Tag: Trump abuse of power

House Intelligence Committee to review impeachment investigation report Monday

The Hill logoThe House Intelligence Committee will begin reviewing a report Monday on its investigation into President Trump’s dealings with Ukraine, a committee official confirmed to The Hill.

The committee is then expected to consider and adopt the report Tuesday evening. The report and any minority views will be sent to the House Judiciary Committee, which could draft articles of impeachment against the president in the next few weeks, according to Politico.

This is a major event, moving impeachment proceedings one step closer to a possible impeachment trial in the Senate.

View the complete November 30 article by Marina Pitofsky and Olivia Beavers on The Hill website here.

Trump’s photo op play: Facing impeachment, the president strives to look hard at work

Washington Post logoPALM BEACH, Fla. — As Democrats in Congress push to impeach him, President Trump has toured a manufacturing plant in Texas, boasted about economic gains and signed numerous bills. He served turkey to U.S. troops in Afghanistan on Thanksgiving and grieved with the families of fallen service members at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware.

And next week, Trump is scheduled to jet to London to meet with European allies and be received at Buckingham Palace by Queen Elizabeth II.

Sure, Trump has been consumed by the impeachment proceedings, popping off daily, if not hourly, about what he dubs a “hoax.” But he and his aides also have staged photo opportunities and public events designed to showcase the president on the job — a strategy one year out from the election to convince the American people that he is hard at work for them at the same time that Democrats are trying to remove him from office.

View the complete November 30 article by Philip Rucker on The Washington Post website here.

BREAKING: House Intelligence releases impeachment findings

The Hill logoDemocrats on the House Intelligence Committee released a lengthy memo Tuesday detailing their weeks of evidence-gathering as part of the impeachment inquiry, in which they claim President Trump abused the power of his office.

“The evidence is clear that President Trump used the power of his office to pressure Ukraine into announcing investigations into his political rival, former Vice President Joe Biden, and a debunked conspiracy theory that it was Ukraine, not Russia, that interfered in the 2016 election. These investigations were designed to benefit his 2020 presidential reelection campaign,” three House Democratic chairs said in a statement.

The report, which the Intelligence panel is poised to transmit to the House Judiciary Committee, lays out details that Democrats hope will boost their case as they seek to argue President Trump is unfit for office. They are primarily, if not entirely, resting their case on the claims Trump used the most powerful office in the world to press Ukraine to open to investigations that would benefit him politically.

Continue reading here.

While Withholding Aid, Trump Pushed Ukraine Conspiracy On Fox

A senior budget official learned on June 19 that President Donald Trump had inquired about U.S. military aid to Ukraine after seeing a media report, according to his newly released testimony in the House impeachment inquiry.  And in an interview with Fox’s Sean Hannity that same night, the president linked Ukraine to a conspiracy theory involving the Democratic National Committee’s hacked server, demonstrating his state of mind about the country at that time.

Mark Sandy, a career official in the Office of Management and Budget, told the House impeachment inquiry into Trump’s abuses of power that on June 19 he was informed by OMB political appointee Michael Duffey that Trump “had seen a media report” and “had questions” about the military aid package to Ukraine.” Sandy did not recall the specific article, but some have speculated it was a June 19 report on U.S. plans to send $250 million in military equipment to Ukraine.

Other testimonies before the inquiry indicate that OMB illegally froze the aid at the president’s order on July 25, that Ukrainian officials inquired about the hold on the aid the same day, and that the package became conditioned on Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky publicly announcing investigations that would benefit Trump politically. The aid was reportedly released only after Trump became aware of a whistleblower complaint about his dealings with Ukraine.

View the complete November 28 article by Matt Gertz from MediaMatters on the National Memo website here.

Pompeo-Trump relationship tested by impeachment inquiry

The Hill logoSecretary of State Mike Pompeo is on rocky terrain with President Trump and members of the State Department following critical testimony by diplomatic officials in the public impeachment hearings led by House Democrats. 

Career foreign service officers and Trump appointees came forward last week to lay out in great detail how the president and his allies carried out a smear campaign against the now-former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine and how the administration’s policy toward the country raised concerns among veteran diplomats.

The witnesses testified about their frustrations with the lack of a public defense from Pompeo when State Department employees were under attack or sidelined, and Trump has expressed frustration with officials underneath Pompeo who provided the bulk of damaging testimony about the president’s dealings with Ukraine.

