.com/huffpost/pelosi-fact-sheet-trump-ukraine.html?soc_src=social-sh&soc_trk=tw
State Department Tried to Block Taylor’s Testimony
But the House Intelligence Committee was ready with a subpoena.
Yet another attempt by Trump to obstruct justice fails.
The State Department tried to block Mr. Taylor from appearing for Tuesday’s deposition, or to limit his testimony if he did, according to an official working on the impeachment inquiry who insisted on anonymity to described the negotiations. Early Tuesday morning, in keeping with a pattern that has allowed investigators to extract crucial information from numerous administration witnesses, the House Intelligence Committee quietly issued a subpoena to compel Mr. Taylor to testify, and he complied.
Hungary’s Orban Gave Trump Harsh Analysis of Ukraine Before Key Meeting
Just 10 days before a key meeting on Ukraine, President Trump met, over the objections of his national security adviser, with one of the former Soviet republic’s most virulent critics, Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary, and heard a sharp assessment that bolstered his hostility toward the country, according to several people informed about the situation.
Mr. Trump’s conversation with Mr. Orban on May 13 exposed him to a harsh indictment of Ukraine at a time when his personal lawyer was pressing the new government in Kiev to provide damaging information about Democrats. Mr. Trump’s suspicious view of Ukraine set the stage for events that led to the impeachment inquiry against him.
The visit by Mr. Orban, who is seen as an autocrat who has rolled back democracy, provoked a sharp dispute within the White House. John R. Bolton, then the president’s national security adviser, and Fiona Hill, then the National Security Council’s senior director for Eurasian and Russian affairs, opposed a White House invitation for the Hungarian leader, according to the people briefed on the matter. But they were outmaneuvered by Mick Mulvaney, the acting White House chief of staff, who supported such a meeting.
As a result, Mr. Trump at a critical moment in the Ukraine saga sat down in the Oval Office with a European leader with a fiercely negative outlook on Ukraine that fortified opinions he had heard from his personal lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, and from President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia repeatedly over the months and years.
Echoing Mr. Putin’s view, Mr. Orban has publicly accused Ukraine of oppressing its Hungarian minority and has cast his eye on a section of Ukraine with a heavy Hungarian population. His government has accused Ukraine of being “semi-fascist” and sought to block important meetings for Ukraine with the European Union and NATO.
Ten days after his meeting with Mr. Orban, Mr. Trump met on May 23 with several of his top advisers returning from the inauguration of Ukraine’s new president, Volodymyr Zelensky. The advisers, including Rick Perry, the energy secretary; Kurt D. Volker, then the special envoy for Ukraine; and Gordon D. Sondland, the ambassador to the European Union, reassured Mr. Trump that Mr. Zelensky was a reformer who deserved American support. But Mr. Trump expressed deep doubt, saying that Ukrainians were “terrible people” who “tried to take me down” during the 2016 presidential election.
Mr. Orban’s visit came up during testimony to House investigators last week by George P. Kent, a deputy assistant secretary of state responsible for Ukraine policy. The meeting with Mr. Orban and a separate May 3 phone call between Mr. Trump and Mr. Putin are of intense interest to House investigators seeking to piece together the back story that led to the president’s pressure on Ukraine to investigate Democrats.
Trump’s Ukraine envoy testifies amid questions of quid pro quo
William Taylor will face questions about his concerns that Trump was withholding military aid to pressure Ukraine to investigate Biden.
President Donald Trump’s top envoy to Ukraine arrived on Capitol Hill Tuesday with the potential to deliver some of the most revealing testimony to date in the House’s impeachment inquiry.
William Taylor was facing questions from House investigators about the deep concerns he had that Trump was withholding military aid to the eastern European nation to pressure Ukrainian leaders to investigate former Vice President and 2020 hopeful Joe Biden on spurious charges.
According to a source in the room for Taylor’s deposition, the longtime career government official’s opening statement was 15 pages long and prompted “a lot of sighs and gasps” inside the room.
Taylor, who replaced U.S. ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch after her unceremonious ouster by Trump in May, raised alarms with colleagues on Sept. 1 in a text message exchange released earlier this month by the three committees spearheading the inquiry.
“Are we now saying that security assistance and [White House] meeting are conditioned on investigations?” he wondered, referring to a potential meeting between Trump and his Ukrainian counterpart, Volodymyr Zelensky.
