12/05/19 Speaker Pelosi Statement on Impeachment Inquiry
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) called for the House to move forward with articles of impeachment against President Trump. In a statement, the speaker argued that the facts against the president are “uncontested” and said he had abused his power and put at risk national security.
But the Republicans’ legal expert brought a surprise, if one that received too little attention. Jonathan Turley submitted an extensive written statement, in which he disagreed with his fellow witnesses in myriad respects. But as he delivered his opening oral remarks, he cut to the heart of the matter: “The use of military aid for a quid pro quo to investigate one’s political opponent, if proven, can be an impeachable offense.”
It was easy to miss this line, especially as Turley quickly returned to railing against what he consistently characterized as an impeachment process moving too hastily. But this was it—the whole ball game.
Democrats familiar with the matter believe the Judiciary panel is on track to begin publicly debating and voting on articles by the end of next week, despite uniform Republican opposition, laying the groundwork for a possible vote to impeach the president by Dec. 20, the final day Congress is scheduled to be in session this year.
And then Congress returns on January 7th of 2020…
She is standing firm…she’s doing it.
Here’s the visual…
Watch 
And better view…
Any word on who the House Democrats will appoint as Impeachment Managers? That’s who is tasked with brining the Articles of Impeachment to the Senate for the trial. They make the case against the President like a prosecutor. This is all so rare to see first hand
@dragonfly9 thanks again for posting this Lawfare piece. I had been reading those Senate rules and Procedures to explain all this but this is much better.
We are almost to this part of Impeachment,
They will enter the Senate chamber under a series of theatrical stage directions, which are laid out in a document entitled, “Rules of Procedure and Practice in the Senate when Sitting on Impeachment Trials.” The Senate’s impeachment rules are weirdly detailed, specifying speeches and oaths that different actors must recite and the specific times of day when things must happen. Yet they offer no rules of evidence or standards of proof and allow majority votes in the Senate to decide key questions that in any normal trial proceeding would be decided by judges under law.
Following these rules, the managers—led, say, by Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff—will have alerted the Senate that they’re ready to present the articles, and Julie Adams, the secretary of the Senate, will have responded that the Senate will receive them. Schiff and the others will approach the Senate bar. The Senate’s sergeant at arms, Michael C. Stenger, will proclaim: “All persons are commanded to keep silence, on pain of imprisonment, while the House of Representatives is exhibiting to the Senate of the United States articles of impeachment against Donald Trump.” Following Stenger’s proclamation, the House managers will exhibit the articles, displaying their allegations against the president.
A few blocks away, Chief Justice John Roberts will have already received a request from the Senate—the first time in more than 20 years a chief justice will have received such a summons: He must arrive at the Capitol building the next day at 1:00 p.m. to preside over the consideration of the impeachment articles. The chief justice will return to the Senate daily—except on Sundays—while the articles are being considered and throughout Trump’s trial. No one is certain how long that may take.
The following day, the chief justice will arrive at the Capitol and take an oath administered by, in all likelihood, the president pro tempore of the Senate, Chuck Grassley. Roberts will then administer a special oath required by Article I of the Constitution to the senators present: ‘‘I solemnly swear … that in all things appertaining to the trial of the impeachment of Donald J. Trump, now pending, I will do impartial justice according to the Constitution and laws: So help me God.’’
Meanwhile, a writ of summons will be delivered to President Trump. The writ will recite the impeachment articles and call on Trump to appear before the Senate, to file his answer to the articles, and to abide by the orders and judgments of the Senate in its consideration of them. Trump’s derisive tweets about the Senate process will give rise to the widespread inference that he has, in fact, received the Senate’s writ.
I just want to point out that a person sent by the Senate reads the Articles of Impeachment to the President’s face, not in a letter or court documents but straightforward all the misconduct he stands accused of, hopefully with some awkward eye contact and foot shuffling included.
Trump asks Supreme Court to void financial records subpoena
Cross-posting
Still a major obstacle? Wtf? 
Conservative writer Jennifer Rubin WAPO
Along with Trump’s tax returns. 
Wow… Rudy… making this easy, huh?
If Russia didn’t have kompromat on Donnie before (and they probably did), they definitely do now.
