Trump enters the stage

POLITICO

‘Extremely stable genius’: Trump defends his mental fitness as he tears into Pelosi

The speaker says he needs ‘an intervention.’ The president says ‘she’s lost it.’

By QUINT FORGEY and DANIEL LIPPMAN

05/23/2019 04:47 PM EDT

Washington’s political chaos descended into farce on Thursday when the speaker of the House and the president of the United States accused one another of being mentally unwell.

Hijacking an afternoon White House event with American farmers and agriculture industry leaders, President Donald Trump began calling on his top aides to state for the public record that he was “calm” during a disastrous meeting with Democratic leaders the day before.

“I’ve been watching her. I have been watching her for a long period of time. She’s not the same person. She’s lost it,” Trump said of Speaker Nancy Pelosi, just moments after he announced $16 billion in federal aid to growers hammered by the U.S.-China trade conflict.

In a remarkable scene, the president proceeded to name-check senior White House staff and advisers in the Roosevelt Room whom he said had attended Wednesday’s session on infrastructure initiatives with top congressional Democrats — which Trump abandoned after declaring that the lawmakers could not simultaneously negotiate legislation while investigating and threatening to impeach him.

“Kellyanne, what was my temperament yesterday?” Trump asked White House counselor Kellyanne Conway.

“Very calm. No tamper tantrum,” she replied before criticizing journalists’ coverage of the meeting, which Trump has complained portrayed him with a “rage narrative.”

“The whole Democrat Party is very messed up. They have never recovered from the great election of 2016 — an election that I think you folks liked very much, right?” Trump said, addressing the farmers flanking his lectern. “Well, Nancy Pelosi was not happy about it, and she is a mess.”

Not even the leaders’ families were spared from the sniping and accusations of poor physical well-being. Christine Pelosi, the speaker’s daughter, sought to defend her mother on Twitter earlier Thursday, commenting on a Washington Post reportdetailing how a conservative Facebook page had posted a doctored video of the California Democrat in which she appears to drunkenly slur her words.

“Republicans and their conservative allies have been pumping this despicable fake meme for years! Now they are caught,” Christine Pelosi wrote online. “#FactCheck: Madam Speaker doesn’t even drink alcohol!”

Pelosi herself on Thursday invoked the president’s wife and children in appearing to question Trump’s fitness for office, telling reporters in the Capitol: “I wish that his family or his administration or his staff would have an intervention for the good of the country.”

At that same news conference, the speaker questioned whether Trump was truly in charge of his White House and seemed to jokingly reference the Constitution’s 25th Amendment, which allows the Cabinet to remove a president from office if he can’t perform his duties.

It was a reporter’s question at the White House about Pelosi’s “intervention” remark — which Trump dubbed “a nasty-type statement” — that put the president on the defensive Thursday. He began turning to aides such as Mercedes Schlapp, the White House director of strategic communications, and pressing them for first-hand accounts of his scuttled meeting with Democrats.

“You were very calm and you were very direct, and you sent a very firm message to the speaker and to the Democrats,” Schlapp said.

Next up was Trump’s top economic adviser, Larry Kudlow, who said the president’s conversation with Democrats was “much calmer than some of our trade meetings,” followed by White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who described the president’s demeanor as “very calm and straightforward and clear.”

But the greatest praise for the commander in chief came from Trump himself, who told the assembled members of the media during one non-sequitur: “I’m an extremely stable genius. OK?”

Minutes after the event concluded, Pelosi had already fired back a retort from the speaker’s official Twitter account.

“When the ‘extremely stable genius’ starts acting more presidential,” she wrote online, “I’ll be happy to work with him on infrastructure, trade and other issues.”

The bizarre exchange of insults between the two ends of Pennsylvania Avenue comes amid growing pressure on Speaker Pelosi to pursue an impeachment inquiry into the president’s conduct.

At a closed-door meeting Thursday morning with her Democratic colleagues, Pelosi claimed that Trump “wants to be impeached” by the House so that he can notch a victory during a trial in the Senate, which is controlled by a healthy Republican majority.

Close associates and Republicans close to the president, interviewed in recent weeks, dispute the idea that Trump welcomes impeachment. But with impeachment talk increasingly in the air in Washington and Trump seeming to goad Democrats into moving in that direction, the president may be taking the threat more seriously now.

“In the past he’s always pooh-poohed the idea of impeachment and he always thought that they’re not really serious about it,” said a Republican close to the White House who has discussed the issue with Trump. “That this is sort of a game that they’re putting out there. Even the media, his view was, ‘They need me, I’m the biggest star they ever had and I’m helping the New York Times, MSNBC and CNN.’”

A former senior White House official said Trump doesn’t want to get impeached “in his heart of hearts,” but “the specter of [impeachment] creates that production value that’s so important to him.”

Drag-out fights with Democrats “creates the diametric choice between us and them,” the former official added. “That’s why he does those rallies. It is what motivates his base, it’s what motivates him and he’s ‘producing’ the presidency.”

Trump also sees impeachment as a political wedge he can wield against Pelosi’s newly expanded caucus, this person said: “He thinks that this is just going to rip the Democrats apart because some want to [impeach] and some don’t.”

© 2019 POLITICO LLC

A RIVAL MONSTER
JURISPRUDENCE
Trump’s Judge Whisperer Promised to Take Our Laws Back to the 1930s
By JAMAL GREENE

MAY 27, 20198:30 AM
Leonard Leo.
Federalist Society Executive Vice President Leonard Leo speaks to media at Trump Tower on Nov. 16, 2016.
Carolyn Kaster/AP
One week before the 1980 presidential election, toward the end of his lone debate against Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan stared into the camera and implored Americans to ask themselves, “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” The question is widely believed to have ended Carter’s presidency.

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Last week, the Washington Post published a profile of Federalist Society Executive Vice President Leonard Leo, focusing in part on a speech he gave to the Council for National Policy in which he warmly predicted the Supreme Court would soon return to the pre–New Deal era of “limited, constitutional government.” Leo believes, in other words, that the court’s view of the Constitution was better off 85 years ago than it is today.

“I think we stand at the threshold of an exciting moment in our republic,” Leo told the council at a closed-door meeting in February, audio of which was obtained by the Post. “This is really, I think, at least in recent memory, a newfound embrace of limited constitutional government in our country. I don’t think this has really happened since probably before the New Deal.”

The average American doesn’t know who Leo is, but as the Post piece makes clear, he‘s one of the most influential lawyers in the country. A longtime leader within the Federalist Society, Leo has had Donald Trump’s ear on judicial appointments and has been the main curator of the president’s list of Supreme Court candidates. Two of Leo’s personal picks, Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch, have been elevated to the highest court in the country since Trump’s election. So when Leonard Leo says he wants to return to a pre–New Deal Constitution, you should listen. And you should be alarmed.

As Leo knows, constitutional law was very different in the 1930s from what it is today. And in a word, it sucked.

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In the 1930s, the courts were fully complicit in maintaining the country as a thoroughgoing ethnocracy, governed openly for the benefit of white men. Public schools in 21 states were racially segregated by law. “Separate but equal” schools had been affirmed by the Supreme Court as late as 1927, in a unanimous decision allowing Mississippi to kick a Chinese American girl out of her local “white” school for being a member of the “yellow” race. The outlawing of segregation is settled law in our country, and nobody would dare dream of returning to those antiquated judicial interpretations, you might say? Several of Trump’s judicial nominees have conspicuously, outrageously, refused to say whether they thought Brown v. Board of Education, which ended legal school segregation in 1954, was correctly decided.

In the 1930s, through a combination of discriminatory literacy tests, poll taxes, “good character” requirements, and straight-up violence, less than 1 percent of black people in the Deep South—where they represented more than a third of the population—were registered to vote. The Supreme Court had blessed these intimidation practices for decades, ever since a 1903 decision in which the court said it couldn’t do anything about Alabama’s self-described effort “to establish white supremacy in this state” by refusing to register black voters. Discriminatory voting practices of this sort weren’t banned until the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the most significant provision of which was gutted six years ago in an opinion by Chief Justice John Roberts (whom Leo also helped elevate to the court).

In the 1930s, women had no constitutional right to equality. They could legally be kept off of juries, given different work hours, paid less money, and imprisoned for using birth control. It would be another four decades before the Supreme Court struck down even a single law for discriminating against women. Kavanaugh and Gorsuch—again, both products of Leo’s vetting—recently dissented from the court’s temporary blocking of a Louisiana law that would have left the entire state with just a single doctor able to perform abortions.

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In the first half of the 20th century, the police could beat confessions out of arrestees. Poor defendants had no right to a lawyer. Evidence could be illegally seized and used in prosecutions. In 1944, for example, South Carolina executed a 14-year-old black boy named George Stinney for the murders of two white girls. He was questioned alone, without his parents or a lawyer present, and convicted by an all-white jury after a two-hour trial and 10 minutes of deliberation. He wasn’t allowed to appeal. He had to sit on books to fit into the headpiece of the electric chair. Only in 2014, 70 years too late, did a circuit court judge vacate the 14-year-old Stinney’s murder conviction. The Stinney case tells you all you need to know about criminal justice in the age Leo wants to bring back.

The 1930s was of course the decade of the Great Depression, when unemployment hit 25 percent and most Americans lived in poverty. The post–New Deal court decisions Leo wishes to repudiate are the ones that gave the government the power to enact minimum wage laws, to create unemployment insurance and Social Security, to provide health insurance to the aged and destitute, and to give workers collective bargaining rights. In the 1930s, those too old to work and too poor not to could often expect a quick but painful death. This is the human toll of “limited government.”

If we’re looking for Reagan’s shining city upon a hill, we won’t find it in America’s now-distant past. Not most of us, anyway. And if it’s what Leo is promising us, we can only hope it’s not in America’s future.

Brett Kavanaugh Donald Trump History John Roberts Judiciary Law Neil Gorsuch Supreme Court
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All contents © 2019 The Slate Group LLC. All rights reserved.

Below the level of rationality , there exists the primal question, -what shadows follow is from the choice between the evil genius , or the managed one?

Can this, does this question signal some kind of doubly vested metaphor in the new schemal working of things, of deciding what route best describes
venturing into the proper road to peace, rather than war?

For the former describes a split between good and evil, while the later above it and beyond.

And now:


TheHill

CAMPAIGN
May 27, 2019 - 01:57 PM EDT
3 modelers predict Trump reelection: report

BY ZACK BUDRYK
TWEET SHARE EMAIL

Three modelers are predicting President Trump will win reelection in 2020 based on a combination of economic data and incumbent advantages, according to a column in The New York Times.

Steven Rattner wrote that Ray Fair of Yale favors Trump to win based on a model that combines incumbency and gross domestic product growth rates.

The model predicted Barack Obama’s 2008 popular vote margin within a fraction of a percentage point and got within two-tenths of a point for his 2012 vote share, Rattner, who served as a counselor to the Treasury secretary during the Obama administration, added.

The model correctly predicting an electoral victory for Trump in 2016, but overestimated his popular vote share by about 5.5 points, which Rattner attributed to Trump’s personal unfavorables.

“In other words, a more ‘normal’ Republican would likely have won the popular vote by a substantial margin (instead of losing it by three million votes),” Rattner wrote.

Trump’s status as the incumbent also puts the odds in his favor for 2020, according to the Obama-era official.

Mark Zandi, Moody’s Analytics’s chief economist, has also said Trump is poised to win based on an analysis of 12 models, while Donald Luskin of Trend Macrolytics made a similar prediction based on an Electoral College analysis, Rattner noted.

“So the question for 2020 may well be whether Mr. Trump can overcome the majority of voters’ poor perception of him and use a good economy and incumbency to win re-election,” he writes.

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©


International :

Unfit To Lead

Why Did UK Parliament Bar Trump Addressing Them?

By

johnnyfreedom / Daily Kos (05/27/2019)

On the Quora UK website, Nate White–an articulate & witty writer–proffered this written response a couple months ago to the query “Why do some British people not like Donald Trump?” There’s a link to the website at the end of his response.

“A few things spring to mind.

Trump lacks certain qualities which the British traditionally esteem.

For instance, he has no class, no charm, no coolness, no credibility, no compassion, no wit, no warmth, no wisdom, no subtlety, no sensitivity, no self-awareness, no humility, no honour and no grace – all qualities, funnily enough, with which his predecessor Mr. Obama was generously blessed.