Eight days later, Taylor’s concerns grew more urgent. In texts with two other diplomats, Taylor said it was “crazy” that military aid to Kiev was being blocked in order to force “help with a political campaign.” Nearly $400 million in military assistance to Ukraine was put on hold in late July by the White House but was released in September two weeks after POLITICO revealed that it was frozen. Taylor described the hold on aid as a “nightmare” and said it had already shaken Ukraine’s faith in the United States.
"The Russians love it. (And I quit.)," Taylor said of the prospect that the aid would be blocked even after Ukraine agreed to open Trump’s preferred investigations.
Two more articles following this story directly.
Ukraine Envoy Testifies Trump Linked Military Aid to Investigations, Lawmaker Says
In closed-door testimony, a Democratic lawmaker said, William B. Taylor Jr., the top American diplomat in Ukraine, drew a “direct line” between President Trump’s withholding of security aid and his demand for investigations.
William B. Taylor Jr., the United States’ top diplomat in Ukraine, told impeachment investigators privately on Tuesday that President Trump held up security aid for the country and refused a White House meeting with Ukraine’s leader until he agreed to investigate Mr. Trump’s political rivals.
The testimony drew what one lawmaker described as a “direct line” between American foreign policy and his own political goals.
In testimony that Democrats in attendance called the most damaging account yet for the president, Mr. Taylor provided an “excruciatingly detailed” opening statement that described the quid-pro-quo pressure campaign that Mr. Trump and his allies have been denying.
Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Democrat of Florida, who sat in on the deposition as a member of the House Oversight and Reform Committee, said that Mr. Taylor relied in part on detailed “notes to the file” that he had made as he watched the pressure campaign unfold. His testimony shed new light on the circumstances around a previously revealed text message in which Mr. Taylor wrote to colleagues that he thought it was “crazy to withhold security assistance for help with a political campaign.”
On Tuesday, Mr. Taylor directly addressed accusations surrounding Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, and Burisma, a Ukrainian gas company that employed Hunter Biden, the son of former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., one of the leading Democratic candidates for president.
He “drew a very direct line in the series of events he described between President Trump’s decision to withhold funds and refuse a meeting with Zelensky unless there was a public pronouncement by him of investigations of Burisma and the so-called 2016 election conspiracy theories,” Ms. Wasserman Schultz said.
Opening statement of Ambassador William B. Taylor
PDF:
Below, a few takeaways from Taylor’s opening statement.
1. There was a quid pro quo on military aid, he believes
In the text messages described above, Taylor, the acting U.S. ambassador, asked Sept. 1 about hundreds of millions of dollars in withheld military aid: “Are we now saying that security assistance and WH meeting are conditioned on investigations?” And on Sept. 9, he worried that “it’s crazy to withhold security assistance for help with a political campaign.”
In his opening statement, Taylor said nothing has disabused him of that belief.
“I believed that then, and I still believe that,” he said.
2. But it wasn’t the only one
One of the big questions here was whether Trump might have gotten leverage from a) withholding hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid, or b) from withholding an Oval Office meeting that new Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky badly wanted.
Graphic: Who’s who in the impeachment inquiry
“By mid-July it was becoming clear to me that the meeting President Zelenskyy wanted was conditioned on the investigations of Burisma,” which employed Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden, “and alleged Ukrainian interference in the 2016 U.S. elections,” Taylor said.
The military aid was held up around the same time, but Taylor said it took him longer to reach the same conclusion about it.
“It still had not occurred to me that the hold on security assistance could be related to the ‘investigation,’" he said, describing where things stood in late August when the withheld military aid was first reported. “That, however, would soon change.”
3. An explicit quid pro quo — explicitly relayed to Ukraine
Taylor provides perhaps the most compelling evidence yet that this quid pro quo didn’t just exist but was explicitly communicated to Ukraine. He said he was told by National Security Council aide Tim Morrison that Sondland, the ambassador to the European Union, directly communicated that quid pro quo to a top Zelensky aide, Andriy Yermak.
“During this same phone call I had with Mr. Morrison, he went on to describe a conversation Ambassador Sondland had with Mr. Yermak at [a meeting in] Warsaw,” Taylor said. “Ambassador Sondland told Mr. Yermak that the security assistance money would not come until President Zelenskyy committed to pursue the Burisma investigation.” (Zelenskyy, the spelling used by Taylor in his written remarks, is the preferred spelling in Ukraine.)
That’s about as explicit as it gets — although it’s secondhand. It appears Morrison’s testimony will now be key.
