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The Impeachment of President Donald J. Trump

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#996

Summary of Impeachment Inquiry into Trump 2019

October 3rd-15th

Calendars:

General Congressional News:

News:

Documents:

Oversight And Reform Committee Investigations into Trump 2019:

News:

Documents:

Intelligence Committee Investigations into Trump 2019:

News:

Documents:

Forgeign Affairs Committee Investigations into Trump 2019:

News:

Documents:

Other House and Senate Committees:

News:

Documents:

:newspaper: Timeline has been updated. Breaking news starts below. :point_down:

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House Financial Services Committee Investigations into Trump
Other House and Senate Committees Investigations into Trump
The Senate Trial
Sideshow Rudy & Co
House Judiciary Committee Investigations into Trump
#997

BIg Thx for all your HARD work and dedication @Pet_Proletariat

You are a whiz…:trophy:

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#998

This rebuke from Congress feels like it would be considered an impeachable offense. It reflects that a majority of the House does not support T.

So am placing it here.

House overwhelmingly condemns Trump’s Syria decision

The House voted 354-60 on Wednesday on a resolution condemning President Trump’s decision to withdraw U.S. troops from northern Syria, which paved the way for Turkey to lead a military offensive against Kurdish forces who allied with the U.S. in the fight against ISIS.

Why it matters: It’s a significant bipartisan rebuke of Trump’s decision, which he defended at a press conference earlier Wednesday where he said the Kurds are “not angels.” The resolution calls on Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to cease his military operation and urges the White House to “present a clear and specific plan for the enduring defeat of ISIS,” which could see a resurgence as the U.S. plans a total withdrawal from Syria.

The big picture: AP notes that the House debate on the resolution was “extraordinary for the intensity of lawmakers’ opinions.” In the Senate, Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) plan to introduce a bill as early as Thursday that would introduce crippling sanctions against Turkey for its military operation.

  • Trump has already authorized sanctionsagainst some Turkish officials, but he made clear on Wednesday that he does not regret the decision to withdraw troops from northern Syria.
  • “Our soldiers are not in harm’s way, as they shouldn’t be, as two countries fight over land that has nothing to do with us,” Trump said at a press conference with Italian President Sergio Mattarella. “And the Kurds are much safer now. The Kurds know how to fight, and as I said, they’re not angels.”
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#999

Statement from Pelosi

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#1000

Going back to the story about the 4th Giuliani associate being arrested, it turns out to be Andrey Kukushkin, who somehow we all missed.

And suddenly John Bolton’s “drug deal” comment gets interesting… cause this guy’s a marijuana kingpin!

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#1001

Cross-posting :pray:

Day 1000, yikes but go @matt !

Day 1000

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#1002

U.S. House Intelligence chairman says impeachment transcripts to be public

U.S. Representative Adam Schiff, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said on Wednesday the committee will make public transcripts of interviews conducted with witnesses in the impeachment probe of President Donald Trump.

In a letter to House colleagues, the Democratic chairman said the transcripts would be made public, subject to redactions, at some points in the future. Some Republicans have been complaining they have been unable to see transcripts.

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#1003

The Trump Impeachment Inquiry: What Happened Today

Another official spoke with investigators, and Congress settled in before a big day of testimony.

  • Michael McKinley told investigators he resigned last week as a top aide to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo out of frustration with an increasingly politicized State Department — particularly the way the Trump administration wrestled Ukraine policy away from career diplomats. He warned that efforts to pressure Ukraine “to procure negative information on political opponents” would “have a serious impact on foreign service morale and the integrity of our work overseas.”
  • Senator Mitch McConnell , the majority leader, outlined the next few months of impeachment at the Senate Republicans’ weekly lunch. He said House Democrats wanted to move expeditiously, possibly approving articles of impeachment by Thanksgiving. Chief Justice John Roberts would then preside over the Senate trial, which Mr. McConnell hoped would be completed by Christmas.
  • At a private meeting in the Capitol on Tuesday night, Speaker Nancy Pelosi asked her caucus whether the House should take a formal vote to authorize the impeachment investigation. The idea was quickly shot down, according to a Democratic aide in the room. Representative Anthony Brindisi of New York said a vote was not required by the Constitution and warned it would play into Republicans’ hands. “You said it perfectly,” Ms. Pelosi told him.
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#1004

Perry pins in on Giuliani who is directed by T…and so on…everyone looking for their ‘out.’ Guliani is being investigated up to his eyeballs…so yeah, pin it on him.

WASHINGTON—Energy Secretary Rick Perry said he sought out Rudy Giuliani this spring at President Trump’s direction to address Mr. Trump’s concerns about alleged Ukrainian corruption, a sign of how closely the president’s personal lawyer worked with the administration on Ukraine policy.