So for us, the stark contrast does rather throw Trump’s limitations into embarrassingly sharp relief.

Plus, we like a laugh. And while Trump may be laughable, he has never once said anything wry, witty or even faintly amusing – not once, ever.

I don’t say that rhetorically, I mean it quite literally: not once, not ever. And that fact is particularly disturbing to the British sensibility – for us, to lack humour is almost inhuman.

But with Trump, it’s a fact. He doesn’t even seem to understand what a joke is – his idea of a joke is a crass comment, an illiterate insult, a casual act of cruelty.

Trump is a troll. And like all trolls, he is never funny and he never laughs; he only crows or jeers.

And scarily, he doesn’t just talk in crude, witless insults – he actually thinks in them. His mind is a simple bot-like algorithm of petty prejudices and knee-jerk nastiness.

There is never any under-layer of irony, complexity, nuance or depth. It’s all surface.

Some Americans might see this as refreshingly upfront.

Well, we don’t. We see it as having no inner world, no soul.

And in Britain we traditionally side with David, not Goliath. All our heroes are plucky underdogs: Robin Hood, Dick Whittington, Oliver Twist.

Trump is neither plucky, nor an underdog. He is the exact opposite of that.

He’s not even a spoiled rich-boy, or a greedy fat-cat.

He’s more a fat white slug. A Jabba the Hutt of privilege.

And worse, he is that most unforgivable of all things to the British: a bully.

That is, except when he is among bullies; then he suddenly transforms into a sniveling sidekick instead.

There are unspoken rules to this stuff – the Queensberry rules of basic decency – and he breaks them all. He punches downwards – which a gentleman should, would, could never do – and every blow he aims is below the belt. He particularly likes to kick the vulnerable or voiceless – and he kicks them when they are down.

So the fact that a significant minority – perhaps a third – of Americans look at what he does, listen to what he says, and then think ‘Yeah, he seems like my kind of guy’ is a matter of some confusion and no little distress to British people, given that:

  • Americans are supposed to be nicer than us, and mostly are.
  • You don’t need a particularly keen eye for detail to spot a few flaws in the man.

This last point is what especially confuses and dismays British people, and many other people too; his faults seem pretty bloody hard to miss.

After all, it’s impossible to read a single tweet, or hear him speak a sentence or two, without staring deep into the abyss. He turns being artless into an art form; he is a Picasso of pettiness; a Shakespeare of shit. His faults are fractal: even his flaws have flaws, and so on ad infinitum.

God knows there have always been stupid people in the world, and plenty of nasty people too. But rarely has stupidity been so nasty, or nastiness so stupid.

He makes Nixon look trustworthy and George W look smart.

In fact, if Frankenstein decided to make a monster assembled entirely from human flaws – he would make a Trump.

And a remorseful Doctor Frankenstein would clutch out big clumpfuls of hair and scream in anguish:

‘My God… what… have… I… created?

If being a twat was a TV show, Trump would be the boxed set.”

Daily dose of outrage at what is going on in Washington.

Contact us: contact@dailysoundandfury.com

Except where otherwise noted, content on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.

The. Problem with the Trump’s transcendentalism is that it is predicated on objective criteria which he lacks.

The wall! Again!

BBC News

Trump supporters build US-Mexico barrier
The private group says it has begun construction on a US-Mexico border wall in New Mexico
A group of Trump supporters has begun building the first privately constructed US-Mexico border wall after a crowd-funding campaign.

US military veteran Brian Kolfage posted a picture of the steel fence going up in the state of New Mexico.

He said it was being erected with more than $22m (£17m) in donations he raised through an online campaign last year.

The fundraiser was launched as Congress refused President Donald Trump funding for his signature campaign promise.

Presentational white space
Mr Kolfage, an Air Force veteran, triple amputee and Purple Heart recipient, tweeted a series of videos and images showing the new barrier on Sunday.

“WE MADE HISTORY! The first crowdsource funded international border wall!” Mr Kolfage wrote on Twitter.

The barrier is being built through his nonprofit organisation WeBuildtheWall Inc, which he set up after organising a GoFundMe campaign in December entitled We The People Will Fund The Wall.

Former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon is chairman of WeBuildtheWall’s advisory board.

Trump’s border wall - in seven charts
Six things that could topple Donald Trump’s border wall
Mr Bannon told CNN the new private barrier would link two 21-mile sections of existing fencing.

Kris Kobach, a former Kansas secretary of state who is now general counsel for WeBuildtheWall, told CNN the privately built section would cost up to $8m.

The group has hired Fisher Industries, a North Dakota-based contractor that Mr Trump had argued should be appointed to build the wall, according to the Washington Post.

Trump supporter Jeff Allen, 56, said the barrier is being built on land he co-owns in the city of Sunland Park, New Mexico, across the border from Ciudad Juarez, Mexico.

He said the section, about half a mile long, would be finished by the end of the week.

Former Kansas secretary of state Kris Kobach (left) giving tour of construction site
Image caption Founder Brian Kolfage tweeted a picture of former Kansas secretary of state Kris Kobach (left) giving tours of the construction site
Mr Allen told AFP news agency: "This is Americans’ way of saying, ‘Congress, you’re worthless, and we’re fighting it. We’re going to build [the wall] ourselves.’

“This is not Europe. This is America. We protect our borders.”

He denied hating immigrants, saying he is married to a Mexican woman, and his daughter was born in Ciudad Juarez.

“This is not about racism,” Mr Allen told AFP. "This is about me protecting myself, and America having a secure border.

“If people want to immigrate, they should go to a port of entry and apply.”

WeBuildtheWall said it was just the beginning of its mission to secure the US southern border.

“Buckle up, we’re just getting started!” the group wrote on Facebook.

US judge blocks funds for Trump border wall plan
Trump escalates migrant wall stand-off
US Customs and Border Protection told the BBC: "This project is not connected to our efforts.

“Please reach out to the company leading construction for any information related to their endeavour.”

Last week a court blocked a plan by the Trump administration to channel defence department funds to build a border wall.

A federal judge granted the injunction against the use of $1bn in Arizona and Texas because it had not been approved by Congress.

Copyright © 2019 BBC. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.

youtu.be/YR5ApYxkU-U

Fox News

RUSSIA INVESTIGATIONPublished May 29, 2019 Last Update 26 minutes ago
Dems ramp up calls for Trump impeachment after Mueller speaks out on Russia probe
By Ronn Blitzer | Fox News

Prominent Democrats are ramping up calls to impeach President Trump in the aftermath of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s statement on Wednesday recapping his investigation’s findings and emphasizing his report did not exonerate the president of obstruction of justice.

SPECIAL COUNSEL ROBERT MUELLER BREAKS SILENCE ON RUSSIA PROVE, SAYS CHARGING TRUMP WITH A CRIME WAS ‘NOT AN OPTION’

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., whose committee would play a starring role in any impeachment effort, said during a New York City press conference on Wednesday afternoon, “With respect to [the] impeachment question, at this point all options are on the table and nothing should be ruled out.”

Mueller’s statement triggered an avalanche of calls from 2020 Democratic presidential hopefuls, and puts pressure on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who has resisted calls so far from Democrats to pursue impeachment. During an event in California on Wednesday, Pelosi was non-commital but said, “Many constituents want to impeach the president. But we want to do what is right and what gets results.”

Others, though, want to move ahead with impeachment now: Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., tweeted that there is a “legal and moral obligation to begin impeachment proceedings immediately.”

Continue Reading Below

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., described Mueller’s statement as “an impeachment referral,” and said that Congress should act on it.

Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., also compared Mueller’s remarks to an “impeachment referall,” and said, “We need to start impeachment proceedings. It’s our constitutional obligation.”

Beto O’Rourke also weighed in, calling for “consequences, accountability, and justice,” and saying impeachment was “the only way to ensure that.”

Rep. Seth Moulton, D-Mass., who is also running for president, said now that Mueller’s job is done, “Impeachment hearings should begin tomorrow.”

On the topic of obstruction of justice, Mueller stated that it would be unconstitutional to charge a sitting president with a crime, and he would not accuse someone of a crime without them being able to defend themselves in a court proceeding. At the same time, he said he was unable to exonerate the president either. This has added fuel to Democrats’ desire to impeach Trump.

In an earlier statement, Nadler, the top Democrat on the committee, vowed that Congress would “respond.”

“Given that Special Counsel Mueller was unable to pursue criminal charges against the President, it falls to Congress to respond to the crimes, lies and other wrongdoing of President Trump – and we will do so,” Nadler said in a statement. “No one, not even the President of the United States, is above the law.”

Nadler’s statement specifically addressed obstruction of justice, saying that “the Constitution points to Congress to take action to hold the President accountable.” Pelosi, in a statement, did not explicitly mention impeachment, but said, “The Congress holds sacred its constitutional responsibility to investigate and hold the President accountable for his abuse of power.”

Rep. Doug Collins, R-Ga., the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, issued a statement with a very different conclusion than Nadler.

“Special Counsel Mueller confirmed today what we knew months ago when his report was released: there was no collusion and no obstruction,” Collins said in a statement. “Relitigating the 2016 election and reinvestigating the special counsel’s findings will only further divide our country.”

White House press secretary Sarah Sanders also issued a statement, emphatically stating that it was time to move on from the investigation after Mueller’s report did not find evidence of collusion with Russia, and the Justice Department determined there was insufficient evidence of obstruction.

“The report was clear—there was no collusion, no conspiracy—and the Department of Justice confirmed there was no obstruction,” Sanders said. Special Counsel Mueller also sstated that Attorney General Barr acted in good faith in his handling of the report. After two years, the Special Counsel is moving on with his life, and everyone else should do the same."

GARY MELTZ: MUELLER SPEAKS – IS IMPEACHMENT INEVITABLE? HERE’S HOW PELOSI CAN GET PROGRESSIVES TO BACK DOWN

Trump’s 2020 campaign also addressed Mueller’s statement.

“Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s remarks today confirmed what we already knew. There was no collusin between the Russians and the Trump campaign, and there was no case for obstruction,” campaign manager Brad Parscale said in a statement. " President Trump has been fully and completely exonerated. Mueller said his investigation is over. The case is now closed."

Parscale went on to address the investigation of “the origins of the Russia hoax,” and why the Justice Department and FBI intiated their probe of the Trump campaign.

“Anyone who is for transparency, constitutional civil libterties, and the rule of law should want to know why human sources, wiretapping, and unmasking were used to infiltrate a presidential campaign,” he said.

Fox News
This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. ©2019 FOX News Network, LLC. All rights reserved. All market data delayed 20 minutes.





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POLITICS
White House Wanted USS John McCain ‘Out of Sight’ During Trump Japan Visit
U.S. military officials worked to ensure President Trump would not see the warship that bears the name of the late senator, a frequent target of the president’s ire
A tarp obscures the name of the USS John S. McCain ahead of President Trump’s visit to Japan.
A tarp obscures the name of the USS John S. McCain ahead of President Trump’s visit to Japan.

By Rebecca Ballhaus and Gordon Lubold
Updated May 29, 2019 11:00 p.m. ET
The White House wanted the U.S. Navy to move “out of sight” the warship USS John S. McCain ahead of President Trump’s visit to Japan, according to an email reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

The ship was named after the father and grandfather of the late senator—a war hero who became a frequent target of Mr. Trump’s ire—and the senator’s name was added to the ship in 2018.

The Wall Street Journal
Copyright ©2019 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

??? ??? ???

Professor: Dems need to impeach Trump to win 2020

Professor Allan Lichtman, who correctly predicted the last nine presidential election wins, says Democrats will only have a chance at winning in 2020 if they impeach President Donald Trump.

View on CNN

© 2019 Cable News Network. Turner Broadcasting System, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

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Now what?

U.S. President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin shake hands as they hold a joint news conference after their meeting in Helsinki, Finland, July 16, 2018
U.S. President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin shake hands as they hold a joint news conference after their meeting in Helsinki, Finland, July 16, 2018REUTERS/Leonhard Foeger/File Photo
Trump Attacks Mueller Probe - Inadvertently Confirms Russia Helped Elect Him
‘And now Russia has disappeared because I had nothing to do with Russia helping me to get elected’

Haaretz

U.S. President Donald Trump tweeted an attack on Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation on Thursday and admitted for the first time that Russia “helped me to get elected” — while denying any involvement. Later in the day, Trump retracted the statement.