View the complete November 27 article by Brett Samuels and Morgan Chalfant on The Hill website here.

The day of Trump’s call with Ukraine’s president, minute-by-minute

Washington Post logoJuly 25 was not an obviously remarkable day in the presidency of Donald Trump. It was a Thursday, scheduled with the sort of standard activities in which presidents engage: a ceremony at the Pentagon, a White House event focused on employment. It was as unremarkable as the weather: hot, but not too.

That summary, though, ignores the events that unfolded over the course of the day, events that are at the center of the impeachment inquiry focused on President Trump’s interactions with Ukraine.

On Tuesday, we learned more about how the Trump administration shifted on July 25 in a way that allowed Trump and his team to pressure Ukraine into launching investigations that would benefit Trump personally. In light of that new information, we’ve created the following timeline of the events of the day. A normal day in the Trump presidency, overlaid with some abnormal machinations.

View the complete November 26 article by Philip Bump on The Washington Post website here.

The GOP Attack Machine Targets The US Military

The focus here isn’t President Donald Trump. He is a creature unto himself. Rather, this is about his spineless political party, which stands mute, or even supportive, as he breaks U.S. military discipline, morale and leadership.

The GOP used to be the party of superpatriots, always saluting our men and women in uniform. It still playacts. Some members of the Republican caucus continue to make a show of thanking soldiers for their service even as they savage the soldiers’ reputations to advance the president’s interests. (Someday we’ll get to the bottom of what those interests really were.)

Navy Secretary Richard Spencer has just been fired. Ignore the convoluted explanations for his termination. In the end, Spencer was dismissed for having openly opposed Trump’s perverse move to reverse the judgments on three service members accused or convicted of war crimes. The decisions were all reached within the military justice system.

View the complete November 27 article by From a Harrop on the National Memo website here.

Trump knew of whistleblower complaint when he released aid to Ukraine

Lawyers from the White House Counsel’s Office told Trump in August about the complaint, explaining that they were trying to determine whether they were legally required to give it to Congress, two people said.

WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump had already been briefed on a whistleblower’s complaint about his dealings with Ukraine when he unfroze military aid for the country in September, according to two people familiar with the matter.

Lawyers from the White House Counsel’s Office told Trump in late August about the complaint, explaining that they were trying to determine whether they were legally required to give it to Congress, the people said.

The revelation could shed light on Trump’s thinking at two critical points under scrutiny by impeachment investigators: his decision in early September to release $391 million in security assistance to Ukraine and his denial to a key ambassador around the same time that there was a “quid pro quo” with Kiev. Trump used the phrase before it had entered the public lexicon in the Ukraine affair.

View the complete November 27 article by Michael S. Schmidt and Maggie Haberman from The New York Times on The Star Tribune website here.

As Trump cases arrive, Supreme Court’s desire to be seen as neutral arbiter will be tested

Washington Post logoThe legal cases concerning President Trump, his finances and his separation-of-powers disputes with Congress are moving like a brush fire to the Supreme Court, and together provide both potential and challenge for the Roberts court in its aspiration to be seen as nonpartisan.

he court, composed of five conservatives nominated by Republican presidents and four liberals chosen by Democrats, has little choice but to step onto a fiercely partisan battleground.

It announced Tuesday that it will consider on Dec. 13 whether to schedule a full briefing and argument on the president’s request that it overturn a lower-court ruling giving New York prosecutors access to Trump’s tax returns and other financial records in their investigation of ­hush-money payments in the lead-up to the 2016 election.

View the complete November 26 article by Robert Barnes and Ann E. Marimow on The Washington Post website here.

At Florida ‘homecoming rally,’ Trump builds his case against impeachment

“The radical Democrats are trying to overturn the last election because they know that they cannot win the next election,” he says.

SUNRISE, Fla. — President Donald Trump on Tuesday spent much of his “homecoming rally” here building his case against impeachment before thousands of enthusiastic supporters.

He cast Democrats’ inquiry as a desperate effort to win back the White House in 2020. He went so far as to call the impeachment proceedings “bullshit,” prompting a new audience chant containing the expletive. And he put those proceedings in the same category as the Mueller investigation, labeling all of it a “scam” and a “hoax.”

“They’re attacking me because I’m exposing a rigged system that enriched itself at your expense and I’m restoring government of, by and for the people,” he told the crowd at the BB&T Center.

View the complete November 26 article by Nancy Cook and Matthew Choi on the Politico website here.