Tag: Trump abuse of power

There Are More Recordings Of Donald Trump And Lev Parnas, Attorney Reveals

The latest bombshell tape could be just the beginning.

The lawyer for Lev Parnas told CNN’s Anderson Cooper on Saturday that there are other recordings of his client and President Donald Trump.

Joseph Bondy revealed the existence of other tapes just hours after he released a video of the president giving the order to “get rid of” then-U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch.

“Are there more recordings that Lev Parnas has? With the president?” Cooper asked Bondy.

“Yes,” Bondy replied. Continue reading.

Senate Republicans push back on calls for more impeachment witnesses

Republicans appeared unmoved by Democrats’ arguments for Trump’s removal and reiterated that the Senate shouldn’t seek new evidence.

Senate Republicans on Sunday defended President Donald Trump and panned calls for witnesses to testify in the Senate impeachment trial, ahead of the start of the second week.

In interviews on major networks, Republicans appeared unmoved by House Democrats’ opening arguments for Trump’s removal and reiterated that the Senate should not seek new evidence.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee and a strong Trump ally, warned on Fox News’ “Sunday Morning Futures With Maria Bartiromo” that calling in witnesses would create only more havoc. Continue reading.

Trump Tied Ukraine Aid to Inquiries He Sought, Bolton Book Says

New York Times logoDrafts of the book outline the potential testimony of the former national security adviser if he were called as a witness in the president’s impeachment trial.

WASHINGTON — President Trump told his national security adviser in August that he wanted to continue freezing $391 million in security assistance to Ukraine until officials there helped with investigations into Democrats including the Bidens, according to an unpublished manuscript by the former adviser, John R. Bolton.

The president’s statement as described by Mr. Bolton could undercut a key element of his impeachment defense: that the holdup in aid was separate from Mr. Trump’s requests that Ukraine announce investigations into his perceived enemies, including former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and his son Hunter Biden, who had worked for a Ukrainian energy firm while his father was in office.

Mr. Bolton’s explosive account of the matter at the center of Mr. Trump’s impeachment trial, the third in American history, was included in drafts of a manuscript he has circulated in recent weeks to close associates. He also sent a draft to the White House for a standard review process for some current and former administration officials who write books. Continue reading.

Schiff ‘has not paid the price’ for impeachment, Trump says in what appears to be veiled threat

Washington Post logoPresident Trump escalated his attacks on Rep. Adam B. Schiff on Sunday, issuing what appears to be a veiled threat against the California Democrat one day before Trump’s team is expected to deliver the crux of its defense in the third presidential impeachment trial in U.S. history.

“Shifty Adam Schiff is a CORRUPT POLITICIAN, and probably a very sick man,” Trump tweeted Sunday morning. “He has not paid the price, yet, for what he has done to our Country!”

Schiff, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, is the lead impeachment manager in the Senate trial. Continue reading.

Four significant questions raised by the newly released recording of Trump and Lev Parnas

Washington Post logoAt the beginning of a video released Saturday by an attorney representing Lev Parnas, we see a hallway. At the end of the hallway is an arch with a dark-colored backdrop, in front of which two people appear to be posing for a photograph. Behind the person on the left is what looks like an American flag.

That shot establishes what we’re looking at: footage captured during a fundraising dinner on April 30, 2018, for the group America First Action, which was held at Trump’s D.C. hotel. That shot is definitive because it’s trivial to match that distant scene with one we’ve seen from a much closer perspective, thanks to material released by the House Intelligence Committee. In one photo from the committee, for example, we see Parnas and President Trump standing in front of an archway with blue curtains, flanked by American flags.

Parnas would become tightly integrated into Trump’s circle, though the distance at which he was kept varies depending on whom you ask. Trump insists Parnas, an eventual business associate of Trump’s personal attorney Rudolph W. Giuliani, was only given access to the president because he’d contributed to Trump’s campaign or to America First. Parnas, the argument goes, was simply one of hundreds of such people who take photos with the president. To hear Parnas tell it, though, his work for Giuliani in late 2018 and in 2019 was well-known by Trump and was integral to the effort to get Ukraine to investigate former vice president Joe Biden, a possible opponent of Trump’s in the upcoming election. Continue reading.

‘Stop lying’: White House attorney’s bogus defense of Trump summarily discredited by observers with readily available facts

AlterNet logoAfter three days of House impeachment managers’ brilliant prosecution of President Donald Trump – and “prebuttal” of the arguments the president’s team was expected to make – White House attorneys Saturday morning began their defense of President Trump.