Trump tweeted: “Russia, Russia, Russia! That’s all you heard at the beginning of this Witch Hunt Hoax. … And now Russia has disappeared because I had nothing to do with Russia helping me to get elected. It was a crime that didn’t exist. So now the Dems and their partner, the Fake News Media,…”

He continued in a second tweet: “…say he fought back against this phony crime that didn’t exist, this horrendous false accusation, and he shouldn’t fight back, he should just sit back and take it. Could this be Obstruction? No, Mueller didn’t find Obstruction either. Presidential Harassment!”

Donald J. Trump
:heavy_check_mark:
@realDonaldTrump
·
Russia, Russia, Russia! That’s all you heard at the beginning of this Witch Hunt Hoax…And now Russia has disappeared because I had nothing to do with Russia helping me to get elected. It was a crime that didn’t exist. So now the Dems and their partner, the Fake News Media,…

Donald J. Trump
:heavy_check_mark:
@realDonaldTrump
…say he fought back against this phony crime that didn’t exist, this horrendous false accusation, and he shouldn’t fight back, he should just sit back and take it. Could this be Obstruction? No, Mueller didn’t find Obstruction either. Presidential Harassment

Trump deletes tweet finally admitting Russia helped elect him
Trump deletes tweet finally admitting Russia helped elect him Screen shot / Twitter
Read more: Fox News senior analyst: Mueller said he would indict Trump if he weren’t president | Even Netanyahu knows it’s over: Analysis

Trump has long contended that his 2016 presidential victory, which he often refers to as one of the greatest of all time, was in no way aided by the Russians. Trump on multiple occasions has falsely claimed that his 306-point electoral college win was the biggest since Ronald Reagan, despite former President Obama winning with 332 points in 2012.

White House adviser Kellyanne Conway regularly uses a talking point that the allegation that Russia helped Trump win is an insult. “The idea that any of us, and me as a campaign manager, would cheat, steal, lie, cut corners, talk to Russians, was an insult from the beginning,” Conway said last month while talking to reporters.

Fox News Senior Analyst: Mueller Said He Would Indict Trump if He Weren’t President

Trump told reporters Thursday as he departed the White House, “Russia didn’t help me at all.” He said Russia would have preferred that Hillary Clinton be elected, not him.

Read more: ‘Flurry of lies:’ CNN banner blasts Trump’s statements on Mueller probe

Trump claimed, “Nobody has been tougher” on Russia “than me.”

Mueller said that charging Trump with a crime was “not an option” because of federal rules, but he used his first public remarks on the Russia investigation to emphasize that he did not exonerate the president.

“If we had had confidence that the president clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said so,” Mueller declared on Wednesday.

Trump unleashes fury on Mueller
The special counsel’s remarks stood as a pointed rebuttal to Trump’s repeated claims that he was cleared and that the two-year inquiry was merely a “witch hunt.” They also marked a counter to criticism, including by Attorney General William Barr, that Mueller should have reached a determination on whether the president illegally tried to obstruct the probe by taking actions such as firing his FBI director, James Comey.

Mueller made clear that his team never considered indicting Trump because the Justice Department prohibits the prosecution of a sitting president.

“Charging the president with a crime was therefore not an option we could consider,” Mueller said during a televised statement.

He said he believed such an action would be unconstitutional.

Mueller did not use the word “impeachment,” but said it was the job of Congress, not the criminal justice system, to hold the president accountable for any wrongdoing.

The Associated Press contributed to this report

In unprecedented circumstances, the unprecedented things, like indicting a sitting president, SHOULD BE DONE!
Vel Santic Chayon-Laufer 15:36 30.05.2019
@Vel Santic Chayon-Laufer@ It is because you do not understand the law. There was no underlying crime established, no collusion. On the obstruction side, there was insufficient evidence to proceed . Whatever evidence of obstruction was found would not be sufficient to win a case in a court of law. Trump skirted the borderline of obstruction, that much is clear but the criminality was never established. Thus cannot indict. It is exactly with the principals of Common

© Haaretz Daily Newspaper Ltd.
All Rights Reserved

youtu.be/lSYFJB7o9ZQ

Brian Epstein committed suicide today.

Here is his connection to President Trump:

In 2002, in a profile about Epstein in New York Magazine, Trump was quoted as saying, “I’ve known Jeff for fifteen years. Terrific guy. He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. No doubt about it – Jeffrey enjoys his social life.”

----- — --------------'------


Trump again boosts a baseless conspiracy theory, this one about Jeffrey Epstein
Trump contradicted his own officials, retweeting a right-wing conspiracy about Epstein.

By Riley Beggin on August 11, 2019 10:20 am

Christopher Furlong/Getty Images
President Donald Trump retweeted a popular conspiracy theory about financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s death by suicide, elevating unsubstantiated claims that Epstein, who died in federal custody, was killed by Bill Clinton.

Epstein was found dead in his jail cell in Manhattan Saturday morning while he was awaiting trial for sex trafficking. He was accused of sex crimes against dozens of young girls, who he allegedly raped and molested over years at his luxury properties across the country.

The Bureau of Prisons — a law enforcement arm of Trump’s own Department of Justice, which was holding Epstein — said in a statement he had died by apparent suicide.

But rather than tweet a statement confirming his DOJ’s findings, Trump promoted a theory countering his administration’s statement by retweeting a video by a conservative personality who simultaneously pushed back against the conspiracy theory that Trump — who was at one time an associate of Epstein’s — killed the financier while pushing the conspiracy theory that Bill Clinton (who was also an Epstein associate) was responsible for the sex offender’s death.

The conservative personality captioned the tweet “we know who did this” and used the hashtags ClintonBodyCount (a reference to a long-running conspiracy theory that originated in the 1990s which claims Bill and Hillary Clinton secretly kill their enemies) and ClintonCrimeFamily.

Beyond the unsubstantiated claims of Bill Clinton’s involvement in Epstein’s death, the video also contains misinformation; for instance, it says that Epstein died while being monitored on suicide watch. Officials have said Epstein in fact was not on suicide watch when he died.

There is absolutely no evidence to support the idea that Epstein was murdered. But here’s why people are connecting him to Clinton (and to Trump) online, according to reporting by Vox’s Andrew Prokop:

In the years before Epstein’s 2007 guilty plea to solicitation of prostitution with a minor, he was known for “collecting” friendships with many noteworthy or influential people — including Clinton and Trump, who were social acquaintances. Clinton took international trips on Epstein’s plane in the early years of his post-presidency, including a trip to several African countries with Kevin Spacey and Chris Tucker.

Trump, meanwhile, reportedly attended Epstein-hosted events in New York and Florida, as Epstein patronized the Mar-a-Lago Club. In 2002, Trump even gave a remarkable on-the-record comment about Epstein to a New York magazine journalist, calling him “terrific” and adding that he “likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.”

Epstein’s relationship with Clinton led to the revival of the Clinton Body Count conspiracy theory following his death. Vox’s Dylan Matthews traced the meme to its origins:

According to a history and debunking first published by Snopes in 1998, the body count meme originated in 1993 with Indianapolis lawyer and militia movement activist Linda Thompson, who compiled a list of 34 people connected to the Clintons who had passed away and titled it, “The Clinton Body Count: Coincidence or the Kiss of Death?” William Dannemeyer, a notoriously homophobic then-retired Congressman from Orange County, California, picked up the list, trimmed it to 24, and sent it Congressional leadership in 1994 as he ran for the US Senate.

Thompson provided — by her own admission — “no direct evidence” that the Clintons were responsible for any of the deaths, and Snopes provides a comprehensive account of each death, most of which were easily explained heart attacks, plane crashes, or suicides.

As Matthews writes, the conspiracy theory took off following the death by suicide of an official who was connected to a number of Clinton administration scandals. Many prominent conservatives — including members of Congress — rejected the idea that the official, Vince Foster, had died by suicide, arguing that he had been killed. These arguments further fed the Clinton Body Count conspiracy as did the easily explained deaths of other members of the Clinton administration and Democratic Party officials in the Clinton’s orbit.

After Epstein’s death Saturday morning, the competing #TrumpBodyCount popped up in response to the Clinton theories. Like Clinton, Trump has been linked to Epstein, and he faced an allegation that he’d raped a 13-year-old girl while at one of Epstein’s parties. Right-wing personalities, including Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr., were quick to use the hashtag’s popularity to promote the claim that Twitter is biased against conservatives, something there is no evidence for.

As is the case with the Clinton Body Count conspiracy theory, there is absolutely no evidence whatsoever to suggest President Trump is was involved in Epstein’s death.

Trump is no stranger to spreading conspiracy theories, especially when they involve his political adversaries. He claimed in 2017 that former President Barack Obama wiretapped Trump Tower. And before that, he spent years promoting the baseless claim that Obama was born in Kenya.

He’s said, without evidence, that a million people voted illegally for Hillary Clinton in 2016 and that Sen. Ted Cruz’s dad was connected to the man who killed former President John F. Kennedy.

It is therefore unsurprising that Trump would boost the conspiracy theory du jour, and given his Department of Justice said Epstein died by suicide, his retweet also follows a pattern of the president promoting ideas that contradict his administration’s experts.

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Interest rates, Bolton , Supreme court decision :

Trump tweets:

The Federal Reserve should get our interest rates down to ZERO, or less, and we should then start to refinance our debt. INTEREST COST COULD BE BROUGHT WAY DOWN, while at the same time substantially lengthening the term. We have the great currency, power, and balance sheet…

Now doesen’t this make sense?
After all China manipulates money to her advantage, and the debt soaring in the trillions, would a move like that cause lack of trust among investors in U.S. bonds, becoming detrimental instead of beneficial?

Bolton:

Is he pressured out, due to Trump’s diminishing popularity census?

"Democrats emboldened by President “Trump’s sinking poll numbers are playing hardball on spending and guns legislation, arguing they now have new leverage with Republicans and the White House” (New York Times, Sept 12, 2019)

On another front, a Trump win on illegal immigration from Central America:

NBC news :

The U.S. Supreme Court late Wednesday gave the Trump administration permission to enforce its toughest restriction yet on asylum seekers at the southern border, even though a lawsuit to stop the new policy is still working its way through the lower courts.

As a result, the government can now refuse to consider a request for asylum from anyone who failed to apply for it in another country after leaving home but before coming here. The order means, for instance, that migrants from Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador cannot seek asylum in the U.S. if they didn’t first ask for it in Mexico.

Conflicting news, while the House is setting groundwork on Articles of Impeachment.

Here is an interesting question:

Is the Iran debacle last week , allegedly precipitated by Iran’s Saudi invasion, a set up of any kind for geo political gain?

Not everything is obvious nowedays on it’s face.

Some of the reasons for a set agenda being carried out, are based on such flimsy evidence , that for protagonists to point to conspiracy theories becomes trifle matters of inconspicuous play acting.

Is it possible that the whole dynamic was a set up of incongruous yet malleable elements, such as lagging oil prices, outcomes of Iran sanctions, the squeeze of which have necessitated a primal Iranian reaction?

Was such an accelerating squeeze applied to a depressed Iran, which sees a more important role for herself in Middle East politics, a trigger to be applied at a predictable moment?
And is this trigger somehow related to the equally depressed public awareness of Trumpian political ineffective policies?

Is not the time ripe for a minimal Saudi ‘defensive’ incursion , with voices already airing questions , such as is such a worth cause for our sons to die for?
For it certainly can not be denied that limited engagement is the way involvement usually is the way major wars begin.The most notorious example is the entry into the Vietnam Theatre.

It is obvious that limited engagement bites both ways, in essence it commands respect and consideration by planners, nut leaves open the idea ofmlatwr escalation, perhaps serving both: the variabilituy of Middle Eastern politics , and the equally changing political future of a president under fire?

The shifting sands can equally be applied, both : defensively and offensively, tying a Gordian knot around them . and in very Kantian terms muddle the current configured arena of national and international arenas.

Here is an excerpt from the Washington Post:

Democracy Dies in Darkness
Opinions
The escalating crisis with Iran is Trump’s self-inflicted wound

President Trump publicly discussed Iran three times on Sept. 16, saying “it’s looking” the country was behind an attack on Saudi oil fields. (Drea Cornejo/The Washington Post)
By David Ignatius
Columnist
September 19, 2019 at 6:19 PM EDT
It’s a good rule never to start a fight you’re not eager to finish. But the Trump administration and its Arab allies now seem caught in a version of that dilemma with Iran, which is proving to be a tougher adversary than Washington expected.

