Trump enters the stage

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.”

Fox News I

redistributed. ©2019 FOX News Network, LLC. All rights reserved.

ADMINISTRATION

October 05, 2019 - 03:51 PM EDT

Trump calls for Romney’s impeachment

President Trump called for Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) to be impeached Saturday and argued that Republican voters in the state made a “mistake” nominating Romney for the Senate.

In a pair of tweets, the president argued that the Utah Republican should be removed from office and that former Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), another frequent Trump critic, was “better” than Romney.

“I’m hearing that the Great People of Utah are considering their vote for their Pompous Senator, Mitt Romney, to be a big mistake. I agree! He is a fool who is playing right into the hands of the Do Nothing Democrats! #IMPEACHMITTROMNEY,” Trump tweeted.

“No Kevin, Jeff Flake is better!” he added, responding to Fox News reporter Kevin Corke’s tweet questioning whether Romney was “the new #JeffFlake.”

Senators cannot be impeached but can face recall votes in some states. Utah does not have any provisions in state law for recalling a sitting senator.

Romney, who was elected to the Senate last year, faced the highest disapproval rating of Utah’s congressional delegation, according to a poll taken in July.

His office did not immediately return a request for comment from The Hill.

Trump told House Republicans that he made Ukraine call because of Perry: Report

Trump compares his impeachment to Clinton email server

Trump accuses Democrats of ‘interfering’ with 2020 election and ‘continuing to interfere’ with 2016

Defense chief on Ukraine: ‘My aim is to keep the department apolitical’

Trump rails against whistleblower, impeachment inquiery

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The New York Times

Biden Faced His Biggest Challenge, and Struggled to Form a Response

WASHINGTON — Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s presidential campaign was under attack, and he and his advisers were torn over what to do.

For more than a week, President Trump had been hurling unfounded accusations about Mr. Biden, his son Hunter and their dealings in Ukraine. Mr. Biden and his advisers debated whether to mount a fierce counterattack or to stick to a set of policy arguments he had been planning to roll out. Bad news loomed in the background: Mr. Biden’s poll numbers had already grown wobbly, his fund-raising was uneven, and cable news was flashing chyrons by the hour showing Mr. Trump’s wild claims.

Mr. Biden himself was equivocating: He wanted to defend and protect his son, but he also believed the president was baiting him into a dirty fight. And as a lifelong adherent to congressional tradition, Mr. Biden was wary of acting hastily as an impeachment inquiry was getting underway.

The strain grew so acute that some of Mr. Biden’s advisers lashed out at their own party, taking the unusual step of urging campaign surrogates to criticize the Democratic National Committee — a neutral body in the primary — for not doing more to defend Mr. Biden, while the Republican National Committee was running TV ads attacking him. Frustrated, D.N.C. officials informed the Biden camp that it would continue denouncing Mr. Trump but would not run ads for Mr. Biden or any other candidate.

The Biden campaign’s tense deliberations reached a climax last weekend when Mr. Biden agreed to give a scorching rebuttal to Mr. Trump in a speech on Wednesday in Reno, Nev. But he delivered it well into the evening on the East Coast, and it was mostly lost amid another long day of Trumpian eruptions.

To some Biden allies, it seemed too little too late: a case study in political indecision. Now Mr. Biden looks more vulnerable than at any point since he entered the campaign. Facing one of the greatest challenges of his candidacy, Mr. Biden has plainly struggled to meet the moment, or fully reconcile his own cautious instincts with his protectiveness of his family’s privacy and his preference for taking the moral high road against Mr. Trump.

June 14, 2019

Interviews with more than 50 Democratic strategists, lawmakers and lobbyists provide a portrait of a candidacy facing challenges on all sides, and one at risk of losing its core argument that Mr. Biden is the Democrat best able to defeat Mr. Trump in a general election.

There is no evidence behind Mr. Trump’s claim that Mr. Biden intervened inappropriately with Ukraine to help his son, but Democrats have been unnerved by the president’s onslaught and Mr. Biden’s halting response.

Mr. Biden has argued that he is the Democrat best able to assemble a wide coalition of supporters and defeat Mr. Trump.CreditTiffany Brown Anderson for The New York Times

In addition to the attacks from Mr. Trump, Mr. Biden’s top rivals, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, each out-raised him in the third quarter by about $10 million. And as Ms. Warren has emerged as Mr. Biden’s most formidable competition, Mr. Sanders, her main challenger for progressive support, just had a heart attack, casting uncertainty over whether he could siphon votes from Ms. Warren, as the Biden camp had hoped.

Even before last week, Mr. Biden’s advisers were acknowledging to donors that he may well lose both of the leadoff nominating contests in Iowa and New Hampshire.

His communications aides contend that most voters were more focused on what Mr. Trump did to prompt the impeachment inquiry than on the false claims themselves. And they pointed to the former vice president’s forceful attacks on Mr. Trump at a news conference Friday to argue that he was now ready to do battle with the president.

“This guy like all bullies is a coward,” Mr. Biden said. “He does not want to run against me.”

Oct. 5, 2019

On Thursday, Mr. Biden, whose inner monologue rarely remains repressed, gave voice to the tension he is struggling with as he spoke at a fund-raiser in Palo Alto, Calif.

Recalling the difficulty Hillary Clinton had in confronting Mr. Trump’s campaign style, Mr. Biden worried about being “sucked into the trap of the stuff that Trump was laying. He wants you in a mud fight.”

“But when you respond to that,” he continued, “it brings you back down into that.”

Mr. Biden was even blunter, and angrier, in private after news first emerged that Mr. Trump had exhorted the Ukrainian government to investigate him and his son.

“I can’t believe this guy is going after my family like this,” he told Senator Chris Coons of Delaware, as the two campaigned in Iowa, Mr. Coons recalled.

Leading Democrats have been pleading privately with Mr. Biden and his top aides to aggressively confront Mr. Trump, and expressing impatience with them for not seizing this opportunity to engage him in a two-man race. After all, Mr. Biden had spent months framing his candidacy as a singular crusade to oust an aberrant president.

“It’s time to really respond so everybody hears it,” said Representative Cedric Richmond of Louisiana, a campaign co-chairman. “If someone says something enough, people will start to believe it, and this president gets in his zone of telling a lie over and over again. You have to make sure people don’t believe in it.”

David Plouffe, former President Barack Obama’s campaign manager, was mystified. Mr. Biden “should use this moment and become Trump’s opponent,” Mr. Plouffe said. “I don’t understand it.”

But Mr. Biden is confronting an almost unimaginable situation: the president he hopes to challenge is facing impeachment for urging another country to help smear him. What’s more, the House inquiry centers on what Mr. Biden values most in his private and public life: protecting his family and honoring institutional norms.

Several Democrats close to Mr. Biden say he did not take on Mr. Trump sooner in large part because of his reverence for congressional prerogatives — he did not want to immediately insert himself into the House’s jurisdiction. But Mr. Biden also sought to address the attacks on his son on his own terms rather than sit for hastily arranged television interviews that would have forced him to answer questions about Hunter Biden’s work that few of his own aides dared pose.

Now, just as his monthslong lead in the primary is eroding, he faces an opponent who’s threatening his son, the political system he dedicated his adult life to and, as he approaches his 77th birthday, his last chance to become president.

Mr. Trump has hurled unfounded accusations about Mr. Biden and his son Hunter and their dealings with Ukraine.CreditAnna Moneymaker/The New York Times

Worried about his family

For Mr. Biden’s campaign, no attack could have been more difficult to deal with than one involving the candidate’s son.

Mr. Biden nearly did not run for president because of the effect it would have on his family — and particularly on Hunter Biden and his children, according to multiple advisers to the former vice president. Hunter Biden has struggled for years with substance addiction and had recently gone through a very public divorce from his first wife.

In separate interviews, Mr. Coons and his fellow senator from Delaware, Tom Carper, both said they had warned Mr. Biden that the president would target his family.

“He expected his family to be attacked,” Mr. Carper said, adding that Mr. Biden assured him he was braced for “the onslaught.’’

Mr. Biden’s family, including his son, encouraged him to enter the race, knowing the attacks were inevitable. But as Anita Dunn, one of Mr. Biden’s closest advisers, put it: “When it happens, it still feels pretty lousy.”

The Biden campaign has attempted to handle the candidate’s son with great sensitivity. Mr. Biden made clear at the outset that Hunter, a lawyer who had long advised his father on his campaigns, should not be made to feel excluded, people who spoke with him said. One adviser to Mr. Biden recently telephoned his son to solicit advice on the upcoming debate in Ohio.

But to most of Mr. Biden’s aides, Hunter Biden has been a spectral presence. He is living in Los Angeles and stayed away from Mr. Biden’s campaign launch in Philadelphia. Hunter Biden quietly attended the last two debates and appeared with his new wife, Melissa Cohen, at a July fund-raiser in Pasadena, Calif.

Still, Mr. Biden’s advisers are aware that Hunter Biden carries political vulnerabilities. His business career has intersected repeatedly with his father’s political power, through roles he had held in banking, lobbying and international finance. Working for a Ukrainian energy company beginning in 2014, he was paid as much as $50,000 a month while his father was vice president, and some of Mr. Biden’s admirers worry that, while Mr. Trump’s accusations are without merit, voters may view Hunter Biden’s actions as problematic.

Even one of Mr. Biden’s Democratic rivals, Beto O’Rourke, said on Saturday that he would not allow “anyone in my cabinet to have a family member to work in a position like that.”

In the past, Mr. Biden has bristled at questions about whether his family had benefited financially from his political career. He did so again on Friday when he was asked whether his son’s work in Ukraine represented a conflict of interest. Pointing a finger at the questioner he said: “Let’s focus on the problem. Focus on this man, what he’s doing, that no president has ever done. No president!” The Trump campaign was soon circulating a clip of the episode.

For his allies, it is both poignant and painful that Mr. Biden’s family is again at the heart of his public identity. He lost his first wife and daughter, and nearly lost his two sons, in a car accident in the weeks after he was elected to the Senate in 1972. His final years as vice president, as well as his hopes to run for president in 2016, were overwhelmed by his elder son Beau’s death from brain cancer.

Jim Mowrer, a former Democratic congressional candidate from Iowa who served with Beau Biden in the military, said he spoke to Hunter Biden early this year and got the impression he was trying to focus on personal matters rather than the campaign. Mr. Mowrer said he saw the elder Mr. Biden in Iowa last month and they discussed not Hunter but his other son, Beau.

“Beau’s death is very, very fresh in his mind, and so now these attacks on Hunter are even more unsettling,” Mr. Mowrer said.

A big bet on South Carolina

The politics of Ukraine and impeachment have been so costly for Mr. Biden, in part, because he is confronting so many other challenges in the Democratic race: a struggle to excite liberal primary voters, an ascendant rival in Ms. Warren and a decline in fund-raising that has forced him to spend even more time appealing to donors in cities hundreds of miles from the early primary states.

Mr. Biden’s campaign manager, Greg Schultz, acknowledged some of those problems in a briefing for Democratic donors at Morgan Stanley’s New York office last month. Mr. Schultz assured the group that they had a path to the nomination that depended on winning South Carolina — the fourth primary state — and then scoring big victories in the Super Tuesday primaries in March.

In South Carolina, where Mr. Biden’s support appears strongest among the early-voting states, some of his supporters are discussing a trip to Iowa before Thanksgiving — to vouch for the former vice president, and to emphasize his ability to appeal to minority constituencies, like African-Americans.

“We probably know Joe Biden a lot better than they do,” said State Senator Dick Harpootlian of South Carolina, a Biden supporter.

Mr. Schultz acknowledged at the briefing that Mr. Biden had been uneven at times during debates and on the stump. Still, he predicted Mr. Biden would maintain an advantage over Ms. Warren, saying she would struggle to overcome the persistent competition on the left from Mr. Sanders

Mr. Biden’s monthslong lead in the primary has been eroding as progressive candidates have gained support and surpassed him in fund-raising. CreditTiffany Brown Anderson for The New York Times

But Ms. Warren has recently pulled well ahead of Mr. Sanders. Now, even Mr. Biden’s own campaign aides privately acknowledge that South Carolina may not be much of a political firewall if Ms. Warren rolls through Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada.

As he finds his way forward, Mr. Biden is relying on a circle of advisers, some formal and others less so, but there is no chief strategist. Mike Donilon, who wrote much of the Reno speech, may be the closest person to playing that role. Democrats who know Mr. Biden well say the campaign is mostly in his hands — and he makes the final calls.

While Mr. Biden’s team has done little polling in the race, he is expected to conduct a survey of Iowa Democrats next week on the Ukraine issue ahead of a new advertising push in the state.

Mr. Biden has begun to escalate his attacks on the president, and his campaign began airing a commercial hitting back at the president for trying to “pick his opponent and face only the candidates he thinks he can beat.” Still, there is no final consensus, in Mr. Biden’s camp, about how consistently he should confront Mr. Trump.

“He’s never gone negative,” said William M. Daley, the former White House chief of staff, who worked on Mr. Biden’s 1988 campaign. “That’s not him, that’s the charm of Joe.”

Thomas Kaplan contributed reporting from Los Angeles.

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

Oct. 4, 2019

Biden’s Strategy for Managing the Ukraine Story

For Joe Biden, Trump Impeachment Inquiry Brings a Long-Expected Test

Sept. 24, 2019

Jonathan Martin is a national political correspondent. He has reported on a range of topics, including the 2016 presidential election and several state and congressional races, while also writing for Sports, Food and the Book Review. He is also a CNN political analyst. @jmartnyt

Alexander Burns is a national political correspondent, covering elections and political power across the country, including Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign. Before coming to The Times in 2015, he covered the 2012 presidential election for Politico. @alexburnsNYT

Kurt Volker, Ukraine and a Turbulent End in the Trump Administration

Oct. 5, 2019

Oct. 5, 2019

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

© 2019 The New York Times Company

POLITICO

Susan Collins: Trump made ‘big mistake’ in asking China to probe Biden

Sen. Susan Collins speaks during annual remembrance ceremonies on Saturday at firefighters memorial in Augusta, Maine. | Joe Phelan/The Kennebec Journal via AP

10/05/2019 06:03 PM EDT

Susan Collins on Saturday became the latest Republican senator to criticize President Donald Trump for calling on foreign countries to investigate a political rival, saying he made a “big mistake.”

“I thought the president made a big mistake by asking China to get involved in investigating a political opponent,” Collins said at a press gaggle in her home state of Maine, according to the Bangor Daily News. “It’s completely inappropriate.”

Collins is the third Republican senator to voice criticism of Trump for the ongoing Ukraine scandal at the heart of the House’s impeachment proceedings, joining Mitt Romney and Ben Sasse.

During a press gaggle on Thursday, Trump called on China to investigate political rival and presidential candidate, former Vice President Joe Biden.

“Likewise, China should start an investigation into the Bidens. Because what happened in China is just about as bad as what happened with Ukraine,” Trump said.

Saying that the House likely will pass articles of impeachment on Trump, Collins said she would not comment “on the evidence on both sides coming forth every day.”

“Should the articles of impeachment come to the Senate — and right now I’m going to guess that they will — I will be acting as a juror as I did in the Clinton impeachment trial,” Collins said.

Collins also joined in Republican criticism of House Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff’s description of the phone call between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky during the testimony of acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire last week.

Collins said Schiff “misrepresented and misled people about what was in the transcript in the call."

© 2019 POLITICO LLC

Trump seized on a conspiracy theory called the ‘insurance policy.’ Now, it’s at the center of an impeachment investigation.

Published 7 Hours AgoNBC. News

President Donald Trump announced that the U.S. has issued new sanctions on Iran’s central bank at the “highest level” while speaking in the Oval Office on September 20, 2019 in Washington, DC.

An anonymous post from March 2017 on the far-right 4chan message board teased a conspiracy theory that would eventually make its way to the White House.

“Russia could not have been the source of leaked Democrat emails released by Wikileaks,” the post teased, not citing any evidence for the assertion.