It’s not going well.

Deputy White House Counsel Mike Purpura (photo) has been making the majority of today’s arguments – they have decided that not enough people will be watching on TV so Saturday’s defense will last not eight but just two hours.

Purpura is not doing a good job – unless his job is to lie to U.S. Senators and the American people. Continue reading.

Tape Made Public of Trump Discussing Ukraine With Donors

New York Times logoThe recording from a dinner in 2018 showed that the president spent an hour with two key players in the Ukraine pressure campaign. He has repeatedly said he does not know them.

WASHINGTON — For more than an hour one evening in 2018, President Trump sat around a dinner table in a private suite in his Washington hotel with a group of donors, including two men at the center of the impeachment inquiry, talking about golf, trade, politics — and removing the United States ambassador to Ukraine.

The conversation, captured on a recording made public Saturday, contradicted Mr. Trump’s repeated statements that he does not know the two men, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, who went on to work with the president’s personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani to carry out a pressure campaign on Ukraine.

The recording — a video shot on Mr. Fruman’s phone during the dinner in April 2018 — largely confirmed Mr. Parnas’s account of having raised with Mr. Trump criticisms of the ambassador to Kyiv at the time, Marie L. Yovanovitch, and the president’s immediate order that Ms. Yovanovitch should be removed from the post. Continue reading.

Assessing the Trump team’s 6-point impeachment defense

Washington Post logoPresident Trump’s legal team in his impeachment trial began its defense on Saturday morning with a slightly more lawyerly version of one of Trump’s favorite tweets: read the transcript.

“They didn’t talk a lot about the transcript of the call,” White House counsel Pat Cipollone told the assembled senators in the Senate chambers at the outset of his remarks, “which I would submit is the best evidence of what happened on the call.”

That line, in itself, is a neat encapsulation of Trump’s case. It focuses on the rough transcript of Trump’s July 25, 2019 call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as exculpatory — while also asserting that the central issue is the call itself. It isn’t. The presented evidence shows a broad campaign of pressure of which that call was only one part, a campaign that is harder for Trump’s team to refute. Continue reading.

“TAKE HER OUT”: Donald Trump’s Role in the Ukraine Scheme is Reportedly Caught on Tape

Lordy, there are tapes—or, at least, one tape. When Lev Parnas, one of Rudy Giuliani’s Ukraine bagmen, gave an interview to MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow last week, he recalled attending a private dinner in April, 2018, at the Trump International Hotel, on Pennsylvania Avenue, where the hotel’s proprietor, who works part time as the forty-fifth President of the United States, ordered a White House aide to fire Marie Yovanovitch, a veteran diplomat who was then serving as the U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine.

This was one of many damaging claims that Parnas made to Maddow, prompting Trump’s supporters to dismiss him as a self-serving fantasist. But, on Friday, it emerged that Igor Fruman, Parnas’s sidekick and fellow-defendant, has provided a tape recording to federal prosecutors that features Trump using mob-boss language to order Yovanovitch’s axing. ABC News, in a reportpublished on Friday morning, as the House managers were preparing to wrap up their presentation in the Senate impeachment trial, said that it has reviewed a tape recording in which a voice that “appears to be President Trump’s” says of Yovanovitch, “Get rid of her! Get her out tomorrow. I don’t care. Get her out tomorrow. Take her out. O.K.? Do it.”

The White House’s response to the ABC News story didn’t deny that Trump attended the dinner, which reportedly took place on April 30, 2018, or that the President used the language attributed to him in the ABC News report. “Every President in our history has had the right to place people who support his agenda and his policies within his Administration,” the White House press secretary, Stephanie Grisham, said in a statement.

Why Adam Schiff’s forceful argument recalls Michael Cohen’s ominous warning to Congress about Trump

AlterNet logoIf you haven’t already, I encourage you to put aside nine minutes to watch Representative Adam Schiff’s closing remarks from Thursday’s Senate trial.

Schiff began by stating the obvious: the facts prove that Donald Trump is guilty as charged. We all know it. But the question remains as to whether he should be removed from office. Schiff makes the case that Trump should be removed because he has demonstrated that he will choose his own personal interests over protecting our national interests—which makes him dangerous.

At that point, I was reminded of the warning Michael Cohen gave to Congress last year. Continue reading (video of both speeches on the post).