It is down to another wire, the matter or impeachment has been subordinated to voting for it.
The issue with that one is, that premature voting on it will be used as a political springboard, whereupon, for the Republicans to argue that a Senate voting against it, signals how the Dems are negatively politically motivated.
On the other hand, critics of the immediate House vote express frustration at appearing weak, or something like it.
CONGRESS
Democrats angrily walk out of White House meeting after Trump ‘meltdown’
“He was insulting, particularly to the speaker,” Schumer said.
Oct. 16, 2019, 4:49 PM ET
By Rebecca Shabad and Alex Moe
WASHINGTON — Democratic leaders in Congress on Wednesday angrily walked out of a White House meeting with President Donald Trump after he had a “meltdown,” according to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
“What we witnessed on the part of the president was a meltdown. Sad to say,” Pelosi told reporters outside the White House with House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer.
The President started the meeting with a lengthy bombastic monologue, according to a senior Democratic aide. He bragged aboutthe “nasty” letter he sent to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan over the Turkish leader’s decision to invade northern Syria, the aide said.
The meeting quickly devolved into a series of contentious exchanges centering on the president’s decision earlier this month to pull troops from Syria, which paved the way for the Turkish invasion. The White House called the meeting to discuss the president’s decisionand the deescalating situation on the ground. Ahead of the meeting, the House overwhelmingly votedin favor of a resolution rebuking Trump’s decision to pull troops out in a 354-60 vote.
“I think that vote, the size of the vote — more than 2 to 1 of the Republicans voted to oppose what the president did — it probably got to the president, because he was shaken up by it,” Pelosi said. “That’s why we couldn’t continue in the meeting because he was just not relating to the reality of it.”
At one point during the meeting, Schumer brought up former Defense Secretary James Mattis, who told NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday that Trump’s decision to pull troops from Syria could lead to ISIS’s resurgence.
According to multiple aides, Trump called Mattis, “the world’s most overrated general.”
“You know why?,” Trump said, according to one aide. “He wasn’t tough enough. I captured ISIS. Mattis said it would take two years. I captured them in one month.”
The Democratic leaders said that the moment that prompted them to abruptly leave was when Trump called Pelosi “a third-rate politician” to her face.
According to the senior Democratic aide, Hoyer stated, “This is not useful.”
Pelosi and Hoyer then stood up and left the meeting, the aide said.
As they left said, Trump shot back, “Goodbye, we’ll see you at the polls.”
Schumer followed shortly thereafter.
“He was insulting, particularly to the speaker,” Schumer told reporters later on Wednesday. “She kept her cool completely. But he called her a third-rate politician. He said that there are communists involved and you guys might like that. I mean, this was not a dialogue. It was sort of a diatribe — a nasty diatribe not focused on the facts, particularly the fact of how to curtail ISIS, a terrorist organization that aims to hurt the United States in our homeland.”
Hoyer echoed those remarks, saying that the meeting “deteriorated into a diatribe” and that they were “deeply offended” by the way Trump treated Pelosi. He said that after serving in Congress over the course of six presidential administrations, he has “never” seen a president “treat so disrespectfully a co-equal branch of the government.”
White House Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham denied the Democrat’s characterization of the meeting, saying, “The President was measured, factual and decisive, while Speaker Pelosi’s decision to walk out was baffling, but not surprising. She had no intention of listening or contributing to an important meeting on national security issues. While Democratic leadership chose to storm out and get in front of the cameras to whine, everyone else in the meeting chose to stay in the room and work on behalf of this country.”
Republicans, who stayed behind in the meeting, spoke to reporters afterward. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., said that Pelosi stormed out of the room, calling it “unbecoming” of the speaker.
“When there is a time of crisis, leaders should stay” whether they like what they’re hearing or not, he added.
The dramatic meeting comes amid the House’s ongoing impeachment inquiry. Democrats on Wednesday said that impeachment did not come up during their conversation with the president.
The episode was reminiscent of the White House meeting Trump held with congressional leaders in May on the nation’s infrastructure, during which Pelosi said that Trump threw a “temper tantrum” and “stormed out” of the room. Trump said at the time that he would only work with Democrats if they stopped investigating him.
Rebecca Shabad
Rebecca Shabad is a congressional reporter for NBC News, based in Washington.