The post baselessly insinuated that CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity firm that worked with the Democratic National Committee and had been contracted to investigate a hack of its servers, fabricated a forensics report to frame Russia for election interference. The 4chan post was published three days before then-FBI Director James Comey testified before Congressabout Russian interference in the 2016 election.

Back home, battleground Democrats encounter support — but not hunger — for impeachment
CIA’s top lawyer made ‘criminal referral’ on complaint about Trump Ukraine call
GOP senator says diplomat told him Trump was withholding aid to ensure investigations

And that was how it started. That post is the first known written evidence of this unfounded conspiracy theory to exonerate Russia from meddling in the 2016 election, which more than two years later would make its way into the telephone call that may get President Donald Trump impeached. (Federal law enforcement officials have repeatedly made it clear that Russia unquestionably did meddle in the election.)

In the years that followed the original 4chan post, at least three different but related conspiracy theories would warp and combine on the fringes of the internet, eventually coalescing around Ukraine’s supposed role in helping Trump’s 2016 opponent, Hillary Clinton.

Ukraine wasn’t originally part of the theory, but in July, Trump floated CrowdStrike’s nameduring a call with the president of Ukraine as just one piece of a convoluted conspiracy accusation. That phone call is now at the center of a congressional investigation and impeachment inquiry into whether the president abused his power for political gain.

"I would like to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine, they say CrowdStrike … " Trump said on the call, according to a White House summary. “I guess you have one of your wealthy people. … The server, they say Ukraine has it.”

To even people who have followed these theories closely, Trump’s call felt detached from any sense of logic.

“It’s a whole new mountain of nonsense,” said Duncan Campbell, a British digital forensics expert who investigated the original claim about CrowdStrike.

This omnibus conspiracy theory has been frequently referred to on far-right blogs, Fox News and recently by the president as the Democrats’ “insurance policy,” a reference to the supposed setup as a way to impeach the president if Trump were to win the election.

Though all the individual theories have been debunked, each has contributed elements that have been cited by the president, as well as his personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani.

Beginning months after Trump’s inauguration, conspiracy theorists have pushed this fanciful and unsubstantiated narrative in which the Democratic National Committee framed Russia for its election interference in 2016 and later covered up its false accusation with help from then-Vice President Joe Biden and officials in Ukraine.

In the conspiracy theory, impeachment proceedings recently pursued by House Democrats were always the DNC’s endgame, effectively a cash-out on the “insurance policy.”

Trump has repeatedly referred to the “insurance policy” by name in tweets and in remarks on the White House’s South Lawn.

“This is a study of Russia. Why didn’t they invest in the insurance policy? In other words, should Hillary Clinton lose, we’ve got an insurance policy,” Trump said in front of the White House on May 30. “Guess what? What we’re in right now is the insurance policy.”

Although Trump has often brought up various conspiracy theories, there had been little indication that the president had taken aggressive action on them. That changed last month, when the White House released the summary of a call with Ukraine. The subsequent release of a whistleblower complaint further confirmed that the ardently pro-Trump conspiracy theories that have percolated on the far right for years had reached the highest echelons of power — and influenced the decision-making of the president.

NBC News tracked these various threads in an attempt to understand how they evolved and how they eventually reached the president.

CrowdStrike

Campbell, the digital forensics expert, helped debunk the theory that CrowdStrike framed Russia for the DNC in 2018. He analyzed the data and the origin of documents that had been published on a blog two months after the 4chan post, which purported to contain proof that Russia couldn’t have hacked the DNC.

Campbell investigated the claims and found that the documents were fake, with metadata on the files offering proof that they were illegitimate. Campbell also tracked the source of the documents to a 39-year-old British internet troll working under a fake name who had frequently pushed pro-Russian conspiracy theories under various aliases.

But the fake documents proved effective in perpetuating the CrowdStrike theory. The fake documents found their way to a group of former intelligence officials called Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity led by William Binney, a whistleblower who used to work at the National Security Agency. Binney pushed the conspiracy theory several times on Fox News and, at the request of Trump, met with then-CIA Director and current Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to discuss the theory. Binney has since disavowed the veracity of the documents after viewing the files’ metadata.

Two years later, in June, former Trump adviser Roger Stone revived the debunked CrowdStrike conspiracy theory as part of his defense. Stone has been charged with witness tampering and five counts of making false statements to the special counsel.

One month and 11 days after that, Trump brought up CrowdStrike in a call with Ukraine’s president.

Even after months of investigating the origins of the CrowdStrike conspiracy theory, Campbell said he doesn’t believe even the president has a full grasp of what the theory is meant to insinuate.

Campbell also said that CrowdStrike examined many servers as part of its investigation into how the DNC was hacked, whereas the president wondered on the phone with Ukraine’s president if a single server might be in Ukraine. The company also recently clarified that it had taken no servers into its possession as part of its DNC investigation.

Campbell said Trump may have mixed up even another conspiracy theory in a news conference last week, conflating Hillary Clinton’s email server with the DNC servers examined by CrowdStrike.

At Trump’s direction, the State Department has recently reignited a probe to find the contents of a private email server Clinton held when she was secretary of state. When asked by a reporter if he believes some of Clinton’s deleted emails could be in Ukraine, Trump replied, “I think they could be.”

“Trump’s comments seem to me to be incoherent, even in the context of this conspiracy theory,” Campbell said.

Steve Marcus | Reuters

Democratic presidential candidate and former U.S. Vice President Joe Biden responds to a question during a forum held by gun safety organizations the Giffords group and March For Our Lives in Las Vegas, Nevada, October 2, 2019.

Nina Jankowicz, a former advisor to Ukraine’s foreign ministry, also said she was surprised when Trump mentioned CrowdStrike in conjunction with Ukraine.

“I was in Ukraine when the first conspiracies about ‘Ukrainian collusion’ was coming about,” Jankowicz said. “It was all this murky narrative about how maybe the Ukrainians wanted Hillary.”

Jankowicz said that while various conspiracy theories had swirled around Ukraine, none to her knowledge had touched on CrowdStrike. That company was part of a separate conspiracy theory that posited that the location of Clinton emails were hidden as part of a cover-up.

“Never was there any mention in 2016 of the DNC servers being in Ukraine,” said Jankowicz, who is now a fellow at the Wilson Center studying disinformation. “The whole CrowdStrike thing blows my mind.”

Thoeries Collide

Conspiracy theorists were eager to tie CrowdStrike to yet another theory focused on one of the president’s political rivals: Joe Biden.

In March, John Solomon, a conservative opinion contributor to the politics-focused news website The Hill, began to gain traction with conservative media publications for a series of articles insinuating that the Biden family had been involved with a cover-up that included the vice president pressuring Ukraine’s president to fire a prosecutor who wanted to investigate the Biden family’s business connections in the country.

The theory has been widely debunked. While Hunter Biden, Joe Biden’s son, did work with a Ukrainian energy company, an investigation into his business relationships was later closed, and the investigator who was fired was the focus of international pressure due to a lack of corruption enforcement.

But the notion of a Biden-led cover-up dovetailed nicely with what Trump and many conspiracy theorists were working to prove — that Russia hadn’t hacked the election.

While it’s not clear how the CrowdStrike portion of the conspiracy theory reached Trump, outside of Binney’s meeting years before, Giuliani seized on the Ukraine thread publicly, while privately beginning to pursue an investigation.

In April, Masha Yovanovitch, then U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, was recalled to Washington. Yovanovitch had been mentioned by Solomon in his articles as denigrating Trump to Ukrainian officials, a claim that was echoed on Fox News.

“The idea was to make it look like Ambassador Yovanovich was doing Clinton and Obama’s bidding,” Jankowicz said.

Looking to combine the two theories, online conspiracy theorists began pushing baseless rumors that CrowdStrike’s chief technology officer and co-founder, Dmitri Alperovitch, who is Russian-American, was simultaneously working for Ukraine. There is no evidence to support that claim.

The conspiracy theory about Biden wound up being repeated three times in Trump’s phone call with Ukraine’s president. The Hill’s columns were later explicitly mentioned in the whistleblower complaint about Trump’s interactions with Ukraine’s president that was released to Congress last week.

The Ukraine element fit particularly well with the “insurance policy” narrative that suggested any attempt to investigate the president was actually part of a Democratic conspiracy.

The phrase refers to a text sent from then-FBI agent Peter Strzok to FBI attorney Lisa Page, with whom he was having an affair. Strzok, who was investigating Russia’s interference into the 2016 election for the FBI, was texting with Page about internal debates about how publicized and prioritized the probe, which had not yet been made public, should be.

Rudy Giuliani, President Donald Trump’s personal attorney, defended himself Sunday on “This Week with George Stephanopoulos” from accusations lodged by a former White House official that he has trafficked unfounded theories about foreign interference in the 2016 presidential election.

“It’s like an insurance policy in the unlikely event you die before 40,” Strzok wrote in a text, referring to the investigation. Transcripts of 16 months of texts between Strzok and Page were released by the Justice Department in December 2017.

Trump and conservative media have since taken the text to mean Strzok and members of what the president termed the “deep state” at the FBI were part of what he called a “coup” to remove him from office, even before he was elected.

For this conspiracy theory, Jankowicz said, the more anecdotes, the better — even if they don’t make sense when they’re all put together.

“That’s all the proof that any conspiracy theorist needs. Don’t look at the timeline at all. You just need a simple narrative to stick to,” Jankowicz said. “The more complicated you make it, the harder it is to figure out. And sometimes that’s the point.”

The Hill and Fox News

On March 23, Giuliani’s Twitter account hit “like” on a tweet featuring a video clip from Sean Hannity’s Fox News primetime show. In it, frequent guest commentator Joe DiGenova alleged that Ukrainian officials tried to help Hillary Clinton during the 2016 U.S. elections, referring to one of Solomon’s articles in The Hill.

That “like” by Giuliani is the earliest known public evidence of how this conspiracy theory reached the president’s personal lawyer, according to records of Giuliani’s social media activity preserved by NBC News.

In the six months since the Twitter interaction, Giuliani has tweeted numerous times in reference to the Ukraine theory, including falsely stating in April that “now Ukraine is investigating Hillary campaign and DNC conspiracy with foreign operatives including Ukrainian and others to affect 2016 election.” Ukraine is not investigating the Clinton campaign.

Other members of Trump’s inner circle have also promoted various accusations leveled against Biden that coincided with Giuliani’s efforts to dig up dirt on him. Legitimate concerns about Biden’s son and his business deal with the Ukrainian energy company Burisma have been folded into the conspiracy theory, conflating real-life conflict of interest questions with allegations of a fantastical conspiracy by a global cabal.

On Monday, Giuliani was subpoenaed for his involvement in the White House effort to dig up incriminating evidence on Biden; the article that was mentioned in the Fox News segment ended up as a part of a whistleblower complaintfiled against the president; and Solomon’s main source has walked back some of the claims that helped fuel the article that reached Fox News.

The president now faces an impeachment inquiry into whether his attempts to pressure the president of Ukraine to investigate the conspiracy theory constitutes an abuse of power and if the president’s staff then tried to cover up the president’s action

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Trump’s Latest Excuse: Rick Perry Made Me Do. It

This might be Donald Trump’s most comedic excuse yet for betraying his oath of office as president of the United States.

We all knew Trump couldn’t withstand the heat of an impeachment inquiry by Congress without throwing someone under the bus. In fact, he’s already blurted out the vice president’s involvement, practically ensuring that lawmakers take a hard look at Mike Pence.

But it also appears that just a day after Energy Secretary Rick Perry tried to tiptoe out the back door, Trump threw a proverbial ax at the center of his back. Unfortunately, no one feels the least bit sorry about any of this, true or not.

Three sources told Politico on Thursday that Perry was expected to resign from the Trump administration by the end of November. This news followed reports that Democrats are seeking information from Perry about his travels to Ukraine last May to attend President Volodymyr Zelensky’s inauguration.

According to a whistleblower complaint that prompted the impeachment inquiry of Trump, Pence was supposed to have attended Zelensky’s inauguration. But around the time of the trip, it was “made clear” that Trump didn’t want to interact with Zelensky until he saw how the Ukrainian president “chose to act” in office, according to a letterSenate Foreign Relations Committee Ranking Member Bob Menendez sent Perry as part of the investigation.

So, Perry made the trip and conducted high-level meetings with Ukrainian officials instead.

Now, Axios is reporting that Trump claimed on Friday that he didn’t even want to have the phone conversationwith Zelensky. This is the call at the center of the whistleblower complaint that Trump continuously characterizes as “perfect.” Trump only made the call because Perry had urged him to, the presidents claimed.

According to the news site, Trump made this claim during a conference call with Republican members of the House. Three sources who were on the call told Axios that Trump had blamed Perry.

Axios noted:

Per the sources, Trump rattled off the same things he has been saying publicly — that his call with Zelensky was “perfect” and he did nothing wrong.

But he then threw Perry into the mix and said something to the effect of: “Not a lot of people know this but, I didn’t even want to make the call. The only reason I made the call was because Rick asked me to. Something about an LNG [liquified natural gas] plant,” one source said, recalling the president’s comments. 2 other sources confirmed the first source’s recollection.

As Axios pointed out, several text messages made public this week seem to indicate that the president’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, is largely responsible for advocating for that phone call, not Perry. But we’ll see.

On Friday’s call with Trump were House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, Whip Steve Scalise, Republican Conference Chair Liz Cheney, and other GOP leaders, Axios said. We’ll see what they say on Sunday.

Good Riddance to Rick Perry, the Latest Official to Be Embroiled in the Impeachment Inquiry

Report: Trump Enlisted Mike Pence to Try to Influence Ukraine

Trump Extremely on His ‘BULLSHIT’ Today

House Democrats Subpoena White House as Part of Impeachment Inquiry

Here’s the Whistleblower Complaint at the Heart of Trump’s Ukraine Scandal

The Case Is Really Really Really Not Closed

© 2019 G/O Media Inc

Jared Kushner to lead Trump’s impeachment defense — and Twitter asks what could possibly go wrong

By DAVE GOLDINER

NEW YORK DAILY NEWS

OCT 05, 2019 | 6:51 PM

Jared Kushner is taking on another task for his father-in-law, President Trump. (MANDEL NGAN/AFP/Getty Images)

Jared Kushner is taking the reins of President Trump’s impeachment defense — and even the #MAGA army has to be asking why.

The presidential son-in-law has so far failed in high-profile assignments to bring peace to the Middle East, come up with a grand compromise on immigration and get America to kick its opioid habit.

He also famously advised Trump to fire FBI Director James Comey, leading to the Russia collusion investigation that crippled most of the president’s first three years in office.

So now he’s going to lead the White House “don’t call it a war room” impeachment fightback as Democrats move closer than ever to removing Trump from office.

Some say President Mike Pence might want to start measuring the drapes in the White House.

[More Politics] GOP Sen. Susan Collins slams ‘completely inappropriate’ Trump for asking China for dirt on Biden »

“I mean, since he solved the Middle East Peace question and the opioid crisis, Jared’s been a little under-occupied,” wrote Republican operative Rick Wilson, a frequent Trump critic.

There’s little doubt that Trump could certainly use a more organized strategy as the impeachment storm gathers.

He has so far struggled to come up with a coherent message and has dug himself deeper into trouble by venting his rage at the attacks aimed at him.

[More Politics] Trump points finger at Rick Perry for damning call to Ukraine president: report »

Trump has sought to attack the intelligence whistleblower’s credibility but that strategy has fallen flat as virtually all of his claims have been verified by documents or Trump himself.

Trump has likewise lashed out at Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), but it’s unclear what difference it makes whether the impeachment leader stumbled or misled reporters about some aspects of the handling of the complaint.

Worst of all, Trump has more or less confirmed some of the most damaging claims made against him by insisting he did nothing wrong by demanding that foreign leaders help him by investigating Democratic rival Joe Biden.

1

Donald Trump in the White House

It’s unclear that Kushner, who will work alongside White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, has the skill set to turn things around.

Kushner, the husband of Trump’s daughter Ivanka, is still a Beltway neophyte whose political instincts are mocked by allies and opponents alike.