Iran’s alleged attack last Saturday on Saudi oil facilities caught U.S. analysts by surprise. It was a major strike, using a combined force of 25 Iranian ballistic missiles and drones, according to Saudi officials, against assets that were supposedly protected by U.S. and Saudi defensive weapons.

For U.S. officials, one message is that the Iranians are much more militant and risk-tolerant than American analysts had believed. Another is that the Iranians have correctly assessed that President Trump doesn’t want war and are taking advantage of that perceived weakness. The more Trump talks about his desire for a diplomatic solution, the more Iran seems ready to attack. That’s a dangerous dynamic.

The United States has enormous military power in the Persian Gulf, enough to obliterate Iran many times over. But the unpleasant fact is that Iran hasn’t been deterred by this force. That’s a situation strategic planners dread, because it can drive a nation toward conflict simply to demonstrate its credibility and avoid a larger battle.

U.S. officials describe Iran’s denials of responsibility for the Saudi strike as baldfaced lies. They say intelligence leaves no doubt the attacks originated inside Iran, though officials are wary of revealing publicly how much they know about Iranian operations. Col. Turki al-Malki, a Saudi military spokesman, said bluntly Wednesday, in displaying fragments of Iranian munitions: “The attack was launched from the north and unquestionably sponsored by Iran.”

The attack on the Saudi refinery at Abqaiq was a potential game changer for oil markets. It showed the vulnerability of energy infrastructure — not just in Saudi Arabia but also among its gulf neighbors: Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. These countries have made huge investments in U.S. military systems that, it turns out, leave them vulnerable.

President Trump is shown during a meeting in the Oval Office at the White House on Monday. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
Energy analysts must assume that such an attack could happen again, against multiple targets, unless the United States launches retaliatory strikes that would themselves pose big risks for gulf energy shipments. Thus, upward pressure on oil prices could continue for months and maybe years — not the message Trump wants as he prepares for an election year.

But for Trump, this is a self-inflicted wound. As the confrontation escalates, it’s important to remember that it was entirely unnecessary.

Trump chose to abandon the 2015 Iran nuclear agreement, against the advice of most of his allies and many of his senior aides, and despite Iran’s compliance with the deal. He apparently wanted a bigger, better deal that would outdo President Barack Obama’s version. And he seemed certain that if he applied “maximum pressure” through economic sanctions, Iran would come to the table.

Instead, starting in May, Iran launched an escalating campaign against Saudi and UAE oil targets. With Trump’s blessing, the United States adopted a low-key response. Even after Iran shot down a U.S. surveillance drone in June, Trump personally decided against a military response.

Some national security officials worried that this reticence might weaken deterrence, but Trump wanted to avoid war. He understood that another major conflict in the Middle East would be a political disaster, especially in defense of a Saudi Arabia that’s unpopular with many in Congress.

Trump has continued to seek talks with Iran, despite warnings from some analysts that Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, would refuse. Trump encouraged mediation efforts by Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and French President Emmanuel Macron, but those were spurned by Tehran, as was Trump’s suggestion of a meeting this month in New York with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani.

Against a cocky Iran, the Trump administration continues its relatively soft line. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said this week that last Saturday’s attacks were an “act of war.” But Thursday, he blandly countered Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif’s threat of “all-out war” against any retaliation with the assurance that his goal was “achieving peace and peaceful resolution.”

The Iran confrontation converges on three painful realities: Iran is now a full-fledged menace to security and oil shipments in the region; any military action against Iran must include some Saudi forces for it to be politically acceptable in the United States; Saudis and Emiratis, seeing anew their vulnerability, are wary of open conflict.

This dangerous chain of events was predictable — and indeed, predicted. Now Trump must decide whether to fight a war he and the country don’t want, or to accommodate an Iran whose truculence he helped create. Welcome to the Middle East, Mr. President.

Read more:

Max Boot: In his showdown with Iran, Trump blinks

The Post’s View: Trump has dug himself into a hole with Iran

Jason Rezaian: The Saudi-Iran rivalry isn’t new, but it’s getting riskier by the hour

Kenneth M. Pollack: How Trump played himself and gave Iran’s hard-liners what they wanted

David Ignatius: Trump’s Iran sanctions could backfire

David Ignatius writes a twice-a-week foreign affairs column. Follow
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Ukraine drama could give Democrats no choice but to impeach Trump
Analysis by Stephen Collinson, CNN
Updated 6:56 AM EDT, Mon September 23, 2019

(CNN) The Ukraine scandal raging around Donald Trump is forcing Democrats to confront a fateful choice on impeachment that will not just shape the 2020 election but will echo down the ages.

The facts of whether the President pressured Ukraine to investigate his potential Democratic general election opponent Joe Biden while a US military aid package was on the table are still obscured.

Trump supporters say there is so far no evidence that he offered a quid pro quo to the Ukrainians and note that an intelligence community whistleblower who raised the alarm was operating with a second-hand knowledge of Trump’s conversations.

What's going on with Trump and Biden and Ukraine
What’s going on with Trump and Biden and Ukraine

But if Trump used his power to try to coerce a foreign leader into influencing US elections, it could precipitate the worst political crisis of a presidency that has been mired in notoriety from its first hours.

It would amount to a situation in which Trump’s team, which according to the Mueller Report expected to benefit from Russian election meddling in 2016, is now using the power of the presidency to incite collusion ahead of the 2020 election.

That possibility seemed to unlock a shift Sunday in the Democratic position on impeachment. House Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff said on CNN that Trump may have “crossed the Rubicon.” And House Speaker Nancy Pelosi – who has been loath to contemplate an impeachment drama – warned that events might necessitate a “new stage of investigation.”

Republican senators who have strongly supported Trump were largely silent but Republican Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah tweeted Sunday “it would be troubling in the extreme” if Trump pressured Ukraine to investigate Biden and that it is “critical for the facts to come out.”

There is no evidence of wrongdoing by Biden or his son Hunter. The then-Ukrainian prosecutor general Yury Lutsenko said in May that Burisma Holdings, a major energy company, did not violate Ukrainian law by having Hunter Biden on its board and paying him.

Trump’s claims that Biden pushed for the firing of a Ukrainian prosecutor because he investigated a business for which his son served as a board member have previously been found to be false. The prosecutor was seen as corrupt by multiple governments and international institutions, not just the former vice president.

Why pressure by Trump on Ukrainians would matter
Presidents are expected to act in the interests of all Americans and not to use their vast discretion in foreign policy to pursue political vendettas or subvert US democracy. The Founders saw the presidency as a public trust, meaning that its incumbents should not put their personal interests over the national interest. The Ukraine story is so significant because it may have the potential to fall into such grave constitutional territory and could represent an abuse of presidential power.

Trump and his team seemed at odds Sunday over whether to publish the transcript of his conversations with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

And they went on offense in typical fashion, bending facts and spinning conspiracy theories, obfuscation and hypocrisy.

Trump insisted that he said “absolutely nothing wrong” in the call with the Ukrainian president. “It was perfect,” he said. Trump often gives the impression that he believes he is not constrained by norms on the limits of power observed by past presidents. In July for instance, he said, falsely, that Article 2 of the Constitution “allows me to do whatever I want as President.”

Past scrapes like the 2016 Russian election meddling scandal – and multiple controversies ranging from his insulting behavior toward the late Sen. John McCain to his payments to women who claimed they had affairs with him – have failed to bring him down. His emergence from each may have taught him a lesson.

Trump says he spoke to Ukrainian President about Biden
Trump on Sunday appeared to add new context to the Ukraine story when he said that he did indeed discuss Biden with Ukraine’s president at a time when Kiev was awaiting a $250 million military aid package from the United States. The call with Zelensky took place on July 25. Congress passed the bill in August and the White House lifted a hold on the money in September.

“The conversation I had was largely congratulatory, with all of the corruption taking place and largely the fact that we don’t want our people like Vice President Biden and his son creating to the corruption already in the Ukraine,” Trump said.

CNN has reported that Trump urged Zelensky to investigate Biden’s son in a call on July 25, but did not discuss a pending aid package at the time, indicating there may not have been an explicit quid pro quo outlined in the conversation.

The latest developments highlighted Pelosi’s reluctance to trigger impeachment proceedings against Trump amid fears of a political backlash. But Schiff, a Pelosi ally, suggested things may be about to change.

“This would be an extraordinary remedy, a remedy of last resort and not first resort,” Schiff said Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

“But if the President is essentially withholding military aid at the same time he is trying to browbeat a foreign leader into doing something illicit, providing dirt on his opponent during a presidential campaign, then that may be the only remedy that is co-equal to the evil that that conduct represents.”

Pelosi and Schiff were in close coordination throughout the weekend talking about the Ukraine whistleblower story and coordinating strategy, a leadership aide confirmed to CNN.

The way that events could force the hands of Democratic leaders became even clearer later on Sunday.

Pelosi hinted at a change of strategy in a message to Democratic colleagues, over half of whom had already backed the idea of impeachment.

“If the Administration persists in blocking this whistleblower from disclosing to Congress a serious possible breach of constitutional duties by the President, they will be entering a grave new chapter of lawlessness which will take us into a whole new stage of investigation,” Pelosi wrote on Sunday.

Democratic reluctance on impeachment
Pelosi has been reluctant to embrace impeachment since Senate Republicans are unlikely to vote to convict the President. There is also no desire to set Trump’s political base alight as Democrats try to keep their House majority in 2020.

If Trump’s behavior is exposed as corrupt, Democrats may be forced into impeachment hearings – whatever the long-term political cost.

To do nothing would be to accept that a President can abuse his power by seeking foreign interference in American democracy. Trump would feel validated and emboldened.

The balance between Congress and the Presidency will have been fundamentally altered and there will be few checks and balances left capable of constraining Trump and future presidents.

Inaction might also be politically unsustainable since Democrats might see their own leaders as willing to use the power of a House majority to defend their own presidential front-runner.

Trump allies hit back
Seeking to fog such questions, Trump’s lieutenants went on the offensive on Sunday talk shows using a familiar playbook.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo revived debunked questions about Biden’s conduct.

“I do think if Vice President Biden behaved inappropriately, if he was protecting his son and intervened with the Ukrainian leadership in a way that was corrupt, I do think we need to get to the bottom of that,” Pompeo said on ABC’s “This Week.”

“America cannot have our elections interfered with, and if that’s what took place there, if there was that kind of activity engaged in by Vice President Biden, we need to know.”

For the administration to make an argument about electoral interference seems somewhat rich, given that Trump has long rejected evidence that Russia intervened in 2016 to help him.

On “State of the Union,” Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said there was no reason to believe Trump pressured Ukraine, though admitted he wasn’t on the call in question.

And he argued that Biden’s son should not have been allowed to do business in Ukraine while his father was vice president. Asked by Jake Tapper Sunday about the glaring inconsistency in this statement since Trump’s children continue to work globally on a business from which the President has not fully divested, Mnuchin dodged.

“I don’t really want to go into more of these details,” Mnuchin said.

Both Mnuchin and Pompeo opposed releasing transcripts of Trump’s calls, arguing that a President has a right to confidentiality in conversations with foreign leaders.

The administration’s efforts to stop acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire from releasing the whistleblower report to Congress, and its opposition to releasing a transcript, are only fueling speculation the White House has something to hide. If there was wrongdoing such conduct could equal obstruction of justice, historically an impeachable offense.

Trump, however, said that he hoped they would release the transcript.

Biden, meanwhile, spent the weekend defending himself and trying to turn the scandal to his own advantage in a tight primary race.

“Trump is doing this because he knows I’ll beat him like a drum and he is using the abuse of power and every element of the presidency to try to do something to smear me,” Biden said.

CNN’s Marshall Cohen, David Shortell, Pamela Brown, Evan Perez. Nathan Hodge and Dana Bash contributed to this report.
View on CNN
©

The New York Times

Opinion

Why a Trump Impeachment Should Terrify You

What’s just and what’s wise aren’t always the same.

By Frank Bruni

Opinion Columnist

Sept. 25, 2019

Speaker Nancy Pelosi announcing a formal impeachment inquiry into President Trump.CreditJim Lo Scalzo/EPA, via Shutterstock

This article is adapted from Frank Bruni’s free weekly newsletter. You can sign up here to receive it every Wednesday.

President Trump deserves to be impeached. But the prospect terrifies me, and it should terrify you, too.