Mr. Perry, in an exclusive interview with The Wall Street Journal, said he contacted Mr. Giuliani in an effort to ease a path to a meeting between Mr. Trump and his new Ukrainian counterpart. He said Mr. Giuliani described to him during their phone call several concerns about Ukraine’s alleged interference in the 2016 U.S. election, concerns that haven’t been substantiated.

Mr. Perry also said he never heard the president, any of his appointees, Mr. Giuliani or the Ukrainian regime discuss the possibility of specifically investigating former Vice President Joe Biden, a Democratic presidential contender, and his son Hunter Biden. Mr. Trump’s request for a probe of the Bidens in a July 25 call with Ukraine’s president has sparked the impeachme

Mr. Giuliani, in an interview, confirmed the spring phone call and said he was telling Mr. Perry to be careful with regards to the new Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky. “Everything I said there I probably said on television 50 times,” he said.

Mr. Giuliani has repeatedly accused Ukraine of interfering in the election on Democrat Hillary Clinton’s behalf, allegations that Democratic lawmakers and others say are a way to undermine U.S. intelligence agencies’ conclusion that Russia interfered in the 2016 election on Mr. Trump’s behalf—a finding about which the president has repeatedly expressed skepticism.

Mr. Perry’s phone call to Mr. Giuliani came after a May meeting at the White House following the inauguration of the Ukrainian president. U.S. officials at that meeting, including Mr. Perry and Kurt Volker, the U.S. envoy for Ukraine negotiations, urged Mr. Trump to meet his new counterpart. Mr. Trump told officials there that they needed to work with Mr. Giuliani to resolve his concerns before he would agree to such a meeting, according to people familiar with the matter.

Mr. Trump said he wasn’t comfortable that the Ukrainians had “straightened up their act,” a concern that Mr. Perry later understood to be related to Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign, Mr. Perry said, quoting Mr. Trump. “Visit with Rudy,” Mr. Perry said the president told him.

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#1005

In a tragic event, Chairman of the House Oversight Committee Rep. Elijah Cummings passed away last night. He fought right up until the end. He will be dearly missed.


https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/10/17/elijah-cummings-dies-baltimore/

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#1006

Witnesses report that Sondland met with Ukrainians and explicitly told them that Trump would meet with Zelensky only if he would investigate “corruption” (Biden).

Quid pro quo.

Sondland testifies before Congress on today.

Sondland asked Ukrainian officials during private White House talk about gas firm linked to Hunter Biden

Sondland’s meeting with Ukrainian officials just steps from the White House Situation Room came minutes after a larger meeting that included John Bolton.

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#1007

RIP…Elijah Cummings…and a tribute to his words and what others have said about him.

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#1008

I just want to pull some details out of that NBC story. Sondland seems to be in deep here.

Lawmakers plan to grill Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland on Thursday about a private discussion he had with top Ukrainian officials in the White House in which he explicitly mentioned the Ukrainian gas company linked to Hunter Biden, amid negotiations over granting Ukraine’s new president an audience with President Donald Trump, NBC News has learned.

Sondland’s meeting with the Ukrainians just steps away from the White House Situation Room came minutes after a larger West Wing meeting that included then-National Security Adviser John Bolton, who had been noncommittal about scheduling a meeting between Trump and new Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy. Sondland directly contradicted Bolton by telling the Ukrainians that in fact, Trump was committed to meeting with Zelenskiy on the condition he open a corruption investigation, two people told about the matter tell NBC News.

Bolton abruptly ended the meeting.

But, the individuals say, Sondland then invited the Ukrainian officials to continue the conversation separately, escorting them to a private room in the White House basement, the individuals said. That’s when Sondland was overheard discussing Burisma Holdings, whose board of directors former Vice President Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden joined in 2014.

Sondland’s explicit conditioning of a meeting between Zelenskiy and Trump prompted Bolton to direct then-Trump Russia adviser Fiona Hill to report the situation to White House lawyers. Although some details about the meeting had been previously disclosed, this account provides the most extensive chronology to date of the chain of events that led Bolton to call the shadow Ukraine policy aimed at advancing Trump’s political interests “a drug deal,” as NBC News has reported.

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#1009

CNN includes a copy of his opening statement

https://www-m.cnn.com/2019/10/17/politics/sondland-deposition-impeachment-inquiry/index.html?r=https%3A%2F%2Fcurrentstatus.io%2F

US Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland was directed by President Donald Trump to work with Rudy Giuliani on Ukraine, he plans to tell Congress Thursday, and was left with a choice: Abandon efforts to bolster a key strategic alliance or work to satisfy the demands of the President’s personal lawyer.