Kushner has been famously handed a laundry list of responsibilities but few have resulted in any notable successes. His Mideast peace plan, for example, is considered so dead on arrival that it has never even been released for fear it could do more harm than good.

[More Politics] Trump points finger at Rick Perry for damning call to Ukraine president: report »

The one major achievement he can boast is passing a modest criminal justice reform plan with the help of celebrity friends like Kim Kardashian.

Kushner is notably camera shy and does not relish taking the hour-by-hour fight to Trump’s opponents on cable TV shout fests like White House attack dog Stephen Miller. He also has an unfortunate habit of being out of town or on vacation with his photogenic family when crisis comes calling.

Copyright © 2019, New York Daily News

The Ukraine Connection




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POLITICO

What Putin Got From the Trump-Zelensky Phone Call
The biggest beneficiary of the Ukraine scandal is, sure enough, the Kremlin.

By MOLLY K. MCKEW

10/06/2019 06:50 AM EDT

Molly K. McKew is a writer and lecturer on Russian influence and information warfare. She advised the Georgian president and national security council from 2009 to 2013 and former Moldovan Prime Minister Vlad Filat in 2014 and 2015.

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A year ago, I was in Kiev when a young Ukrainian soldier was killed. Olesya Baklanova, 19, enlisted in the Ukrainian Armed Forces as soon as she was eligible and fought to be assigned a combat post. Deployed to the front lines of her country’s war against Russia, she was killed during the night while manning an observation post, shot by a sniper stationed among the Russian and proxy forces dug in a few hundred meters way. She was one of four Ukrainian soldiers killed at their post that night — one of the estimated 13,000 soldiers, fighters and civilians killed in eastern Ukraine in the past five years.

Her story was a concise reminder of the realities of Ukraine’s forgotten war. Russian forces seized Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula in early 2014; weeks later, Russia formally annexed the territory. This was an important strategic goal for President Vladimir Putin. To ensure that no one had time to do anything about it — and to further destabilize Ukraine — Russia then launched a war in eastern Ukraine, in the Donbas region, using nominal separatists with Russian backing.

Five years on, it’s still a hot war, with Russia constantly pushing forward the line of occupation. Some 1.5 million people have been displaced. The shifting mass of regular and irregular Russian troops in eastern Ukraine — soldiers and mercenaries; “separatist” proxies and militias; a lot of guys with pseudonyms using advanced Russian weaponry that Russia claims must have been bought at the local corner shop (note: it is supplied from Russia) — constantly test and adapt new capabilities, especially electronic warfare capabilities, on the battlefield.

Ukrainian forces, with Western support, have steadily developed new measures to counter whatever is thrown at them. The Ukrainian war effort is defined both by this ingenuity and by sacrifice. The army, left gutted by former President Viktor Yanukovych, was rebuilt entirely in wartime. New units are rotated through areas of heavy fighting to increase their combat experience — a wartime readiness strategy that contributes to spikes in casualties, but which has been enormously successful. The average age of Ukrainian recruits is officially around 36, though anecdotally it’s over 40 at the front, as the generation that remembers life before independence now leads the fight to keep it.

The dirty, confusing, irregular conflict in Ukraine is part of a broader political war waged by the Kremlin. In countless ways, this is the inevitable evolution of Russia’s aggression against its neighbors after Putin paid so little price for invading Georgia in 2008. I worked as an adviser to the Georgian government in the years after that war, and we watched as almost everyone normalized Putin’s behavior, emboldening him to press forward. Now, Russia’s army sniper school has been transferred to the Ukrainian front, training the next generation of elite Russian marksmen by having them pick off Ukrainian soldiers. Soldiers like Baklanova.

This is the necessary context in which Americans should understand the gravity of President Donald Trump’s attempt to strong-arm Ukraine into becoming a subsidiary of his reelection campaign. In one gesture, Trump reduced the survival of Ukraine to a bargaining chip in an utterly petty pursuit; embroiled Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian president, in scandal and undercut his ability to defend the interests of his nation; and weakened the clout of U.S. leadership on Ukraine, the region and beyond.

The biggest beneficiary of this latest Trump-derived scandal is the Kremlin. This isn’t some theoretical future calculus. It has an immediate impact on U.S. security and our strategic outlook. And it enhances the ability of the Kremlin to keep stirring chaos inside the United States.

Trump is bargaining away U.S. security for conspiracy theories about Ukraine and the Bidens that he hopes will not only strengthen his position for his reelection, but will also erase the evidence that Kremlin intervention helped to elect him president. It’s actually hard to know which part of all this makes the Kremlin most happy.


Since the annexation of Crimea, there has been a lot of speculation about Putin’s long-term goals for Ukraine and the region, be it rebuilding a kind of Russian empire or disrupting what he views as another empire moving toward his borders. But in the near term, Putin knows that pushing for a pro-Kremlin alignment in Ukrainian politics — especially with the war still on — is a waste of effort. Far better to hope for what has succeeded elsewhere along the Russian rim, and in Europe, and in the United States: the sense that it would be nice to get along better with Russia, because it’s exhausting to live under a constant existential threat.

The caveat to this is that Russia doesn’t actually want to get along. Putin needed Crimea, as he detailed in a March 2014 speech marking its annexation, because it was where Prince Vladimir, ruler of the medieval federation known as the Kievan Rus, was baptized into Orthodox Christianity more than a thousand years ago — the starting point of the arc of Russian history that has culminated in Vladimir Putin. Annexing Crimea into Russia did away with the inconvenient fact that the Russian empire was born in Ukraine. Putin spent years telling people that Crimea was Russia. And then, suddenly, it was.

A lot of what Putin has done since 2014 is about keeping Crimea. An important component of achieving that is ensuring that Ukraine remains a nation governed by a fractious elite awash in Russian money and highly subject to Kremlin manipulations. This helps keep Ukraine in limbo between Russia and the West.

Because if Russia can’t have Ukraine, neither can anyone else. Right now, the Kremlin’s de facto veto on Ukraine’s westward integration is the war. In the simplest terms, a country not in control of its own territory isn’t an ideal alliance partner — it’s the same card the Kremlin played to keep Georgia out of NATO. The ongoing conflict can also be used to disrupt the politics, society and economy of Ukraine. In exchange for agreeing to end the war, the Kremlin wants a new form of the veto — a permanent “special status” guarantee for Ukraine’s eastern provinces, which will allow the Kremlin to maintain political control over territories within Ukraine through local Russian proxies. It would be the end of Ukraine’s post-independence geopolitical aspirations, preventing it from ever integrating fully into NATO or the European Union.

The Kremlin wants you to believe Ukraine has only two choices: Ukrainians can keep fighting and dying to defend their sovereignty, or they can accept a proxy occupation designed to disrupt their governance and national unity. The only chance for a third option is unwavering Western support — which requires unwavering American support — for the Ukrainian people’s desire to live in a reformed, secure, democratic nation at peace within its recognized borders and working toward integration into Western institutions. The Kremlin’s propaganda works to make Americans believe that this third option is just some unicorn dream — that a corrupt, divided, Nazi-infested Ukraine is utterly unsupported by the distracted, feckless, immoral West (that’s Kremlin terminology, not my own).

Since 2014, the propaganda on this has become pretty stale and formulaic. The Trump-Zelensky spectacle — a play about American fecklessness and Ukrainian corruption in one “perfect” act — was a gift to the Kremlin to refresh the tired themes.


This whole tent revival is a spinoff of a longer play, the script of which is ribboned with conspiracy narrative actively hawked and amped by the Kremlin’s disinformation machinery. In this drama, of course, poor Russia — despite documentation of their operations by U.S. and Dutch intelligence; financial records, personnel and travel records; lists of accounts and content archived from social media; high-level sources inside the Kremlin; and more — is a blameless bystander in the 2016 attacks on American election systems and the aggressive information operations that targeted and polarized American society. And the actual villain, totally conveniently, happens to be Ukraine, the nation the Kremlin has been working to smear and dismantle since 2013.

It is a tedious and clunky story that weaves in and out of other bonkers, far-right disinformation conspiracies — Seth Rich, QAnon, everything a secret plot and ANY DAY NOW the real truth is gonna come out — that has been amply documented as false by very smart and patient researchers and journalists. But the once-respected Rudy Giuliani has become a well-oiled cog in the machine nonetheless. You can spend time trying to unravel his 52-dimensional chess explanations of how he has uncovered a Clinton/Soros/Ukraine plot, but honestly, don’t. It’s unclear whether he actually understands that virtually all of it is made up by malign actors who are just here to watch it all burn. But listening to his self-narrative about being the hero of the story is a sign that he’s an easy mark for anyone who understands how to work this psychology.

The waters were so heavily chummed for sharks like Giuliani — how could he not take the bait and run after the irresistible story that solves all problems?

Maybe Giuliani explained the story to Trump in a way that made sense: It could exonerate Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, muddle the narrative, Febreze away the stink of the Mueller report from Trump himself forever. Or maybe the sales pitch was all about the Biden thing. Regardless, Trump unleashed Giuliani, apparently with the support of U.S. diplomats, to undercut U.S. interests and policy — because, again, Trump just doesn’t care if Ukraine, a nation of 44 million people is sentenced to purgatory because of his actions. It is a crippling indictment of his judgment, his leadership, his fitness for office and his grasp on reality.

False equivalencies are the lifeblood of Russian propaganda, an easy tool to exploit bias and distort perception. They are also a tactic that Trump deploys nearly instinctually. “Fake Ukraine collusion 2020” as the new “fake Russia collusion 2016” is an extraordinarily powerful false equivalency — to minimize the significance of the support the Kremlin levied to help get Trump elected, to erase the importance of the Mueller investigation, and to create problems for the new Ukrainian president and his country.

By embroiling Ukraine in scandal, by politicizing support of Ukraine among the American audience, by linking Ukraine to the conspiracy nexus that underlies all thinking in Trump world — and by minimizing the existential threat that Ukraine and Ukrainians face every day from the Russian assault on their nation — Trump is advancing core Kremlin objectives. He has made the president of Ukraine an accomplice in that effort, or maybe just a companion in the same trap.


And this isn’t just about Ukraine. There is a systematic Russian effort to gain similar concessions on Moldova and Georgia — to force acceptance of a Russian veto of those countries’ determination to be nations aligned with Western values. The United States should be leading a political and diplomatic effort to expose what Russia is doing and explain what those Russian efforts mean. We should be leading to counter the advance of illiberal ideals in the world.

Instead we look inward at the circus. Faith in who we are and what defines us is eroding, while the geostrategic landscape of the world is remade around us — and not by anyone who believes that the will of the people is going to be a thing that matters in the future.

Trump has sent clear signals that Ukraine might not have his support — go ahead, make your own deal with Putin #shrug. Diplomatic resources that should have been focused on crafting a policy to counter Russian aggression were diverted to chase down rumors and personal vendettas instead.

It’s easy to ignore the details of Russia’s war in Ukraine. It’s easy to get lost in the smoke-and-mirrors fiction that what the Kremlin is doing isn’t actually what it is doing — a dance at which the West has become quite adept since Russia’s cyberattack on Estonia in 2007 and invasion of Georgia in 2008.

We watch what the Kremlin does to its neighbors, to us, to Europe, to the Middle East, to Afghanistan — and we blink. Hackers, cyberattacks, disinformation, invasion, annexation, devastation, mercenaries, terrorists, giant arms expos — and we blink.

Ukraine is now the front line, the place where we have the best chance to act, and to stop ignoring the reality of what we face.

There’s a reason Congress has consistently, and in a bipartisan fashion, approved military assistance for Ukraine so it can defend itself against Russian invasion and aggression. With limited but targeted resources and support, America and other NATO allies have quietly done a lot to bolster Ukraine. It’s a vast, sweeping success story. A story that almost no one talks about for fear that the president will interfere.

We don’t offer this support on some fantastical whim anchored in Cold War nostalgia, but because it is in our vital contemporary interest, in countless respects, to limit the further expansion of Russia’s hold on the Black Sea region, which the Kremlin uses to stage its war in Syria and to project power into the Middle East and Africa, across the Mediterranean on up to the western Arctic, and beyond. It is a pattern of activity that has degraded the security environment in which we and our alliances operate, and it has contributed to the sense of political instability and unrest, of churn and upheaval, that has plagued Europe since the financial crisis, the migration crisis, and Brexit, and that has defined the Middle East since the Islamic State and Bashar Assad became twin pillars of decay.

Using the Black Sea as an operational base, the Kremlin works against the United States and our interests, consistently choosing confrontation over cooperation. Russian forces attack U.S. ships, troops and planes with electronic warfare, mercenaries and air assets, toeing the line about what is defined as activity “below the line of conflict.” They have not pivoted from a zero-sum view of relations with the United States. And not seeing how far the line has moved since 2008 — we now accept borders being changed by force, and the deployment of Russian forces to new ports and bases, and the fact that Russia arms the Taliban as they target American soldiers in Afghanistan, and ongoing, overt political interference in our domestic politics — is still a crazy, blind weakness of the West.

This is why remembering Olysea Baklanova is so important. America might be looking inward, waving our arms about whatever horrific violation Trump has tweeted that day — but we can’t define what Trump did to Ukraine from the perspective of our sad, fleabag circus.

Every time Trump guts an institution, diverts money to his personality projects, labels an internal enemy, violates a norm, secures a job for a corrupt and unqualified appointee, ignores the law, asks a foreign leader to “do him a favor” — every time he breaks a rule and pays no price, he provides illustration for Putin’s expanding primer on “the hoax” of democracy and “the people.”

Putin believes that all democracy is farce, and he has worked tirelessly to make sure that Western democracies believe this too. His propaganda machinery has supported Trump and the Brexiteers, faux-democrats like Hungarian President Viktor Orban and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, because their self-dealing motivations amplify the firehose of cynicism that now spreads anti-democratic derision across the West.

Ukrainians have bled during a five-plus year war that they haven’t lost to Russia. They fight this war at the border of Europe to defend their democracy and the right to pursue a future of their choosing. They fight this war because they know that someone has to, and because they know what it will cost them if they don’t.

It will cost us, too. Trump recently called Ukraine “a big, wide, beautiful wall” between Russia and Europe. In reality, it is the thinnest of shields. For Ukrainians, that shield holds the line between the future they want and the past they won’t go back to. For Americans, in more than a symbolic way, the thin shield of Ukraine stands between the America we think we are, and the America we might actually be, in a world where the terms are dictated by autocrats and our power is greatly diminished.

Ukrainians deserve American support — far less cynical American support — not because we decide this-or-that president or prime minister is a guy we like, but because the people of Ukraine have died to have what we have, and to become equal members of alliances that are the architecture of American prosperity, security and power in the world. Trump talks constantly about how none of our allies are paying enough for security. Well, the Ukrainians have paid. They’ve paid a lot. Their commitment, and vibrancy, and innovative spirit will help reinforce and reinvigorate our alliances. It is of material benefit to the United States of America to have a thriving, secure, democratic Ukraine — and Georgia, and Moldova — integrated into that architecture.

And maybe if we can help them get there, it will begin to counter the corrosion of that architecture that has occurred under President Trump.

© 2019 POLITICO LLC

And latest controversies:

LIVE UPDATES

The latest on the Trump impeachment inquiry

By Fernando Alfonso III, CNN

Updated 8:48 AM ET, Sun October 6, 2019

What we’re covering here

The latest: President Trump called for Sen. Mitt Romney to be “impeached” in a tweet Saturday after the Republican from Utah criticized the President for urging Ukraine and China to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden. Senators and members of Congress can’t be “impeached," according to the US Constitution.

Vice President slams impeachment inquiry:Vice President Mike Pence criticized Democrats in Congress during a speech Saturday for launching “a partisan impeachment inquiry in a blatant attempt to overturn the will of the American people."

White House subpoenaed: House Democrats subpoenaed the White House Friday as part of the impeachment investigation into Trump. The White House said the “subpoena changes nothing — just more document requests, wasted time, and taxpayer dollars that will ultimately show the President did nothing wrong.” (You can read the subpoena here.)

