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The Impeachment of President Donald J. Trump

Pelosi says she would have held Lewandowski in contempt ‘right then and there’

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told a group of lawmakers Wednesday evening that Corey Lewandowski should have been held in contempt “right then and there” when he talked over members, dodged their questions and promoted his possible Senate campaign from a House hearing.

In a small huddle with lawmakers from across the caucus, Pelosi (D-Calif.) complained that no witness should be able to treat members of Congress like President Trump’s former campaign manager did during a Tuesday hearing before the House Judiciary Committee, according to three people familiar with the exchange.

“I would have held him in contempt right then and there,” she said.

Several lawmakers in the room took her remarks as a dig at House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.), who chose not to hold Lewandowski in contempt for his defiant behavior on Tuesday

:astonished:

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So true. Also, there’s absolutely nothing about this on the Fox News page. Except there is this:

Trump%20-%20Fox%20n%20Friends

:thinking: Wonder if Trump’s echo chamber will ask him anything about this – should be interesting to hear what spin he’s concocted.

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Yes…with that call to Putin about Wildfires/adoptions/whatevs…that content of the call was elaborated a bit more by the Russians. (from Slate Article - mentioned by @Keaton_James)

For one thing, the Trump administration stayed silent for several hours after the Russian government and media publicized the call earlier today. The Russian statement heralded the call as “a sign that fully-fledged bilateral relations could be restored in the future.”

and more questionable interactions with foreign heads, and possible set-ups for promises T would like to offer…

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T has broken his silence…a mere 12 hours since this story hit the airwaves. (I haven’t listened to the Fox & Friends episode yet.)

He starts off with an insult…“Anybody dumb enough…”

Here comes the spew…

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The internal watchdog for American spy agencies declined repeatedly in a briefing on Thursday to disclose to lawmakers the content of a potentially explosive whistle-blower complaint that is said to involve a discussion between President Trump and a foreign leader, according to two people familiar with the briefing.

During a private session on Capitol Hill, Michael Atkinson, the inspector general of the intelligence community, told lawmakers he was unable to confirm or deny anything about the substance of the complaint, including whether it involved the president, according to the people, who spoke on condition of anonymity to describe the closed-door conversation. The meeting was still underway

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[My hand shoots up.] “Ooh, ooh, me, in the back, I’m dumb enough to believe it.”

[Trump continues.] …that I would say something inappropriate with a foreign leader while on a potentially “heavily populated call. I would only do what is right anyway, and only do good for the USA!”

[My hand is up again.] Sir, how populated was the room when you asked Russia to hack Hillary’s email? I believe several million were listening. Other than saying this would be a really stupid crime, do you have any actual defense? BTW, we’re not talking about something “inappropriate” here or it never would have been flagged by the Inspector General. We’re talking about something potentially treasonous. Also BTW, what is up with those quotation marks – who are you quoting, sir? Yourself? Thank you for answering my qu…

[Trump turns and boards helicopter.]

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For detail,

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Potentially

The House Judiciary Committee is preparing to take initial steps to potentially hold former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski in contempt over his refusal to answer questions at this week’s hearing before the panel, multiple sources tell CNN.

But it is a process that could take weeks: First, a letter is expected to be sent to Lewandowski asking him to answer questions and warning him he can be held in contempt if he doesn’t answer. Then, they may offer a contempt resolution, officially notice a committee vote and then hold a vote in committee before any floor action.

Some Democrats have been irked by the failure to hold Lewandowski in contempt immediately during the hearing, according to Democratic sources. That flies in the face of current House rules that would have made the process quite cumbersome to immediately hold him in contempt at the hearing.

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House Intelligence Committee Stakeout

House Intelligence Committee Chair Adam Schiff speaks to reporters after a meeting with Intel Inspector General Michael Atkinson to discuss a whistleblower’s complaint about a reported conversation President Trump had with a world leader recently.

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Following his introductory remarks, Schiff removes from his breast pocket a letter from Inspector General Michael Atkinson and reads one crucial sentence (he will be releasing the entire letter soon). The following is transcribed from the video:


Schiff quoting the Inspector General: "I set forth the reasons for my concluding that the subject matter involved in the complainant’s disclosure not only falls within the DNI’s juristiction, but relates to one of the most significant and important of the DNI’s responsibilities to the American people."

Schiff continues in his own words, “This is what’s being withheld from Congress right now.”


This is an extremely grave matter. The Director of National Intelligence is jeopardizing the security of our nation by violating the law that requires he turn over this critical information.

:fire:

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Whistleblower complaint about President Trump involves Ukraine, according to two people familiar with the matter

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/whistleblower-complaint-about-president-trump-involves-ukraine-according-to-two-people-familiar-with-the-matter/2019/09/19/07e33f0a-daf6-11e9-bfb1-849887369476_story.html

A whistleblower complaint about President Trump made by an intelligence official centers on Ukraine, according to two people familiar with the matter, which has set off a struggle between Congress and the executive branch.

The complaint involved communications with a foreign leader and a “promise” that Trump made, which was so alarming that a U.S. intelligence official who had worked at the White House went to the inspector general of the intelligence community, two former U.S. officials said.

Two and a half weeks before the complaint was filed, Trump spoke with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, a comedian and political newcomer who was elected in a landslide in May.

That call is already under investigation by House Democrats who are examining whether Trump and his attorney Rudolph W. Giuliani sought to manipulate the Ukrainian government into helping Trump’s reelection campaign. Lawmakers have demanded a full transcript and a list of participants on the call.

A White House spokesperson declined to comment.

The Democrats’ investigation was launched earlier this month, before revelations that an intelligence official had lodged a complaint with the inspector general. The Washington Post first reported on Wednesday that the complaint had to do with a “promise” that Trump made when communicating with a foreign leader.

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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.”
>
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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