That’s not to say that it’s the wrong move. Arguably, it’s the only move, at least in terms of fidelity to the Constitution and to basic decency. From the moment that Trump stepped into the office of the presidency, he has degraded it — with words that a president has no business speaking (or tweeting); with ceaseless lies; with infantile and often unhinged behavior; with raging conflicts of interest; with managerial ineptitude; with a rapacious ego that’s never sated; and with foreign dealings that compromise America’s values, independence and interests. How can principled lawmakers not tell him, in the most emphatic manner available, that enough is enough?

But there’s no way to say what happens now that a formal impeachment inquiry is being opened. None. You’re going to hear a lot in coming days and weeks about Bill Clinton, but using the example of his impeachment in late 1998 is a bit ridiculous: He was a very different president accused of very different offenses at a very different time. Besides which, political analysts who do cite it don’t agree on the lessons. So a pundit making confident predictions about the political fallout from the impeachment of Trump is a pundit far out on a slender limb.

Any scenario is possible, including one in which impeachment redounds to Trump’s benefit and increases the chances of his re-election, because he paints himself a martyr, eludes conviction in the Senate, frames that as exoneration and watches his fans mobilize and turn out as never before. And a second Trump term wouldn’t just be the sadly suboptimal byproduct of a noble stand; it would be disastrous. Morally as well as practically, limiting this unfit, amoral, unsteady man’s time in the presidency takes precedence over any small cluster of sentences written centuries ago.

But while an impeachment’s impact on November 2020 is unknowable, its effect on us as a nation is almost certain. A dangerously polarized and often viciously partisan country would grow more so, with people on opposing sides hunkering down deeper in their camps and clinging harder to their chosen narratives as the president — concerned only with himself — ratcheted up his insistence that truth itself was subjective and up for grabs.

That’s not a reason to blink, but it’s a reality to brace for. At a juncture when we so desperately need to rediscover common ground, we’d be widening the fault lines. Bringing the country together afterward would call for more than a talented politician; it would demand a miracle worker. None of the Democratic presidential candidates qualify.

Impeachment should terrify you because it would mean a continued, relentless, overwhelming focus on Trump’s lawlessness, antics, fictions and inane tweets. He would win in the short term — and all Americans would lose — because as long as most of the oxygen in Washington is consumed by the ghastly carnival of this barker, there’s too little left for the nation’s very real problems and for scrutiny of his substantive inadequacy in addressing them.

From the House Republicans’ persecution of Hillary Clinton through the permanent hysteria of House Democrats under Trump, Washington has devolved ever further into a place where process muscles out progress, grandstanding eclipses governing and noise muffles any meaningful signal. To be engaged in politics is to be engaged in battle — and that shouldn’t and needn’t always be so.

Where’s the infrastructure plan that we’re — oh — a quarter-century late in implementing? Where are the fixes to a health care system whose problems go far beyond the tens of millions of Americans still uninsured? What about education? Impeachment would shove all of those issues even further to the margins than they already are.

During the Democratic primary and then the general election, the Trump melodrama and the Trump spectacle would overshadow all else. And many Americans’ estrangement from Washington — their cynicism about its ability to improve their lives even a whit — would intensify.

That could be all the more true on account of their confusion. If you’re favorably disposed toward Trump and receptive to his claims of persecution, you’ve watched the meticulous and drawn-out work of Robert Mueller, you’ve noticed a seemingly nonstop schedule of Capitol Hill hearings and of star witnesses (Michael Cohen, Mueller, Bill Barr, Corey Lewandowski), and you thought that the House Judiciary Committee was already doing an impeachment inquiry. The latest developments strike you as “Groundhog Day” on the Potomac.

If you’re horribly offended and utterly exhausted by Trump, you’re tempted to cheer impeachment as long-sought justice and prayed-for release and forget that it’s just the prelude to the main act, which is a trial in the Senate. That chamber is controlled by Republicans, who, based on current conditions, are as likely to convict Trump as they are to co-sponsor Elizabeth Warren’s wealth tax. So Trump’s supporters would wind up furious that he was put through what they regarded as an overwrought exercise with a foregone conclusion, while the frustration of Trump’s detractors would be exponentially multiplied. Let the healing begin!

And would impeachment proceedings effectively lay bare — and force Americans to focus on — sins of Trump’s that are being ignored? That’s long been one of Democrats’ arguments for impeachment, but I wonder. For starters, some of the hearings to date — Lewandowski’s in particular — raise questions about their ability to pry loose what they want from witnesses and isolate the damning evidence amid the ambient vitriol. But more than that, there has been such saturation coverage of Trump that many voters may not be able to stomach it any more, and today’s political tribalism doesn’t allow for all that much in the way of epiphanies and transformations. Trump’s true colors were conspicuous from the start. You either saw a perverse rainbow or you stared into darkness.

Meanwhile, Trump. How vulnerable will drawn-out impeachment proceedings make him feel? How impotent? How desperate? To flex his power, vent his fury or distract the audience, what would he do? He’s untethered by scruple. He’s capable of anything. Maybe it’s not just a culture war that he’d whip up. Maybe it’s the real thing.

Certainly he’d do all he could to persuade Americans of the nefariousness of Democrats, and absolutely his strategy would be to smear the people, the procedures and the institutions arrayed against him as utterly unworthy of trust. If holding on to power meant ruling over rubble, so be it. Trump is beholden only to Trump, and he’d simply declare the rubble gold dust.

TRUMP AND IMPEACHMENT

Opinion | Frank Bruni: The Corey Lewandowski Trap

Sept. 21, 2019

Opinion | John Yoo: Beware of Impeaching Trump. It Could Hurt the Presidency.

Sept. 24, 2019

Opinion | Ross Douthat: Does Donald Trump Want to Be Impeached?

Sept. 24, 2019

CreditDamon Winter/The New York Times

Jamelle Bouie

Trump Wants to Party Like It’s 2016

Sept. 25, 2019

Noah Bookbinder

The Zelensky Memo Is All the Proof Needed to Impeach Trump

Sept. 25, 2019

Roger Cohen

Trump and Johnson on the Brink

Sept. 25, 2019

© 2019 The New York Times Company

If you have followed this forum , I would like to throw out an idea.

What of Trump was subscribed to the role of Chief Executive unwillingly. to pay off his dents or be foreclosed?

What of the contradiction implicit in MWO politics is such, that the contradiction has to be supported.

Further, what if, such acting skills may invigorate Trump’s failure on many fronts, including his less then notable performance on the ‘Apprentice’?

What is, and this is the final of, what if, a new model of world politics requires a world sourced procedure which requires a univsrsallly debated primary US election?

Is this very far fetched in light of the astounding place US politicking has changed in only a few years?

sorry. double post.

But is this even conceivably possible?

I would argue yes. How would you feel about it?

Media hype isn’t enough to bring on an impeachment. I’ve never liked the Speaker Nancy. I would have preferred her replaced with someone younger.

Gotta have a smoking gun, without it Nancy and the Dems are dead in the water and shouldn’t proceed. I’d rather see Trump voted out of office than impeached. Seems like the Reps have the more level head. I mean sure, the party line and all, and they all swallow their disgust because Trump is after all the President and the office itself does deserve some respect.

He’s been harsh on the environment, ain’t doing Mother Earth any favors. Harsh on Brazile, but won’t contribute to our own piece of lungs for the planet. The oil will run out, and you can only store the coal dust from the scrubbers for so long. The miners wanted their jobs back regardless. A bit of forward thinking in that regard would be appreciated. The economy is strong but I haven’t seen much evidence that the poor or middle class are getting any greater share of the profit for doing the work. Seems it’s still more of the same old same old.

If we got any brainwashing going on its taken place with “our” representatives in office. All talk.

Exactly and that is the way politics is done within the circles of lawyers who know how to drive awareness of correctness and transparency of insight to the hilt to line their self esteem and pocket book.
It echoes all through the chambers and used transcendentally to lower the reality of over subscribed elitists’ expectations verging on narcissism by representatives.
So while Trump was ad hoc diagnosed as consistent with Narcissistim, even approaching borderline illness, he had to be accepted by now ; he’s been in the saddle for a term, and that time is irrevocable.
The China syndrome is a fair indicator , and so is the economic indexes, but a worrisome sign is remvoking the Paris agreement , by fiat.
I think this forum is still worth of pursuing through the upcoming elections and through the middle of the next, if he gets elected ; in order to get a deeper feel of his position in all that has taken place, and how his act ultimately fits into the larger picture.

Are the pieces starting to add up?

Such rhetoric from Trump is now so common that it hardly seems noteworthy. Hyperbole and bombast from partisans in this sense is like a drug that must be used in ever-larger dosages to be effective, or akin to a person who uses so much salt that he no longer remotely tastes the actual food underneath.

The deeper change is that most Americans no longer respect the institutions of Washington, and many believe at some fundamental level they are not on the level. The Gallup polling organization has been measuring this trend for decades. Back in the 1970s, when my mother and most Americans no matter their partisan affiliation were shocked by Nixon’s lawbreaking, the presidency, Congress and the media all commanded majority or near-majority support when people were asked whether they had high “confidence” in the institutions. These days, none of these institutions is even close to majority support, and only 11 percent of people say they have “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in Congress.

This trend may be a solemn development — but don’t expect it to receive a lot of solemnity.

How can politics become merely the product of left wing imagination? It has gotten to the point where the man on main street may wonder if the current state of affairs is really a coup against conservative values , or, the start of an impending conspiracy of undermining democracy.
How long can this process of disbelief continue without some indication of a limitation?

OCTOBER 1, 2019

By David Leonhardt

Opinion Columnist

The president of the United States accused one of his congressional critics of treason yesterday morning and said that the critic should be arrested. And yet it might not even have been the most outrageous thing that the country learned about President Trump yesterday.

That distinction could also belong to the news, broken by Times reporters, that during a phone call with the prime minister of Australia, Trump pressured him to produce information discrediting Robert Mueller’s recent investigation. White House aides took the unusual step of restricting access to the transcript of the phone call, in a sign they believed it was problematic. It was the same step they had taken after Trump’s July call with Ukraine’s president.

The Australia call is part of the Trump administration’s attempt to shift attention away from Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, on Trump’s behalf, and instead to suggest that American intelligence agencies did something wrong by investigating Russia. Alarmingly, William Barr, the attorney general, appears to be overseeing the effort, meeting with foreign officials to ask for help.

The mere fact that the Justice Department has asked for foreign help with an investigation isn’t the problem. That’s routine, as some conservatives pointed out. In this case, however, the attorney general is involving himself, personally, to an unusual degree — and he’s doing so to advance a farcical idea meant to sully American intelligence agencies, all on behalf of Trump.



As The Washington Post reported: “Current and former intelligence and law enforcement officials expressed frustration and alarm Monday that the head of the Justice Department was taking such a direct role in re-examining what they view as conspiracy theories and baseless allegations of misconduct.”

On its own, either the “treason” accusation or the conspiracy mongering is an impeachable offense. One involves baselessly accusing a political rival of a crime punishable by death. The other involves sublimating American foreign policy to the president’s personal interests.

Last week, I compiled a list of 40 significant ways that Trump has behaved like no other modern president. Yesterday, Trump added two more potential items. It’s frightening stuff. The only good news is that Trump seems to be unable to control himself, which increases the chances that Senate Republicans will finally abandon him or that the American public will reject him in 2020.

For more …

Susan Hennessey, Lawfare: “Among the more alarming implications of this story is that the Attorney General is a fully-committed Fox News conspiracy theorist.”



Sam Vinograd, CNN: “Would any intel official (in a democracy) share anything of import with Barr at this point? Intelligence is not supposed to be used for political retribution.”

The Washington Post’s Karen Tumulty on the treason lie: “It has become so easy to dismiss such comments as hyperbole and bluster — just Trump being Trump — that we risk losing sight of how dangerous, how fundamentally un-American they are.”

Jeff Flake, the former Republican senator from Arizona: “My fellow Republicans, it is time to risk your careers in favor of your principles. Whether you believe the president deserves impeachment, you know he does not deserve re-election. Our country will have more presidents. But principles, well, we get just one crack at those. For those who want to put America first, it is critically important at this moment in the life of our country that we all, here and now, do just that.”

William Kristol, in The Times: “We may not yet know whether removal from the office to which President Trump was elected is warranted. But surely we know enough to judge that Mr. Trump does not deserve renomination for that office for an additional four years.”