Johnson said the president “vehemently, angrily denied it” and said “I’d never do that,” when Johnson asked Trump about the implication that Ukraine’s military aid was linked to an investigation into Hunter Biden.

Former GOP Rep. Joe Walsh, a longshot candidate for the Republican nomination for president, on Sunday called President Trump a “traitor” for asking Ukraine and China to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden and his son, Hunter, despite their being no evidence of wrongdoing.

Walsh argued that Trump should be impeached for asking other countries to “interfere in our election.”

The Latest: Trump warns Turkey over Syria, threatens economy

on October 7, 2019

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Latest on President Donald Trump’s decision to pull U.S. troops from northern Syria (all times local):

12:06 p.m.

President Donald Trump is threatening to destroy the economy of Turkey if it does not watch over captured Islamic State fighters and their families detained in Syria.

In a tweet Monday, Trump said: “If Turkey does anything that I, in my great and unmatched wisdom, consider to be off limits, I will totally destroy and obliterate the Economy of Turkey.”

Trump defended his sudden decision to pull back U.S. troops from northern Syria, clearing the way for an expected Turkish military invasion against Kurdish forces. They were backed by the U.S., but Turkey views them as terrorists and a threat to the country.

Democrats and Republicans warn that a Turkish attack could lead to a massacre of the Kurds, who are holding thousands of captured IS fighters and their families.

__

11:20 a.m.

Sen. Lindsey Graham, a top Republican ally of President Donald Trump, is threatening legislation to impose economic sanctions on Turkey if it invades Syria. Graham has Democratic allies and warned that any congressional vote would be overwhelming.

Trump decided to pull back U.S. troops from northern Syria, clearing the way for an expected Turkish assault and essentially abandoning Kurdish fighters who fought alongside American forces to defeat the Islamic State.

His announcement immediately drew pushback from Republican lawmakers.

Graham said Monday that Trump’s moves are a “disaster in the making” that would empower IS and Syria. He said he’s already spoken to Maryland Democrat Chris Van Hollen about drafting the sanctions legislation. Graham said on Twitter that “sanctions against Turkey - if necessary - would be veto-proof.”

Utah Republican Sen. Mitt Romney also weighed in, saying Trump’s “decision to abandon our Kurd allies in the face of an assault by Turkey is a betrayal.”


9:20 a.m.

President Donald Trump is defending his decision to pull back U.S. troops from northern Syria, clearing the way for an expected Turkish assault and essentially abandoning Kurdish fighters who fought alongside American forces to defeat the Islamic State.

The move drew immediate outrage from some of the Republican president’s closest allies in Congress, with Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham calling the decision “a disaster.”

Syria’s Kurds accuse the U.S. of turning its back on its allies and risking gains made in the fight against the Islamic State group.

Trump defended the move in a series of tweets, acknowledging that “The Kurds fought with us” but claiming they “were paid massive amounts of money and equipment to do so.”

Hearst Newspapers© Copyright 2019 Hearst Communications, Inc.

Trump loses NY federal court fight to keep tax returns secret from Manhattan DA probe

Dan Mangan

Jacob Pramuk

Published 3 Hours Ago Updated 1 Hour AgoCNBC.com

A federal judge dismisses President Trump’s lawsuit seeking to block the release of his personal and corporate tax returns to the Manhattan district attorney.

DA Cyrus Vance Jr. is eyeing how the Trump Organization accounted for hush money payments made to two women, porn star Stormy Daniels and Playboy model Karen McDougal, to keep them quiet about alleged affairs with Trump.

Trump’s lawyers immediately appeal the ruling.

A federal judge on Monday dismissed President Donald Trump’s lawsuit seeking to block the release of his personal and corporate tax returns to the Manhattan district attorney, who is conducting a criminal investigation related to the president’s company.

U.S. District Judge Victor Marrero’s ruling flatly rejected what he called the “extraordinary claim” by Trump that while president he is immune not only from criminal prosecution but also from being criminally investigated by a state prosecutor or anyone else.

Marrero said that under Trump’s theory, not only his behavior would be immune from an investigation, but so would suspected “misconduct of any other person, business affiliate, associate or relative who may have collaborated with the President in committing purportedly unlawful acts.”

“This Court finds aspects of such a doctrine repugnant to the nation’s governmental structure and constitutional values,” Marrero wrote in his 75-page decision in U.S. District Court in Manhattan. Marrero said if Trump’s argument was allowed, it could “frustrate the administration of justice” in regard to a president’s conduct.

Trump’s lawyers immediately appealed the ruling.

Less than two hours later, the U.S. Circuit Court for the Second Circuit granted a temporary stay of enforcement of a grand jury subpoena for eight years of Trump’s tax returns from his accoutants, Mazars USA, pending an expedited review a a panel of that court’s judges.

Trump, in reaction to the ruling, suggested that congressional Democrats are in cahoots with DA Cyrus Vance Jr. to try to bring him down. “The Radical Left Democrats have failed on all fronts, so now they are pushing local New York City and State Democrat prosecutors to go get President Trump,” he tweeted.

Trump’s personal lawyer Jay Sekulow told NBC News, “We are very pleased that the Second Circuit Court of Appeals has issued a stay of the subpoena issued by New York District Attorney Cy Vance.”

A spokesman for Vance declined to comment.

Vance’s office had objected to a federal court becoming involved in the dispute. Prosecutors also had accused Trump’s legal team of trying to delay execution of the subpoena so that the statute of limitations for potential crimes that Vance is investigating would expire.

Vance’s investigation includes an inquiry into whether the Trump Organization violated the law in how it accounted for hush money payments to two women, Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal, ahead of the 2016 election.

Both women were paid to keep them quiet about their claims of sexual affairs with Trump years earlier.

Trump denies having sex with either woman, but his then-personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, paid Daniels for her silence, and the Trump-friendly tabloid The National Enquirer paid off McDougal.

The judge’s ruling came right before a 9 a.m. deadline that Trump’s lawyers had set.

The lawyers had told the judge that they would ask the Second U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to handle the dispute if Marrero did not issue his ruling by then.

Trump has repeatedly fought efforts by prosecutors and lawmakers to release his tax returns, breaking a decades-long tradition of presidential candidates.

— CNBC’s Kevin Breuninger contributed to this report

© 2019 CNBC LLC. All Rights Reserved. A Division of NBCUniversal

youtu.be/IYhqlOQ1vHY

The New York Time
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Trump Throws Middle East Policy Into Turmoil Over Syria

Oct. 7, 2019

WASHINGTON — President Trump threw Middle East policy into turmoil with a series of conflicting signals on Monday as his vow to withdraw American forces from the region touched off an uprising among congressional Republicans and protests by America’s allies.

Defending his decision to clear the way for a Turkish military operation against America’s Kurdish allies in northern Syria, Mr. Trump said it was “time for us to get out” and let others “figure the situation out.” But after Republican allies condemned the move, he pivoted sharply and said he would restrain Turkey.

“As I have stated strongly before, and just to reiterate, if Turkey does anything that I, in my great and unmatched wisdom, consider to be off limits, I will totally destroy and obliterate the Economy of Turkey (I’ve done before!),” the president wrote on Twitter, without explaining what exactly he would consider off limits.

Even after Mr. Trump walked back his decision, Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the majority leader, warned him against “a precipitous withdrawal” that would benefit Russia, Iran, President Bashar al-Assad of Syria and the Islamic State. Mr. McConnell sharply urged the president to “exercise American leadership.”

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A Defense Department official said that the president’s threat to destroy the Turkish economy should remove any ambiguity about whether Mr. Trump had endorsed a Turkish attack on the Kurds. “The Department of Defense made clear to Turkey — as did the president — that we do not endorse a Turkish operation in Northern Syria,” Jonathan Hoffman, a Pentagon spokesman, said in a statement. “The U.S. armed forces will not support, or be involved in any operation.”

The herky-jerky policy pronouncements kept supporters, foreign leaders, military officers and his own aides off balance as they tried to interpret Mr. Trump’s meaning and anticipate its consequences. The president has long agitated to get the United States out of what he considers fruitless overseas wars only to be pulled back to some extent by the national security establishment and congressional allies.

In this case, Mr. Trump seemed to be responding instinctively to a comment by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey near the end of a telephone call on Sunday. Rather than hold back Mr. Erdogan anymore, Mr. Trump promptly announced late that night that he would pull out American troops near the border who have served as a trip wire deterring Turkey from sending forces into Syria against Kurdish fighters allied with the United States.

By Monday morning, he was bombarded with complaints from both Republicans and Democrats, who charged that such a move would abandon some of United States’ most loyal and effective allies in the region, while emboldening some of America’s most threatening enemies.

“If I didn’t see Donald Trump’s name on the tweet, I thought it was Obama’s rationale for getting out of Iraq,” Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina and usually one of the president’s most vocal backers, said on Fox News.

As with President Barack Obama’s decision to pull out American troops from Iraq in 2011, Mr. Graham said, Mr. Trump’s withdrawal would create a vacuum for remnants of the Islamic State, Mr. Assad and others to surge forward again.

“This is a big win for Iran and Assad, a big win for ISIS,” Mr. Graham said, using another term for the Islamic State. “I will do everything I can to sanction Turkey if they step one foot in northeastern Syria. That will sever my relationship with Turkey. I think most of the Congress feels that way.”

Mr. Graham said he would also introduce a nonbinding resolution asking Mr. Trump to reconsider his move, which he called “shortsighted and irresponsible.” The president’s assertion that the Islamic State has been defeated is “the biggest lie being told by the administration,” Mr. Graham added.

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Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, a member of the House Republican leadership, called withdrawing United States forces from northern Syria “a catastrophic mistake.” Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida, said it would be “a grave mistake that will have implications far beyond Syria.”

Nikki R. Haley, Mr. Trump’s former ambassador to the United Nations, joined the chorus. “We must always have the backs of our allies, if we expect them to have our back,” she tweeted. “The Kurds were instrumental in our successful fight against ISIS in Syria. Leaving them to die is a big mistake. #TurkeyIsNotOurFriend.”

Senator Mitt Romney, Republican of Utah, shared a tweet from Mr. Graham and added his own thoughts. “The President’s decision to abandon our Kurd allies in the face of an assault by Turkey is a betrayal,” he wrote. “It says that America is an unreliable ally; it facilitates ISIS resurgence; and it presages another humanitarian disaster.”

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Left virtually on his own, Mr. Trump found support on Capitol Hill from Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky and one of the president’s staunchest defenders. Mr. Trump “once again fulfills his promises to stop our endless wars and have a true America First foreign policy,” Mr. Paul tweeted.

Image
Senator Lindsey Graham on Capitol Hill in July. “This is a big win for Iran and Assad, a big win for ISIS,” Mr. Graham said.CreditErin Schaff/The New York Times
Mr. Trump came to office promising to get the country out of overseas wars, contending that the military’s involvement in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks had largely been a waste of lives and money, with little to show for it.

A similarly sudden decision last winter to pull American troops out of Syria prompted Defense Secretary Jim Mattis to resign, and Brett McGurk, the special presidential envoy to the coalition fighting the Islamic State, accelerated his own planned departure in protest.

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The Senate, led by Mr. McConnell, relayed its displeasure in January by voting overwhelmingly to rebuke Mr. Trump over his planned withdrawal of military forces from Syria and Afghanistan.

Mr. Trump later walked back his decision in Syria to some extent, but has been frustrated not to be doing more to extricate the United States from entanglements in the region. His supporters said the latest move should therefore not be a surprise and the Kurds had fair warning.

The Kurdish forces in the area, part of the Syrian Democratic Forces, or S.D.F., have been the most reliable American ally in the region for years, a critical element in recapturing territory once controlled by the Islamic State. But Turkey has long considered the Kurdish fighters to be terrorists and has lobbied the United States to abandon support for them.

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“The United States was supposed to be in Syria for 30 days, that was many years ago,” Mr. Trump tweeted on Monday. “We stayed and got deeper and deeper into battle with no aim in sight.” Now, he said, it is time to leave.

“I held off this fight for almost 3 years, but it is time for us to get out of these ridiculous Endless Wars, many of them tribal, and bring our soldiers home,” Mr. Trump wrote. “WE WILL FIGHT WHERE IT IS TO OUR BENEFIT, AND ONLY FIGHT TO WIN. Turkey, Europe, Syria, Iran, Iraq, Russia and the Kurds will now have to figure the situation out.”

He offered little sympathy for the fate of America’s Kurdish allies: “The Kurds fought with us,” he wrote, “but were paid massive amounts of money and equipment to do so.”

Mr. Trump has been particularly irritated that the United States continues to pay to detain thousands of Islamic State fighters. For months, he has tried to pressure European states and others to take those fighters who originated from there, only to run into strong resistance.

“Europe did not want them back, they said you keep them USA!” Mr. Trump wrote. “I said ‘NO, we did you a great favor and now you want us to hold them in U.S. prisons at tremendous cost. They are yours for trials.’ They again said ‘NO,’ thinking, as usual, that the U.S. is always the ‘sucker,’ on NATO, on Trade, on everything.”

But if Turkey moves against the Kurds, the S.D.F. could abandon camps to fight the Turks, potentially allowing some 10,000 captured Islamic State fighters, including 2,000 foreigners, to escape. United States military officers were trying to reassure the S.D.F. in hopes of avoiding such a scenario.

The United States has suspended longstanding efforts to create a safe zone in Syria near the Turkish border that would have kept Turkish forces and Syrian fighters at a distance from each other. But one State Department official who briefed reporters on the condition of anonymity under administration ground rules said that the United States was now controlling the air space over northeast Syria in part to prevent Turkish aggression.

The prospect that an American withdrawal would lead to a Turkish incursion alarmed European allies. The French and Germans issued statements expressing deep concern. A State Department official said the international reaction to a possible Turkish operation had been “devastating” and acknowledged it would destabilize the region.

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For now at least, the Syrian Defense Forces leadership has told American officials that it will continue to detain the Islamic State fighters and their families in makeshift camps in northern Syria. But a State Department official acknowledged that the best-trained guards could be pulled away in the event of conflict with Turkey.

Most of the camps are farther south than where the Turkish forces have indicated they might go in Syria, outside the boundary of even the broadest safe zone that has been discussed. If the Kurdish guards flee advancing Turkish forces, the official said, then the administration expects the Turks to take over the detention centers.

American counterterrorism specialists said on Monday that transferring counterterrorism responsibilities to a Turkish military force that has proved ill -trained and ill equipped to conduct such operations in their own country would be disastrous and potentially reverse important victories by American troops and their Kurdish partners on the ground.

“It’s hard to imagine Turkey has the capacity to handle securely and appropriately the detainees long held by the Syrian Kurds — and that’s if Turkey even genuinely intends to try,” said Joshua A. Geltzer, a former senior director for counterterrorism at the National Security Council under Mr. Obama.

“The release or escape of such detainees,” he added, “would instantly energize ISIS’s efforts, already underway, to regroup and surge again.”

© 2019 The New York Times Compan

Now it’s notable that two contradictory processes are going on simulteniously, the US withdrawal against which even Mitch Mc’Onell is voicing his objections, and the impeachment.

Deep level conservatives may even skirt the idea of an intentional parallel here, of tail wagging .

What politi cal and military stategists are saying is that a bloodbath will follow, and Turks joining the Iran-Russia-China axis.

Throwing the Kurds under the bus, has salient features, never the less, of pulling our boys back from a veritable abyss.

Let’s see how it will play out.

The proposition of the military involvement was massaged by the Democratic summons of higher up Pentagon generals.

OR:

Is this an incredibly daring sideshow, where an old guard perfectly insulated by the idea of an irresistibly powerful US, can bend pre and perceptions, where revision will certainly be plausible within a span of a certain amount of time’s passage?

There is the theory of combinations , or partially derived propositions which can not defy the cliche of time healing all wounds.

Perhaps the strategy compels politics to become a handmaiden of slam assurance of a reality that can not possibly change .

