Additional damning information against President Donald Trump has emerged since his impeachment last month.
The Trump impeachment trial begins Tuesday afternoon in the Senate, but some important questions remain unanswered or have emerged since the House voted Dec. 18 to impeach, reported The Bulwark.
New evidence emerged over the holidays, when the public is distracted, showing Trump’s knowledge of the Ukraine quid pro quo and awareness of the scheme’s illegality. Continue reading.
The evidence against Trump is overwhelming and irrefutable. Because his attorneys can’t argue with the facts, today they launched his defense with the false claim that Trump’s been denied due process.
Trump and his lawyers were offered a chance to participate in the House impeachment proceedings. They refused.
New York Times: “The House did offer Mr. Trump and his lawyers a chance to participate in the latter stages of the impeachment proceedings, but he declined to take them up.”
Trump stonewalled the House impeachment inquiry.
New York Times: “Fueling the obstruction of Congress charge, a dozen more witnesses, some with direct knowledge of Mr. Trump’s actions, were blocked from speaking to investigators, and the Trump administration refused to produce a single document under subpoena.” Continue reading “Sekulow’s ‘Due Process’ Argument Falls Flat”
The team of House Democrats arguing their case for impeachment in the Senate are slamming the trial resolution put forward by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), describing the compressed schedule as an attempt to cover up President Trump‘s conduct.
The resolution, circulated by McConnell on Monday night, would give the House Democrats 24 hours over the course of two days to make their opening arguments to impeach and remove Trump from office over his contacts with Ukraine. The same time constraints would be placed on the White House team defending Trump.
“A White House-driven and rigged process, with a truncated schedule designed to go late into the night and further conceal the President’s misconduct, is not what the American people expect or deserve,” the impeachment managers wrote in a statement. Continue reading.
For a guy who claims to hate corruption, President Trump sure has a funny way of showing it — including by trying to make it easier to pay bribes.
Trumpworld continues to claim that L’Affaire Ukraine is a big misunderstanding. Trump was not extorting a desperate foreign ally into smearing a domestic political rival. Heavens no.
He was merely trying to root out his true nemesis: international corruption! Continue reading.
A majority of Americans want the Senate to convict and remove President Donald Trump from office, according to a new poll conducted by CNN.
Fifty-one percent of respondents to the poll want the Senate to convict Trump on the impeachment charges brought by the House, which would lead to his immediate expulsion from office. Meanwhile, 45 percent of respondents said they don’t want to see the president removed. The poll was conducted from Jan. 16-19 and released Monday, on the eve of the Senate impeachment trial, which gets underway Tuesday, though senators were sworn in last week.
The numbers are the most favorable for removal since another CNN poll in June 2018. Approval for impeachment and removal has generally hovered between 36 and 47 percent, peaking at 50 percent in polls from October and November 2019, once impeachment proceedings were underway in the House. Continue reading.
Two legal briefs were submitted over the weekend in connection with President Donald Trump’s impeachment trial: one from Democratic House impeachment managers, the other from the president’s legal team. Legal experts Benjamin Wittes and Quinta Jurecic, in an article for The Atlantic, assert that there is an enormous difference between the two: while the House brief is professionally organized, the one from Team Trump is a rambling mess that reads like “the scream of a wounded animal.”
“The House managers’ brief is an organized legal document,” Wittes and Jurecic explain. “It starts with the law, the nature and purposes of Congress’ impeachment power, then walks through the evidence regarding the first article of impeachment, which alleges abuse of power, and seeks to show how the evidence establishes the House’s claim that President Trump is guilty of this offense. It then proceeds to argue that the offense requires his removal from office.”
Wittes and Jurecic go on to explain why the document from Trump’s allies, unlike the House brief, is an embarrassment. Continue reading.
A lawyer for Lev Parnas, an associate of President Trump‘s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, is asking Attorney General William Barr to recuse himself from an investigation into alleged campaign finance violations against Parnas.
Joseph Bondy made the request in a letter sent to Barr and filed in New York federal court on Monday, CNN reported. In it, Bondy argues that Barr has a “conflict of interest” in the matter and that he should appoint a special prosecutor from outside the Justice Department to handle the case.
“Given the totality of the circumstances, we believe it is appropriate for you to recuse yourself from the ongoing investigation and pending prosecution of Mr. Parnas,” wrote Bondy. Continue reading.
John Dean is a veteran of the Watergate era who has been offering insights on President Donald Trump’s many scandals. After having a lot to say about former special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation, Dean (who served as White House Counsel under President Richard Nixon) has recently been weighing in on the president’s Ukraine scandal. And Dean, during an interview with CNN’s Ana Cabrera on Sunday, speculated that Trump might have “dictated” some of his impeachment defense brief because the arguments used are “not legally sophisticated.”
The 81-year-old Dean told Cabrera, “I actually thought Trump might have dictated part of this brief like he did the letter that (White House Counsel) Cipollone sent to Congress that said that what they were doing was not proper. It’s of that vernacular. It’s not legally sophisticated. It actually plays to the base.”
In the impeachment defense brief, Trump’s attorneys argued that none of Trump’s actions with Ukraine amounted to impeachable offenses and asserted that Democrats are attempting a “brazen and unlawful” campaign to hurt his chances of being reelected in November. Continue reading.
Trump defense team seizes on the lack of an article charging the president with a crimePresident Donald Trump’s defense team is arguing that a president should not be convicted by the Senate on articles of impeachment that do not include a criminal violation, putting the very definition of an impeachable offense at the center of the Senate trial set to begin Tuesday.
And some legal experts said the outcome of that debate could set a new, higher standard for removing a president from office in future impeachments.
Trump’s memorandum released Monday, much of which reads more like a political argument than a legal or constitutional one, stresses that the two articles of impeachment “allege no crime or violation of law whatsoever — much less ‘high Crimes and Misdemeanors,’ as required by the Constitution.” Continue reading.
House Democrats on Monday hammered the White House’s impeachment defense heading into the Senate trial of President Trump, describing their historic effort as necessary to protect the country from a man who they say believes he is above the law.
In a nine-page memo, authored by the seven Democratic impeachment managers set to prosecute the case, the Democrats refuted “every allegation and defense” presented by the White House in its own trial preview, released over the weekend.
The Democrats also seek to pin responsibility on the GOP-controlled Senate, saying that a fair trial is contingent on their ability to call in witnesses and receive documents that the White House has so far blocked. Continue reading.