President Trump has routinely communicated with his personal lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, and other individuals speaking on cellphones vulnerable to monitoring by Russian and other foreign intelligence services, current and former U.S. officials said.
Phone records released this week by the House Intelligence Committee revealed extensive communications between Giuliani, unidentified people at the White House and others involved in the campaign to pressure Ukraine, with no indication that those calls were encrypted or otherwise shielded from foreign surveillance.
The revelations raise the possibility that Moscow was able to learn about aspects of Trump’s attempt to get Ukraine to investigate a political rival months before that effort was exposed by a whistleblower report and the impeachment inquiry, officials said.
Trump is not identified by name in the House phone records, but investigators said they suspect he may be a person with a blocked number listed as “-1” in the files. And administration officials said separately that Trump has communicated regularly with Giuliani on unsecured lines.
“It happened all the time,” said one former senior aide, who noted that Giuliani had a range of foreign clients.
The disclosures provide fresh evidence suggesting that the president continues to defy the security guidance urged by his aides and followed by previous incumbents — a stance that is particularly remarkable given Trump’s attacks on Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential campaign for her use of a private email account while serving as secretary of state.
The connection to the Ukraine campaign is also troubling because of how Moscow could exploit knowledge that Trump was secretly engaged in efforts to extract political favors from the government in Kyiv.
Insight into Giuliani’s discussions with Trump could enable Moscow to adapt or amplify its propaganda promoting the baseless claim that Ukraine, rather than Russia, hacked the Democratic National Committee in the 2016 U.S. election. That claim is now widely embraced by Trump’s Republican allies. Russia is already using its disinformation capabilities to target U.S. citizens, officials said, and could enlist its own operatives in Ukraine to feed false information to Giuliani, who traveled to Kyiv this week. He met there with a Ukrainian lawmaker who studied at the KGB’s academy in Moscow in the early 1990s.
The White House declined to comment, and Giuliani did not respond to requests for comment.
Trump and Giuliani have effectively “given the Russians ammunition they can use in an overt fashion, a covert fashion or in the twisting of information,” said John Sipher, former deputy chief of Russia operations at the CIA. Sipher and others said that it is so likely that Russia tracked the calls of Giuliani and others that the Kremlin probably knows more now about those conversations than impeachment investigators.
“Congress and investigators have call records that suggest certain things but have no means whatsoever of getting the actual text” of what was said, Sipher said. “I guarantee the Russians have the actual information.”
U.S. officials said that Giuliani would have been considered a target of Russian intelligence efforts from early in Trump’s presidency and that it is assumed that the Kremlin intensified its surveillance of the president’s lawyer when he turned his focus to Ukraine — a former Soviet republic and target of Kremlin aggression where Russian intelligence has made deep inroads — late last year.
“That would definitely put him on the radar,” said a U.S. official who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters. “There’s no way around that.”
Other officials went further, saying that Trump’s conduct has become a matter of renewed concern among senior officials at the White House after repeated attempts to break him of his habit of speaking on his own cellphone or to others using unsecured lines.
“It’s absolutely a security issue,’’ the former aide said, saying foreign intelligence agencies could be listening in on the president’s unsecured calls with Giuliani. “It’s a bonanza for them.”
Former officials said Trump has provided his private cell number to British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, French President Emmanuel Macron and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, but it’s unclear whether he has had conversations with those leaders on his cellphone. Four people in communication with him in recent months said that he continues to use that device routinely.
Former White House chief of staff John F. Kelly and intelligence officials made a concerted attempt in 2017 to get Trump to use secure White House lines, even after the president had retreated to the residence in the evenings, officials said. But when Trump realized that this enabled Kelly to compile daily logs of his calls, and the identities of those he was speaking to, Trump became annoyed and reverted to using his cellphone, officials said. “He was totally paranoid that everyone knew who he was talking to,” a former senior administration official said.
Aides were so determined to push the president to use hardened landlines that they gave him a tutorial on how foreign governments could listen to his calls, former administration officials said. Aides said that Trump’s habits improved but that he still frequently used a cellphone they viewed as less safe.
