Trump abuse of power 52 , CD3 DFL

Trump’s Plot To ‘Investigate The Investigators’ Is A Flop

For months, the names of Michael Horowitz and John Durham have figured in the pounding rhythms of right-wing media in which a heroically afflicted president faces down his perfidious enemies. A steady drumbeat of reports from Fox News, echoed by President Trump and Republican loyalists in Congress, proclaimed these two obscure Justice Department officials would get to the bottom of an alleged conspiracy against the Trump presidency.

They would, in Trump’s words, “investigate the investigators.” It was oh so promising.

“I will tell you this,” Trump blustered on October 25. “I think you’re going to see a lot of really bad things,” he said. “I leave it all up to the attorney general and I leave it all up to the people that are working with the attorney general who I don’t know. … I think you’ll see things that nobody would’ve believed.”

White House tells Democrats it won’t cooperate in impeachment hearings

The White House on Friday signaled it will not participate in future impeachment proceedings in the House and called on Democrats to end their impeachment inquiry.

White House counsel Pat Cipollone wrote in a letter to the Democratic chairman of the House Judiciary Committee that it would be a “reckless abuse of power” for House Democrats to adopt articles of impeachment and “would constitute the most unjust, highly partisan, and unconstitutional attempt at impeachment in our Nation’s history.”

The letter did not explicitly state that the White House would not participate in any House proceedings moving forward, but gave the indication that it would not cooperate and would instead shift its focus to defending President Trump in a potential Senate trial.

Rep. Smith Seeking To Exclude Democratic Candidates From Senate Trial

Rep. Jason Smith (R-MO) is introducing a resolution demanding that the GOP-controlled Senate exclude anyone running for president from participating in Trump’s increasingly likely impeachment trial. This is the latest in a series of stunts by Trump and his congressional GOP defenders aimed at distracting from Trump’s conduct.

Smith’s resolution urges the Senate to change its rules “to require a sitting United States Senator actively seeking election to the Presidency of the United States to recuse himself of herself” from the impeachment trial for any first-term incumbent president. Such a move would exclude Sens. Michael Bennet (D-CA), Cory Booker (D-NJ), Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), Bernie Sanders (I-VT), and Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and the millions they represent from having a say on whether to remove the president for high crimes and misdemeanors.

With a Democratic House majority, the resolution is unlikely to make it to the floor — much less be adopted. But it comes on the heals of an array of other stunts and bizarre arguments made by Trump and his GOP defenders in recent weeks.

Fox News judge explains why he would ‘certainly’ impeach Pres. Trump

Fox News Judge Andrew Napolitano declared Wednesday that he would “certainly” vote to impeach President Donald Trump if he was a member of Congress.

During an appearance on “America’s Newsroom,” Napolitano asserted his belief that “the Democrats have credibly argued that [Trump] committed impeachable offenses” in the Ukraine scandal.

“The easiest one — because this existed in Andrew Johnson, Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton — is obstruction of Congress,” he said. “So — by directing his subordinates to refuse to comply with lawfully issued subpoenas, whether it’s for testimony or for documents — that’s an impeachable offense.”

White House adopts confident tone after Pelosi signals go on impeachment

The White House on Thursday appeared self-assured after Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) made clear a vote to impeach President Trump was all but inevitable in the House, with administration officials signaling they relish the looming fight in a Senate trial.

The president and his allies have spent weeks hammering the same narrative about the House impeachment inquiry, dismissing it as a partisan “sham” that failed to produce evidence of wrongdoing.

The White House has refused to turn over documents, blocked witnesses and declined offers to participate. House Democrats have threatened to draft articles of impeachment accusing Trump of obstruction for defying congressional subpoenas.

Democrats consider bribery, obstruction for impeachment articles against Trump

House Democrats are considering articles of impeachment against President Trump that include obstruction and bribery but are unlikely to pursue a treason charge as they weigh how to illustrate that the president’s activities involving Ukraine were part of what they see as a pattern of misconduct, according to congressional aides.

Democratic members of the Judiciary Committee and Intelligence Committee, which this week released a report of their findings from a two-month-long impeachment investigation, have said that they believe Trump’s actions vis-a-vis Ukraine meet the definition of bribery, one of the crimes the Constitution identifies specifically as an impeachable offense.

Central to the Intelligence Committee’s findings is that Trump compromised U.S. national security when he held back diplomatic engagement and congressionally approved military aid from Kyiv, until Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky committed to publicly announce he was launching investigations into a debunked conspiracy theory surrounding a hacked Democratic National Committee server and of the son of former vice president Joe Biden, who is running to replace Trump in 2020.

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

On 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.

House sets up Monday hearing to hear evidence on Trump impeachment

The House Judiciary Committee will hold a hearing on Monday morning to receive presentations of evidence from investigators as it moves forward with crafting articles of impeachment against President Trump.

The Thursday announcement came hours after Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) formally announced that the House is drafting articles of impeachment.

It also comes the day after the House Judiciary Committee held a hearing with constitutional experts to discuss whether Trump’s efforts to pressure the Ukrainian government to investigate his political opponents amounted to impeachable offenses.

Trump soundly mocked for demanding speedy resolution to impeachment: ‘You don’t get to dictate terms’

President Donald Trump broke with his Republican defenders, who say impeachment is moving too fast, and demanded a quick resolution to the constitutional process.

House Democrats moved the impeachment process from the Intelligence Committee to the Judiciary Committee after nearly two weeks of testimony, and Trump called for a speedy end to the matter.

“The Do Nothing Democrats had a historically bad day yesterday in the House,” Trump tweeted. “They have no Impeachment case and are demeaning our Country. But nothing matters to them, they have gone crazy.”

Pelosi says House will move to impeach President Trump

Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) announced Thursday that the House will move forward with impeaching President Trump, saying his actions — as revealed by their weeks-long investigation — left them “no choice” but to pursue his removal from office.

The move erases any lingering doubt that Democrats view Trump’s dealings with Ukraine as a severe violation of the Constitution — and any question of whether they will take the next step of making him just the third president in the nation’s history to be impeached.

“The president’s actions have seriously violated the Constitution,” Pelosi said in a televised address against a backdrop of American flags. “Our democracy is at stake. The president leaves us no choice but to act.”

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