Alex Moe
Alex Moe is a Capitol Hill producer for NBC News covering the House of Representatives.
Hallie Jackson, Peter Alexander and Frank Thorp V contributed.
Remember when Juliani was the hero of 9-11? Things have really changed.
Trump’s fury rises with key impeachment inquiry testimony on the horizon
Analysis by Stephen Collinson, CNN
Updated 12:59 AM EDT, Thu October 17, 2019
Washington(CNN)President Donald Trump’s frustration with the Democratic impeachment probe is boiling over, with investigators set Thursday to peel back yet another layer of what is being revealed as a broad, and possibly unlawful, behind-the-scenes scheme to pressure Ukraine for political gain.
Trump blew up Wednesday at House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who made the fateful decision to initiate impeachment investigations three weeks ago. Those have moved at staggering speed and produced a torrent of damaging revelations for the White House.
The President’s tantrum, described by top Democrats, came with his increasingly vehement denials of wrongdoing being challenged every day by testimony from current and former officials that has undercut the administration’s effort to stall an impeachment process that it claims is illegal in itself.

Democrats say Trump had a ‘meltdown’ at White House meeting
Another day of danger looms on Thursday for the President with Gordon Sondland, the Republican donor-turned-US ambassador to the European Union, due to give a private deposition on Capitol Hill that could get to the root of Trump’s backdoor dealings with Ukraine.
Sondland was a go-between linking Trump’s circle to the government in Kiev, amid allegations the White House conditioned incentives – including hundreds of dollars in military aid – on Ukraine’s willingness to open an investigation into the President’s possible 2020 foe, Joe Biden.
The President’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, is meanwhile slipping ever deeper into trouble, amid revelations about his go-it-alone Ukraine policy shop that could also come back to hurt Trump.
CNN reported Wednesday that a federal inquiry into Giuliani’s activity also includes a counterintelligence probe – to establish whether the former New York mayor’s business ties to Ukraine made him vulnerable to a foreign intelligence service.
“He needs an attorney. I mean, he needs a bunch of attorneys, because Giuliani is in serious trouble,” said Guy Smith, a former adviser to President Bill Clinton’s impeachment defense.
“If there’s a (counterintelligence) investigation going on, this is serious business. Those guys don’t just look for non-paid parking tickets. This is serious stuff,” Smith told CNN’s Brooke Baldwin.
Trump’s meltdown

On impeachment, Democrats crack down on White House stonewalling strategy
Trump unleashed his fury at Pelosi during a briefing for top congressional leaders on the situation in Syria following Turkey’s assault on Kurdish anti-ISIS allies abandoned by Trump.
“What we witnessed on the part of the President was a meltdown, sad to say,” said the California Democrat, who colleagues said the President blasted as a “third-rate politician.”
The showdown followed a vote in the House that overwhelmingly condemned Trump for paving the way for the Turkish invasion, in which many Republicans broke with their standard compliance and lined up against the President.
"We were offended deeply by his treatment of the speaker of the House of Representatives, said Pelosi’s No. 2, Steny Hoyer of Maryland.
White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham described the meeting differently, saying in a statement that Trump had been “measured” and “decisive” and that Pelosi “had no intention of listening.”
After the meeting, the President tweeted several photos of the gathering, including one of Pelosi that he captioned, “Nervous Nancy’s unhinged meltdown!” The speaker retaliated by turning the picture into her Twitter cover shot.
Trump then tweeted,“Nancy Pelosi needs help fast! There is either something wrong with her ‘upstairs,’ or she just plain doesn’t like our great Country. She had a total meltdown in the White House today. It was very sad to watch. Pray for her, she is a very sick person!”
For all the bitter political battles between Republicans and Democrats in the post-9/11 era, there has never been this level of personal animosity between a President and his enemies.
Trump’s fury at the impeachment probe had been in evidence earlier in two White House press events with Italy’s President.
“People, like, that are testifying – I don’t even know who they are. I never even heard of some of them, most of them,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office.
CNN has reported that the White House is frustrated that it cannot get a handle on the impeachment drama because it learns of developments only when they seep out of closed hearings.
“I have all these people testifying. And then they leak out. They don’t say the good parts, they only say the bad parts,” the President said, complaining that he was not allowed lawyers in the depositions. “The Democrats are treating the Republicans very, very badly.”