The president now uses a government cellphone that is hardened and routinely scrubbed, administration officials say, but it is still viewed as less safe than using the hardened lines.
The House report identifies dozens of calls at key moments in the campaign to pressure Ukraine that may have been vulnerable to Russian monitoring.
On the day that U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch was told by the State Department to return to Washington, Giuliani had 11 calls with phone numbers associated with the White House, according to the report, as well as a nearly nine-minute phone call with “-1.”
In the middle of that flurry of communications, Giuliani had an eight-minute phone call with Lev Parnas, his Soviet-born associate, raising the possibility that the former New York mayor may have been recounting his interactions with the White House that day. Foreign intelligence agencies often glean information about a primary target, such as a senior official in the White House, through monitoring the ancillary communications of others in touch with them, according to former intelligence operatives.
The web of calls underscores the extent to which Trump entrusted aspects of his secret agenda with Ukraine to a network of people outside the U.S. government.
Senior administration officials, including former top White House Russia adviser Fiona Hill, testified that they were largely kept in the dark about Giuliani’s activities and communications with Trump.
U.S. officials said that Russia has benefited from nearly every aspect of the Ukraine controversy, including the strain it has placed on Ukraine’s relationship with the United States, the attempt to divert attention from Russia’s attacks on a U.S. election, and the paralyzing impact the impeachment inquiry has had on Washington.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) announced on Wednesday that the House would proceed with articles of impeachment against Trump, who is accused of abusing the powers of his office for political gain. At the center of the case is a July 25 call in which Trump asked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate former vice president Joe Biden and his son Hunter, who served on the board of a Ukrainian gas company, and probe a conspiracy theory blaming Ukraine rather than Russia for hacking the Democratic National Committee during the 2016 election.
As alleged leverage, Trump withheld a White House meeting sought by Zelensky until the Ukrainian leader made a public commitment to those investigations, which stood to help Trump in the 2020 election, and ordered a suspension of hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. military aid to Ukraine.
The records released in the House impeachment report show potential security vulnerabilities that extend beyond the White House. The report also lists calls between Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), the ranking Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, and Parnas, who officials said is also considered a likely target of Russian intelligence, given that he was going back and forth to Ukraine and speaking to high-level tycoons and government officials there.
In an appearance on Fox News this week, Nunes said that he didn’t recall speaking with Parnas but that it was possible. A spokesman for Nunes did not respond to requests for comment on his communications with Parnas and Giuliani.
U.S. Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland also spoke in July with Trump by cellphone from an outdoor table at a restaurant in central Kyiv, a city where U.S. officials said Russia had intercepted a phone call in 2014 between two senior U.S. diplomats and leaked it to drive a wedge between the United States and Europe.
House investigators’ ability to obtain Giuliani’s call records by subpoenaing logs from mobile phone companies suggests that those calls were not made using secure lines or encrypted applications such as Signal or WhatsApp — which likely would have rendered those calls invisible to the mobile providers.
The metadata logs provide details on the time, duration and participants on the calls but not their contents. Citing that gap, Giuliani suggested this week that he may not have been speaking to Trump about Ukraine during the conversations.
“The mere fact I had numerous calls with the White House does not establish any specific topic,” Giuliani said in a tweet on Wednesday. “Remember, I’m the president’s attorney.”
But Giuliani has previously said he was updating the president regularly on his Ukraine activities, and Trump told those working on Ukraine policy to go through Giuliani.
Even the use of a secure White House line provides no meaningful security if the recipient of the call is on an insecure line or cellphone, officials said.
“Giuliani calling the president through the Situation Room does not guarantee any level of security because he’s using a commercial cellphone and at least part of his call is coming over commercial phone lines,” said Larry Pfeiffer, former senior director of the White House Situation Room in the Obama administration and former chief of staff to the CIA director. And even if both parties were using commercially encrypted apps such as WhatsApp or Signal, Pfeiffer said, “I would not want to be trusting commercial encryption over government encryption when conducting national security business.
Giuliani has used the WhatsApp encrypted text application but is otherwise known for his lack of technological sophistication.