Beyond guilt and innoscence , all’s well in love and war.

Trump’s move: Are you kidding me?
Fox News host Brian Kilmeade slams President Trump’s decision to withdraw troops from Northern Syria.

Now the Dems, his own media are bashing him. How can he St and it?
Well, he is a.good soldier. That’s how!
He is only sticking to his guns!

2 Republican senators refute Trump’s Ukraine-Biden conspiracy theory

Sens. Rob Portman (R-OH) and Ron Johnson (R-WI) know that what Trump says about Biden just isn’t true.

By Alex Ward

on October 7, 2019 4:20 pm

Sens. Rob Portman (R-OH) and Ron Johnson (R-WI) arrive for the Republican Senate Policy luncheon at the National Republican Senatorial Committee on June 12, 2018.

Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call

Two senators over the past five days have blown a major hole in one of President Donald Trump’s favorite conspiracy theories about Ukraine. Those two lawmakers are staunch Republicans.

Here’s what Trump believes: Joe Biden improperly used the power of his office as vice president to get a Ukrainian general prosecutor fired, in order to stop him from investigating a Ukrainian gas company that Biden’s son Hunter served on the board of. The reality is that Barack Obama’s administration — as well as many other Western European officials — wanted the prosecutor, a man named Viktor Shokin, removed because he was believed to be trying to stymie anti-corruption efforts in Ukraine.

But you don’t have to take my word for it: Take what Sens. Ron Johnson (R-WI) and Rob Portman (R-OH) have recently said about Shokin’s 2016 departure.

“The whole world felt that this that Shokin wasn’t doing a [good] enough job. So we were saying, ‘Hey, you’ve … got to rid yourself of corruption,” Johnson told the radio program The Vicki McKenna Show on Thursday.

And then on Monday, Portman told Ohio’s Columbus Dispatchthe same thing. While the article doesn’t contain quotes to this effect, it describes Portman as “disput[ing] Trump’s characterization of an ousted Ukrainian as an aggressive battler of corruption,” saying he and other lawmakers “believed the prosecutor wasn’t doing nearly enough to root out corruption — not because he was doing too much.”

This isn’t terribly surprising. Johnson and Portman were two of three GOP senators who co-signed a bipartisan 2016 letter to Ukraine’s then-president calling for him to “press ahead with urgent reforms to the Prosecutor General’s office and judiciary.” Four days later, Shokin resigned (although he didn’t officially leave until the following month when Ukraine’s Parliament voted him out).

But in another sense, this is a crucial point. Trump’s belief in this conspiracy theory is seemingly part of what got him into this mess: He noted it in conversation with current Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in their now infamous July 25 callwhere Trump pressured his counterpart to investigate Biden’s conduct.

“I heard you had a prosecutor who was very good and he was shut down and that’s really unfair,” the president told Zelensky. “A lot of people are talking about that, the way they shut your very good prosecutor down and you had some very bad people involved.”

What Portman and Johnson have done, though, is confirm Trump’s desire to want Biden investigated isn’t based in reality. Shokin was so bad that Biden, European, and GOP lawmakers wanted him gone.

It’s worth noting that neither senator has said they believe Trump’s desire to have Kyiv probe a 2020 rival is impeachable conduct, so the president isn’t in any more danger of leaving the White House early. Johnson, particularly, has become one of the president’s staunchest defenders in recent days, signing a September 2019 letterasking Attorney General Bill Barr to look into possible Biden-Ukraine corruption and pushing debunked conspiracy theories about the FBI on television this weekend.

But what’s more clear than ever is that the impeachment crisis, of Trump’s own making, was based on a conspiracy theory he had no business believing in.

© 2019 Vox Media, Inc. All Rights Reserved

youtu.be/dJe1iUuAW4M

Two alternative theories are emerging within political and public domains.

The first one is based on the view that Trump is a vile and manipulative narcissist, of a very high IQ , a managed genius of high caliber, who will not stop catering to his vast self perception, not even short of destroying the cradle of civilisation he should be grateful for, for that accounts for his abundant wealth.

The second view much more conventional is that he has been set up not only by the contradictory mesh that his own conflicting situation bears on the basic contradictions of current national and international politics, but by the imbalance between his own assessed economic reality, and that of his handlers who set him up in this mess.
His core supporters are not of the agile mind who could possibly pick up on this subtler distinction, and go along with the make America less swampy idea.

They are for the most part, bible thumping like those from Missouri, who believe only what become a appearent to them.

This reinforces the earlier ontological contradictive struggle inherent within an assumed contention , readily appearent to those in ‘know’.

His certainty may be an embedded assurance of his worth as a businessman, politician, and actor.

Again, this work proceeds the developmental first stage, and that is meant figuratively, which may or may not have a sequal .


------------‘--------------’
-------‘’—‘’‘-----’‘---------------’

Democracy Dies in Darkness

The Plum Line

Opinion

This will get worse for Trump. Adam Schiff signals what’s next.

(Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP)

By Greg Sargent

Opinion writer

October 8, 2019 at 9:19 AM EDT

Public opinion is shifting precipitously against President Trump, with a new Post-Schar School pollshowing that 58 percent of Americans support the House’s impeachment inquiry, and 49 percent support outright removal.

But even more ominously for Trump, 62 percent say Trump’s pressure on the Ukrainian president, the topic of the inquiry, was “inappropriate.” This, along with the large majority backing the inquiry, suggests a broad public appetite to learn more about this scandal. If more evidence of related corrupt conduct emerges, support for removal could keep growing.

Democracy Dies in Darkness

Politics

Live updates: White House says it will not cooperate with House impeachment inquiry; Democrats to subpoena State Dept. official

President Trump arrives to speak during a signing ceremony in the Roosevelt Room at the White House on Monday. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

By Felicia Sonmez, John Wagner and Colby Itkowitz

October 8, 2019 at 8:01 PM EDT

The White House said Tuesday that it will not cooperate with House Democrats’ impeachment inquiry, ratcheting up tensions between the legislative and executive branches amid an outcry from Democrats that the Trump administration is stonewalling their investigations.

Trump personal attorney Rudolph W. Giuliani said earlier Tuesday that he would not cooperate with House investigators and that he “can’t imagine” that anyone from the Trump administration would appear before a Democratic-led panel investigating the president.

Giuliani’s comments came hours after the State Department blocked a scheduled deposition by Gordon Sondland, a key figure in the Ukraine controversy, prompting three House committee chairmen to announce that they would issue a subpoena.

The Democrats said they viewed the move as “obstruction of the impeachment inquiry,” while President Trump sought to justify it by calling the House committees investigating him a “kangaroo court.”

Meanwhile, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) said he would invite Giuliani to appear before his panel to testify about “corruption and other improprieties involving Ukraine” — a prospect that Senate Democrats said they would welcome.

●Poll: Majority of Americans say they endorse opening of House impeachment inquiry of Trump.

●House Democrats consider masking identity of whistleblower from Trump’s GOP allies in Congress.

●Demoralized State Department personnel question Pompeo’s role in Ukraine crisis

7:30 p.m.: McCarthy says Trump ‘is right to call out this rushed process’

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) issued a statement Tuesday night supporting Trump’s decision not to cooperate with House Democrats’ impeachment inquiry.

“President Trump is right to call out this rushed process because Democrats refuse to protect the transparency and basic fairness that have been integral to previous impeachment proceedings,” McCarthy said.

Earlier Tuesday, Pelosi sent a letter to House Democrats defending the inquiry.

“The President will be held accountable,” she wrote. “When it comes to impeachment, it is just about the facts and the Constitution.”

7:00 p.m.: House Democrats subpoena Sondland

Three House Democratic committee chairs sent a letter Tuesday night formally subpoenaing Sondland. The subpoena compels Sondland to testify at a deposition on Oct. 16 at 9:30 a.m and to produce documents by Oct. 14.

“In light of Secretary Pompeo’s direct intervention to block your appearance before our Committees, we are left with no choice but to compel your appearance at a deposition pursuant to the enclosed subpoena,” Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.), the House Intelligence Committee chairman, Rep. Eliot L. Engel (D-N.Y.), the chairman of the Committee on Foreign Affairs, and Rep. Elijah E. Cummings (D-Md.), the chairman of the Committee on Oversight and Reform, wrote in the letter.

6:40 p.m.: Gowdy expected to join Trump’s legal team

Former congressman Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) is expected to join Trump’s legal team as an outside counsel, according to a senior White House official who said Gowdy met with White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney earlier Tuesday.

Trump has blessed the move, the official added.

Gowdy is a former chairman of the House Oversight Committee; he also led the two-year House investigation into the 2012 terrorist attacks on a U.S. diplomatic outpost in Benghazi, Libya.

Like many in Trump’s inner circle, he has been a regular fixture on Fox News Channel, both before and after his departure from the House in January.

— Josh Dawsey

6:10 p.m.: House Democrats respond to White House: Letter ’won’t halt Congress one iota’

Several House Democrats took to Twitter on Tuesday night to denounce the letter sent by White House counsel Pat Cipollone to House leaders.

“Trump and his enablers continue to argue that the Constitution is unconstitutional,” Rep. Bill Pascrell Jr. (D-N.J.) said. “This letter could’ve been written by the same authoritarian goons trump admires so much. It’s garbage and won’t halt Congress one iota.”

Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.), who had briefly pursued a 2020 presidential bid, said Trump’s actions show he has “a guilty conscience.”

“I want you to imagine what would happen if while driving you saw police lights behind you and instead of pulling over, you sped away,” he said. “If you think you can’t do that, then it’s clear why @realDonaldTrump can’t do that. But he is.”

And Rep. Rick Larsen (D-Wash.) argued that the White House’s refusal to cooperate with the impeachment inquiry warrants yet another article of impeachment.

“I don’t think I’m confused here: The House wants, but does not need, the WH to conduct an impeachment inquiry; and obstruction of an impeachment inquiry is, itself, can be grounds for impeachment,” he tweeted.

5:45 p.m.: Louisiana Republican running for governor calls for Pelosi’s expulsion

Rep. Ralph Abraham (R-La.) filed a House resolution Tuesday calling for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to be expelled from Congress, citing the ongoing impeachment inquiry targeting Trump.

Abraham is locked in a heated race for governor, and his resolution targeting Pelosi (D-Calif.) — a despised figure among GOP voters — comes just days before Louisiana voters go to the polls Saturday for the first round of voting.

“Nancy Pelosi’s vicious crusade against our lawfully-elected President is nothing more than a politically-motivated witch hunt and it must be stopped,” Abraham said in a statement. “She has disgraced the people’s House and weaponized the Speaker’s gavel for her party’s political gain.”

Recent polls show Democratic Gov. Jon Bel Edwards is on the cusp of securing a second term Saturday by winning an outright majority. Abraham is trying to both keep Edwards under 50 percent and outflank GOP businessman Eddie Rispone to win the right to challenge Edwards in a Nov. 16 runoff.

Only five members have been expelled from the House since its founding in 1789 — most recently Rep. James A. Traficant (D-Ohio), who was ousted in 2002 after his conviction on federal corruption charges.

A Pelosi spokesman dismissed the letter as a “publicity stunt” meant to bolster Abraham’s teetering campaign ahead of Trump’s planned visit to the state Friday.

— Mike DeBonis

5:30 p.m.: White House press secretary says Trump ‘has done nothing wrong’

White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham defended Trump in a statement shortly after the release of the letter to House leaders.

“The President has done nothing wrong, and the Democrats know it,” Grisham said. “For purely political reasons, the Democrats have decided their desire to overturn the outcome of the 2016 election allows them to conduct a so-called impeachment inquiry that ignores the fundamental rights guaranteed to every American.”

She accused Democrats of holding closed-door hearings to “deny the president the right to call witnesses, to cross-examine witnesses, to have access to evidence, and many other basic rights.”

5 p.m.: White House says it will not cooperate with House impeachment inquiry

In a scathing eight-page letter to House leaders, Cipollone wrote that House Democrats’ recent actions violate “the Constitution, the rule of law, and every past precedent.” He criticized the impeachment inquiry as attempt to overturn the 2016 presidential election results and to influence the upcoming 2020 campaign.

“In order to fulfill his duties to the American people, the Constitution, the Executive Branch, and all future occupants of the Office of the Presidency, President Trump and his Administration cannot participate in your partisan and unconstitutional inquiry under these circumstances,” Cipollone wrote.

Pelosi has said repeatedly that the House does not have to hold a formal vote to launch an impeachment inquiry.

“The effort to impeach President Trump — without regard to any evidence of his actions in office — is a naked political strategy that began the day he was inaugurated, and perhaps even before,” Cipollone wrote.

4:30 p.m.: Pelosi tells Democrats: ‘The President will be held accountable’

In a letter to the House Democratic Caucus, Pelosi urged her members to address the impeachment inquiry they’re undertaking “somberly and prayerfully.”

“The actions taken by the President over the past two weeks show a defiance of our Founders, with a total disregard for their wisdom and the U.S. Constitution,” Pelosi wrote.

Then, mocking a phrase he used to describe himself in a tweet, she wrote, “In his ‘great and unmatched wisdom,’ President Trump must know that no one is above the law. The President will be held accountable. When it comes to impeachment, it is just about the facts and the Constitution.”

Pelosi also accused Trump of “obstructing justice, abusing power and diminishing the office of the presidency,” which she said makes it all the more important that the legislative branch of government perform its role.

4 p.m.: No comment from Sondland’s attorney on subpoena

Robert Luskin, Sondland’s attorney, said he had no additional comment to make about Democrats’ plans to subpoena his client for testimony on Capitol Hill. Sondland’s legal team will review any subpoena when it is served, he added.

— Carol D. Leonnig

3:40 p.m.: Clinton to Trump: ‘Don’t tempt me.’

Hillary Clinton, the 2016 Democratic presidential nominee, responded to Trump’s suggestion that she could win the nomination next year over Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.).

“Don’t tempt me. Do your job,” Clinton tweeted.

Earlier Tuesday, Trump had mused that Clinton “should enter the race to try to steal it away from Uber Left Elizabeth Warren.”

Clinton is currently on a book promotion tour with her daughter and co-author Chelsea Clinton.

3:30 p.m.: House panel asks court to enforce Mueller-related subpoenas, a step toward possible impeachment

Justice Department lawyers urged a federal judge Tuesday to deny a House Judiciary Committee request for grand jury materials in special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation, arguing that in hindsight, courts in 1974 should not have given Congress the Watergate grand jury “road map” that led to President Richard M. Nixon’s impeachment.

Chief U.S. District Judge Beryl A. Howell of Washington, D.C., expressed astonishment at the position, calling it one of several “extraordinary” stances taken by Trump administration lawyers to oppose House subpoenas and witness testimony in a gathering impeachment investigation.

The debate centers on the 1974 decision in Haldeman v. Sirica, ultimately upheld by the full U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, which found that a congressional impeachment investigation and trial satisfy an exception to grand jury secrecy rules provided for a “judicial proceeding.”

— Spencer Hsu

3:15 p.m.: Pocan says individual who blocked Sondland testimony may have broken the law

Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Wis.) send a letter to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Tuesday requesting information on who instructed Sondland not to testify.

Pocan cited Section 713 of Division D of Public Law 116-6, which prohibits the payment of salary to any “officer or employee of the Federal Government who prohibits or prevents … any other officer or employee of the Federal Government from … communication or contact with any Member, committee, or subcommittee of the Congress.”

“I believe the person prohibiting Ambassador Sondland from testifying before the House Intelligence Committee is in violation of this statute, and that their salary should be withheld until Ambassador Sondland appears before Congress,” Pocan wrote.

3 p.m.: Former State Dept. attorney says White House can’t legally block Yovanovitch from testifying.

Harold Koh, a former State Department legal adviser and current Yale Law School professor, said he sees “no basis to legally block” former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch from testifying Friday.

But Trump, through Pompeo, could say “you’ll never work for the U.S. government again,” in which case she could potentially suffer other consequences. He noted how FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe was fired just hours before he was set to retire with full benefits.

