House Democratic leaders are reaching out to members in swing districts to gauge their support for an official vote on the House floor to open an impeachment inquiry, two sources told NBC News.
Leadership is contacting the most vulnerable members first and then will discuss with the larger caucus as early as tonight at their 6:00 pm ET caucus meeting.
House Republicans and the White House have been demanding an official vote to open an inquiry. The White House has said it won’t cooperate with Democrats demands until they do.
While this would be a significant development to make the inquiry more official, Democrats have argued that it is not necessary as deemed by the Constitution.
Republicans would like a vote to officially open the inquiry because it could give them more rights, including subpoena power.
President Donald’s Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani told ABC News on Tuesday he is not complying with a congressional subpoena.
Giuliani told ABC News “if they enforce it, then we will see what happens.”
Giuliani went on to say he is no longer retaining the services of Jon Sale, who was acting as his attorney for this matter. Giuliani said that if Congress seeks to enforce a subpoena, then he will retain counsel.
As part of his final acts as his attorney, Sale sent a letter to Congress on Tuesday replying to the subpoena Giuliani was sent.
Tuesday was the deadline for Giuliani to comply with a wide-ranging subpoena from three of the House committees working on the growing impeachment inquiry into President Trump.
ABC your site looks like clickbait internet trash. You should do something about that, it’s almost completely unreadable.
I was not sure if this had been posted or not…from NYT
A Guide to Impeachment
-
- What Impeachment Is: Impeachment is charging a holder of public office with misconduct. Here are answers to [seven key questions ](How the Impeachment Process Works - The New York Times
module=STYLN_trump_suite&variant=1_trump_suite&state=default&pgtype=Article®ion=footer&context=guide)about the process.
- What the Accusation Is: President Trump is accused of breaking the law by pressuring the president of Ukraine to look into former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., a potential Democratic opponent in the 2020 election. A second person, this one with “firsthand knowledge” of Mr. Trump’s dealings with Ukraine, came forward and is now protected as a whistle-blower.
- What Was Said: The White House released a reconstructed transcript of Mr. Trump’s call to President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine.
- A Visual Timeline: Here are the key figures and dates as Mr. Trump and his allies pressured Ukraine to investigate his political opponents.
- Why Now: A whistle-blower complaint filed in August said that White House officials believed they had witnessed Mr. Trump abuse his power for political gain. Here are 8 takeaways from the complaint.
- How Trump Responds: The president said the impeachment battle would be “a positive” for his re-election campaign. Mr. Trump has repeatedly referred to the whistle-blower as “crooked” and condemned the news media reporting on the complaint. At the beginning of October, Mr. Trump publicly called on China to examine Mr. Biden as well.
Speaker Pelosi is about to make a STATEMENT on IMPEACHMENT - she has met with her caucus. Be on the lookout
…more than likely just before the Ohio Democratic Debates taking place at 5p PST/8p EST
LIVE
Rep Schiff made comments too
got it thanks
Cross-posting for the timeline
I’ll update the timeline first thing tomorrow, summary is pretty much done I just have to double check it against what matt dragged in.
good, why take a vote when you don’t need to
Bah, Someone please find this, I’m already running late to my class.
Got it @anon95374541
A SDNY request for records from former Rep Pete Sessions by subpoena. It is meant to coordinate the information about Igor and Lev’s contribution to Sessions re-election campaign.
Former Rep. Pete Sessions subpoenaed by grand jury investigating Giuliani and associates
Oct. 15, 2019 at 3:44 p.m. PDT
A federal grand jury in New York has issued a subpoena to former Texas congressman Pete Sessions seeking records and other information on his interactions with President Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, and two Giuliani associates charged last week with a scheme to funnel foreign money to U.S. politicians, according to two people familiar with the investigation.
The subpoena seeks records about Sessions’s dealings with Giuliani and two business associates, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, who before their arrest had been helping Giuliani investigate Democratic presidential candidate and former vice president Joe Biden.
Parnas and Fruman were charged last week with violating campaign finance law in an ongoing investigation that has ensnared the president’s personal lawyer because of his relationship with the two men. The subpoena indicates the investigation remains active, with investigators keen to determine whether Giuliani committed any wrongdoing.
A spokesman for Sessions, a Republican from Texas, said in a statement: “Mr. Sessions is cooperating with the US Attorney from the Southern District of New York and will be providing documents to their office related to this matter over the next couple of weeks as requested.”
A spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Manhattan declined to comment. Giuliani did not immediately return a message seeking comment.
and WSJ - Subpoena is all about Giuliani’s actions in this imbroglio.