He has pocket-dialed reporters by accident in recent months and, according to NBC News, at least once went to the Apple store in San Francisco because he had locked himself out of his iPhone. U.S. officials said that Russia would likely have him under physical surveillance when he is in Ukraine, where he arrived this week to work on a documentary aimed at discrediting the impeachment inquiry.
Thanks for those links… @Windthin
I would have never seen this Ukrainian newspaper run by more liberal-minded groups - both British and American…(I did a quick fact check.)
We’re hearing the alarms from Pelosi, and other regarding “all roads lead to Putin,” and therefore awareness of the larger scheme at hand.
Why is Rudy in Ukraine…he’s being messianic among other descriptors (conniving, ruthless…and up to no good) as far as I am concerned. Nothing new there though.
And here’s the backdrop to the scrambling news about Ukraine and what Russia wants.
Watch this video
Commentary on Impeachment process…makes sense to me. MSNBC commentator
More than 500 legal scholars have signed on to an open letter asserting that President Trump committed “impeachable conduct” and that lawmakers would be acting well within their rights if they ultimately voted to remove him from office.
The signers are law professors and other academics from universities across the country, including Harvard, Yale, Columbia, the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Michigan and many others. The open letter was published online Friday by the nonprofit advocacy group Protect Democracy.
“There is overwhelming evidence that President Trump betrayed his oath of office by seeking to use presidential power to pressure a foreign government to help him distort an American election, for his personal and political benefit, at the direct expense of national security interests as determined by Congress,” the group of professors wrote. “His conduct is precisely the type of threat to our democracy that the Founders feared when they included the remedy of impeachment in the Constitution.”
Senate GOP leaders have signaled they intend to defend Trump wholeheartedly, but they’re also loath to let the upper chamber descend into chaos or divide their caucus ahead of a tough 2020 cycle. And even if Senate Republicans wanted to embrace the hard-line posture of the House, the party’s narrow majority makes that all but impossible under Senate rules.
Calling controversial witnesses will require near lockstep party unity from 51 of the 53 Senate Republicans to make any procedural maneuvers, a tough task given the diverse views in the GOP, according to senators and aides.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has privately urged senators to avoid divisive votes on impeachment motions, and other senators are eager to ensure that the GOP doesn’t lose votes — or control of a trial in their own chamber.
So as carefully as they can, given the political need to stay aligned with Trump, GOP senators are pouring cold water on the idea that they can or will produce a Christmas tree of TrumpWorld demands during a trial that will determine whether Trump’s presidency survives the winter.
“I don’t feel like we necessarily need all of them. … It becomes a big circus of people and they call John Bolton and we call Hunter Biden. OK. We can do that,” said Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.). “Is it needed to be able to make a decision based on the evidence we’re looking at right now?”
“If you get into a long convoluted [process], this thing could drag on for a really long time,” said Senate Majority Whip John Thune (R-S.D.). “If both sides get into a bunch of motions about who we bring who [Democrats] bring and we’re having numerous votes on that? I think that’s something, I think, in the end neither side is probably going to be crazy about.”
To establish the ground rules of a Senate trial, McConnell and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) will try and hash out a deal over length and other broad parameters. But when talk turns to calling witnesses, those votes seem likely to be intensely divisive, both between Democrats and Republicans and perhaps among Republicans themselves.
Even though this doesn’t directly tie into the impeachment hearings right now, I’m posting it here since it may soon lead to some big reveals that could have a huge impact on the much anticipated Senate trial.
Talks about a potential plea deal are under way between federal prosecutors and an attorney for Lev Parnas, a Rudy Giuliani associate indicted for making illegal campaign donations who helped Trump lawyer Giuliani’s search for dirt in Ukraine on Joe Biden, says an attorney familiar with the investigation
The talks appear to be in early stages, but the lawyer familiar with the investigation and ex-prosecutors say that pressure mounted on Parnas to cut a deal after prosecutors revealed on Monday that he and his business associate Igor Fruman, who was also indicted for making illegal campaign donations, are “likely” to face additional charges.
If Parnas strikes a deal it could put further legal pressure on Giuliani, who is facing a growing number of legal woes including some relating to his international consulting business as part of an investigation of alleged crimes including money laundering, wire fraud, campaign finance violations, making false statements, obstruction of justice, and violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act.
