Tag: Trump abuse of power

Trump Fighting Corruption? Don’t Make Me Laugh

The House Intelligence Committee is called that for good reason: It oversees intelligence matters. And Trump’s defenders on the committee think it’s their job to insult our intelligence.

One of their more novel defenses of how Donald Trump dealt with Ukraine is that he was implacably determined to root out corruption in that country. For sheer gall, that claim is hard to beat. It’s as though Bill Clinton had rebutted allegations of an affair with Monica Lewinsky by claiming to be a virgin.

It’s not just that Trump is personally corrupt, as he had to admit recently in settling a lawsuit that required him to shut down his foundation and pay a fine of $2 million. Last year, he also had to pay $25 million to settle lawsuits by students who said they were defrauded by Trump University.

View the complete November 17 commentary by Steve Chapman on the National Memo website here.

Republicans Shift Defense of Trump While He Attacks Another Witness

New York Times logoWith Gordon Sondland prepared to testify this week, Republicans backed away from complaints about secondhand information and instead offered a blunter defense: The president did nothing wrong.

WASHINGTON — House Republicans, bracing for another week of impeachment hearings, asserted on Sunday that President Trump had done nothing wrong because his plans for Ukraine to investigate his political rivals never came to fruition — even as the president complicated their efforts by attacking another witness.

On a day of back-and-forth on Twitter and the morning television talk shows that are a staple of Sundays in Washington, Speaker Nancy Pelosi invited Mr. Trump to testify before the House Intelligence Committee, while the president’s allies shifted their emphasis away from the defense they offered last week, when they stressed that witnesses had only secondhand information against him.

That argument may not work much longer, because lawmakers are about to hear from crucial witnesses who had direct contact with the president, including Gordon D. Sondland, a donor to and an ally of Mr. Trump who served as his liaison to Ukrainian officials while the president withheld — but later released — $391 million in military aid to Ukraine.

View the complete November 17 article by Sheryl Gay Stolberg on The New York Times website here.

The missing voice of John McCain in impeachment and Ukraine

Late senator was the foremost expert and advocate in Congress for the Eastern European nation

OPINION — If there was ever a time and a place where the voice of John McCain was missing from Congress, this is it — at the intersection of an impeachment, an election and a constitutional crisis.

The late Arizona Republican was one of the few members famously ready and willing to stand on a political island if he thought it was the right thing to do. So it’s easy to imagine him waiting in the well of the Senate to flash a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down on the fate of President Donald Trump, with cable pundits everywhere holding their breath until he did. Continue reading “The missing voice of John McCain in impeachment and Ukraine”

Impeachment hearings don’t move needle with Senate GOP

The Hill logoSenate Republicans say the first week of House impeachment hearings hasn’t moved the needle in their conference and question whether the proceedings consuming Washington have much traction outside the Beltway.

Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), who is up for reelection next year in what is increasingly becoming a battleground state, and Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), a moderate swing vote in the upper chamber, for example, say their constituents aren’t even closely following the impeachment proceedings.

Although it is becoming increasingly clear that President Trump attempted to use military aid to pressure Ukraine to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden, the bottom line for Republicans is that it doesn’t reach the threshold to remove President Trump from office. 

View the complete November 17 article by Alexander Bolton on The Hill website here.

Sen. Johnson says whistleblower’s sources ‘exposed things that didn’t need to be exposed’

Washington Post logoSen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) said Sunday that the Trump administration officials who provided information to the anonymous whistleblower about the president’s efforts to pressure Ukraine “exposed things that didn’t need to be exposed.”

“This would have been far better off if we would’ve just taken care of this behind the scenes,” Johnson said in an interview on NBC News’s “Meet the Press.” “We have two branches of government. Most people, most people wanted to support Ukraine. We were trying to convince President Trump.”

Johnson’s comments come days after the first public hearings in the impeachment inquiry. Democrats are seeking to prove that Trump leveraged military assistance and an Oval Office meeting in exchange for investigations into former vice president Joe Biden and a debunked theory concerning purported Ukrainian interference in the 2016 presidential election.

View the complete November 17 article by Felicia Sonmez, Karoun Demirjian and Douglas MacMillan on The Washington Post website here.

We’re watching the same impeachment hearings, but seeing vastly different TV shows

AlterNet logo“Are we watching the same show?” Let me tell you, critics love this timeworn retort from readers or other media types who disagree with something they’ve said or written about a favorite episode or series.

Opinions are singular and can be based on observation, structural minutiae, or simple gut feeling. They’re neither right nor wrong, unless some element of that opinion is related to a false premise. Or, and this seems to be more likely to be the case now than ever, unless the person declaring that your opinion is incorrect – not debatable, simply wrong – is utterly convinced they, themselves, are right. Nothing can persuade them otherwise.

And anyone who holds a different view from theirs is wrong, misguided, ill-informed, stupid, dead to them. They believe people of the opposing view could not possibly understand what the show’s point is, what it is actually signaling, its true weight and meaning, how wrongly you have judged it. We can all watch the same program and come away with starkly different takes on what we saw.

View the complete November 17 article by Melanie McFarland from Salon on the AlterNet website here.

Lawmakers spar over upcoming Sondland testimony

The Hill logoPresident Trump’s allies and critics on Sunday took differing views of the implications of U.S. Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland‘s testimony in the House’s impeachment inquiry, with Democrats saying Sondland’s upcoming appearance will show that Trump solicited a bribe and Republicans disputing his statements about a quid pro quo.

Sondland is scheduled to testify in front of the House Intelligence Committee on Wednesday.

Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney (D-N.Y.) told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos that Sondland’s public testimony will demonstrate that Trump solicited a bribe.

View the complete November 17 article by Zack Budryk on The Hill website here.

Chris Wallace crushes GOP Whip Steve Scalise’s twisted defense of Trump

AlterNet logoHouse Minority Whip Steve Scalise (R-LA) struggled on Sunday to defend President Donald Trump’s alleged attempt to bribe the president of Ukraine to investigate Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden.

During an interview on FOX News Sunday, Wallace grilled Scalise about reports that U.S. Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland was overheard saying Trump only cared about things that benefit him like an investigation into Biden.

Wallace pointed out that Trump “never mentions the word corruption” in either of his telephone calls with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky but he did mention Joe Biden and his son.

View the complete November 17 article by David Edwards from Raw Story on the AlterNet website here.

White House Release Of First Trump-Zelensky Call Backfires

When President Donald Trump said he was planning to release the record of his April 21 call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, many observers yawned. In the controversy surrounding the July 25 call, some had raised questions about Trump’s only other call with the new leader, but interest in the April 21 conversation died down as the evidence against the president in the broader Ukraine scandal became so overwhelming and damning.

It was easy to assume that since Trump was so eager this week to release the record of the April 21 call, it would likely be insubstantial and only amount to a distraction for the core issues at impeachment. Jokes were already circulating about the idea that Trump would claim that, since he didn’t commit any crimes on one call, he couldn’t have possibly committed other crimes.

Yet somehow, the release of the new records — again, a decision made largely of Trump’s own initiative — completely backfired.

View the complete November 17 article by Cody Fenwick from AlterNet on the National Memo website here.

GOP divided over impeachment trial strategy

The Hill logoDivisions among Senate Republicans are muddying their strategy for a potential impeachment trial.

As lawmakers await any articles from the House, they’re throwing out their own ideas on what the Senate proceeding should look like.

But Republicans disagree over the length of a trial and who should be asked to testify — two issues that will need to be worked out as part of negotiations on the rules of the trial.

View the complete November 17 article by Jordain Carney on The Hill website here.