If she receives some kind of letter asking her not to testify, but does so anyway, she could be further instructed by that letter not to answer questions that would violate executive privilege or that require recitation of classified material, Koh said in an email to The Post. A claim of violation of classification laws could expose her to prosecution under the Espionage Act and other laws, he said.

“Presumably Ambassador Yovanovitch would just say, ‘I don’t want to testify about privileged and classified matters’ and then go on to testify truthfully and at length about other conversations” — particularly, he said, text chains with other officials similar to the text disclosed to Congress by former Ukraine special envoy Kurt Volker last week.

— Ellen Nakashima

2:45 p.m.: Career diplomats tell Pompeo to defend Yovanovitch

More than two dozen career and political diplomats who at one time worked with Yovanovitch wrote to Pompeo asking him to defend attacks on Yovanovitch.

Yovanovitch, they wrote, “represents the finest in the Foreign Service,” and described her work as “exemplary.”

Which is why, they said, they were so disturbed to learn that during Trump’s call with the Ukrainian president, he disparaged her and said, “she’s going to go through some things.”

Yovanovitch, who was called back early from her Ukraine post, is scheduled to meet with congressional investigators on Friday.

“Ambassador Yovanovitch deserves your unstinting support, as do other career diplomats who may become ensnared in the upcoming Congressional investigation and impeachment process,” they wrote. “All employees of the Department — Foreign Service officers, civil servants, and political appointees — need to know that you have their backs against scurrilous political attacks and smears.”

Those who signed include ambassadors who worked in Republican and Democratic administrations.

2:35 p.m.: Trump ‘must stop stonewalling,’ Biden says

Former vice president Joe Biden responded to the Trump administration’s efforts to block Gordon Sondland, the U.S. ambassador to the European Union, from testifying by arguing that the president should cooperate with lawmakers.

“President Trump must stop stonewalling Congress and fully cooperate with the investigations,” Biden said in a tweet. “The American people deserve the truth.”

1:45 p.m.: Schumer says Giuliani must be under oath if he testifies

Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) said Tuesday that if Giuliani appears before the Senate Judiciary Committee, his testimony must be under oath.

“We welcome Mr. Giuliani testifying,” Schumer tweeted. “Given the apparent depth of his involvement in the president’s effort to convince foreign governments to investigate a political rival, he must testify under oath.”

Schumer was referring to Trump’s effort to persuade the leader of Ukraine to investigate Biden and his son Hunter Biden.

1:30 p.m.: Giuliani says he won’t testify in House, ‘can’t imagine’ others will

Giuliani said Tuesday that he would not testify in front of the House Intelligence Committee and that he “can’t imagine” that anyone from the Trump administration would appear before the panel led by Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.) either.

“The position I’m stating is now the position of the administration,” Giuliani said in an interview in which he revealed that the administration has written a letter that will be released soon saying that Schiff’s committee is illegitimate.

“I wouldn’t testify in front of that committee until there is a vote of Congress and he [Schiff] is removed,” Giuliani said, referring to Republican calls for a full House vote on an impeachment inquiry and the removal of Schiff as the committee’s chairman.

“Let them hold me in contempt. We’ll go to court. We’ll challenge the contempt,” Giuliani added.

A White House spokesman declined to comment on Giuliani’s remarks.

Giuliani, meanwhile, said that he is “very interested” in accepting Graham’s officer to testify in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee but that “there are a lot of legal issues to consider.”

“Graham wants me to lay out in one place, in one time the Ukrainian collusion and the Biden corruption,” Giuliani said, adding that the idea for him to testify was not his. “I appreciate Lindsey offering the opportunity to lay the whole case out.”

It’s unclear how public Giuliani’s testimony would be, if it even occurs. A spokeswoman for the Senate Judiciary Committee said it has yet to be determined whether Giuliani’s appearance would be open or closed to the public. The committee also has not decided whether senators or staff would question Giuliani, she said.

— Josh Dawsey and Seung Min Kim

1 p.m.: Jimmy Carter says Trump is stonewalling, advises him ‘to tell the truth’

Former president Jimmy Carter reacted Tuesday to the Trump administration’s decision to block Sondland from testifying, calling it “a departure from custom and what American people expect.”

“I think that’s going to be another item of evidence used against him if he continues to stonewall and prevent evidence to be put forward to the House and Senate to consider,” Carter said during an appearance on MSNBC.

“My advice to him would be to tell the truth and also to cut back on his Twitter feeds,” Carter told host Andrea Mitchell. “And give the House of Representatives, and also the Senate and the general public, the evidence that we need to form a case either for or against him.”

12:20 p.m.: Harris, Feinstein say they have questions for Giuliani

Sen. Kamala D. Harris (D-Calif.) on Tuesday highlighted a potential dilemma for Giuliani as he decides whether he wants to take up Graham’s offer to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

In a tweet, Harris responded to Graham’s announcement on Twitter that he asked Giuliani to share his concerns “about corruption and other improprieties involving Ukraine.”

“Good. I have questions,” tweetedHarris, who has earned a reputation for her aggressive questioning of witnesses before the committee, including now-Supreme Court Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh.

While testifying would offer Giuliani a chance to advance Trump’s unproven contention that Biden and his son were involved in corruption, it would also provide the opportunity for Harris and other Senate Democrats to probe Giuliani’s role in pressuring Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (Calif.), the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, made that clear in a statement shortly after Harris’s tweet.

“I welcome the opportunity to question Rudy Giuliani under oath about his role in seeking the Ukrainian government’s assistance to investigate one of the president’s political rivals,” she said. “Democratic members have plenty of questions for Mr. Giuliani and this would give us an opportunity to help separate fact from fiction for the American people.”

12:10 p.m.: Trump takes another shot at Schiff

Trump lashed out anew at House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.), who he has previously said should be removed from office.

“Hasn’t Adam Schiff been fully discredited by now?” Trump tweeted. “Do we have to continue listening to his lies?”

The president didn’t spell out what he considered to be lies by Schiff.

11:40 a.m.: House committees to issue subpoena to Gordon Sondland

Three House committee chairmen announced that they would issue a subpoena to compel testimony from Sondland, hours after learning he had declined to appear for a deposition at the direction of the State Department.

“We consider this interference to be obstruction of the impeachment inquiry,” the three committee chairmen said in a statement Tuesday. “We will be issuing subpoena to Ambassador Sondland for both his testimony and documents.”

Schiff, Engel and Cummings issued the statement after Sondland was a no-show on Capitol Hill.

Schiff said that the Trump administration had also directed Sondland not to share text messages relevant to the inquiry, which focuses on a July phone call in which Trump pressured Zelensky to investigate the Bidens.

11 a.m.: Jeffries sends a pointed warning to Trump on Twitter

Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.), a key member of the House Democratic leadership team, sent a blunt warning to Trump on Twitter late Tuesday morning.

“Obstruction of a constitutionally mandated impeachment inquiry is a high crime and misdemeanor,” Jeffries wrote, referring to the standard for impeachment of a president

His tweet came about two hours after news reports that the Trump administration was blocking Sondland from appearing before three House committees.

10:20 a.m.: Trump campaign manager welcomes Giuliani testimony

Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale took to Twitter shortly after Graham announced his invitation for Giuliani to testify, seemingly voicing his approval.

“Open up Pandora’s box! Let the Democrats dirty secrets out,” Parscale tweeted.

10:15 a.m.: Graham say he’ll invite Giuliani to testify on Ukraine corruption

Graham said Tuesday that he would invite Giuliani to testify before his panel about “corruption and other improprieties involving Ukraine.”

Giuliani has pressed Ukraine to investigate Hunter Biden, who was on the board of a Ukrainian gas company, and the firing of the prosecutor who had investigated it.

Former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani took to the airwaves to defend President Trump — and it didn’t always go well. (Zach Purser Brown/The Washington Post)

Meno wrote "Two alternative theories are emerging within political and public domains.

The first one is based on the view that Trump is a vile and manipulative narcissist, of a very high IQ , a managed genius of high caliber, who will not stop catering to his vast self perception, not even short of destroying the cradle of civilisation he should be grateful for, for that accounts for his abundant wealth.

The second view much more conventional is that he has been set up not only by the contradictory mesh that his own conflicting situation bears on the basic contradictions of current national and international politics, but by the imbalance between his own assessed economic reality, and that of his handlers who set him up in this mess.
His core supporters are not of the agile mind who could possibly pick up on this subtler distinction, and go along with the make America less swampy idea.

They are for the most part, bible thumping like those from Missouri, who believe only what become a appearent to them.

This reinforces the earlier ontological contradictive struggle inherent within an assumed contention , readily appearent to those in ‘know’.

His certainty may be an embedded assurance of his worth as a businessman, politician, and actor.

“Again, this work proceeds the developmental first stage, and that is meant figuratively, which may or may not have a sequal .”

The unification of the two is what is at stake, to make a credible effort to see these two views in a.c. c ordnance to a single derivitive to appear as non consequential, within the higher value of the betterment for the country as the whole. At issue is one consisting of a desired progressive national unity within it’s worldly implications.
The vacuum left after the fall of the Soviet Union is enormous, and world politic was left missing the most important political tool with which to grapple day to day matters, that is the dialectics of substantial manifested mechanics of the intercourse of diplomacy.

As hidden it was before it’s demise, it exerted enormous influence within the actual machinations involved, in the Western spheres of influence, as it had within the perimeters of the third world.
Whether the NWO conceptually required such states of affairs, or, negatively, the effecticitu of such relationship was more of a build up of probable contingencies, is still harboring levels of conscious manifestation in accordance with the levels and forces of conscious policy conscious constructions.

Such appear more as fabrication today, and momentum is building to further public required clarity.

The former, seems more likely a scenario, remembering that Trump appeared sans platform in the weaning days of his presidency.

The unification of the two is what is at stake, to make a credible effort to see these two views in a.c. c ordnance to a single derivitive to appear as non consequential, within the higher value of the betterment for the country as the whole. At issue is one consisting of a desired progressive national unity within it’s worldly implications.
The vacuum left after the fall of the Soviet Union is enormous, and world politic was left missing the most important political tool with which to grapple day to day matters, that is the dialectics of substantial manifested mechanics of the intercourse of diplomacy.

As hidden it was before it’s demise, it exerted enormous influence within the actual machinations involved, in the Western spheres of influence, as it had within the perimeters of the third world.
Whether the NWO conceptually required such states of affairs, or, negatively, the effecticitu of such relationship was more of a build up of probable contingencies, is still harboring levels of conscious manifestation in accordance with the levels and forces of conscious policy conscious constructions.

Such appear more as fabrication today, and momentum is building to further public required clarity.

The former, seems more likely a scenario, remembering that Trump appeared sans platform in the weaning days of his presidency.

The unification of the two is what is at stake, to make a credible effort to see these two views in accordance ordnance to a single derivitive to appear as non consequential, within the higher value of the betterment for the country as the whole. At issue is one consisting of a desired progressive national unity within it’s worldly implications.
The vacuum left after the fall of the Soviet Union is enormous, and world politic was left missing the most important political tool with which to grapple day to day matters, that is the dialectics of substantial manifested mechanics of the intercourse of diplomacy.

As hidden it was before it’s demise, it exerted enormous influence within the actual machinations involved, in the Western spheres of influence, as it had within the perimeters of the third world.
Whether the NWO conceptually required such states of affairs, or, negatively, the effecticitu of such relationship was more of a build up of probable contingencies, is still harboring levels of conscious manifestation in accordance with the levels and forces of conscious policy conscious constructions.

Such appear more as fabrication today, and momentum is building to further public required clarity.

The former, seems more likely a scenario, remembering that Trump appeared sans platform in the weaning days of his presidency.

New wrangling:

Trump says Kurds ‘didn’t help us with D-Day’ as Turkey attacks – live

Trump fails to note that allies helped fight Isis for years amid questions over troop pullout

Maanvi Singh in San Francisco (now) and Joan E Greve in Washington (earlier)

Wed 9 Oct 2019 19.11 ED

Key events

19:11 EDT

Donald Trump pressed former secretary of state Rex Tillerson to persude the Justice Department to drop a case against an Iranian-Turkish gold trader who was a client of Rudy Giuliani, Bloomberg is reporting, citing three unnamed sources familiar with the 2017 meeting.

Tillerson refused, arguing it would constitute interference in an ongoing investigation of the trader, Reza Zarrab, according to the people. They said other participants in the Oval Office were shocked by the request.

Tillerson immediately repeated his objections to then-Chief of Staff John Kelly in a hallway conversation just outside the Oval Office, emphasizing that the request would be illegal. Neither episode has been previously reported, and all of the people spoke on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the conversations.

Zarrab was being prosecuted in federal court in New York at the time on charges of evading U.S. sanctions against Iran’s nuclear program. He had hired former Attorney General Michael Mukasey and Giuliani, who has said he reached out repeatedly to U.S. officials to seek a diplomatic solution for his client outside the courts.

The president’s request to Tillerson – which included asking him to speak with Giuliani – bears the hallmarks of Trump’s governing style, defined by his willingness to sweep aside the customary procedures and constraints of government to pursue matters outside normal channels. Tillerson’s objection came to light as Trump’s dealings with foreign leaders face intense scrutiny following the July 25 call with Ukraine’s president that has sparked an impeachment inquiry in the House.

The Guardian has not independently verified Bloomberg’s report.

Updated at 19:11 EDT

19:06 EDT

Bernie Sanders said he “misspoke” when he said he’d be slowing down his campaign

Sanders spoke to reporters outside his home in Burlington, Vt. Photograph: Wilson Ring/AP

In an interview with NBC, Sanders said he wouldn’t be slowing down his campaign after suffering a heart attack, saying he misspoke when he told reporters that he will “change the nature of the campaign a bit” after being hospitalized.

“We’re going to get back into the groove of a very vigorous campaign, I love doing rallies and I love doing town meetings,” Sanders said. “I want to start off slower and build up and build up and build up.”

Last week, Sanders was at a campaign event in Nevada when he experienced chest discomfort and was taken to a hospital.

Updated at 19:06 EDT

18:47 EDT

“I found that to be wholly appropriate,” said Secretary of State Mike Pompeo of the July call between Donald Trump and Ukraine’s president.

“I was on the call. I listened to it. It was consistent with what President Trump has been trying to do to take corruption out” Pompeo told PBS’ Judy Woodruff.

Live on @NewsHour: @JudyWoodruffinterviews Secretary of State Mike Pompeo https://t.co/7BNYxda8Fp

— PBS NewsHour (@NewsHour) October 9, 2019

Updated at 18:47 EDT

18:10 EDT

As we noted earlier, when Trump defended his decision abandon Kurdish allies in Syria by saying that they didn’t help the US during World War II.

“They didn’t help us with Normandy as an example,” Trump told reporters.

Trump on the Kurds: “They didn’t help us in the Second World War, they didn’t help us with Normandy, as an example.” He suggests that they battled alongside U.S. forces for “their land,” and adds, “With all of that being said, we like the Kurds.” pic.twitter.com/4aFGJiQquv

— Luis Velarde (@luivelarde) October 9, 2019

Kurdish forces, did, however, fight alongside the US against Isis for nearly five years, losing roughly 11,000 fighters.

On Sunday, the president announced that US troops would withdraw from the region, and today, Turkey has launched an offensive into north-eastern Syria against Kurdish forces who control the region.

Trump said he learned that the Kurds didn’t help in Normandy from a “very, very powerful article”, and seemed to be referencing a column by conservative opinion writer Kurt Schlichter.

Trump appears to have gotten his “Kurds didn’t help us at Normandy” line from a Kurt Schlichter column. https://t.co/jAbsP9VCQtpic.twitter.com/6HknvoZ0gl

— Will Sommer (@willsommer) October 9, 2019

Misrepresenting howNato works, Trump told reporters: “If you look at how much money we spend on NATO and how much countries from Europe who are a much bigger beneficiary than we are.”

“Alliances are very easy. But our alliances have taken advantage of us,” Trump said.

“We have spent a tremendous amount of money helping the Kurds,” the president said. “They’re fighting for their land. When you say they’re fighting with the US, yes. But they’re fighting for their land.”