The subpoena seeks documents related to Mr. Giuliani’s business dealings with Ukraine and his involvement in efforts to oust the U.S. ambassador in Kyiv, as well as any interactions between Mr. Sessions, Mr. Giuliani and four men who were indicted last week on campaign-finance and conspiracy accounts, the people said.
Mr. Sessions’ knowledge of Mr. Giuliani’s dealings is a primary focus of the subpoena, the people said. Mr. Giuliani has denied wrongdoing and said he has had no indication his actions are being investigated by prosecutors.
…
The subpoena of the former congressman offers a window into the investigation by the Manhattan U.S. attorney’s office into the business dealings of Mr. Giuliani in Ukraine, including his finances, meetings and work for a city mayor there. Investigators have examined his bank records and have questioned witnesses about him since at least August.
The probe comes as House Democrats continue to interview former and current administration officials and others in their impeachment inquiry focusing on efforts by Mr. Trump, Mr. Giuliani and others to press Ukraine to mount investigations that could benefit the president politically. Among other things, they wanted Ukrainian officials to investigate activities by former Vice President Joe Biden, a potential 2020 election rival to Mr. Trump, and his son Hunter Biden, who was on the board of an energy company in Ukraine. No evidence has emerged that the Bidens, who have denied wrongdoing, have done anything improper.
Giuliani’s Response
From NY Daily News - hometown paper for Giuliani
Giuliani — who ran the the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan in the 1980s — said prosecutors had not contacted him as of late Tuesday, and called the inquiry targeting him “strange.”
“I would find it very unusual that they’re carrying out an investigation by leaks,” Giuliani told The News, referring to a string of news reports over the past week on the ongoing investigation. “It would seem to me that it’s not the type of investigation the Southern District carries out, and I have to find out what’s going on."
Just breaking…
Say what? Looks like another head fake – wonder if this one will be as successful as releasing the call summary.
… Even as the impeachment inquiry intensifies in Congress, White House lawyers are leading their own review, the people said. They are seeking to understand White House officials’ actions around Mr. Trump’s July 25 call with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, which is central to the whistle-blower’s allegation that Mr. Trump abused his power.
The lawyers’ inquiry centers on why one of their colleagues, the deputy White House counsel John A. Eisenberg , placed a rough transcript of the call in a computer system typically reserved for the country’s most closely guarded secrets. Mr. Trump later directed that a reconstructed transcript be released amid intensifying scrutiny from House Democrats.
Run, Eisenberg, run for your life! The Trump bus is headed straight for you.
Sounds good. I’ll organize. I want to see if a wiki style header is obtainable through this format for quick reference. Sometimes I can’t find all the incredible stories y’all post.
He shows up in different parts of the story all over the place. He’d be an easy one to throw under the bus.
Pence refuses House request to provide documents related to Ukraine call
Vice President Mike Pence’s office said Tuesday it will not comply with a request from the House to turn over documents related to President Donald Trump’s July 25 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy.
In a letter to the chairmen of the House Intelligence, Foreign Affairs and Oversight committees, Pence counsel Matthew Morgan called the request part of a “self-proclaimed impeachment inquiry,” noting that the House of Representatives has not yet taken a vote to open the inquiry and asserting that the request was part of a process that “calls into question your commitment to fundamental fairness and due process rights.”
Those chairmen sent Pence a request on Oct. 4 asking for documents and communicationspertaining to the phone call and the withholding of military and security aid to Ukraine.
Guys, the Vice President of the United States refused to comply with a subpoena from Congress. Does he get an article now too?
Mike Flynn got caught trying to do the exact same thing in season 1. Are we cycling through old plot-lines already?
Giuliani pressed Trump to eject Muslim cleric from U.S., a top priority of Turkish president, former officials say
Rudolph W. Giuliani privately urged President Trump in 2017 to extradite a Turkish cleric living in exile in the United States, a top priority of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, according to multiple former administration officials familiar with the discussions.
Giuliani, a Trump ally who later became the president’s personal attorney, repeatedly argued to Trump that the U.S. government should eject Fethullah Gulen from the country, according to the former officials, who spoke on the condition on anonymity to describe private conversations.
Turkey has demanded that the United States turn over Gulen, a permanent U.S. resident who lives in Pennsylvania, to stand trial on charges of plotting a 2016 coup attempt against Erdogan. Gulen has denied involvement in the plot.
Giuliani is now under scrutiny for his efforts to pressure Ukraine to investigate Trump’s political rivals. His earlier attempts to persuade the president to turn over the Turkish cleric represent another instance in which he appears to have been pushing a shadow foreign policy from his perch outside government.
