For Impeachment posting (reached my limit)
Wow…double wow! 
Eisenberg is one who knew and covered it up quickly. He’s looking to get disbarred. Bigly.
Limit reset.
Also, Kellyanne Conway would like to talk to you about the war on Christmas on this totally unremarkable day.
#HappyHalloween
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Lawsuit to yield State Department documents relating to Pompeo and Giuliani by Nov. 22
The State Department has agreed to produce some Ukraine-related documents by November 22, according to a joint court filing Wednesday night from the department and watchdog group American Oversight.
There is not a full description yet of how many documents may emerge through this Freedom of Information Act production, but the agreement marks a promise by the State Department to search for documents, redact them, and give them to American Oversight by November 22.
That promise is significant as the State Department has not turned over requested documents to Capitol Hill. Witnesses have given documents to the State Department, which hasn’t given them to impeachment investigators.
American Oversight is now specifically seeking only communications from or to top State Department officials – including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo – when they’re communicating with people outside the government, including or about former US Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch and President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani.
The State Department will also look into the records of Pompeo and two other officials for “final directives” to recall then-Ambassador Yovanovitch from her post.
Earlier this month, in response to an emergency motion from American Oversight, Judge Christopher Cooper ordered lawyers for the group and the State Department to come together to narrow the scope of the documents in the request – eliminating those that would likely be exempt from release – and produce documents in the next 30 days.
Cooper said that he could not think of a third party exemption that would prevent the release of correspondence between Giuliani and top State Department officials regarding Ukraine.
"The judge zeroed in on communications with Rudy Giuliani to be most subject to public disclosure. Why? Because he doesn’t work for the government," American Oversight Executive Director Austin Evers told reporters at the time.
American Oversight had filed a lawsuit and asked for a preliminary injunction to compel the State Department to begin rapidly processing and releasing senior officials’ correspondence with Giuliani and other communications about efforts to pressure the Ukrainian government to open a political investigation. The lawsuit also sought the release of records related to the recall of Yovanovitch.
I don’t trust the State Department to actually release any documents that would incriminate Pompeo, but if they are trying to distance themselves from Giuliani, they might use this as an opportunity to throw him under the bus – putting more pressure on him to flip on his client, Donald Trump, in order to save his own skin.
P.S. Posting this here because, although it does not directly relate to the House’s impeachment inquiry, any documents released to American Oversight in this case will undoubtedly find their way into the inquiry process.
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So… is Ann Coulter trolling her side or ours?
They are eating their own now. The Daily Caller is not exactly left wing.
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https://www.courant.com/sns-bc-us--trump-impeachment-bolton-20191031-story.html
The lawyer for former national security adviser John Bolton signaled Thursday that Bolton will not testify anytime soon in the House impeachment inquiry.
Democratic lawmakers want to hear next week from Bolton over the administration’s approach to Ukraine that is central to House proceedings that could lead to the impeachment of President Donald Trump .
Charles Cooper, Bolton’s lawyer, was in federal court Thursday on behalf of another client whose testimony the House also wants.
The client is former Bolton deputy Charles Kupperman, who wants a federal judge to resolve whether he can be forced to testify since he was a close adviser to Trump.
Cooper said Bolton could be added to the case, which is before U.S. District Judge Richard Leon. Cooper has previously said that Bolton would not testify voluntarily. A House-issued subpoena would put him in the exact same situation as Kupperman.
Leon first brought up Bolton, asking whether adding him to the case would cause any delays. Leon said he hopes to issue a ruling by late December.
Cooper said there would be no delay since the legal issue would be the same, whether a small circle of the president’s advisers are “absolutely immune” from having to testify.
Kupperman went to federal court because he “is in a basic Catch-22,” summoned to testify by the House and forbidden to do so by the White House, Cooper said.
Kupperman doesn’t really care how Leon decides the case, but he wants a judge to do so, Cooper said.
The same question of immunity for Trump advisers also was being weighed in another Washington courtroom Thursday. House Democrats and the White House are locked in a legal struggle over a House subpoena for the testimony of former White House counsel Don McGahn.
There was no indication when U.S. District Judge Ketanji Jackson would rule.
And this article from CNN indicates the judge will hear arguments on Dec. 10.
I don’t like that these articles are both taking the tack: “Well, that’s it. These two witnesses won’t be testifying. The Republican’s stall tactic has worked.” To hell with that, I say, if the proceedings need to be extended to assure an appearance from Bolton, I don’t care if they drag on into next Summer. The future of our nation is at stake.
There’s still an outside chance Bolton will testify as scheduled next week. If he doesn’t: shame, shame, shame on him. I cannot express how deep that shame should be.
