Late October 3, the U.S. House released text messages from U.S. officials posted to Ukraine interacting with Trump officials supporting the whistleblower’s concern about President Trump’s attempt to pressure the Ukrainian government to investigate his political opponent with tax payer dollars.
You can read them here:
Lawmakers from three House committees on Thursday began questioning Kurt Volker, the Trump administration’s former special envoy to Ukraine, as Democrats accelerate their impeachment inquiry into President Trump.
Volker, who resigned his post last week, was one of the figures named in the whistleblower complaint indicating that Trump had pressed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate corruption allegations against former Vice President Joe Biden, while delaying hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. aid that had been approved by Congress.
The notion that Trump would enlist the help of a foreign leader to gain a political advantage over a domestic rival outraged Democrats, who have heightened their investigative scrutiny of the president and could be drafting impeachment articles before the end of the year.
View the complete October 3 article by Scott Wong and Mike Lillis on The Hill website here.
President Trump on Wednesday grew testy with a reporter who pressed him about what he was seeking from Ukraine in relation to Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, demanding that the reporter ask a question to Finnish President Sauli Niinistö.
“Listen, are you ready? We have the president of Finland, ask him a question,” Trump shot back to Reuters White House correspondent Jeff Mason. “Did you hear me? Ask him a question.”
The exchange came toward the end of a combative press conference that was unusually heated even by Trump standards. It seemed to exemplify the growing anger the president has over the impeachment effort in the House against him.
View the complete October 2 article by Brett Samuels and Morgan Chalfant on The Hill website here.
Responding to a Trump tweet storm, the Inspector General of the Intelligence Community a release debunking the President’s statement.
You can read the document below.
Visit the CNN web post below to read the embedded letter from the Intelligence Inspector General regarding the legitimacy of the Ukraine whistleblower complaint.
https://www.cnn.com/2019/09/26/politics/read-icig-report-dni-whistleblower-complaint/index.html
Duration, however, is ‘a whole different matter’Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell reiterated on Monday that he is bound by Senate rules to take up articles of impeachment if they are presented by the House.
“Under the Senate rules, we’re required to take it up if the House does go down that path, and we’ll follow the Senate rules,” McConnell said. “It’s a Senate rule related to impeachment that would take 67 votes to change.”
That makes clear that he does not expect to have a path to use the “nuclear option” to set a new precedent to stop a trial with just a simple majority, effectively bypassing the rules.
View the complete September 30 article by Niels Lesniewski on The Roll Call website here.
Appearing on MSNBC early on Sunday morning, former prosecutor Glenn Kirschner laughed off Rudy Giuliani’s latest defense of Donald Trump’s attempt to blackmail Ukraine for dirt on former Vice President Joe Biden, calling his reasoning “ridiculous” and warning the former New York City mayor he better consider pleading the 5th Amendment if he is called before Congress.
Referring to Giuliani’s appearance on Fox News on Saturday night where the former New York mayor claimed the president had a constitutional duty to pursue claims of criminality in the case of Biden, Kirschner all but rolled his eyes.
“I have never heard an argument before that if the president hadn’t committed this crime, he would have committed a crime,” Kirschner explained to laughter.
View the complete September 29 article by Tom Boggioni from Raw Story on the AlterNet website here.
