Tag: Mike Pence

Schiff: Pence aide provided new impeachment evidence — but VP’s office classified it

A national security aide to Vice President Mike Pence submitted additional classified evidence to House impeachment investigators about a phone call between Pence and Ukraine’s president, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff revealed Friday.

In a letter to Pence, Schiff (D-Calif.) asked the vice president to declassify supplemental testimony from the aide, Jennifer Williams, about Pence’s Sept. 18 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, arguing that there is no “legitimate basis” to keep it secret.

“The Office of the Vice President’s decision to classify ‘certain portions’ of the Sept. 18 call … cannot be justified on national security or any other legitimate grounds we can discern,” Schiff wrote to Pence, requesting a response by Dec. 11.

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Scoop: Trump and Pence intervene in clash between top health officials

Axios logoThe working relationship between the Trump administration’s top health officials, HHS Secretary Alex Azar and CMS Administrator Seema Verma, has grown so dysfunctional that both President Trump and Vice President Pence have intervened to try to salvage the situation, according to three senior administration officials.

Why it matters: It’s an extraordinary intervention at the highest levels of government. And it highlights, as Politico extensively reported, the White House’s urgent desire for the heads of Health and Human Services and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to repair their working relationship.

Behind the scenes: Azar had a clearing of the air meeting with Verma on Wednesday, at Pence’s request, according to two administration officials. This wasn’t the first time the White House had to intervene to fix this broken relationship at the top of HHS.

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This is what President Mike Pence would look like

During the hearings regarding whether or not to impeach President Trump, the vice president has mostly stayed out of the spotlight. But if everything goes the way Democrats hope, with Trump removed from office, Vice President Mike Pence would end up in the center of, well, everything, as president of the United States of America.

If Trump is impeached and removed from office, then Pence would be immediately sworn in as president. That’s what happened in 1974, when Vice President Gerald Ford was sworn in after President Richard Nixon resigned in the face of impeachment proceedings. And there’s no way around the fact that Pence would become the commander in chief, thanks to the 25th Amendment.

“There’s no provision in the Constitution for a special election for president,” says Kimberly Wehle, a law professor and author of How to Read the Constitution — and Why. “There’s a chain of succession pending the next presidential election.”

View the complete November 22 article by Celia Darrough on the Mic.com website here.

Sondland says he told Pence that Ukraine military aid appeared conditioned on political investigations

Washington Post logoVice President Pence was informed just before meeting with the president of Ukraine in September that a U.S. ambassador believed that stalled military aid to Ukraine probably would not be released until Ukraine agreed to announce political investigations sought by President Trump, the envoy testified Wednesday.

Gordon Sondland, the U.S. ambassador to the European Union, told the House Intelligence Committee that he informed Pence of his fears just before the vice president met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in Warsaw on Sept. 1, a meeting where Sondland anticipated that Zelensky was likely to ask about frozen U.S. aid.

The testimony is the first indication that Pence may have known that congressionally appropriated funds for security assistance were conditioned on a foreign power agreeing to open investigations to assist Trump’s political prospects. The Ukrainians were being pressured to announce probes into Burisma, a gas company that hired former vice president Joe Biden’s son, and a debunked assertion that their country interfered in the 2016 campaign, according to congressional testimony and text messages.

View the complete November 20 article by Rosalind S. Helderman and Josh Dawsey on The Washington Post website here.

Vice President Mike Pence’s office releases a statement calling Ambassador Gordon Sondland a liar — but only one of them is under oath

AlterNet logoOn Wednesday, Gordon Sondland, the current US Ambassador to the EU, provided an absolutely bombshell opening statement in his testimony to the House impeachment panel. Among the explosive new information he provided was a statement that he’s spoken directly to Vice President Mike Pence about Donald Trump’s marching orders in Ukraine. From Sondland’s opening statement:

There was a September 1 meeting with President Zelensky in Warsaw. Unfortunately, President Trump’s attendance at the Warsaw meeting was cancelled due to Hurricane Dorian. Vice President Pence attended instead. I mentioned to Vice President Pence before the meetings with the Ukrainians that I had concerns that the delay in aid had become tied to the issue of investigations. I recall mentioning that before the Zelensky meeting.