Taylor also said Sondland later told him directly that both a meeting and military aid depended on the investigations.
“Ambassador Sondland also told me that he now recognized that he had made a mistake by earlier telling the Ukrainian officials to whom he spoke that a White House meeting with President Zelenskyy was dependent on a public announcement of investigations — in fact, Ambassador Sondland said, ‘everything’ was dependent on such an announcement, including security assistance,” Taylor said. “He said that President Trump wanted President Zelenskyy ‘in a public box’ by making a public statement about ordering such investigations.”
Acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney last week appeared to confirm a quid pro quo — saying the aid was held up in part because Ukraine declined to investigate a conspiracy theory about the 2016 election that Trump favors. He soon tried to clean that up, saying Trump was merely concerned about corruption more broadly.
Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) has also described such an arrangement on the 2016 investigation, saying Trump told him about it in an Aug. 31 phone call.
“But the president was very consistent on why he was considering [holding up the aid]," Johnson said this month. “Again, it was corruption, overall, generalized — but yeah, no doubt about it, what happened in 2016 — what happened in 2016, as relates? What was the truth about that?”
Johnson has also said Sondland told him at the time that the aid was tied to the investigation involving 2016 election interference, which Trump would apparently like to use to undercut the idea that Russia was behind it.
4. Sondland has explaining to do
Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee are talking about bringing Sondland back for more questioning, apparently believing he wasn’t forthcoming with them.
Sondland testified last week, for instance, that he wasn’t able to vouch for the lack of a quid pro quo. But Taylor suggests he was directly involved in communicating one. Taylor suggests Sondland tried to put a good face on it — and that Trump and Sondland took care to say it wasn’t a “quid pro quo” — but that that’s what it effectively was.
“Ambassador Sondland said that he had talked to President Zelenskyy and Mr. Yermak and told them that, although this was not a quid pro quo, if President Zelenskyy did not ‘clear things up’ in public, we would be at a ‘stalemate,’" Taylor said of his Sept. 8 phone call with Sondland. “I understood a ‘stalemate’ to mean that Ukraine would not receive the much-needed military assistance.”
Sondland also said testified last week that “I recall no discussions with any State Department or White House official about former vice president Biden or his son, nor do I recall taking part in any effort to encourage an investigation into the Bidens.”
But Taylor described Sondland relaying a direct request involving the Bidens to Ukraine.
5. More cloak-and-dagger
Taylor doesn’t just describe quid pro quos; he describes the kind of secrecy we’ve come to expect from the Ukraine saga.
He says on a June 28 call with the “three amigos” — Sondland, Volker and Energy Secretary Rick Perry — Sondland said he wanted to prevent records of their upcoming call with Zelensky. He says Volker said on the call that he was going to make the White House demands to Zelensky explicit.
“I sense something odd when Ambassador Sondland told me on June 28 that he did not wish to include most of the regular interagency participants in a call planned with President Zelenskyy later that day,” Taylor says. “Ambassador Sondland, Ambassador Volker, Secretary Perry, and I were on this call, dialing in from different locations. However, Ambassador Sondland said that he wanted to make sure no one was transcribing or monitoring as they added President Zelenskyy to the call.”
Taylor also says he was given no rundown of what Trump spoke about with Zelensky in their July 25 call, the rough transcript of which showed Trump requesting the two investigations.
“Strangely, even though I was the Chief of Mission and was scheduled to meet with President Zelenskyy along with Ambassador Volker the following day, I received no readout of the call from the White House,” he says.
The whistleblower who touched off this whole thing has alleged that the call between Trump and Zelensky was stored on a code-word-level computer system that is generally reserved for sensitive national security information.
Sondland also encouraged Taylor in their texts, after Taylor raised concerns about quid pro quos, to speak with him on the phone. Sondland has denied he was trying to avoid a written record of their conversation, saying that’s generally how he conducts business.
The NY Times,
Absolutely! – just finished reading it.
Testimony from Timothy Morrison, Senior official for Russia and Europe on the National Security Council, should provide additional corroboration. According to WaPo’s most excellent “Impeachment Inquiry Schedule” posted by @anon95374541, Morrison was scheduled to testify on Oct. 25, but that deposition has been delayed to an as-yet-to-be-determined date due to the funeral services for the late Rep. Elijah Cummings. Also, Morrison has not said whether or not he will appear – so we’ll just have to wait with bated breath until we find out more.