Tag: Trump abuse of power

Two OMB officials resigned in part over concerns about Ukraine aid hold, official testifies

Washington Post logoMark Sandy, a career official at the White House Office of Management and Budget, revealed the resignations in testimony to impeachment investigators

Two officials at the White House Office of Management and Budget recently resigned in part over concerns about the holdup on Ukraine aid, a career employee of the agency told impeachment investigators, according to a transcript of his testimony released Tuesday.

Mark Sandy, the only OMB official to testify in the impeachment inquiry, did not name the employees in question. He said one worked in the OMB legal division and described that person as having a “dissenting opinion” about how the security assistance to Ukraine could be held up in light of the Impoundment Control Act, which limits the ability of the executive branch to change spending decisions made by Congress.

Sandy, the agency’s deputy associate director for national security programs, testified on Nov. 16, and his remarks revealed some of the White House’s internal maneuverings relating to blocking the aid. Other White House officials, including Sandy’s superiors at the budget office who are political appointees, have defied congressional subpoenas to participate in the House Democrats’ impeachment inquiry.

View the complete November 26 article by Erica Werner and Felicia Sonmez on The Washington Post website here.

House Democrats release final transcripts from impeachment depositions

The Hill logoHouse Democrats on Tuesday released the remaining witness transcripts from their impeachment inquiry into President Trump.

The three House committees that led the closed-door depositions released interviews with Philip Reeker, the acting assistant secretary of State in charge of European and Eurasian Affairs, and Mark Sandy, a senior Office of Management and Budget official.

The document release comes as the House Intelligence Committee plans to work through the Thanksgiving holiday to compile a report for the House Judiciary Committee to use in determining whether to draft articles of impeachment against Trump over allegations that he pressed Ukraine’s president to interfere in the 2020 election by opening two investigations that would benefit Trump politically.

View the complete November 26 article by Olivia Beavers on The Hill website here.

Former GOP congressman involved with Clinton impeachment explains why Trump’s actions are ‘much more serious’ — and blasts his party for holding Obama to a different standard

AlterNet logoWith President Donald Trump facing an impeachment inquiry in the U.S. House of Representatives, journalists have been seeking the insights of those who were involved in the United States’ last two presidential impeachments: President Richard Nixon in 1973/1974 and President Bill Clinton in the last 1990s. Former Rep. Bob Inglis, a South Carolina Republican, discussed his involvement with Clinton’s impeachment during a CNN appearance this week — and he stressed that Clinton/Trump comparisons are misleading because Trump’s actions are much worse.

“The matters that is we impeached Bill Clinton for were really quite less serious than these matters,” Inglis told CNN. “These matters go right to the heart of the functioning of our government with the dealing of the president in foreign policy, and allegedly seeking political dirt on an enemy — a domestic political enemy — (and) using the levers of our government to achieve that objective. That’s a very different scenario — much more serious — than Bill Clinton’s marital infidelity.”

When Inglis was asked what he has to say to fellow Republicans who are defending Trump vigorously, the former congressman responded, “I would say to them that if you are going to keep a republic, you’ve got to keep some principles — and surely, the principle is to fairness and the rule of law. I just ask my Republican friends: if Barack Obama had done any of these things, would we have impeached him? And the answer is pretty clearly yes. In fact, we would have impeached him and removed him from office very quickly if he had done any of these things.”

View the complete November 26 article by Alex Henderson on the AlterNet website here.

House Judiciary schedules first impeachment hearing, invites Trump

Hearing to review constitutional grounds for drafting articles of impeachment

The House Judiciary Committee has invited President Donald Trump to participate in a hearing next week on the constitutional justification for impeachment.

Chairman Jerrold Nadler announced that his panel will hold its first impeachment hearing at 10 a.m. on Wednesday, Dec. 4. The New York Democrat also wrote to the president asking if he intends to participate either personally or through his attorneys, pursuant to the House resolution that set the ground rules for the impeachment process.

“If you would like to participate in the hearing, please provide the Committee with notice as soon as possible, but no later than by 6:00 pm on December 1, 2019. By that time, I ask that you also indicate who will act as your counsel for these proceedings,” Nadler wrote.

View the complete November 26 article by Niels Lesniewski and Katherine Tully-McManus on The Roll Call website here.

Former CIA officer: Trump and his allies have a long history of bullying intelligence experts who probe Russian election interference

AlterNet logoWhen Fiona Hill, a former National Security Council (NSC) senior director specializing in Russian and European affairs, testified before the House Intelligence Committee on November 21, she stressed that there was zero evidence to support the claim that Ukraine rather than Russia interfered in the United States’ 2016 presidential election. Nonetheless, the CrowdStrike conspiracy theory persists on the far right. And journalist Alex Finley, in a report for Just Security, discusses the extremes that President Donald Trump’s allies have been willing to go to in the hope of discrediting intelligence on Russian election interference in 2016.

The CrowdStrike conspiracy theory claims that in 2016, the cyber-security firm CrowdStrike conspired with Democrats and the Ukrainian government to frame the Russian government for interfering in the presidential election. According to the false claim that the Ukrainian government — not Russian President Vladimir Putin — was the real villain in 2016, Finley notes, “Trump never could have colluded with Russia, because Russia never did anything wrong.” And Finley notes that Attorney General William Barr has been investigating people in the U.S. intelligence community who have been part of the Russia investigation — and appointed federal prosecutor John Dunham to head that investigation.