The case against the White House appears to have darkened this week with testimony by the White House’s former top Russia official, Fiona Hill, and several career diplomats.
Hill testified that she had been advised by then-national security adviser John Bolton to inform White House lawyers of her alarm at activity by Giuliani and others, sources have told CNN.
One source said that Hill, a Trump appointee, had seen “wrongdoing” in the White House approach to Ukraine and tried to report it to officials. She was concerned that Giuliani was circumventing the State Department by seeking the removal of then-US Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch and pushing for Ukraine to open an investigation into the former vice president and his son Hunter Biden. There is no evidence of wrongdoing in Ukraine by either Biden.
Democratic investigators will also want to ask Sondland about new details of Hill’s testimony reported in The New York Times. The paper reported that Hill had said Sondland revealed in a meeting that Trump would meet Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky if his government opened the investigation he wanted.
Testimony is a new wild card for White House
Trump’s former top Russia adviser told Congress she saw ‘wrongdoing’ in US policy toward Ukraine, source says
Sondland’s testimony before three House committees represents another wild card for the President.
A longtime Republican fundraiser, Sondland plans to show up on Capitol Hill under a subpoena despite the administration’s policy of seeking to bar testimony from serving officials.
Lawmakers are eager to press him about text messages he exchanged related to Trump’s July phone call with Zelensky and the freezing of foreign aid to Ukraine that cut to the heart of the Democrats’ impeachment probe.
Sondland has been a player in Republican politics for a number of years. A hotelier and philanthropist, he was a late Republican convert to Trump’s cause and was rewarded with his current position – a lofty one for a non-diplomat.
He probably did not bargain for being caught in the middle of the biggest presidential scandal in decades, a factor, along with his neophyte status in Washington, that makes his testimony unpredictable.
Lawmakers may want to know, first of all, why he was involved in a close circle of policy making on Ukraine at all – since the former Soviet state is not a member of the European Union.
State Department Deputy Assistant Secretary George Kent told the inquiry on Tuesday that Sondland, along with then-US Envoy to Ukraine Paul Volker and Energy Secretary Rick Perry, were in an informal Ukraine policy group dubbed the “three amigos,” according to Democratic Rep. Gerry Connolly, a Virginia Democrat who’s a member of the House Oversight Committee.
Sondland will also be questioned over a series of text messages with Bill Taylor, the top US diplomat in Ukraine, that have emerged from the impeachment investigation.
Taylor raised concerns about the US withholding nearly $400 million in US military and security aid in a text that has become a key piece of evidence in the inquiry.
The Washington Post reported that Sondland is expected to tell Congress that Trump relayed to him directly the content of a text he sent to Taylor denying any quid pro quo with Ukraine.
Democrats will seek more understanding of Sondland’s conversation with the President that led up to that text message, and may suggest it is an attempt to create a record of mitigation should the texts emerge in public, as they now have.
Republicans will argue, however, that the text proves that the President had no intention of withholding military aid from Ukraine in order to force it to dish dirt on Biden.
Trump’s closest allies in Congress renewed efforts to discredit the impeachment process.
“The President didn’t do anything wrong,” House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy of California told reporters on Wednesday.
He also picked up Trump’s attacks on House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff, accusing the California Democrat of lying about his contacts with an intelligence community whistleblower who first raised the alarm about the President’s dealings with Ukraine.
There is “no doubt he should be censured,” McCarthy said.
© 2019 Cable News Network. Turner Broadcasting System, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
More witnesses
ABCNews
Trump directed me to work with Giuliani to push Ukraine on investigations: Sondland
By Katherine Faulders,Conor FinneganOct 17, 2019, 9:29 AM ET
WATCH: Catch up on the developing stories making headlines.
The U.S. ambassador to the European Union will tell Congress that President Donald Trumpdirected him and others to work with his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani to push Ukraine to announce investigations, but that he was in the dark on the extent of Giuliani’s efforts and the political motive behind it, according to his opening statement obtained by ABC News.
Gordon Sondland, the Trump mega donor turned diplomat, has emerged as a central character in the impeachment inquiry led by three House committees for the role he played in leading Ukraine policy, at times outside official government channels.