Sondland plans to say he wasn’t aware until “much later” that Giuliani’s agenda might have included an effort to “prompt the Ukrainians” to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter and to involve the Ukrainians in the President’s campaign, according to his opening statement, which was obtained by CNN.

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#1010

According to a copy of his opening statement obtained by The New York Times, Mr. Sondland will say that Mr. Trump refused to take the counsel of his top diplomats, who recommended to him that he meet with the new Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, without any preconditions. The president said that the diplomats needed to satisfy concerns both he and Mr. Giuliani had related corruption in Ukraine, Mr. Sondland will say.

“We were also disappointed by the president’s direction that we involve Mr. Giuliani,” Mr. Sondland will say, according to the 18-page prepared statement. “Our view was that the men and women of the State Department, not the president’s personal lawyer, should take responsibility for all aspects of U.S. foreign policy toward Ukraine.”

His account is at odds with testimony from some foreign policy officials who have portrayed Mr. Sondland as a willing participant who inserted himself into Ukraine policy and was a central player in Mr. Trump’s efforts to win a commitment from the new Ukrainian government to investigate his political rivals.

Mr. Sondland arrived on Capitol Hill on Thursday morning to take his turn in the secure rooms of the House Intelligence Committee, as the latest top foreign policy official to appear before impeachment investigators who are digging into a whistle-blower complaint about Mr. Trump’s dealings with Ukraine. His testimony, which the Trump administration initially sought to block, is a matter of intense interest for the investigators as they try to fill out a picture of what transpired this summer as Mr. Trump and Mr. Giuliani ratcheted up the pressure on the Ukrainians to investigate former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and other Democrats.

Testimony from career diplomats and a former top White House foreign policy adviser in recent days have suggested that Mr. Sondland, a wealthy hotelier from Oregon who had no political experience, was at the heart of the effort to go around normal diplomatic channels to pressure the Ukrainians.

But his prepared remarks offer a more complicated account, casting him as a well-meaning and at times unwitting player who was trying to conduct American foreign policy with Mr. Giuliani and Mr. Trump standing in the way.

Mr. Sondland will say that Mr. Trump put him and top diplomats and administration officials dealing with Ukraine in an impossible position, as they tried to conduct diplomacy with an important European ally.

“Please know that I would not have recommended that Mr. Giuliani or any private citizen be involved in these foreign policy matters,” he planned to say. “However, given the president’s explicit direction, as well as the importance we attached to arranging a White House meeting between Presidents Trump and Zelensky, we agreed to do as President Trump directed.”

Sondland is going to throw Trump and Giuliani under the bus today to save his own skin. Interesting :thinking:

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#1011

McConnell tells Senate Republicans to be ready for impeachment trial of Trump

Majority Leader Mitch McConnell told Republican senators Wednesday to be ready for an impeachment trial of President Trump as soon as Thanksgiving, as the Senate began to brace for a political maelstrom that would engulf the nation.

An air of inevitability has taken hold in Congress, with the expectation Trump will become the third president in history to be impeached — and Republicans believe they need to prepare to defend the president. While McConnell briefed senators on what would happen during a Senate trial, House GOP leaders convened what they expect will be regular impeachment strategy sessions.

In their closed-door weekly luncheon, McConnell gave a PowerPoint presentation about the impeachment process and fielded questions alongside his staff and Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), who was a manager for the 1998 impeachment of President Bill Clinton.

Impeachment is the first step to remove a president, with the House voting on formal charges and the Senate holding a trial in which it either convicts or acquits him.

McConnell said the Senate would likely meet six days a week during the trial, lawmakers said.

“There’s sort of a planned expectation that it would be sometime around Thanksgiving, so you’d have basically Thanksgiving to Christmas — which would be wonderful because there’s no deadline in the world like the next break to motivate senators,” Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.) said.

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#1012

Mr. Cummings, the consummate defender of democracy. This is one of my favorite speeches he gave in committee this year. He is a personal hero.
Click link to watch video. :point_down:

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#1013

:eyes:

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#1014

Mick Mulvaney literally admited quid pro quo and told us to “get over it” openly

Trump’s chief of staff admits it: There was a Ukraine quid pro quo

By the by, I think this moves us from stage 2 straight to stage 5, complete with an actual “get over it” from Mulvaney:

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General Congressional Impeachment News: September - October 2019
#1015

This central claim in Gordon Sondland’s testimony just doesn’t add up

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/10/17/this-central-claim-gordon-sondlands-testimony-just-doesnt-add-up/

Sondland isn’t the first to say he didn’t know what Giuliani was up to. But that’s extremely difficult to swallow — for this reason.