Finley explains, “Last month, media outlets reported that Barr’s investigation had become a criminal one. Whether true or not, the claim — much like the public attacks from Trump, Republicans and the conservative media ecosystem —  seemed like a clear signal to civil servants — whether in the FBI, the CIA or the NSA — to tread very carefully if they planned to take any actions that came anywhere near the Russia-Trump nexus again.”

View the complete November 26 article by Alex Henderson on the AlterNet website here.

Trump says he would ‘love to’ have officials testify but is ‘fighting for future presidents’

The Hill logoPresident Trump on Tuesday claimed he was blocking current and former administration officials from testifying in the impeachment inquiry to protect future presidents. The statement came one day after a federal judge ruled former White House counsel Don McGahn must appear before a House panel.

Trump argued in a trio of tweets that he “would love to have” McGahn, former national security adviser John Bolton, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney testify. The White House has thus far blocked officials from complying with Democratic requests for testimony in the House impeachment inquiry.

“The D.C. Wolves and Fake News Media are reading far too much into people being forced by Courts to testify before Congress,” he tweeted. “I am fighting for future Presidents and the Office of the President. Other than that, I would actually like people to testify.”

View the complete November 26 article by Brett Samuels on The Hill website here.

Legal experts: Impeachment inquiry proves GOP’s ‘governing philosophy’ is shameless narcissism

AlterNet logoIt isn’t hard to predict the eventual outcome of the impeachment inquiry that President Donald Trump is facing: Trump will likely be indicted on articles of impeachment in the U.S. House of Representatives — where Democrats have a majority — but acquitted in a trial in the GOP-controlled U.S. Senate. Legal experts Benjamin Wittes and Quinta Jurecic don’t disagree with that scenario, which they discuss in a November 25 article for The Atlantic. And impeachment, they stress, is exposing the narcissism and shamelessness of the modern Republican Party.

Wittes and Jurecic, in addition to their work with The Atlantic, are key figures at the Lawfare Blog: Wittes is editor in chief, while Jurecic is managing editor. Both have covered Trump’s legal woes extensively. And the wealth of testimony offered during this month’s impeachment hearings, they assert, makes a strong case for impeaching the president and removing him from office.

“The public proceedings largely dramatized the story that we already knew about Trump’s coercive efforts with respect to Ukraine,” Wittes and Jurecic explain. “Witness after witness made it obvious: the president was attempting to force Ukraine to announce sham investigations that would benefit Trump politically, in exchange for a White House visit and hundreds of millions of dollars of military aid. There were a lot of witnesses. They were credible. And they were, individually and collectively, damning.”

View the complete November 26 article by Alex Henderson on the AlterNet website here.

Trump Attacks Yovanovitch Over Failure To Display His Portrait (Not Her Fault)

Donald Trump’s latest reasons for firing Marie Yovanovitch as ambassador to Ukraine: She was an “Obama person” who refused to hang Trump’s portrait in the U.S. Embassy. That’s false on both counts.

Trump’s pique about not having his picture displayed in a timely way — actually the fault of his administration, not the ambassador — came during a week of unfounded or distorted statements by the president about the impeachment inquiry and the political favor he sought from Ukraine.

“This ambassador that everybody says is so wonderful, she wouldn’t hang my picture in the embassy. OK? She’s in charge of the embassy. She wouldn’t hang it,” Trump said in a Fox News interview Friday. “It took like a year and a half or two years for her to get the picture up.”

View the complete November 25 article from the Associated Press on the National Memo website here.

Republicans preview impeachment defense strategy

The Hill logoRepublicans are signaling how they intend to punch back against the fast-paced impeachment inquiry, marking a shift from defense to offense after Democrats scrutinized President Trump’s contacts with Ukraine during two weeks of public hearings.

The president and his supporters appear more energized in the impeachment fight, despite several current and former government officials telling Congress their concerns about a shadowy foreign policy led by people inside and outside the Trump administration.

Trump and his defenders have maintained there was nothing wrong with the July 25 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, in which Trump asked the foreign leader to do him “a favor” by examining unfounded claims of Ukrainian interference in the 2016 presidential election and looking into former Vice President Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden, according to a summary readout of the call released by the White House.

View the complete November 26 article by Olivia Beavers on The Hill website here.

Trump administration to appeal ruling over former WH counsel McGahn testimony

The Hill logoThe Justice Department on Tuesday said it would appeal a ruling by a federal district judge ordering former White House counsel Don McGahn to testify before Congress.

The Department of Justice (DOJ) also asked the judge to pause the ruling while the appeal plays out. In the interim, House Democrats, who issued the subpoena for McGahn’s testimony, have agreed to a weeklong suspension, or stay, of the ruling that was issued Monday night.

DOJ lawyers argued that a stay pending appeal should be granted because there is a “significant chance” that a federal appeals court will find McGahn is “absolutely immune from compelled congressional testimony.”

View the complete November 26 article by John Kruzel on The Hill website here.