Conor Friedersdorf, The Atlantic: “The Republicans working to keep him in power could have Vice President Mike Pence take over within weeks if they so chose. They prefer this moral abomination. May history remember them as men and women who watched a president falsely accuse a sitting member of Congress of treason, and did nothing.”

To this political observer
the truth is beginning to glean through all the mud slinging, is the appearance of the under lying contradiction, that Democracy as defined by appearances, has become unaffordable even through the currency of Freudian economies supplanted into the ID ; that the bottom of the barrel exact the porno economy of simulated warfare, wherein rests the Marxian deliberation with the principle of progressive diminishment of returns.
The NWO is unstable as a conceived and sustainable model , except by the introduction of a nationally fabricated social capital production.
The capital of the ID is fed through simulated effects of production, and the interest is waining strongly , inversely proportional to the hyperkinetic theater of bombast of advertisement. It glamorizes the product’s proclivity to indulge in pre set models .
The value’s transparent actuality has crossed quality’s demise at least a generation or two ago, and is at a cross haired struggle to maintain the stasis necessary to balance production with consumption.
What is next? I fear to imagine if the contradiction of the the cross hairs do not line up exactly as predicated.

I laughed out loud when I heard that Rudy Giuliani hired his own lawyer to represent him in Trump’s possible impeachment.
Perhaps it does not mean much, perhaps it does mean much, perhaps he is just being really wise and covering his own _ _ _.

How do we come to see the future? Possibly, by backpedaling and doing a whole lot of investigating into someone’s background…

Hello Arcturus,

Sure. But backpedaling is drought with inaccuracies, since a lot of revision is going on as we speak , not to mention getting rid of tangible evidence supporting reality by shredding all that’s inconvenient, of revelations about cleaning the swamp.

Maybe Juliani’s lawyer’s lawyer may need a lawyer when all comes up before this is all finished.

But something insidious is hiding there, and before we know it Trump may become either a victim or hero.Nothing is surprising nowadays.
The talk of the town is that of he can have his way , he will abolish term limits , and seek a third term like Roosevelt did, and that’s scary because that model President is associated with War.
There is nothing like a national emergency to cover a bad reputation, suddenly , a Commander in Chief becomes the Man.

That would be an act not to supersede! But only me talking head of the inconceivable.
I operate by self revealing the most basic fears. Now feeling better that it’s out in the open.

The irony of it all:

TheHill

October 02, 2019 - 04:22 PM EDT

Trump approval climbs to highest level of 2019 amid
Impeachment
Inquery
President Trump’s approval ticked up to 49 percent - its highest mark this year, according to a new Hill-HarrisX survey released on Wednesday.

The figure marks a 2-point increase from a Sept. 11-12 poll, but a 2-point decrease from its previous peak of 51 percentlast August.

Trump’s disapproval rating, meanwhile, dropped to 51 percent, which marks his lowest level so far this year.

The nationwide survey was conducted on Sept. 28 and 29, less than a week after House Democrats launched a formal impeachment inquiry into Trump over concerns raised in a whistleblower’s complaint about the president’s communications with Ukraine.

House Democrats threatened Wednesday morning to subpoena the White House for documents related to Trump’s dealings with Ukraine as part of their impeachment inquiry.

House Oversight Committee Chairman Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) said in a memo that House committees have repeatedly tried to obtain voluntary compliance from Trump officials, but the White House has “refused to engage with - or even respond to - the Committees.”

Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) held a joint news conference later that morning, warning that attempts by the White House to “stonewall” the impeachment inquiry and “conceal facts” would be considered an obstruction of justice.

President Trump, meanwhile, has warned about the implications of a potential impeachment, and claimed that Democrats are just trying to hurt the country.

“The Do Nothing Democrats should be focused on building up our Country, not wasting everyone’s time and energy on BULLSHIT,” Trump tweeted following the news conference.

HarrisX researchers surveyed 1,000 registered voters. The margin of error for the full sample is plus or minus 3.1 percentage points.

-Tess Bonn

The Hill 1625 K Street, NW Suite 900 Washington DC 20006 | 202-628-8500 tel | 202-628-8503 fa

Developing strategies of the wall:

Irony is dead: The Trump sons are doing everything possible to make corruption a major 2020 issue

Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump really should sit this Hunter Biden thing out.

By Aaron Rupar

on October 3, 2019 3:10 pm

Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump at a UFC event in Newark in August 2019.

Josh Hedges/Zuffa LLC/Zuffa LLC via Getty Images

A central tenet of Trumpism is never to pass up an opportunity to attack your political foes, but if there’s one situation the president’s children really should stay out of it’s the one unfurling over Joe Biden’s son’s business ties.

To be clear, there’s no doubt that Hunter Biden leveraged his family name into positions he was otherwise unqualified for — like the $50,000-a-month gig on the board of the Ukrainian natural gas company Burisma that President Donald Trump and his enablers are now desperately trying to spin into a scandal.

But if anyone should sit out trying to exploit the situation it is the Trump children, who would not be as rich or as famous as they are if it weren’t for their father. And yet on Wednesday night, both Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. went on Fox News and tried to exploit it anyway.

The hypocrisy and irony of clips like the one below — pushed by an arm of the Trump campaign despite Eric and Don Jr.’s (broken) promise to stay out of politics so conflicts of interest could be avoided between their father and the family business they now manage on his behalf — is truly staggering:

The implication of the conspiracy theory Eric Trump pushed on The Ingraham Angle and Don Jr. on Hannity is that Hunter Biden’s international business dealings created conflicts of interest for the Obama administration’s foreign policy.

Leaving aside the dubiousness of the specific numbers Eric and Don Jr. throw out about the amount of money Hunter Biden made in Ukraine and China, and the fact there’s absolutely no evidence that Obama’s foreign policies were influenced by corrupt motives, even if the Trumps’ point is granted, they themselves are guilty of everything they’re accusing the Bidens of — and then some.

Since Trump’s inauguration, Don Jr. and Eric have been responsible for the Trump Organization, which sprawls across more than 30 countries, about 500 business entitles, and according to Trumpgenerated about $9.5 billion in revenue before he took office. And they certainly haven’t put things on pause during their father’s term in office.

Just hours before the Trumps’ Fox News appearances, Forbes reported that Eric and Don Jr. have sold more than $100 million of the family’s real estate since the January 2017 inauguration — including a $3.2 million deal in the Dominican Republic last year that is “the clearest violation of their father’s pledge to do no new foreign deals while in office.” Foreign money has also poured into the Trump International Hotel, located just blocks from the White House, which the president’s most recent financial disclosure indicated made him $41 million last year alone.

In addition to Ukraine, the Trumps have also accused Hunter Biden of cashing in in China. But as the New York Times detailed in August, a $1.7 billion Trump Organization project in Indonesia received a $500 billion infusion from a state-owned Chinese construction company. And it’s not just Eric and Don Jr.; Ivanka Trump, despite working in the White House, continues to do business in China as well.

And last year, Ivanka’s husband, White House official Jared Kushner, received a massive cash infusion from Qatar.

But none of this seems to give the Trump sons pause. Donald Trump Jr. has attacked Democrats for alleged sexual misconduct, despite the fact that his father has been accused of misconduct by more than 20 women. He has attacked Bernie Sanders for receiving support from Russians in 2016, despite the central role he played in the Trump campaign’s efforts to solicit Russian help. In back-to-back tweetsposted last Thursday, Eric Trump bashed Hunter Biden for his alleged profiteering from corruption, but then in his very next post bragged about a new Trump Organization development in Scotland.

In short, the Trumps are totally shameless — to the extent that the first president in recent history to not divest himself from his personal businesses is doing everything possible to turn corruption into a central 2020 issue. In fact, to hear Don Jr. tell it, the Trump family deserves credit for not being even more corrupt.

“We could have kept doing deals,” he said during a recent trip to Indonesia to hype the aforementioned Trump Organization project there, as though his family business hadn’t shattered the bogus promise it made to stop them in the first place. “The media is never going to give us credit.”

The news moves fast. To stay updated, followAaron Rupar on Twitter, and read more of Vox’s policy and politics coverage.

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Continuing mess:

The New York Times

Impeachment War Room? Trump Does It All Himself, and That Worries Republicans

President Trump has long believed that he is the best communicator in the White House.CreditDoug Mills/The New York Times

By Maggie Haberman and Annie Karni

Oct. 2, 2019

WASHINGTON — President Trump was watching television in the White House on Wednesday morning when cable news channels started airing Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Representative Adam B. Schiff, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, warning at a news conference that any attempts by the president to stonewall their impeachment investigation would be viewed as obstruction.

Mr. Trump did not wait for Ms. Pelosi and Mr. Schiff to finish before responding. First he attacked Ms. Pelosi on Twitter, saying she was neglecting the work of Congress “and trying to win an election through impeachment.” Then he tweeted again, sharing a campaign video that accused Democrats of trying to undo the results of the 2016 election.

He continued those attacks later in the afternoon, both before and after a meeting with Sauli Niinisto, the president of Finland, and became increasingly angry as he went on.

Mr. Trump has long believed that he is the best communicator in the White House, but as the presidential campaign picks up its pace and the prospect of his impeachment becomes more real, he seems to be its only empowered communicator, a one-man war room responding to developments almost hour by hour. And that is making many Republicans anxious.

For now, the White House has no organized response to impeachment, little guidance for surrogates to spread a consistent message even if it had developed one, and minimal coordination between the president’s legal advisers and his political ones. And West Wing aides are divided on everything from who is in charge to whether, after two years of the investigation by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, impeachment even poses a serious political threat to the president.

“This is a very different animal than the Mueller investigation,” said Josh Holmes, a former top aide to Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader. “It’s a political question, not a legal one. They need to persuade Republicans in the House and the Senate of a bunch of really good arguments to have the partywide insulation the president is going to prefer going into this fight.”

And the White House has a narrow runway to adjust and tighten its response, with just over a week until the congressional recess ends. At that point, Republicans will return from their home districts and face questions about Mr. Trump’s tweets and condemnation of the whistle-blower — questions they might have difficulty answering.

“At this point, the president can hold his own,” Mr. Holmes added. “But I think they should be concerned with how Republicans handle it when they get back and for that, it probably does take a little bit of structure.”

For weeks, the most visible defender of the president has been Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, who is himself a central figure in the allegations that Mr. Trump pressured the Ukrainian government to find dirt on Democrats, leading several of the president’s advisers to warn that Mr. Giuliani’s freelance television appearances do him more harm than good.

But Mr. Trump has told them that he is pleased with the performances, and spent part of Saturday giving Mr. Giuliani talking points for the Sunday show circuit.

Others have urged the president to tone down his language, including his repeated use of the word “treason.” But Mr. Trump, who has frequently abandoned norms and paid little in terms of personal political consequences for doing so, has not changed his behavior. That has led some advisers, like Mick Mulvaney, the acting White House chief of staff, to settle into a hands-off approach. Mr. Mulvaney told associates he spent part of Sunday on a golf course outside Washington.

What’s left is Mr. Trump acting alone, and poised to live-tweet his own impeachment, complete with all-caps obscenities, alarming accusations of treason and warnings that impeachment is really a “coup.”

During his public appearances with Mr. Niinisto on Wednesday, Mr. Trump seemed as riled up as he has at any point in his presidency, railing against his opponents, mangling the facts to fit his preferred narrative and making allegations without evidence. Flush with anger and gesturing sharply, he spent most of his time on offense attacking his critics using words like “lowlife,” “dishonest,” “corrupt,” “shifty” and “fraud.”

Behind the scenes, Mr. Trump has seesawed from projecting confidence that there is a political benefit from the impeachment fight to lashing out at aides, blaming them for the fact that he is entangled by it in the first place.

Some Trump aides would like to see the return of Emmet T. Flood, the White House lawyer who oversaw the administration’s response to the special counsel’s investigation.CreditMark Wilson/Getty Images

In an email, the White House press secretary, Stephanie Grisham, rejected questions about the West Wing’s approach to the impeachment inquiry.

“We have stated this several times,” she said. “There has not been any effort to put together a war room. The president did nothing wrong and we are still working over here.”

The confusion in the White House is leaving conservatives who want to help support Mr. Trump without a clear road map for how to do so. At a meeting on Wednesday morning with conservatives and Capitol Hill aides, White House officials were still taking the temperature on the potential political fallout of impeachment, rather than offering any instructions about their path going forward.