But Sondland also suggests any wrongdoing was hardly systemic. In his opening statement, he painted himself and his fellow diplomats as ignorant of Giuliani’s desire to push for specific Ukraine investigations that could carry political benefits for Trump. The implication: Maybe Giuliani did something wrong, but we didn’t really know about it.

That’s extremely difficult to swallow.

Sondland says in his testimony that at a May 23 briefing at the White House, Trump directed the diplomats to work with Giuliani. He said the diplomats were faced with a disappointing choice: work through Giuliani, as Trump demanded, or risk serious harm to relations with the new Ukrainian administration led by President Volodymyr Zelensky. They chose the former, Sondland says.

Whether it was truly such a binary choice is up for debate. But then Sondland makes a big claim:

But I did not understand, until much later, that Mr. Giuliani’s agenda might have also included an effort to prompt the Ukrainians to investigate Vice President Biden or his son or to involve Ukrainians, directly or indirectly, in the President’s 2020 reelection campaign

Sondland isn’t the first to make this claim. Energy Secretary Rick Perry also told the Wall Street Journal this week that he had never heard Trump or Giuliani talk about Ukraine investigating the Bidens.

If Sondland and others were indeed ignorant of Giuliani’s intentions, though, it was apparently a willful brand of ignorance.

The reason is the timeline. In the weeks leading up to that May 23 White House briefing, Giuliani’s and even Trump’s interest in spotlighting the Bidens’ actions in Ukraine were hardly a secret. Giuliani’s, in particular, were big news.

The full Trump-Ukraine timeline

  • On May 1, the New York Times reported on questions about Hunter Biden’s work in Ukraine and noted, “The Trump team’s efforts to draw attention to the Bidens’ work in Ukraine … has been led partly by Rudolph W. Giuliani.”
  • By May 7, Bloomberg News cast doubton a central premise of the Times’s reporting: that then-Vice President Joe Biden’s efforts to push out Ukraine’s top prosecutor could be viewed as benefiting his son’s company.
  • On May 9, Giuliani told the Times that he was traveling to Ukraine to explicitly push for two specific investigations: one involving the origins of the 2016 Russia investigation, and the other involving the Bidens. (These are the same ones that would come up on Trump’s July 25 call with Zelensky.) And Giuliani was upfront about the political nature of his trip. “There’s nothing illegal about it,” he said. “Somebody could say it’s improper. … I’m going to give them reasons they shouldn’t stop [investigating], because that information will be very, very helpful to my client and may turn out to be helpful to my government.”
  • On May 11, Giuliani canceled the trip amid an outcry.
  • On May 19, Trump explicitly pointed to potential wrongdoing by the Bidens. “Biden — he calls them and says, ‘Don’t you dare persecute, if you don’t fire this prosecutor’ — the prosecutor was after his son,” Trump said. “Then he said, ‘If you fire the prosecutor, you’ll be okay. And if you don’t fire the prosecutor, 'We’re not giving you $2 billion in loan guarantees,’ or whatever he was supposed to give. Can you imagine if I did that?”

So according to Sondland, despite all of that, as of May 23 he “did not understand … that Mr. Giuliani’s agenda might have also included an effort to prompt the Ukrainians to investigate Vice President Biden or his son.” He even says Giuliani mentioned the Ukrainian company that employed Hunter Biden, Burisma Holdings, in August, but “I did not know until more recent press reports that Hunter Biden was on the board of Burisma.”

Sondland’s portfolio as E.U. ambassador includes many other countries. But he acknowledges in his opening statement that Ukraine is a big one.

“My involvement in issues concerning Ukraine, while a small part of my overall portfolio, was nevertheless central to my ambassadorial responsibilities,” he said. “In this sense, Ukraine is similar to other non-E.U. countries such as Venezuela, Iran and Georgia.”

Sondland also notes that he attended Zelensky’s inauguration on May 20. So you would think he would know about such a major news story involving that country and sensitive diplomacy issues there. And if not, you’d think he might brush up or be fully debriefed by his aides after being instructed on May 23 to go outside the normal process and work with Giuliani. “ Why does the president want me to work with this specific guy?” he might ask himself. Even a cursory check would have quickly yielded the above stories.

Sondland maintains in his opening statement that he’s not there to toe anybody’s line. “Some may want me to say things to protect the president at all costs; some may want me to provide damning facts to support the other side,” he said. “But none of that matters to me. I have no interest in pursuing higher office or taking political shots. Simply put, I am NOT here to push an agenda. I am here to tell the truth.”

If it is indeed the truth that he and Perry didn’t know what Giuliani wanted from Ukraine, they should probably adjust how they consume the information necessary for their jobs.

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