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Cross-posting 
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Trump and the GOP are gloating about the testimony from Tim Morrison; Trump himself even re-tweeted this. They seem to be ignoring that this “entirely legal call” was immediately placed on a super secret server by the man claiming nothing was odd about it.
Latest Impeachment Witness: I Wasn’t Worried That Trump Broke the Law With Call
Tim Morrison backed up some details—and disputed others—about the now infamous call with the Ukrainian president. But he did say he didn’t think it crossed a legal line.
Top NSC Russia official confirms key testimony linking Trump to quid pro quo
Tim Morrison, however, was careful not to directly criticize the president’s actions.
Given his clear role in attempting to bury the Ukraine call and protect Trump from his own crimes, Morrison’s testimony can only be considered a further effort at obstruction, even as he corroborated Trump’s bribery scheme.
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When should Republicans jump ship?
History could forgive Trump’s defenders. But we know it will reward his deserters.
The facts are only going to get worse for Trump
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Pelosi Expects Public Impeachment Hearings to Begin This Month
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Friday she expects the Democratic-led impeachment inquiry of President Donald Trump to begin public hearings this month but insisted there’s no deadline to finish the investigation.
“I would assume there would be public hearings in November,” Pelosi said in a roundtable with Bloomberg reporters and editors. Any case that is made to impeach the president “has to be ironclad.”
Pelosi spoke a day after the House voted to set up a formal process for public hearings in an investigation of whether Trump used his office to pressure Ukraine to open a politically motivated investigation in exchange for releasing military aid.
Pelosi said the closed-door depositions of witnesses will continue as long as they are “productive.”
“I don’t know what the timetable will be – the truth will set us free,” she said. “We have not made any decisions on if the president will be impeached.”
Pelosi also said that Congress should pursue an impeachment inquiry regardless of its impact on financial markets. “The markets have their own strength and their resilience,” she said.
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An interesting tidbit from the impeachment hearing:
Rachel Maddow highlights reporting on a piece of impeachment inquiry testimony from diplomat Christopher Anderson in which he reveals some backstory on the Trump administration’s failure to condemn Russian aggression toward Ukrainian ships in 2018.
BREAKING: Speaker Nancy Pelosi has just revealed to reporters that it’s possible controversies beyond Ukraine could become part of the impeachment case against President Trump, noting “there were 11 obstruction of justice provisions in the Mueller report.”
I suspect Speaker Pelosi was waiting for formalized proceedings before rolling everything out. We know the White House had no plan in place for impeachment, let alone defending against multiple angles. This is going to get wild.
Satire… or is it?
Study: Millions of Taxpayer Dollars Could Be Saved by Impeaching Pence at Same Time
“It would cost almost nothing in terms of paper or ink cartridges to add the words ‘and Pence, too.’ ”
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Could Trump’s 2019 extortion attempt against Ukraine be a rerun of an earlier one?
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What led to Trump’s first meeting on June 20, 2017, with Ukraine’s then-President Petro Poroshenko? Ukraine had hired the lobbying firm BGR Group in January 2017 to foster contact with Trump, but nothing had happened . . . and then the door opened. Why?On June 7, less than two weeks before Poroshenko’s White House meeting, Trump’s lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, had visited Kyiv to give a speech for the Victor Pinchuk Foundation, headed by a prominent Ukrainian oligarch. While Giuliani was there, he also met with Poroshenko and his prosecutor general, Yuriy Lutsenko, according a news release issued by the foundation.
Just after Giuliani’s visit, Ukraine’s investigation of the so-called black ledger that listed alleged illicit payments to former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort was transferred from an anti-corruption bureau, known as NABU, to Poroshenko’s prosecutor general, according to a June 15, 2017, report in the Kyiv Post. The paper quoted Viktor Trepak, former deputy head of the country’s security service, saying: “It is clear for me that somebody gave an order to bury the black ledger.”
The New York Times reported in May 2018 that Ukraine had “halted cooperation” with Mueller’s investigation. The paper quoted Volodymyr Ariev, a parliament ally of Poroshenko, explaining: “In every possible way, we will avoid irritating the top American officials.”
Was there any implicit understanding that Poroshenko’s government would curb its cooperation with the U.S. Justice Department’s investigation of Manafort, who would later be indicted by Mueller?
Here’s the 2018 NYT article referred to:
In the United States, Paul J. Manafort is facing prosecution on charges of money laundering and financial fraud stemming from his decade of work for a pro-Russian political party in Ukraine.
But in Ukraine, where officials are wary of offending President Trump, four meandering cases that involve Mr. Manafort, Mr. Trump’s former campaign chairman, have been effectively frozen by Ukraine’s chief prosecutor.