Mulvaney emerges as a key facilitator of the campaign to pressure Ukraine
In late May, acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney organized a meeting that stripped control of the country’s relationship with Ukraine from those who had the most expertise at the National Security Council and the State Department.
Instead, Mulvaney put an unlikely trio in charge of managing the U.S.-Ukraine account amid worrisome signs of a new priority, congressional officials said Tuesday: pressuring the fledgling government in Kiev to deliver material that would be politically valuable to President Trump.
The work of those “three amigos,” as they came to call themselves — diplomats Gordon Sondland and Kurt Volker, plus Energy Secretary Rick Perry — has come to light in recent days through newly disclosed text messages and the testimony of government witnesses appearing before an impeachment inquiry in Congress.
But Mulvaney’s connections to the administration’s troubled interactions with Ukraine are also beginning to surface. Mulvaney’s role in enlisting Sondland and the others to take over relations with Ukraine was revealed Tuesday in testimony by George Kent, the State Department’s Ukraine expert, according to Rep. Gerald E. Connolly (D-Va.), who participated in the closed-door hearing before the House Intelligence, Foreign Affairs and Oversight committees.
Mulvaney declined requests for comment. Some of his defenders have said he knew very little about the details of the trio’s efforts in Ukraine and was mainly orchestrating meetings for the president.
“I don’t remember any substantive conversation with Mick. I don’t remember him approving, disapproving, getting involved, having an interest,” said Rudolph W. Giuliani, who, as Trump’s personal lawyer, also served as the president’s emissary to Ukraine. “Mulvaney was not a big player in this. I dealt with Volker and Sondland.”
But current and former officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal matters, said Mulvaney contributed substantially to the unfolding political crisis, both through his connection to key events related to the attempt to pressure Kiev and through his general approach to the chief of staff job, which was driven by a perceived reluctance to displease the president.
U.S. officials said Mulvaney met frequently with Sondland and that details of their discussions were kept from then-National Security Adviser John Bolton and other officials who were raising internal concerns about the hidden Ukraine agenda.
Mulvaney also tolerated meetings between Trump and Giuliani at a time when Giuliani was brazenly declaring in interviews his intent to enlist Kiev in efforts to substantiate conspiracy theories about the 2016 election and revive seemingly dormant probes that could prove damaging to Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden.
Perhaps most significantly, Mulvaney — at the direction of the president — placed a hold on nearly $400 million in aid to Ukraine in the weeks before Trump used a July 25 phone call to pressure Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to pursue Giuliani’s agenda. The impeachment probe was triggered in August by a whistleblower complaint submitted by a CIA employee to the U.S. intelligence community’s inspector general; the complaint focused in part on the July 25 call.
When some in the White House questioned the legality of blocking funds to Ukraine — funds approved by Congress to help fend off Russian attacks on its sovereignty — U.S. officials said Mulvaney told staff that he had determined that the money could be turned on and off with no legal consequence.
And one more for the Kent story,
Never-Before-Seen Trump Tax Documents Show Major Inconsistencies
The president’s businesses made themselves appear more profitable to lenders and less profitable to tax officials. One expert calls the differing numbers “versions of fraud.”
“It really feels like there’s two sets of books — it feels like a set of books for the tax guy and a set for the lender.”
And speaking of interesting implications…
Cuomo signs law aimed at weakening Trump’s pardon power, closes ‘double jeopardy’ loophole
Lawmakers said the measure was necessary to ensure state investigations don’t get derailed by the president.
FBI Arrests Third Man at JFK Airport in Probe of Rudy Giuliani Associates
A Florida man wanted in a campaign finance case involving associates of Rudy Giuliani is in federal custody.
Spokespersons for the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan and the FBI confirm that David Correia was arrested Wednesday morning after getting off a flight at JFK Airport.
Correia is named in an indictment with two Giuliani associates on charges they made illegal contributions to a congressman and a political action committee supporting President Donald Trump. The two associates were arrested last week.
Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer, says he had no knowledge of illegal donations.
Prosecutors say Correia conspired with other defendants to make political donations with the aim of trying to get support for a new recreational marijuana business.
It wasn’t immediately clear whether Correia would appear in Manhattan federal court Wednesday or Thursday, when his co-defendants are due for a hearing.
A lawyer for Correia is not yet listed in court records.
There’s a third man?
It’s a bit murky, but the fourth man could refer to Pete Sessions!
Giuliani’s business dealings with the men are part of the federal investigation, according to people familiar with the matter. A grand jury subpoena has been issued to former congressman Pete Sessions, a Texas Republican, who interacted with Giuliani, Parnas and Fruman.
Giuliani and Sessions have denied wrongdoing. Parnas and Fruman have not formally entered pleas yet to the charges.