“With all of that being said, we like the Kurds,” Trump added.

Turkey unleashes airstrikes against Kurds in north-east Syria

Updated at 18:27 EDT

17:55 EDT

Trump told reporters he’ll cooperate with the House democrats’ impeachment inquiry if “they give us our rights”.

Asked whether he’ll cooperate with the democrats if they hold a vote on the impeachment inquiry, Trump responded: “The Republican Party and president has been treated extremely badly by the Democrats, very unfairly, because they have a tiny margin in the House, they have eviscerated the rules, they don’t give us any fair play, it is the most unfair situation people have seen, no lawyers, you can’t have lawyers, you can’t speak, you can’t do anything.”

But does the president have the right to due process during an impeachment?

In a word: No.

From NPR:

The Constitution states clearly that the House of Representatives “shall have the sole Power of Impeachment,” and that “the Senate shall have the sole Power to try all Impeachments.”

What “impeachment” means in this context is, effectively, indictment — the House has the power to determine whether sufficient evidence exists to spur a trial that would then take place in the Senate.

Updated at 17:55 EDT

17:01 EDT

That’s it from me today. My west coast colleague, Maanvi Singh, will be taking over the blog for the next few hours.

Here’s where the day stands so far:

The Justice Department announced the arrest of an employee at the Defense Intelligence Agency for allegedly leaking sensitive national security information to two journalists.

For the first time, Joe Biden called for the impeachment of Trump over the Ukraine controversy.

Trump defended his decision to withdraw US troops from northern Syria as Turkey launched a military operation in the region. (The president also flippantly said he was not worried about the potential escape of Islamic State fighters because they would likely flee to Europe.)

Despite that defensive stance, a number of Republican lawmakers criticized Trump’s Syria policy as news of the Turkish operation broke.

House Democratsare reportedly planning a new wave of subpoenas as the White House made clear it would not cooperate with the impeachment inquiry.

Maanvi will have more on the news of the day, so stay tuned.

Updated at 17:01 EDT

16:50 EDT

Democrats reportedly planning new wave of subpoenas

House Democrats are preparing a new wave of subpoenas as the White House has signaled it will not cooperate with the impeachment inquiry, according to CNN.

They are also considering a secret interview of the whistleblower who kicked off the Ukraine controversy.

CNN reports:

In the face of the blistering White House letter refusing to cooperate with their probe, Democrats expect they are likely done with any voluntary interviews for most witnesses, according to multiple Democratic sources. And Democrats are now threatening subpoenas to associates of Rudy Giuliani and considering them for current State Department officials, including former US Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch. She is scheduled for an interview Friday, but there are new concerns she won’t appear given that she is still a State Department employee and could face backlash internally if she were to appear voluntarily.

Negotiations are also intensifying over bringing in for an interview the whistleblower whose complaint has upended Trump’s presidency, with new discussions about holding the interview in secret or off site and not disclosing that it happened until after the fact, according to multiple sources familiar with the situation.

Updated at 16:50 EDT

16:44 EDT

In response to a question about the threat facing America’s Kurdish allies now that Turkey had launched a military operation in northern Syria, Trump blamed them for not assisting in World War II.

Asked about the Kurds, President Trump said that the Kurds did not help the US during WWII or in the Normandy invasion/ D-Day

— Jamie Dupree (@jamiedupree) October 9, 2019

Updated at 16:44 EDT

16:34 EDT

Asked about Islamic State fighters potentially escaping amid Turkey’s military operation in northern Syria, Trump told reporters he felt the United States had carried a disproportionate amount of responsibility in capturing the militants.

Trump indicates he’s not worried about ISIS fighters escaping northern Syria because if they do they’ll just end up in Europe pic.twitter.com/cBsbXQxjsg

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) October 9, 2019

Trump said: “Well, they’re going to be escaping to Europe. That’s where they want to go; they want to go back to their homes, but Europe didn’t want them from us.”

Trump predicts Islamic State fighters will escape to Europe - video

The president said the relationship between the US and its European allies had not been “reciprocal” when it came to combating the Islamic State.

In response to Trump’s comments, a CNN reporter questioned whether the flippant remark about Islamic State militants returning to Europe, where the group has previously carried out terrorist attacks, would provoke any condemnation from Republican lawmakers.

Is there a single GOP lawmaker, Trump surrogate or media ally who will take issue with the US president dismissing the escape of ISIS terrorists into Europe? https://t.co/O0HvkWltqs

— Jim Sciutto (@jimsciutto) October 9, 2019

Updated at 17:23 EDT

16:27 EDT

Trump said he would cooperate with the impeachment inquiry if the full House votes on it and “if the rules are fair,” but he appeared to leave himself a lot of wiggle room on the issue.

Trump says he’ll agree to cooperate in Democrats’ impeachment probe only “if the rules are fair.” Won’t commit to cooperation if the full House holds a vote.

— Kevin Liptak (@Kevinliptakcnn) October 9, 2019

Updated at 16:27 EDT

16:16 EDT

Trump predicts Islamic State fighters will escape to Europe

When asked by reporters whether he was concerned that Islamic State fighters would be able to escape because of Turkey’s military operation, Trumppredicted that the militants would not travel to the US.

The president said this to apparently reassure the American people (and surely terrify many US allies): “They’re going to be escaping to Europe.”

President Trump says he will “wipe out” Turkey’s economy if Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan tries to take out the Kurds in northern Syria: “I hope that he will act rationally” https://t.co/1ftZN3y51Ypic.twitter.com/OAkuAlsYc4

— CBS News (@CBSNews) October 9, 2019

Trump also dismissed criticism from senator Lindsey Graham, one of his closest congressional allies, over the president’s decision to withdraw US troops from the region.

Trump said: “I think Lindsey would like to stay there for the next 200 years.”

Updated at 16:16 EDT

16:08 EDT

Trump stands by his decision to withdraw US troops from northern Syria

Speaking to reporters after signing two executive orders, Trump stood by his decision to withdraw US troops from northern Syria even as Turkey launched a military operation in the region.

President Trump: Turkey has been wanting to do this for years. These people have been fighting each other for centuries. I feel like we are doing the right thing by pulling out. It has to be done or otherwise we will never do it.

— Yamiche Alcindor (@Yamiche) October 9, 2019

Asked how he would react if Turkish forces decimated America’s Kurdish allies in the region, Trump warned he would “wipe out” Turkey’s economy if they did so.

15:57 EDT

The British prime minister’s office released a readout from Boris Johnson’s conversation with Trump.

It reads, in part: “The Prime Minister spoke to President Trump this evening. The leaders expressed their serious concern at Turkey’s invasion of north east Syria and the risk of a humanitarian catastrophe in the region. …

“On trade, the Prime Minister underlined his disappointment at the US announcement of tariffs against UK and EU exports in the Airbus-Boeing dispute, which will harm a number of industries including Scotch Whisky. He pressed the President not to impose the tariffs.”

Updated at 15:57 EDT

15:51 EDT

Trump is now making remarks about two executive orders he is signing and noted that he had an “extended conversation” with the British prime minister, Boris Johnson.

President Trump says he just had an “extended conversation” with British PM Boris Johnson, adding “they will be doing a number of things for us.” pic.twitter.com/S1UPo4DHDB

— Eamon Javers (@EamonJavers) October 9, 2019

Updated at 15:51 EDT

15:45 EDT

Even as senator Lindsey Grahamlambastes Trump’s decision to withdraw US troops from Syria, he is standing by the president on confronting the impeachment inquiry.

Specifically, the Senate judiciary committee chairman is accusing House Democrats of abusing their power by not releasing a transcript from their closed-door interview with Kurt Volker, the former US ambassador to NATO.

Graham warned that he would call Volker to publicly testify if the transcript is not released soon.

If this continues, I will call Volker before the Senate Judiciary Committee to testify publicly to ensure the full story is told.t.co/jNi3KQ3wRB

— Lindsey Graham (@LindseyGrahamSC) October 9, 2019

Facebook is refusing to take down a Trumpcampaign ad that centers on false claims of corruption against Joe Biden.

CNN has already refused to air the ad over its factual inaccuracies, but Facebook wrote in a letter to the Biden campaign that the video did not violate the social media platform’s policies.

A Facebook executive wrote: “Our approach is grounded in Facebook’s fundamental belief in free expression, respect for the democratic process, and the belief that, in mature democracies with a free press, political speech is already arguably the most scrutinized speech there is.”

The social media giant’s decision provoked an enraged response from at least one of Biden’s primary opponents, Elizabeth Warren.

The following is a record of a conversation I had this afternoon with a White House official about the telephone call yesterday morning between President Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. The official who listened to the entirety of the phone call was visibly shaken by what had transpired and seemed keen to inform a trusted colleague within the U.S. national security apparatus about the call. After my call with this official I [redacted] returned to my office, and wrote up my best recollection of what I had heard.

The official described the call as “crazy,” “frightening” and “completely lacking in substance related to national security.” The official asserted that the President used the call to persuade Ukrainian authorities to investigate his political rivals, chiefly former Vice President Biden and his son, Hunter. The official stated that there was already a conversation underway with White House lawyers about how to handle the discussion because, in the official’s view, the President had clearly committed a criminal act by urging a foreign power to investigate a U.S. person for the purposes of advancing his own reelection bid in 2020.

The phone call lasted approximately half an hour. The two leaders spoke through interpreters. My conversation with the official only lasted a few minutes, and as a result, I only received highlights:

The President asserted that “it all started in Ukraine,” referring to the allegations of foreign interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election and the subsequent investigation into the Trump campaign’s contact with Russian individuals
The President asked Zelenskyy to locate the “Crowdstrike server” and turn it over to the United States, claiming that Crowdstrike is “a Ukrainian company,” (Note: This appears to be a reference to the DNC server from which Russian hackers stole data and emails that were subsequently leaked in mid-2016; the DNC hired cyber security firm Crowdstrike to do the forensic analysis, which informed the FBI’s investigation. It is not clear what the president was referring to when he claimed Crowdstrike is a Ukrainian company; one of its cofounders was born in Moscow.)
The President told Zelenskyy that he would be sending his personal lawyer, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, to Ukraine soon and requested that Zelenskyy meet with him. Zelenskyy reluctantly agreed that, if Giuliani traveled to Ukraine, he would see him.
The President raised the case of Burisma Holdings, Hunter Biden’s role in the company, and former Vice President Biden’s role in setting Ukraine policy. The President urged Zelenskyy to [end page 1] investigate the Bidens and stated that Giuliani would discuss this topic further with Zelenskyy during his trip to Kyiv.
The President urged Zelenskyy not to fire Ukrainian Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko, who the President claimed was doing a good job. (Note: Lutsenko has spearheaded various politicized investigations, including on Burisma Holdings and alleged “Ukrainian interference” in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Lutsenko is widely reviled in Ukraine, and Zelenskyy has pledged to fire him but has been unable to secure approval from the legislature.)
The President stated that he wanted Attorney General William Barr to speak with Zelenskyy as soon as possible. (Note: It was not clear whether this conversation was to be in reference to Crowdstrike or the investigations of the Bidens.)
The President reiterated his concern that Zelenskyy was surrounded by people who were enemies of the President, including “bad oligarchs.”
The President did not raise security assistance. According to the official, Zelenskyy demurred in response to most of the President’s requests.

I did not review a transcript or written notes, but the official informed me that they exist.

The standard White House practice for Presidential-level phone calls with world leaders is for the White House Situation Room to produce a word-for-word electronic transcript that memorializes the call. The transcript is typically then circulated to key White House officials to be transformed into a formal memorandum that is distributed as an eyes-only document, to the Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense, and Director of the CIA.
In this case, the official told me that such a transcript had indeed been produced and was being treated very sensitively, in hard copy only. Moreover, several additional senior White House officials listened to the entire phone call in an adjacent room in the Situation Room suite and they presumably took written notes on the call.
The official did not know whether the President was aware that other people were listening and that the call was being transcribed. The official also was not certain whether anyone else was in the Oval Office with the President during the call.
On the Ukrainian side, it is unclear who listened to the call or whether a record was produced.

© 2019 CBS Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Copyright © 2019 CBS Interactive Inc.

The following is a record of a conversation I had this afternoon with a White House official about the telephone call yesterday morning between President Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. The official who listened to the entirety of the phone call was visibly shaken by what had transpired and seemed keen to inform a trusted colleague within the U.S. national security apparatus about the call. After my call with this official I [redacted] returned to my office, and wrote up my best recollection of what I had heard.

The official described the call as “crazy,” “frightening” and “completely lacking in substance related to national security.” The official asserted that the President used the call to persuade Ukrainian authorities to investigate his political rivals, chiefly former Vice President Biden and his son, Hunter. The official stated that there was already a conversation underway with White House lawyers about how to handle the discussion because, in the official’s view, the President had clearly committed a criminal act by urging a foreign power to investigate a U.S. person for the purposes of advancing his own reelection bid in 2020.

The phone call lasted approximately half an hour. The two leaders spoke through interpreters. My conversation with the official only lasted a few minutes, and as a result, I only received highlights:

The President asserted that “it all started in Ukraine,” referring to the allegations of foreign interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election and the subsequent investigation into the Trump campaign’s contact with Russian individuals
The President asked Zelenskyy to locate the “Crowdstrike server” and turn it over to the United States, claiming that Crowdstrike is “a Ukrainian company,” (Note: This appears to be a reference to the DNC server from which Russian hackers stole data and emails that were subsequently leaked in mid-2016; the DNC hired cyber security firm Crowdstrike to do the forensic analysis, which informed the FBI’s investigation. It is not clear what the president was referring to when he claimed Crowdstrike is a Ukrainian company; one of its cofounders was born in Moscow.)
The President told Zelenskyy that he would be sending his personal lawyer, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, to Ukraine soon and requested that Zelenskyy meet with him. Zelenskyy reluctantly agreed that, if Giuliani traveled to Ukraine, he would see him.
The President raised the case of Burisma Holdings, Hunter Biden’s role in the company, and former Vice President Biden’s role in setting Ukraine policy. The President urged Zelenskyy to [end page 1] investigate the Bidens and stated that Giuliani would discuss this topic further with Zelenskyy during his trip to Kyiv.
The President urged Zelenskyy not to fire Ukrainian Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko, who the President claimed was doing a good job. (Note: Lutsenko has spearheaded various politicized investigations, including on Burisma Holdings and alleged “Ukrainian interference” in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Lutsenko is widely reviled in Ukraine, and Zelenskyy has pledged to fire him but has been unable to secure approval from the legislature.)
The President stated that he wanted Attorney General William Barr to speak with Zelenskyy as soon as possible. (Note: It was not clear whether this conversation was to be in reference to Crowdstrike or the investigations of the Bidens.)
The President reiterated his concern that Zelenskyy was surrounded by people who were enemies of the President, including “bad oligarchs.”
The President did not raise security assistance. According to the official, Zelenskyy demurred in response to most of the President’s requests.

I did not review a transcript or written notes, but the official informed me that they exist.

The standard White House practice for Presidential-level phone calls with world leaders is for the White House Situation Room to produce a word-for-word electronic transcript that memorializes the call. The transcript is typically then circulated to key White House officials to be transformed into a formal memorandum that is distributed as an eyes-only document, to the Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense, and Director of the CIA.
In this case, the official told me that such a transcript had indeed been produced and was being treated very sensitively, in hard copy only. Moreover, several additional senior White House officials listened to the entire phone call in an adjacent room in the Situation Room suite and they presumably took written notes on the call.
The official did not know whether the President was aware that other people were listening and that the call was being transcribed. The official also was not certain whether anyone else was in the Oval Office with the President during the call.

© 2019 CBS Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved.

U.S. accused of abandoning Kurds to face Turkish onslaught

Trump defends troop drawdown in northern Syria
23M AGO
Biden announces support for Trump’s impeachment

Turkey launches military offensive in Syria

Copyright © 2019 CBS

Fallout:

House Democrats are increasingly confident they have all the evidence they need to impeach President Donald Trump for obstructing their investigations.