The decision to halt the investigations by an anticorruption prosecutor was handed down at a delicate moment for Ukraine, as the Trump administration was finalizing plans to sell the country sophisticated anti-tank missiles, called Javelins.
The highly suspicious interactions between the Trump administration and Ukraine in 2017/18 and in 2019 are eerily similar. The question arises, in 2019 when Trump extorted the President of Ukraine, was he simply re-running a play he’d already executed earlier with the previous President of Ukraine?
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Both cases involve Trump’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani.
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In both cases, meetings were stalled between Trump and the President of Ukraine (Petro Poroshenko in the first case, Volodymyr Zelensky in the second). Such a meeting is highly coveted by a Ukrainian leader needing to legitimize his rule.
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In the first case, the stalled meeting was suddenly given the green light two weeks after Giuliani’s visit to Poroshenko and Ukraine’s Prosecutor General who was handling the Manafort investigation.
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In the second case, the stalled meeting was OK’d after Trump’s extortion demand in his July 25 phone call with Zelensky.
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In both cases, Trump was vitally interested in influencing investigations in Ukraine for his own personal benefit.
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In the first case, Trump wanted to stop Ukraine’s investigation of his ex-campaign manager, Paul Manafort, which could lead to Robert Mueller receiving damning evidence against Trump.
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In the second case, Trump wanted Ukraine to investigate his political rival, Biden, to further his chances of re-election.
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In both cases, Ukraine’s need for Javelin missiles to defend against Russian attacks was at the center of the interaction.
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In the first case, Javelin missiles were indeed released to Ukraine after they stopped their investigations into Manafort and stopped cooperating with Mueller. And Trump did indeed meet Poroshenko.
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In the second case, Javelin missiles were also released, but Trump did not get the investigation of the Bidens that he was demanding. That’s very likely because the whistleblower exposed his extortion attempt and Trump was forced to release the missiles anyway in an attempt to make it look like he really wasn’t extorting Ukraine. Trump also did indeed meet with Zelensky, but again, that’s likely because his hand was forced by the revelations about his extortion attempt.
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I was wondering when this would come up again…
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Cross-posting
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Growing number of GOP senators consider acknowledging Trump’s quid pro quo on Ukraine
A growing number of Senate Republicans are ready to acknowledge that President Trump used U.S. military aid as leverage to force Ukraine to investigate former vice president Joe Biden and his family as the president repeatedly denies a quid pro quo.
In this shift in strategy to defend Trump, these Republicans are insisting that the president’s action was not illegal and does not rise to the level of an impeachable offense as the Democratic-led House moves forward with the open phase of its probe.
But the shift among Senate Republicans could complicate the message coming from Trump as he furiously fights the claim that he had withheld U.S. aid from Ukraine to pressure it to dig up dirt on a political rival, even as an increasing number of Republicans wonder how long they can continue to argue that no quid pro quo was at play in the matter.
The pivot was the main topic during a private Senate GOP lunch on Wednesday, according to multiple people familiar with the session who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the meeting. Sen. John Neely Kennedy (R-La.) argued that there may have been a quid pro quo but said that the U.S. government often attaches conditions to foreign aid and that nothing was amiss in Trump’s doing so in the case of aid to Ukraine, these individuals said.
Inside the lunch, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), who ran against Trump in 2016, said a quid pro quo is not illegal unless there is “corrupt intent” and echoed Kennedy’s argument that such conditions are a tool of foreign policy.
“To me, this entire issue is gonna come down to, why did the president ask for an investigation,” Kennedy, who worked as a lawyer, said in an interview. “To me, it all turns on intent, motive. … Did the president have a culpable state of mind? … Based on the evidence that I see, that I’ve been allowed to see, the president does not have a culpable state of mind.”
Are they high?
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Top White House official tried to find out if ambassador went rogue or acted at Trump’s direction on Ukraine
A top White House official told lawmakers he tried to find out whether President Donald Trump told a key US diplomat he wanted Ukraine to investigate the Bidens, multiple sources familiar with his closed-door impeachment inquiry deposition on Capitol Hill told CNN.
His actions show concern inside the White House about the extent of the President’s role in the push for investigations that could help Trump politically.
Tim Morrison, the President’s top Russia adviser, had multiple conversations with American Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland. In those discussions, the ambassador referenced talks he had with the President. Morrison became concerned that Sondland was going rogue on Ukraine.
Morrison told lawmakers he thought Sondland was a “free radical,” according to two of the sources. The term was a reference to molecules that cause cancer.