Paul Teller, an aide in the White House Office of Legislative Affairs, quizzed the group about whether it thought a long or short impeachment process would play better with the president’s base. Mr. Teller also told the group that he believed Mr. Trump would want to see Mr. McConnell bring impeachment to a vote on the Senate floor, where Mr. Trump would be acquitted, rather than move to simply dismiss the charges.

Stephen Miller, Mr. Trump’s main domestic policy adviser, also briefly attended the meeting, but observed more than he spoke, according to a person familiar with what took place.

In the West Wing, aides who have seen Mr. Trump survive potentially debilitating scandals like the release of the “Access Hollywood” tape a month before the 2016 election, and the appointment of a special counsel with wide-ranging powers to investigate him, are shrugging off impeachment as just another bump in the road.

Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and a senior White House adviser, is not pushing for the creation of any sort of official “war room,” and has told colleagues he is comfortable with the current structure supporting the president — one that also gives him freewheeling power.

Kellyanne Conway, the White House counselor and one of Mr. Trump’s longest-serving aides, has told reporters that Trump supporters will not leave him because of impeachment. She joins a group that includes Jay Sekulow, one of the president’s personal lawyers, and other aides and allies, who believe that anything resembling a White House “war room” is needless and would make them look as if they were under siege.

“We won the Mueller probe,” Mr. Sekulow said on his afternoon radio show on Monday. “I tell you what. If Mueller was a war, this is a skirmish.”

But on Wednesday night, one White House official was anticipating changes with some staff members focused on the inquiry.

Other aides privately conceded that they did not know how the politics of the impeachment process would play out, and would like to see the White House Counsel’s Office bring back someone like Emmet T. Flood, the White House lawyer who oversaw the administration’s response to the special counsel’s investigation and worked on President Bill Clinton’s legal team during his impeachment.

Mr. Flood left the administration in June.

Some are also starting to notice small public cracks in Republican support.

“Starting to encounter Republicans who wonder if maybe the President should step aside for Pence,” Erick Erickson, the conservative blogger and radio host, wrote on Twitter on Tuesday. “They’re absolutely in the minority on the GOP side, but there does seem to be a fatigue setting in — tired of always fighting and always having to defend.”

While Mr. Trump has been focused in recent days on defending himself, his advisers have continued the assault on Joseph R. Biden, Jr., the former vice president and current presidential candidate, hoping it will cut through the impeachment noise. Mr. Kushner, who has been overseeing campaign messaging on impeachment, also personally signed off on a new round of campaign ads attacking Mr. Biden and his son Hunter Biden.

Mr. Trump insisted on Wednesday that he was not trying to damage Mr. Biden in order to knock him out of the race — even while he attacked him.

“I’d rather run against Biden than almost any of those candidates,” he told reporters. “And I think they’re all weak, but I think Biden has never been a smart guy and he’s less smart now than he ever was.”

‘We’re Not Fooling Around’: House Democrats Vow to Subpoena White HouseOCT. 2, 2019False ‘Coup’ Claims by Trump Echo as Unifying Theme Against ImpeachmentOCT. 2, 2019As Impeachment Moves Forward, Trump’s Language Turns Darker

Trump Envoys Pushed Ukraine to Commit to Investigations

Oct. 3, 2019

Trump Publicly Urges China to Investigate the Bidens

© 2019 The New York Times Company

A scarring synopsis:

MSNBC

Quid pro quo: Newly released texts take Trump scandal to a new level

There’s a striking simplicity to the scandal that will almost certainly lead to Donald Trump’s impeachment: he used his office to try to coerce a foreign government into helping his re-election campaign. The evidence is unambiguous. More information continues to come to light, but few fair-minded observers believe the president’s guilt is in doubt.

There’s been no explicit need for Trump’s detractors to prove that his scheme included a quid pro quo – the United States would trade something of value to a foreign country in exchange for its participation in the Republican’s gambit – since Trump’s effort was itself scandalous.

But as of this morning, the quid pro quo has nevertheless been established, thanks to a series of text messages that were released overnight. NBC News reported this morning:

Text messages given to Congress show U.S. ambassadors working to persuade Ukraine to publicly commit to investigating President Donald Trump’s political opponents and explicitly linking the inquiry to whether Ukraine’s president would be granted an official White House visit.

The two ambassadors, both Trump picks, went so far as to draft language for what Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy should say, the texts indicate. The messages, released Thursday by House Democrats conducting an impeachment inquiry, show the ambassadors coordinating with both Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani and a top Zelenskiy aide.

One text shows Bill Taylor, the acting U.S. ambassador in Ukraine, asking, “Are we now saying that security assistance and WH meeting are conditioned on investigations?” Apparently reluctant to acknowledge criminal wrongdoing in print, U.S. Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland replied, “Call me.”

In a subsequent message, Taylor added, “As I said on the phone, I think it’s crazy to withhold security assistance for help with a political campaign.”

Just as astonishing was a message Kurt Volker, the former special U.S. envoy to Ukraine, sent to a Zelenskiy adviser shortly before the now-infamous Trump/Zelenskiy phone call. The message was clear about the White House’s political expectations, and how a presidential meeting was contingent on the Ukrainian president’s cooperation with the larger scheme.

“Heard from White House,” Volker wrote, “assuming President Z convinces trump he will investigate / ‘get to the bottom of what happened’ in 2016, we will nail down date for visit to Washington.”

The House Foreign Affairs Committee published the texts online here (pdf).

A Washington Post analysis added that the newly released messages not only document the quid-pro-quo element of the scandal, they also offer “a strong suggestion that military aid was used as leverage – and hints at an attempt to hide that.”

For two weeks, Trump’s Republican allies have argued that in order for this to be a real scandal, it would have to include a quid pro quo. That posture has long been wrong: the effort to coerce Ukraine was itself indefensible.

But what will these same GOP voices say now that the evidence has taken the scandal to the next level, meeting the one standard Republicans said had to be met.
©2019 NBC UNIVERSAL

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LIVE UPDATES

The latest on the Trump impeachment inquiry
By Meg Wagner and Mike Hayes, CNN
Updated 12:31 PM ET, Fri October 4, 2019

The latest on the Trump impeachment inquiry What we’re covering here
The latest: Text messages released yesterday between US diplomats and a senior Ukrainian aide show how a potential Ukrainian investigation into the 2016 election was linked to a desired meeting between Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and President Trump.
How Trump is reacting: The President tweeted last night that he has the “absolute right” as president to ask other countries to investigate “corruption.”

2:12 p.m. ET, October 4, 2019
Kurt Volker is expected to resign from McCain Institute

From CNN’s Kylie Atwood

Zach Gibson/Getty Images
Kurt Volker, the former US special envoy to Ukraine, is expected to resign today as the executive director of the McCain Institute, according to a source familiar with the matter.

The source said it is an effort to make sure that the institute is not effected by all to the Ukraine controversy. Volker initially did not want to resign but has concluded it was the best thing for the institute.

About Volker: He was the first witness to appear before three congressional committees and to be deposed on the whistleblower complaint, which alleges that President Trump tried to pressure Ukraine to investigate his Democratic rival Joe Biden.
2:09 p.m. ET, October 4, 2019

What Republican House members are saying about the intelligence inspector general’s briefing
From CNN’s Jason Hoffman and Kristen Holmes
Reps. John Ratcliffe and Chris Stewart, both Republicans, just came out of the closed-door House Intelligence Committee briefing with Intelligence Community Inspector General Michael Atkinson.

Sticking to the Republican talking points, both members attacked House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff and his handling of the whistleblower process.

Ratcliff said Schiff, “should be disqualified from running an investigation where his committee, members or staff, are fact witnesses about contact with the whistleblower, and the whistleblower process”.

Stewart added that everything being discussed today comes down to “one sentence, in one phone call.”

1:59 p.m. ET, October 4, 2019
How the impeachment investigation will likely play out

From CNN’s Marshall Cohen
Democratic lawmakers on Capitol Hill are barreling toward historic impeachment proceedings against President Trump.

The first step in the lengthly process is the investigation. Here’s what you need to know:

It has already started: House Democrats have been conducting multiple investigations through six separate committees, but the impeachment inquiry will now focus on the Ukraine affair. House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, who is leading that probe, told CNN last week that there will be a “busy couple weeks” coming up despite a scheduled congressional recess, and that he expects subpoenas and witness interviews to take place “as expeditiously as possible.”
The key interviews: Critical to the investigation will be an interview with the whistleblower who filed the complaint, as well as other potential witnesses from the White House and possibly from Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, who spearheaded the Ukrainian efforts. The whistleblower has requested anonymity, so security measures will also have to be worked out.
The articles of impeachment: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi initially indicated that she wants the Democratic-run committees to wrap up their probes and submit their most compelling evidence of wrongdoing to the House Judiciary Committee. That panel is traditionally tasked with writing formal articles of impeachment.
Once the articles of impeachment are drawn up, it’ll be time for some key votes in the House. You can read more about next phases here.

12:56 p.m. ET, October 4, 2019
Here’s how the House could enforce subpoenas against key Ukraine witnesses
From CNN legal analyst Elie Honig

Earlier this week, Democrats told the White House to expect subpoenas related to the Ukraine matter. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani have already received subpoenas as part of the ongoing impeachment investigation.
What can the House do to enforce its subpoenas if and when witnesses like Rudy Giuliani and Mike Pompeo refuse to comply?
The House has three traditional legal avenues, all of them problematic.

First, the House theoretically has its own inherent enforcement power, but that has essentially gone dormant after nearly a century of non-use. The House does not have a police force capable of making arrests — the sergeant-at-arms is primarily a security force — or a functioning jail facility.
Second, the House can refer a contempt case for criminal prosecution. But that referral would go to Barr’s Justice Department, and it is very unlikely he would bring criminal charges given his established pattern of protecting Trump and those around him.
Third, the House can file a civil lawsuit in court. But this will take months to resolve, and the House simply does not have the luxury of time to litigate.
But the House is getting creative — and tough. Schiff has notified subpoena recipients that he will draw an “adverse inference” if they do not comply.
In other words, he will assume their non-response means the testimony would have been damaging to those accused.

Second, the House has the ability to bring an article of impeachment for obstruction of Congress; indeed, one of the draft articles of impeachment against Nixon was for obstruction of Congress.
Read more impeachment questions and ask your own here.

12:41 p.m. ET, October 4, 2019
Sen. Lindsey Graham wants Pelosi to call a vote on impeachment

Sen. Lindsey Graham, a Republican from South Carolina, put out a statement today calling on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to call a vote on impeachment.

“We need a ‘John Hancock Moment’ from House Democrats before moving forward on impeachment," Graham said.
He added that he’d like to see Democratic House members put their votes on the record so “history can evaluate their actions.”

More on this: Earlier today, CNN reported that President Trump will send a letter to Pelosi demanding a full house vote on impeachment before the White House turns over documents.
12:40 p.m. ET, October 4, 2019
Volker: Trump said Ukraine “tried to take me down”
From CNN’s Jeremy Herb

Former US special envoy to Ukraine Kurt Volker’s explained in his opening statement to Congress that he connected President Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani with Ukraine’s leadership in an effort to convince Giuliani — and through him the President — there was new leadership in Ukraine that could be trusted.

In Volker’s statement, which was delivered during his closed-door testimony Thursday and obtained by CNN, the US diplomat portrays himself as someone who was seeking to divert Giuliani’s influence on the President and help Trump see that the new government was serious about reform.

Volker said Trump was “skeptical” of Ukraine’s leadership, which he said was understandable given the country’s history of corruption, but he also added that the President suggested that Ukraine “tried to take me down,” a reference to the unproven allegations that Ukraine was involved in the 2016 election meddling.

“He said that 'Ukraine was a corrupt country, full of ‘terrible people,’” Volker said of Trump. “He said they ‘tried to take me down.’" In the course of that conversation, he referenced conversations with Mayor Giuliani. It was clear to me that despite the positive news and recommendations being conveyed by this official delegation about the new President, President Trump had a deeply rooted negative view on Ukraine rooted in the past. He was clearly receiving other information from other sources, including Mayor Giuliani, that was more negative, causing him to retain this negative view.”
Volker also said that he was not aware of any effort to urge Ukraine to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden — and he made a point to distinguish investigations into Biden with investigations into Burisma, the energy company where Hunter Biden was hired as a board member. But he added he was not aware that Biden was mentioned on the July 25 call until the transcript was released.

