Tag: Trump bribery

Top Diplomat Testified Pompeo Called Hannity About Yovanovitch Smears

“It did come up at some point with the secretary,” David Hale said. “I understood that he did call Sean Hannity.”

David Hale, the under secretary of state for political affairs, said in his closed-door impeachment testimony that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo called Fox News host Sean Hannity last spring to ask about the smear campaign launched against former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch, according to a transcript that was made public Monday night.

Discussing efforts by Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani and pro-Trump media to besmirch the reputation of Yovanovitch ahead of her ouster as ambassador, Hale noted that Pompeo spoke to Giuliani twice in late March regarding the allegations.

At the time, conservative columnist John Solomon had reported that former Ukrainian Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko said Yovanovitch had given him a “do not prosecute list.” (Lutsenko would later walk back that claim.)

View the complete November 18 article by Justin Baragona on the Daily Beast website here.

Trump blames Mike Pompeo for State Department officials’ devastating testimony in impeachment inquiry: ‘Rein your people in!’

AlterNet logoPresident Donald Trump unloaded recently on Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, whom he blames for devastating testimony against him the House impeachment inquiry.

The president confronted Pompeo, who has been his closest ally, during an Oct. 29 lunch at the White House, according to four current former senior administration officials who spoke to NBC News.

“(Trump) just felt like, ‘rein your people in,’” said one senior administration official.

View the complete November 18 article by Travis Gettys from Raw Story on the AlterNet website here.

Never Trumper’: President unleashes on Pence aide after she testifies about ‘inappropriate’ Ukraine pressure

AlterNet logoPresident Donald Trump on Sunday lashed out at an adviser to Vice President Mike Pence after she testified that the president put “inappropriate” pressure on Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden.

“Tell Jennifer Williams, whoever that is, to read BOTH transcripts of the presidential calls,” Trump ranted on Twitter. “[S]ee the just released ststement from Ukraine. Then she should meet with the other Never Trumpers, who I don’t know & mostly never even heard of, & work out a better presidential attack!”

In a transcript released over the weekend, Williams told House investigators that Trump appeared to be trying to serve a “personal political agenda, as opposed to a broader … foreign policy objective of the United States.”

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

Sondland testimony looms over impeachment hearings this week

The Hill logoDramatic testimony from U.S. diplomats working in Ukraine have significantly raised the stakes for this week’s impeachment inquiry appearance from Gordon Sondland, the mega-donor to President Trump who is now the U.S. ambassador to the European Union.

Sondland is expected to come under tough questioning from Democrats and Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee on Wednesday after shifting his initial statement in the inquiry to acknowledge it was his belief that Trump linked Ukrainian security assistance to that country announcing investigations into former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter.

Testimony last week from William Taylor, the top U.S. diplomat in Ukraine, has also put a new spotlight on Sondland. Taylor testified that one of his staffers overheard Sondland speaking with Trump about the desired investigations into Biden and 2016 election interference.

View the complete November 18 article by Cristina Marcos on The Hill website here.

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.