To find out whether Sondland had talked to the President, Morrison went so far as asking Trump’s executive secretary if the President had actually talked with Sondland. The ambassador’s claims about having the conversations checked out each time, Morrison said in his testimony Thursday, according to the sources. In his own opening statement, Sondland downplayed both Trump’s role and his own in the effort to pressure Ukraine – suggesting he was reluctantly working with Rudy Giuliani, the President’s personal attorney, who was running a shadow diplomatic operation in Ukraine.
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UPDATE: Here’s Rachel Maddow’s take on what may have been the first time Trump extorted Ukraine. That chain of events back in 2017 is uncannily similar to his most recent extortion attempt.
Maddow closes with a clip of Rep. Gerry Connolly stepping out one of the impeachment hearings on Wednesday. He makes cryptic statement that implies the committees may already be tugging at this very thread.
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‘It’s like nothing we have come across before’: UK intelligence officials shaken by Trump regime’s requests for help with counter-impeachment inquiry aimed at discrediting Mueller’s findings that Russia interfered in 2016 election.
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It’s really heart rending the way Trump is shredding our century’s-long alliance with the UK. They are perhaps our most valuable ally, having stood by us through thick and thin. Will they be so quick to come to our aid when we need their help in the future? No. And who benefits from dividing us? Trump’s BFF, Putin.
This article offers up a host of offenses Trump has perpetrated against the UK – a sad, but crucial accounting. A couple telling passages:
Trump and Barr have also been asking other foreign governments for help in investigating the FBI, CIA and Mueller investigators. The US president has called on the Australian prime minister Scott Morrison for assistance, while the attorney general has been on similar missions to the UK and Italy.
And the information being requested has left allies astonished. One British official with knowledge of Barr’s wish list presented to London commented that “it is like nothing we have come across before, they are basically asking, in quite robust terms, for help in doing a hatchet job on their own intelligence services”.
The Trump followers’ counternarrative is that US intelligence and security services had deliberately, and wrongly, concluded that the Russians were behind the hacking. The real culprit, they allege, was a private company, Crowdstrike, which is run with an anti-Russian agenda.
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Every aspect of the Crowdstrike conspiracy tale has been disproved. But this has not stopped Trump from demanding that Zelensky looks into it, albeit in a somewhat incoherent manner, in the now infamous 25 July call to the Ukrainian president.
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It’s good to see the House Intelligence Committee pro-actively issuing subpoenas instead of waiting for a no-show. Now if the key witness, John Eisenberg, stays home on Monday, BOOM, he’s instantly in violation of a subpoena. (Eisenberg is the Trump ally who placed the incriminating phone call summary on a super secret server and asked Vindman to keep it secret as well – with no apparent reason other than to help Trump avoid accountability for his extortion attempt on Ukraine.)
The same goes for Brian McCormack, Rick Perry’s chief of staff. Interviewing him will be crucial to finding out what Perry knew and when about Trump’s extortion attempt. Perry was one of “The Three Amigos” who were allegedly carrying out the scheme on Trump’s behalf when the whistleblower blew the lid off it.
Until Friday night when these subpoenas were issued, these two witnesses had only been requested to testify. Now they will be breaking the law if they refuse to appear.
The House Intelligence Committee subpoenaed two more administration officials Friday as part of its expanding impeachment investigation into President Trump’s dealings with Ukraine.
Investigators subpoenaed John Eisenberg, the White House National Security Counsel’s top legal adviser, to testify on Monday. The House also subpoenaed Brian McCormack, outgoing Energy Secretary Rick Perry’s chief of staff, for Monday deposition, according to a source familiar with the matter.
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Internal Mueller documents show Trump campaign chief pushed unproven theory Ukraine hacked Democrats
President Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, suggested as early as the summer of 2016 that Ukrainians might have been responsible for hacking the Democratic National Committee during the presidential campaign rather than Russians, a key witness told federal investigators last year.
Newly released documents show that Manafort’s protege, deputy campaign manager Rick Gates, told the FBI of Manafort’s theory during interviews conducted as part of former special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential campaign. Gates told the FBI that Manafort had shared his theory of Ukrainian culpability with him and other campaign aides before the election.
The new information shows how early people in Trump’s orbit were pushing the unsubstantiated theory about Ukraine’s role. And it illustrates a link between Mueller’s investigation, which concluded in March, and the current House impeachment investigation of Trump. The president had pushed Ukrainians to open a probe into whether their country interfered in the election — an assertion his allies have made in an effort to discredit Mueller’s findings about Russia’s role.
The documents were released in response to lawsuits filed by BuzzFeed and CNN seeking documents related to Mueller’s investigation. BuzzFeed on Saturday published the first installment of internal Mueller records, released by the Justice Department to the news organization in response to a court order.
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