While he denied in a September text messagealready obtained by Congress that there were “quid pro quo’s of any kind,” Sondland will tell committee staff and lawmakers Thursday that Ukraine announcing “anti-corruption” investigations “was one of the pre-conditions for securing a White House meeting with President [Volodymyr] Zelenskiy,” the country’s new president eager for U.S. support.
But Sondland will say that he, former special envoy for Ukraine Kurt Volker, and Energy Secretary Rick Perry, while “disappointed,” had no choice but to work with Giuliani to do that: “The key to changing the President’s mind on Ukraine was Giuliani… My understanding was that the President directed Mr. Giuliani’s participation, that Mr. Giuliani was expressing the concerns of the President.”
In a July 25 call, Trump asked Zelenskiy to “do us a favor” and work with Giuliani and Attorney General William Barr to investigate an unfounded allegation that Ukraine interfered in the 2016 presidential election and claims of corruption by former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter, who sat on the board of Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company.
At least one week before the call, Trump had ordered nearly $400 million of U.S. security assistance to Ukraine to be withheld – a fact that Ukrainian officials would learn later in August as Sondland, Volker, and others continued to ask for an investigation announcement.
Sondland will say that he did not know the political nature of those investigations, that Giuliani never discussed the Biden’s with him, and that he didn’t know the Biden connection to Burisma – insinuating that if he did, he would have opposed the effort.
“Inviting a foreign government to undertake investigations for the purpose of influencing an upcoming U.S. election would be wrong. Withholding foreign aid in order to pressure a foreign government to take such steps would be wrong. I did not and would not ever participate in such undertakings,” his opening statement reads.
Instead, he will say he believed the administration was pushing for “a public embrace of anti-corruption reforms by Ukraine” as a precondition for the meeting.
“Nothing about that request raised any red flags for me, Ambassador Volker, or Ambassador Taylor,” Sondland will say. Taylor, a career State Department official, is the top diplomat to Ukraine. Volker resigned as special envoy in late September after the extent of his role in facilitating Giuliani’s efforts was revealed.
But Taylor did raise a red flag in September. In text messages turned over to Congress by Volker and first obtained by ABC News, Taylor tells Volker and Sondland, “I think it’s crazy to withhold security assistance for help with a political campaign.”
In his testimony Thursday, Sondland will confirm that after receiving that message, he called Trump directly and asked him what he wanted from Ukraine.
“The President responded, ‘Nothing. There is no quid pro quo.’ The President repeated: ‘no quid pro quo’ multiple times. This was a very short call. And I recall the President was in a bad mood,” Sondland will say.
In those texts, Sondland and Volker also discussed working with Zelenskiy’s aides to have them announce an investigation, including into Burisma, in order to secure a White House meeting. On Aug. 13, they even help draft a statement for Zelenskiy to announce the investigations that, at Giuliani’s insistence, included specific references to Burisma and the 2016 election, according to a source familiar with Sondland’s testimony.
"We intend to initiate and complete a transparent and unbiased investigation of all available facts and episodes, including those involving Burisma and the 2016 U.S. elections,” Volker’s draft says in part. Sondland responds, “Perfect,” and says it should be sent to Andrey Yermak, a top Zelenskiy aide.
In his testimony, Sondland defends that draft: “Requesting that parties align their public messaging in advance of any important leadership meeting is a routine way to leverage the power of face-to-face exchange.”
Sondland is the sixth person to testify in the impeachment inquiry led by the House Intelligence, Oversight, and Foreign Affairs committees. Still the current E.U. ambassador, he was initially blocked from appearing for testimony by the State Department and White House. But he announced last week that he would comply with a subpoena and testify Thursday.
Fiona Hill, the National Security Council’s former senior director for European and Russian affairs, told House lawmakers and investigators on Monday that she believed Sondland was a potential national security risk, given his inexperience and extensive use of a personal cell phone for official diplomatic businesses, sources familiar with her testimony told ABC News.
The New York Times first reported some of these details about Hill’s testimony regarding Sondland. When reached by ABC News, a representative for Hill had no comment on the matter.
Sondland, according to Hill’s testimony, would also provide the cellphone numbers of American officials to foreigners, creating potential counterintelligence risks, sources familiar with Hill’s testimony confirmed to ABC News.
ABC News’ Benjamin Siegel and Ali Dukakis contributed to this report.