Lawmakers say White House counsel Pat Cipollone’s letter sent Tuesday night to Speaker Nancy Pelosi — accusing Democrats of running an “invalid” and “illegitimate” impeachment probe — is the final insult in a long-running campaign of obstruction that will likely become a voluminous article of impeachment against Trump.

Former Rep. Trey Gowdy was fired as a Fox News contributor, a spokesperson for the network tells CNBC on Wednesday.

Gowdy has been tapped to join President Donald Trump’s outside counsel as the White House suits up for an impeachment fight with Congress, Trump’s personal lawyer Jay Sekulow said.

A source familiar with the situation says that Gowdy representing the president would pose a conflict of interest with his role as a Fox contributor.

— President Donald Trump wants the House to vote on impeachment as soon as possible — ideally, three weeks ago.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi? Not so much.

The White House put proof of its stance in an eight-page letter on Tuesday evening — half lawyerly complaint, half campaign fundraising message — accusing the Democratic-led House of running a sham investigation and announcing Trump would block any further participation by his administration.

The letter challenged the rights of the House to set the rules of impeachment, charged Democrats with trying to reverse the results of the 2016 election and influence the 2020 contest, and concluded that there is “no legitimate basis” for the inquiry Pelosi is calling “impeachment” that’s already underway.

“For the foregoing reasons, the President cannot allow your constitutionally illegitimate proceedings to distract him and those in the Executive Branch from their work on behalf of the American people,” White House Counsel Pat Cipollone wrote.

The Constitution vests the House with “the sole Power of Impeachment” in Article I, Section 2, and prescribes in Article I, Section 5, that “each House may determine the Rules of its Proceedings.” What’s really going on is a fight over when the House will first take a vote involving Trump that has any form of the word “impeach” in it.

ROCHESTER, N.H. — Former Vice President Joe Biden called for President Donald Trump to be impeached during a blistering campaign speech on Wednesday.

“Donald Trump has violated his oath of office, betrayed this nation and committed impeachable acts,” Biden said in his strongest comments to date on the matter, adding, “He should be impeached.”

Today:


.
What the polls are saying: More than half of US voters want Trump impeached and removed from office, according to a Fox News Poll released Wednesday.

And here is what Trump is tweeting about Fox News:

From the day I announced I was running for President, I have NEVER had a good @FoxNews Poll. Whoever their Pollster is, they suck. But @FoxNews is also much different than it used to be in the good old days.

Ha! I wonder how that goes down with the American people!

Evangelical Christians:

The Guardian

Pastors from the Las Vegas area pray with Donald Trump.

Evangelical Christianity

Abandoning Kurds could cost Trump support of evangelical Christians
One of the president’s staunchest constituencies has stuck by him through many controversies but Syria may be a policy lurch too far

Tom McCarthy in New York
@TeeMcSee
Fri 11 Oct 2019 02.00 EDT
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Evangelical Christian voters have been among Donald Trump’s most enthusiastic and reliable supporters. Trump’s recent rejection of asylum seekers and cuts to domestic food assistance programs have not stopped followers of Christ from flocking to the president.

A great schism, however, may finally be at hand. In drips that have become a gush, evangelical leaders this week have sharply criticized Trump’s decision to stand down US forces in northern Syria, warning that Turkey’s invasion of the region threatens America’s longstanding Kurdish allies and vulnerable Christian communities.

“It is very possible that the American withdrawal from the region will lead to the extinction of Christianity from the region,” Ashty Bahro, former director of the Evangelical Alliance of Kurdistan, told the Christianity Today news outlet.

‘Betrayal leaves a bitter taste’: spurned Kurds flee Turkish onslaught
“An invasion by Turkey into NE Syria would pose a grave threat to the region’s Kurds and Christians, endangering the prospects of true religious freedom in the Middle East,” tweeted the evangelical leader Tony Perkins, a Trump adviser.

The Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN) founder, Pat Robertson, described even more grave stakes in a broadcast on Monday.

“I believe … the president of the United States is in danger of losing the mandate of heaven if he permits this to happen,” Robertson said.

Despite warnings from domestic and international allies, Trump’s move allowed Turkey to launch a ground and air assault on Wednesday against Syria’s Kurds, who had been a crucial American ally in the fight against the Islamic State.

As Turkish planes bombed towns in north-eastern Syria, angry and terrified civilians fled, unsure of their futures. But another consequence of Trump’s decision is that losing the mandate of heaven could seriously hurt Trump’s re-election chances.

White evangelicals made up 26% of voters in the last presidential election and they voted 81% for Trump, according to Robert P Jones, chief executive of the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) and author of The End of White Christian America.

Trump has won the avowed love of evangelicals by appointing conservative judges, opening the way for new abortion restrictions, supporting Christian universities, moving the US embassy in Israel to Jerusalem and other measures.

With so much common ground, not all of Trump’s most high-profile evangelical allies have broken with him over Syria. The Liberty University president, Jerry Falwell Jr, who helped Trump seal the deal with evangelical voters as a 2016 campaign adviser, said Trump was “keeping his promise to keep America out of endless wars”.

Christian leader Jerry Falwell urges Trump support: ‘He’s a moral person’
“The president has got to do what’s best for the country, whether it helps him with this phony impeachment inquiry or not,” Falwell told the Associated Press.

But other extremely loyal Trump allies have split with him, warning that Roman Catholic, Armenian and Syrian Orthodox churches in northern Syrian border cities such as Ras al-Ayn, which is in the crosshairs of the Turkish invasion, are under threat. Thousands of civilians have fled Turkish shelling in the area.

“Today I ask that you join me in praying for the lives affected by the White House decision to pull US troops out of northern Syria,” tweeted one evangelical pastor, Franklin Graham. “Both Democrat & Republican leaders are deeply concerned bc this would be, in essence, abandoning our closest allies there – the Kurdish people.”

“Hey @SpeakerPelosi,” tweeted the evangelical radio host Erick Erickson, “maybe do a vote to initiate impeachment STAT, have the committee get out articles by tonight and over to the Senate, and perhaps we’ll still have time to save some of the Kurds.”

“Pray for our Kurdish allies who have been shamelessly abandoned by the Trump Administration,” tweeted the Republican senator Lindsey Graham. “This move ensures the reemergence of ISIS.”

The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanuyahu, a deeply popular figure in the American evangelical community, joined the chorus.

“Israel strongly condemns the Turkish invasion of the Kurdish areas in Syria and warns against the ethnic cleansing of the Kurds by Turkey and its proxies,” Netanyahu said. “Israel is prepared to extend humanitarian assistance to the gallant Kurdish people.”

But evangelical Christians are not ready to cast Trump out entirely. Earlier this week CBN News, America’s top Christian-themed media outlet, reported that Trump would be the keynote speaker this weekend at the Value Voters Summit, a huge political convention for evangelical Christians.

“Typically, when President Trump speaks to evangelical audiences, he receives multiple standing ovations,” the report said. “This Saturday will probably be more of the same because, even with the swirl of impeachment surrounding him, evangelicals have stood solidly behind the president so far.”

“So far.” The report went on to note evangelical “concern” about the Syria situation and concluded:

“President Trump will have an opportunity to explain his reasoning in front of this all-important voting block.”

© 2019 Guardian News & Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

Counter argument to mistaken strategy of Syrian withdrawal:

Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

GLOBAL RESOURCES
5 Reasons Why Trump is Right About Getting America Out of Syria

RICHARD SOKOLSKY, AARON DAVID MILLER
JANUARY 03, 2019

LOS ANGELES TIMES
Source: Getty

Summary: Although the president’s failure to consult with Congress and allies in making the decision to withdraw from Syria was diplomatic malpractice, critics’ fears about the withdrawal are overblown.

Much of America’s foreign policy establishment, on both the right and the left, has been in an uproar over President Trump’s decision to withdraw 2,000 U.S. troops from Syria. If Trump’s critics are to be believed, it amounts to one of the worst foreign policy blunders in American history, a catastrophe for the nation’s interests and influence in the Middle East. Although the president’s failure to consult and coordinate with Congress and allies in making the decision was a head-spinning case of diplomatic and political malpractice, on balance, critics’ fears about the withdrawal are overblown.

Here are five reasons why.

Richard Sokolsky
Richard Sokolsky is a nonresident senior fellow in Carnegie’s Russia and Eurasia Program. His work focuses on U.S. policy toward Russia in the wake of the Ukraine crisis.
THE ISLAMIC STATE “CALIPHATE” ISN’T GOING TO RETURN.
Islamic State now controls 1% of the territory it once held in Syria and Iraq. It has lost thousands of fighters and recruitment is down. Syria is not Iraq in 2011, where Islamic State militants advanced when there were no countervailing forces. The group’s fighters still confront thousands of determined Kurdish forces, and Syria, Iran, Israel, Turkey and Russia share a common interest in preventing an Islamic State resurgence. Jihadist attacks in northeast Syria will continue and could certainly contribute to keeping Syria unstable. But a continued U.S. military presence won’t change that, or eliminate the risk of a terrorist attack on the United States. Wiping out Islamic State was never realistic — the political, economic and sectarian grievances that inspire its fighters cannot be eliminated by military means alone, and the Trump administration refuses to invest in the kind of stabilization efforts that might address those issues.

ISRAEL AND THE KURDS CAN SURVIVE WITHOUT U.S. TROOPS IN SYRIA.
It’s true that the foothold that Iran and its Lebanese proxy, Hezbollah, have established in Syria threatens Israeli security. But Israel is capable of defending itself and is doing so by attacking Iranian and Hezbollah targets in Syria. “Our enemies understand our intelligence and air superiority,” said the Israel Defense Forces chief of staff after Trump’s announcement.

Aaron David Miller
Aaron David Miller is a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, focusing on U.S. foreign policy.
As for the Kurds, U.S. officials always made it clear that Washington viewed its partnership with these fighters as transactional, temporary and tactical. It simply isn’t in U.S. interests to help carve out the autonomous enclave the Kurds seek in northeast Syria. That fight could lead to a direct military confrontation with Syrian President Bashar Assad’s forces or with our NATO ally Turkey, which sees the Syrian Kurds, allied as they are with the militant Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK, as a mortal enemy. The major actors, including Turkey, have an interest in avoiding an all-out battle with the Kurds, who, in the wake of Trump’s decision, have begun to seek reconciliation with the Assad regime.

VITAL U.S. INTERESTS WON’T BE SACRIFICED WHEN THE TROOPS ARE WITHDRAWN.
The United States doesn’t have vital interests in Syria. This was true under President Obama just as it is under Trump. Yes, the Syrian war is a proxy conflict between the U.S. and Iran and Russia, and yes the war has had a horrific toll — hundreds of thousands of civilians killed, a massive refugee crisis, whole cities destroyed, terrorists sent around the world — but neither the White House, Congress nor the American public, after protracted wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, support a huge military and economic investment in Syria.

Syria is not a major source of oil. It does not pose an existential threat to Israel. The terrorist threat it poses to the United States has been inflated and is better handled by means other than military action. The country is so broken and dysfunctional that neither Russia nor Iran will be able to use its influence there as a springboard to establish hegemony in the Middle East.

AS U.S. TROOPS DEPART, RUSSIA AND IRAN AREN’T LEFT WITH A WIN.
Iran and Russia will dominate Syria as they have done for years. Both countries have always had a greater strategic stake in Syria than the U.S. and thus were more willing to accept a high price to protect their interests there. Now both will struggle with the difficulties of pacifying and reconstructing a war-torn state. With American forces in place, Putin and the Iranians could leave some of the dirty work of confronting the remnants of Islamic State to Washington; no longer. And with the U.S., a common adversary, gone, tensions between Iran and Russia could rise. The more Syria becomes a burden for Russia and Iran, the better for the United States.

AMERICAN CREDIBILITY HASN’T BEEN DESTROYED.
Any damage to the U.S. stems from our own reckless rhetoric and confused policy in Syria — we never committed to ousting Assad, pushing out Iran or helping the Syrian Kurds realize their political goals. Other U.S. allies and partners will judge America’s support based on how the U.S. responds to them individually, not on how Washington has behaved in a country where it has no vital interests.

Two U.S. presidents have failed to come up with an effective policy toward Syria and the Syrian civil war. Withdrawing 2,000 U.S. forces from a battlefield in which other powers have the will and resources to prevail may make Syria even messier than it is now. But keeping U.S. military forces in place with no serious, long-term strategy or attainable objectives to guide them would not make the situation significantly better. Syria was never America’s to win or lose, and getting out now is not a catastrophe.

This article was originally published in the Los Angeles Times.

SUPPORT THE GLOBAL THINK TANK
Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace

© 2019 All Rights Reserved

Fox News

POLITICSPublished October 11, 2019 Last Update 7 hrs ago

Trump protest in Minneapolis erupts in pepper spray, MAGA hat fires

Hundreds of protesters outside President Trump’s rally in Minneapolis Thursday night set fire to Make America Great Again hats and other memorabilia in an effort to show their defiance to the current administration before police broke up the crowd, reports said.

There were reports that multiple protesters were arrested. One report indicated that protesters threw urine.

TRUMP BELITTLES BIDENS WITH GRAPHIC LANGUAGE AT MINNEAPOLIS RALLY, AS CHAOS UNFOLDS OUTSIDE ARENA

Cell phone video posted by Star Tribune reporter Chao Xiong showed Trump supporters walking through a crowd of protesters outside the Target Center in Minneapolis, shouting, “Lock him up” and “Shame on you.”

A reporter for The Washington Post posted a video on Twitter that appeared to show a protester punch a Trump supporter in the back of the head as he left the rally. The crowd can be heard shouting “Nazi scum! Off our streets!” The video shows a Trump supporter being followed by protesters before someone calls out “There’s a Nazi over here,” prompting the attack.

Continue Reading Below

The apparent Trump supporter was also slapped and pushed before eventually running to safety.

The Minneapolis Star Tribune reported that police deployed pepper spray.

Police officers on horseback and bicycles formed a protective line in front of the arena, according to The Tribune. Officers with riot batons and shields also maneuvered through the crowd of protesters. The Post captured video of one Hispanic family who wore pro-Trump clothing departing from the rally as one protester shouted “He hates you!” The mother repeated “Mexicanos for Trump!" as she left the scene.

Trump arrived in Minnesota as polls show Americans’ support rising for impeachment. Democrats claim he used his office to pressure Ukraine into investigating the Bidens for his political gain. Trump insists that he was just making sure the country was doing its part to weed out corruption.

Trump was joined by Vice President Mike Pence, who had a separate schedule of appearances in the state Trump is trying to tip his way next year.

Trump praised police officers during his rally. USA Today reported that Minneapolis police were not allowed to attend the rally in their uniforms, so they wore, “Cops For Trump” t-shirt

Fox News©2019 FOX News Network, LLC. All rights reserved. All market data delayed 20 minutes.

POLITICS NEWS

Trump loses appeal over House subpoena for financial records

The president has challenged the authority of the House Oversight Committee to obtain his tax returns.

SHARE THIS —

Oct. 11, 2019, 10:35 AM ET

By Dartunorro Clark

The U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia has affirmed a lower court’s ruling rejecting President Donald Trump’s challenge to a subpoena from House Democrats seeking the president’s tax returns.

The House Oversight and Reform Committee — chaired by Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md. — subpoenaed 10 years of Trump’s financial records from accounting firm Mazars USA and the Trump Organization in April.

The subpoena was prompted by the testimony of Trump’s former attorney and fixer, Michael Cohen, who told Congress that Trump inflated and deflated the value of his assets for his personal benefit.

The president has attempted to block the subpoena, challenging the authority of the committee to obtain his financial records.

This is a breaking story, please check back for updates.

Dartunorro Clark is a political reporter for NBC News.

© 2019 NBC UNIVERSAL

And now another happening in DC,
that’s worth noting.

IMMIGRATION
Judge rules Trump violated the law on wall funding with national emergency
The president ordered that money for Pentagon construction projects would be used instead for the barrier on Mexico’s border.