During the actual meeting, President Zelensky raised the issue of security assistance directly with Vice President Pence. The Vice President said he would speak to President Trump about it.

In fact, when questioned by House counsel Daniel Goldman, Ambassador Sondland went further, making it clear Mike Pence knew exactly what the investigation was about, even if the Bidens weren’t specifically mentioned.

View the complete November 20 article by Jen Heyden from Daily Kos on the AlterNet website here.

Sondland acknowledges Ukraine quid pro quo, implicates Trump, Pence, Pompeo and others

Washington Post logoA U.S. ambassador on Wednesday explicitly linked President Trump, Vice President Pence and other senior officials to what he came to believe was a campaign to pressure a foreign government to investigate Trump’s political rival in exchange for a coveted White House meeting and hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid.

The potentially historic, if hotly disputed, testimony from U.S. Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland is the most damaging yet for Trump in Congress’s intensifying inquiry into whether the president should be impeached.

More forcefully than he has before, Sondland declared that the Trump administration would not give Ukraine’s newly elected president, Volodymyr Zelensky, a chance to visit the White House — unless Zelensky agreed to announce investigations that could help the president politically.

View the complete November 20 article by Rachael Bade, Aaron C. Davis and Matt Zapotosky on The Washington Post website here.

IRS whistleblower case advances as Senate staff looks at whether political appointee meddled with audit of Trump or Pence

Washington Post logoSenate aides spoke to the whistleblower, and follow-up interviews are expected.

Two senators are looking into a whistleblower’s allegations that at least one political appointee at the Treasury Department may have tried to interfere with an audit of President Trump or Vice President Pence, according to two people with knowledge of the matter, a sign that lawmakers are moving to investigate the complaint lodged by a senior staffer at the Internal Revenue Service.

Staff members for Sens. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) and Ron Wyden (Ore.), the chairman and ranking Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, met with the IRS whistleblower earlier this month, those people said. Follow-up interviews are expected to further explore the whistleblower’s allegations.

It could not be learned to what extent the senators consider the whistleblower a credible source. Trump administration officials have previously played down the complaint’s significance and suggested that it is politically motivated.

View the complete November 18 article by Jeff Stein and Tom Hamburger on The Washington Post website here.

Never Trumper’: President unleashes on Pence aide after she testifies about ‘inappropriate’ Ukraine pressure

AlterNet logoPresident Donald Trump on Sunday lashed out at an adviser to Vice President Mike Pence after she testified that the president put “inappropriate” pressure on Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden.

“Tell Jennifer Williams, whoever that is, to read BOTH transcripts of the presidential calls,” Trump ranted on Twitter. “[S]ee the just released ststement from Ukraine. Then she should meet with the other Never Trumpers, who I don’t know & mostly never even heard of, & work out a better presidential attack!”

In a transcript released over the weekend, Williams told House investigators that Trump appeared to be trying to serve a “personal political agenda, as opposed to a broader … foreign policy objective of the United States.”

View the complete November 17 article by David Edwards from Raw Story on the AlterNet website here.

Internal White House debate stifles release of Pence-Zelenskiy call

Nearly three weeks after the vice president said he had “no objection” to releasing a transcript, administration is divided on whether it could help or hurt Trump’s cause.

WASHINGTON — It’s been almost three weeks since Vice President Mike Pence said he had “no objection” to releasing a reconstructed transcript of his phone call with the leader of Ukraine. But as House Democrats’ impeachment inquiry continues moving swiftly into its second month, the White House still has not made a decision on whether to make those details of Pence’s call public.

The internal debate has divided White House officials over whether releasing the call would help or hurt their flailing efforts to counter accusations that President Donald Trump held up military aid to pressure Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy to investigate his political rivals, according to two people familiar with the discussions.

One concern raised by some of Trump’s allies is that releasing his call with Zelenskiy was a mistake because it fueled the impeachment inquiry rather than tamp it down, these people said. Another is that a comparison of Pence and Trump’s calls with Zelenskiy could potentially make the president’s self-described “perfect” conversation appear significantly less so.

View the complete October 29 article by Monica Alba and Carol E. Lee on the NBC News website here.