Tag: Trump impeachment hearings

Watch: GOP strategist labels Rep. Doug Collins a ‘screeching histrionic drama queen’ who’s ‘waving’ his ‘junk around’

AlterNet logoRepublican strategist Rick Wilson had a few carefully chosen words for the Ranking Member of the House Judiciary Committee, Rep. Doug Collins, Thursday night after a 13-hour day of impeachment debate that featured repeated outbursts, stonewalling, and theatrics from the Republican Member from Georgia.

“I don’t want to say that Doug Collins is a screeching, histrionic drama queen, because that would insult screeching, histrionic drama queens,” Wilson said on MSNBC’s “The 11th Hour,” “but this whole thing is a bad faith effort, performative in every way.”

Wilson, author of the book, Everything Trump Touches Dies, was far from done.

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Republicans are terrified people will watch impeachment hearings as Democrats make a compelling case

AlterNet logoOn the first day of impeachment hearings in the House Judiciary Committee, following the fact-collection hearings last month held by the House Intelligence Committee, one thing was certain: Republicans are terrified that people might actually watch this thing. From the very beginning of the hearing, GOP members kept throwing out BS procedural objections and forcing votes, clearly hoping that curious viewers would get bored and turn the hearings off before hearing any testimony.

We’d better hope it didn’t work. While some (including myself) feared that Wednesday’s hearing — featuring four law professors talking about the legal and historical aspects of impeachment — was going to be boring, it was actually as interesting, if not more so at points, than the direct witness testimony heard in November.

Instead of getting mired in legal dithering, the three law professors called by Democrats were clear as a summer’s day in their opinions: Donald Trump’s behavior is absolutely impeachable, and furthermore stopping presidents from doing what he did was the main reason why the founding fathers wrote impeachment powers into the damn Constitution in the first place.

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House Judiciary schedules first impeachment hearing, invites Trump

Hearing to review constitutional grounds for drafting articles of impeachment

The House Judiciary Committee has invited President Donald Trump to participate in a hearing next week on the constitutional justification for impeachment.

Chairman Jerrold Nadler announced that his panel will hold its first impeachment hearing at 10 a.m. on Wednesday, Dec. 4. The New York Democrat also wrote to the president asking if he intends to participate either personally or through his attorneys, pursuant to the House resolution that set the ground rules for the impeachment process.

“If you would like to participate in the hearing, please provide the Committee with notice as soon as possible, but no later than by 6:00 pm on December 1, 2019. By that time, I ask that you also indicate who will act as your counsel for these proceedings,” Nadler wrote.

View the complete November 26 article by Niels Lesniewski and Katherine Tully-McManus on The Roll Call website here.

What does female authority sound like? Marie Yovanovitch and Fiona Hill just showed us.

Washington Post logoPublic impeachment hearings began last week, if you’ll recall, with “Walter Cronkite” trending on Twitter. Why? One of the first witnesses, acting Ukraine ambassador William B. Taylor Jr., sounded somewhat like the legendary newscaster — a bourbon barrel of a baritone, mellow and oaky with age.

If a bureaucrat is going to testify before the House Intelligence Committee and be streamed into households around the country, it doesn’t hurt for him to remind Americans of the most trusted man in news. That kind of tone-based credibility goes a long way. Rightly or not, you felt like you could trust a man like this; you’d heard and trusted his voice before.

The next day, Marie Yovanovitch took her turn at the witness table. Impressively credentialed and equally poised, the former Ukraine ambassador’s testimony prompted a standing ovation in the hearing room, but it didn’t prompt adoring comparisons to any deceased icons. Her voice did not, after all, sound like Walter Cronkite’s. Hers was the precise, measured tone of a polite 61-year-old woman. And we simply don’t have as many reference points for 61-year-old women who’ve been elevated to the status of most trusted voice in anything.

View the complete November 22 column by Monica Hesse on The Washington Post website here.

Republicans fumble when confronted with Trump’s witness intimidation — and one even faked a phone call: report

AlterNet logoOne of the biggest problems Republicans face as they struggle to defend President Donald Trump from impeachment is President Donald Trump himself.

That was as evident on Friday as it has ever been when, in the middle of the House Intelligence Committee’s hearing with former Ukraine Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch, Chair Adam Schiff (D-CA) told the witness that Trump had attacked her on Twitter while she was testifying.

Schiff said that this behavior constitutes witness intimidation. While there was some dispute about whether the tweets would mee the legal standards for such a criminal charge, they could clearly be considered witness intimidation in the scope of articles of impeachment.

View the complete November 15 article by Cody Fenwick on the AlterNet website here.

Here’s why Republican impeachment theatrics — as buffoonish as they are — serve a purpose for the GOP

The Hill logoLiberal and progressive pundits — and some Never Trump conservatives as well — have been highly critical of the silly, buffoonish theatrics that Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, Rep. Devin Nunes of California and other far-right House Republicans brought to the first public testimony in the impeachment inquiry against President Donald Trump. But then, Jordan and Nunes weren’t trying to win over liberals, progressives or anti-Trump conservatives on Wednesday, November 13, when they aggressively attacked the testimony of two diplomats: Ambassador William B. Taylor (top U.S. ambassador to Ukraine) and the U.S. State Department’s George P. Kent (deputy assistant secretary for European and Eurasian affairs). They were playing to Trump’s hardcore MAGA base, pushing emotional buttons rather than relying on substance.

For that matter, Jordan and Nunes weren’t trying to win over independents either. They were preaching to the converted, determined to show pro-Trump voters that they still have their backs.

Rep. Adam Schiff, Democratic chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, knew what he was doing with Taylor and Kent’s testimony — and that testimony made a strong case for impeaching Trump. Schiff and other House Democrats showed exactly why Trump deserves impeachment: during a phone conversation on July 25, Trump tried to pressure Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky into investigating a political rival — former Vice President Joe Biden — as well as his son, Hunter Biden. The testimony demonstrated that Trump withheld military aid to Ukraine and made an investigation of the Bidens a condition of that aid.

View the complete November 15 article by Alex Henderson on the AlterNet website here.

Trump’s envoy to testify that ‘no quid pro quo’ came from Trump

Washington Post logoThe U.S. ambassador to the European Union, Gordon Sondland, intends to tell Congress this week that the content of a text message he wrote denying a quid pro quo with Ukraine was relayed to him directly by President Trump in a phone call, according to a person familiar with his testimony.

Sondland plans to tell lawmakers he has no knowledge of whether the president was telling him the truth at that moment. “It’s only true that the president said it, not that it was the truth,” said the person familiar with Sondland’s planned testimony, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomatic matters.

The Sept. 9 exchange between Sondland and the top U.S. diplomat to Ukraine has become central to the House Democrats’ impeachment inquiry into whether the president abused his office in pressuring Ukraine to open an investigation into his political rival Joe Biden and his son, who sat on the board of a Ukrainian energy company. The White House and its defenders have held up Sondland’s text, which included “no quid pro quo’s of any kind,” as proof that none was ever considered.

View the complete October 12 article by Aaron C. Davis and John Hudson on The Washington Post website here.