© 2019 ABC News Internet Ventures. All rights reserved.
Here it is, the crix6 of identity politics exposed:
MEET THE PRESS
Trump replaces ‘America First’ with ‘Me First’
First Read is your briefing from “Meet the Press” and the NBC Political Unit on the day’s most important political stories and why they matter.
President Donald Trump speaks during a campaign rally, on Oct. 17, 2019, at the American Airlines Center in Dallas.Jeffrey McWhorter / AP
SHARE THIS —
Oct. 18, 2019, 8:59 AM ET
By Chuck Todd, Mark Murray and Carrie Dann
WASHINGTON — In an inaugural address he delivered just more than 1,000 days ago, President Donald Trump proclaimed that “America First” would guide his agenda.
But on a jaw-dropping Thursday — following a jaw-dropping Wednesday — Trump and his White House made it abundantly clear it was Trump First.
Or Putin and Erdogan First.
From the White House press briefing room, acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney said Trump had chosen his own Florida golf resort to host next year’s G-7 meeting in the United States.
“That decision is without precedent in modern American history: The president used his public office to direct a huge contract to himself,” the Washington Post says.
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Mulvaney also admitted that the Trump administration withheld foreign aid to Ukraine because, among other things, it wanted the country to investigate the conspiracy theory that somehow Russia wasn’t involved in the hacking of DNC emails in 2016.
Question: “So the demand for an investigation into the Democrats was part of the reason that he ordered to withhold funding to Ukraine?”
Mulvaney: “The look back to what happened in 2016 …”
Question: “The investigation into Democrats.”
Mulvaney: “… certainly was part of the thing that he worried about in corruption with that nation. And that is absolutely appropriate.”
Mulvaney tried to walk back that comment later in the day.
And then Trump celebrated a ceasefire in northern Syria between Turkey and the Kurds — which gave Turkey everything it wanted.
“The cease-fire agreement reached with Turkey by Vice President Mike Pence amounts to a near-total victory for Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who gains territory, pays little in penalties and appears to have outmaneuvered President Trump,” the New York Times writes.
Ask yourself: Who gains from the G-7 being held at Trump’s golf resort?
Who gains from withholding foreign aid from a country — unless it agrees to an investigation into the 2016 election?
And who gains from the military incursion into northern Syria?
It’s not America.
2020 Vision: This week’s forgotten debate
Tuesday’s Democratic debate took place just three days ago.
But it feels more like three weeks ago, right?
That’s the consequence of the impeachment inquiry, plus the situation in Syria, plus the jaw-dropping statements and actions from the White House.
The debate was just an intermission from the bigger drama playing out in Washington.
On the campaign trail
Today: Amy Klobuchar, Julian Castro, Tulsi Gabbard and John Delaney stump in Iowa… Kamala Harris, Cory Booker and Tom Steyer attend a cook-off in Orangeburg, S.C… Elizabeth Warren holds a town hall in Norfolk, Va… And Mark Sanford also is the Hawkeye State.
Saturday: Bernie Sanders holds his “Bernie’s Back” rally in Long Island City, N.Y., at 1:00 pm ET… Klobuchar, Gabbard and Sanford remain in Iowa… Harris and Booker stay in South Carolina… Buttigieg raises money in DC… And Castro attends a house party in Las Vegas.
Dispatches from NBC’s embeds
Joe Biden Thursday spoke at the DNC’s Women’s Leadership Forum in D.C., where he floated the idea that President Trump will be removed from office before the 2020 election. NBC’s Marianna Sotomayor reports Biden’s remarks: “’He’s got another year in office … maybe. Maybe,’ he said. ‘He’s not even smart enough to know what he doesn’t know.’” And on Rudy Giuliani, Biden said, “Giuliani, God bless him, reminds me of that old line from Voltaire. Voltaire said, I’ve never made but one prayer to God. Oh Lord, make my enemies ridiculous. And God granted it. Well God has granted it again to the Democratic Party.”
Trump Agenda: Mitt’s theory
Mitt Romney may have a theory about what happened with Trump’s Syria decision.
Chuck Todd
Chuck Todd is moderator of “Meet The Press” and NBC News’ political director.
Mark Murray
Mark Murray is a senior political editor at NBC News.
Carrie Dann is a political editor for NBC News.