Volker testified that he became aware that the foreign aid to Ukraine was being held up but at the same time that he was connecting Ukrainian leadership aides with Giuliani, but he said he “did not perceive these issues to be linked in any way.”

Volker also warned Ukraine to tread carefully so as not to influence US election.

“Moreover, as I was aware of public accusations about the Vice President, several times I cautioned the Ukrainians to distinguish between highlighting their own efforts to fight corruption domestically, including investigating Ukrainian individuals (something we support as a matter of US policy), and doing anything that could be seen as impacting US elections (which is in neither the United States’ nor Ukraine’s own interests),” he said in his statement.
12:33 p.m. ET, October 4, 2019
Mitt Romney: Trump’s appeals to Ukraine and China are “wrong and appalling”
From CNN’s Kevin Liptak

Sen. Mitt Romney tweeted today that President Trump’s appeals to Ukraine and China to investigate Joe Biden are “wrong and appalling.”

“When the only American citizen President Trump singles out for China’s investigation is his political opponent in the midst of the Democratic nomination process, it strains credulity to suggest that it is anything other than politically motivated,” wrote Romney.
“By all appearances, the President’s brazen and unprecedented appeal to China and to Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden is wrong and appalling,” Romney continued.

Romney is one of few Congressional Republicans who have criticized the President’s actions.

12:22 p.m. ET, October 4, 2019
Trump claims Hunter Biden is getting “a billion and a half dollars out of China.” That’s a misrepresentation of his role.
From CNN’s Tara Subramaniam
Evan Vucci/AP
Speaking to reporters at the White House, President Trump said that Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, took out “a billion and a half dollars out of China.”

“Biden is corrupt, his son is corrupt,” Trump said. “His son takes out billions of dollars, billions, and he has no experience.”

Trump has repeatedly accused both Joe Biden and his son, Hunter Biden, of corruption involving China and Ukraine. There is no evidence of wrongdoing by Joe Biden or his son Hunter.
Here’s what we know about Hunter Biden and China: According to the New York Times, Biden’s son Hunter has a 10% interest in BHR Partners, a private-equity fund that the Chinese government-owned Bank of China has invested in.
As of May 2019, both The New York Times and the Washington Post reported that Hunter had not received any money from the fund or in connection with his role as an unpaid advisory board member.

You can read more from the fact check here.
11:51 a.m. ET, October 4, 2019
Trump says he’s not sure if White House will comply with subpoenas
Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP/Getty Images
President Trump was asked if the White House will comply with the House’s impeachment inquiry. He said he wasn’t sure.

“That’s up to the lawyers,” Trump told reporters.

Some background on this: House Democrats have said they plan to subpoena the White House today for a host of documents as part of the impeachment inquiry. They have warned the White House and Trump’s administration against interfering with the probe.
So what can the House do if officials refuse to comply with the subpoenas? CNN legal analyst Elie Honig says there are three traditional legal avenues — and all of them problematic.
The House theoretically has its own inherent enforcement power, but that has essentially gone dormant after nearly a century of non-use. The House does not have a police force capable of making arrests — the sergeant-at-arms is primarily a security force — or a functioning jail facility.
The House can refer a contempt case for criminal prosecution. But that referral would go to Attorney General William Barr’s Justice Department, and it is very unlikely he would bring criminal charges given his established pattern of protecting Trump and those around him.
The House can file a civil lawsuit in court. But this will take months to resolve, and the House simply does not have the luxury of time to litigate.

© 2019 Cable News Network. Turner Broadcasting System, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

youtu.be/IYhqlOQ1vHY

The New York Times

2nd Official Is Weighing Whether to Blow the Whistle on Trump’s Ukraine Dealings

The official, a member of the intelligence community, was interviewed by the inspector general to corroborate the original whistle-blower’
President Trump pressured the president of Ukraine to investigate the son of former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. during a phone call.CreditAnna Moneymaker/The New York Times

By Michael S. Schmidt and Adam Goldman

Oct. 4, 2019

WASHINGTON — A second intelligence official who was alarmed by President Trump’s dealings with Ukraine is weighing whether to file his own formal whistle-blower complaint and testify to Congress, according to two people briefed on the matter.

The official has more direct information about the events than the first whistle-blower, whose complaint that Mr. Trump was using his power to get Ukraine to investigate his political rivals touched off an impeachment inquiry. The second official is among those interviewed by the intelligence community inspector general to corroborate the allegations of the original whistle-blower, one of the people said.

The inspector general, Michael Atkinson, briefed lawmakersprivately on Friday about how he substantiated the whistle-blower’s account. It was not clear whether he told lawmakers that the second official was considering filing a complaint.

A new complaint, particularly from someone closer to the events, would potentially add further credibility to the account of the first whistle-blower, a C.I.A. officer who was detailed to the National Security Council at one point. He said that he relied on information from more than a half-dozen American officials to compile his allegations about Mr. Trump’s campaign to solicit foreign election interference that could benefit him politically.

Oct. 4, 2019

Other evidence has emerged to back the whistle-blower’s claim. A reconstructed transcript of a July callbetween Mr. Trump and President Volodymyr Zelensky released by the White House also showed Mr. Trump pressuring Ukraine. Mr. Trump appeared to believe that its release would quell the push for impeachment, but it only emboldened House Democrats.

Because the second official has met with Mr. Atkinson’s office, it was unclear whether he needs to file a complaint to gain the legal protections offered to intelligence community whistle-blowers. Witnesses who speak with inspectors general are protected by federal law that outlaws reprisals against officials who cooperate with an inspector general.

Whistle-blowers have created a new threat for Mr. Trump. Though the White House has stonewalled Democrats in Congress investigating allegations from the special counsel’s report, the president has little similar ability to stymie whistle-blowers from speaking to Congress.

The Trump administration had blocked Mr. Atkinson from sharing the whistle-blower complaint with lawmakers but later relented.

The Evidence Collected So Far in the Trump Impeachment Inquiry

Oct. 4, 2019

Mr. Trump and his allies have taken aim at the credibility of the original whistle-blower by noting that he had secondhand knowledge. The president has also singled out his sources, saying that they were “close to a spy.”

“I want to know who’s the person who gave the whistle-blower the information because that’s close to a spy,” Mr. Trump told staff members at the United States Mission to the United Nations. “You know what we used to do in the old days when we were smart with spies and treason, right? We used to handle it a little differently than we do now.”

Mr. Atkinson has identified some indications of “arguable political bias” that the whistle-blower had in favor of a rival candidate. But the inspector general said that the existence of that bias did not alter his conclusion that the complaint was credible.

Still, testimony from someone with more direct knowledge of Mr. Trump’s efforts to use American foreign policy for potential political gain would most likely undermine conservatives’ attacks on the C.I.A. officer’s credibility.

President Trump’s personal lawyer. The prosecutor general of Ukraine. Joe Biden’s son. These are just some of the names mentioned in the whistle-blower’s complaint. What were their roles? We break it down.

The House Intelligence Committee has taken the lead on the investigation into the whistle-blower’s claims as part of the impeachment inquiry into whether Mr. Trump abused his powers by using high-level diplomacy to advance his personal interests. Committee aides had sought to interview the whistle-blower last week but have yet to sit down with him, and it was unclear how soon they could.

Democrats looking to keep up the momentum of their impeachment inquiry are seeing more results than they have in their examination of the findings of the investigation by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, into Russia’s election interference and Mr. Trump’s efforts to impede investigators. Though Mr. Mueller laid out stark examples of Mr. Trump trying to interfere with the inquiry, the White House has fought Democrats’ pursuit of eyewitness testimony.

House Democrats have moved more quickly in scrutinizing Mr. Trump’s use of power to solicit potential foreign help in his 2020 re-election campaign.

Late Thursday, they released explosive texts exchanged by State Department officials and Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani about pressuring the Ukrainians to commit to conducting the investigations that could help Mr. Trump politically.

In one exchange, the Americans sought to have Mr. Zelensky issue a statement promising to investigate a Ukrainian natural gas company where Hunter Biden, the younger son of former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., sat on the board.

But the top American diplomat in Ukraine, William B. Taylor Jr., raised concerns about the White House’s decision to freeze $391 million in military assistance to Ukraine, tying it directly to the campaign to pressure the Ukrainians to develop dirt on the president’s political opponents.

“As I said on the phone, I think it’s crazy to withhold security assistance for help with a political campaign,” Mr. Taylor wrote on Sept. 9 to Kurt D. Volker, the State Department’s former special envoy for Ukraine, and Gordon D. Sondland, the United States ambassador to the European Union.

The texts show a dispute among the men about whether the president was trying to use the security aid or a White House meeting with Mr. Zelensky as leverage — a charge at the heart of the impeachment inquiry.

Mr. Trump has denied that he held up the aid as a quid pro quo. “Listen to this: There is no pro quo,” he told reporters on Friday on the South Lawn of the White House in response to questions about the texts.

Nicholas Fandos contributed reporting.

Trump Denies Quid Pro Quo for Ukraine, but Envoys Had Their Doubts

Oct. 4, 2019

Impeachment Investigators Subpoena White House and Ask Pence for Documents on Ukraine

Oct. 4, 2019

White House Knew of Whistle-Blower’s Allegations Soon After Trump’s Call With Ukraine Leader

Sept. 26, 2019

Sept. 24, 2019

Michael S. Schmidt is a Washington correspondent covering national security and federal investigations. He was part of two teams that won Pulitzer Prizes in 2018 — one for reporting on workplace sexual harassment and the other for coverage of President Trump and his campaign’s ties to Russia. @NYTMike

Adam Goldman reports on the F.B.I. from Washington and is a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner.

CreditT.J. Kirkpatrick for The New York Times

Impeachment Investigators Subpoena White House and Ask Pence for Documents on Ukraine

Oct. 4, 2019

Trump Denies Quid Pro Quo for Ukraine, but Envoys Had Their Doubts

© 2019 The New York Times Company

Fox News. descriptive reaction to impeachment :

TRUMP IMPEACHMENT INQUIRY

Published October 05, 2019

Matt Gaetz: Democrats’ impeachment inquiry ‘politically illegitimate’ – and public will see that

By Charles Creitz | Fox News

The American people will recognize Democrats’ effort to impeach President Trump as a “politically illegitimate exercise,” according to Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla.

Democrats have decided to be less transparent in their latest endeavor against Trump because past congressional hearings didn’t pan out as planned, Gaetz claimed Friday on “Hannity.”

“The radical left and their allies in the fake news media have been uncontent to just disagree with him, and so they have been trying to delegitimize his election,” he said. “They’re going to rush to an impeachment and the American people will see it as the politically illegitimate exercise that it is.”

“They’re going to rush to an impeachment and the American people will see it as the politically illegitimate exercise that it is.”

— U.S. Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla.

WASHINGTON POST AWARDS ADAM SCHIFF ‘FOUR PINOCCHIOS’ FOR FALSE COMMENTS ABOUT WHISTLEBLOWER

Gaetz, who serves on the House Judiciary Committee, also claimed that House hearings featuring former Nixon White House counsel John Dean, ex-Special Counsel Robert Mueller, and Corey Lewandowskibackfired for Democrats.

“They’re not interested in developing the evidence – they’re not actually interested in holding hearings and bringing people forward,” he said, calling the three hearings “disaster[s] for Democrats.”

Some inside government ‘hell-bent on destroying this president,’ Hogan Gidley says

Rudy Giuliani slams Barack Obama, saying ex-president could have stopped any potential Biden-Ukraine ‘conflict’

He called the Russia investigation a “hoax” and said Democrats pushing forward with the Trump impeachment inquiry are not getting routine participation from all members of Congress.

Gaetz questioned why Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., remains chairman of the powerful House Intelligence Committee despite a claim about the Ukraine whistleblower that earned him four “Pinocchio’s” from the Washington Post.

CLICK HERE FOR THE ALL-NEW FOXBUSINESS.COM

The Post he hadn’t told the truth about his knowledge of the Ukraine whistleblower. Schiff has played a leading role in investigating the Trump-Ukraine scandal but hasn’t been truthful in the process, according to Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler.

“Schiff’s answers are especially interesting in the wake of reports in The New York Times and The Washington Post that the whistleblower approached a House Intelligence Committee staff member for guidance before filing a complaint with the Intelligence Community inspector general,” Kessler wrote.

On “Hannity,” Gaetz claimed Schiff, “lied to the American people for two and a half years.”

“How is Adam Schiff even the chairman of a committee in the Congress right now?” he asked. “That guy should be gone.”

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