Tag: Trump corruption

Lawmakers express concern after reading whistleblower report

Members urge patience, even public release of the complaint so the American people can see it for themselves

Some lawmakers expressed concerns Wednesday evening after reading a divisive whistleblower report that House and Senate Intelligence committee members were allowed to review in secure Capitol rooms.

Democratic lawmakers and even a Republican said the complaint raised concerns, but many urged patience and called for public release of the complaint so the American people could see it for themselves. The complaint was delivered to the Intelligence panels before the House voted 421-0 Wednesday evening to adopt a nonbinding resolution urging the administration to make the complaint itself available to Congress.

Sen. Ben Sasse told NBC News, “there’s obviously some really troubling things here.” But the Nebraska Republican urged caution and careful deliberation, saying both parties should “slow down” before Democrats begin using the word impeach, or Republicans begin to “circle the wagons.”

View the complete September 25 article by Chris Cioffi on The Roll Call website here.

Phone Call Showed Only a Slice of Trump’s Obsession With Ukraine

New York Times logoSince the 2016 campaign, the president has had an intense fixation on the country, which he believes is tied up in the origins of the special counsel’s investigation.

WASHINGTON — It was not a country that would naturally have seemed high on the priority list of a president who came to office relishing a trade clash with China, promising to reorder the Middle East and haranguing European allies to spend more on NATO.

But for President Trump, Ukraine has been an obsession since the 2016 campaign.

Long before the July 25 call with the new Ukrainian president that helped spur the formal start of impeachment proceedings against him in the House, Mr. Trump fretted and fulminated about the former Soviet state, angry over what he sees as Ukraine’s role in the origins of the investigations into Russian influence on his 2016 campaign.

View the complete Septembe 25 article by Kenneth P. Vogel, Julian E. Barnes, Maggie Haberman and Sharon LaFraniere on The New York Times website here.

Barr’s relationship with Trump called into question again by Ukraine call

Analysis: Trump’s call with Ukraine’s leader raises questions about whether he thinks the attorney general’s job includes advocating for him personally.

The Trump administration’s release of notes documenting President Donald Trump’s conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has raised questions about Trump’s relationship with Attorney General William Barr and whether he views Barr as someone whose job includes advocating for him on personal matters.

Repeatedly over the course of the call, Trump told Zelenskiy that his personal attorney Rudy Giuliani and Barr will be contacting Ukrainian prosecutors on two investigations: one related to an email server tied to Trump’s former political rival, Hillary Clinton, and the other related to his potential future political rival, former Vice President Joe Biden.

“I would like to have the attorney general call you or your people and I would like you to get to the bottom of it,” Trump told Zelenskiy about an investigation he wanted into CrowdStrike, a California-based company that investigated the Russian hacking of emails belonging to the Democratic National Committee in 2016.

View the complete September 25 article by Julia Ainsley on the NBC News website here.

218 House lawmakers now support an impeachment inquiry on Trump

Washington Post logoThe White House released a rough transcript Wednesday of President Trump’s July 25 call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky telling him to work with U.S. Attorney General William P. Barr to investigate the conduct of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden. The administration transmitted the whistleblower’s complaint to Congress before the vote, and members of the Intelligence committees had a chance to review it.

On the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in New York on Wednesday, Trump dismissed Democrats’ move to open an impeachment inquiry against him, denied that he pressured Ukraine’s leader to investigate Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden and suggested that the White House should release even more records of his communications.

The July 25 call has been the subject of intense scrutiny since The Washington Post reported last week that a whistleblower had come forward with concerns about the matter.

View the complete September 25 article by Felicia Sonmez, Colby Itkowitz and John Wagner on The Washington Post website here.

Trump White House accidentally sends Ukraine talking points to House Democrats — then demands the email be ‘recalled’

AlterNet logoWith House Speaker Nancy Pelosi — after months of adamant opposition to impeaching President Donald Trump — having changed her mind this week in response to the Ukraine scandal, the White House is making sure it has its talking points in order.  Those Ukraine talking points have been sent to House Democrats in a document titled “What You Need to Know: President Trump’s Call With President Zelensky,” and Politico’s Andrew Desiderio has posted screenshots of the document on Twitter.

According to reports, Trump asked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to help dig up dirt on a political opponent, former Vice President Joe Biden, and his son Hunter Biden during a phone conversation on July 25. And the White House, in its list of talking points, tries to make the conversation sound innocent.

In the document, the White House claims that the press has been promoting “flat-out falsehoods about the call” — for example, the White House denies that Trump urged Zelensky to investigate Joe Biden and Hunter Biden, and that Trump threatened to withhold military aid to Ukraine if they weren’t investigated. The White House insists that during the conversation, there was “no mention of the aid package to Ukraine at all.”

View the complete September 25 article by Alex Henderson on the AlterNet website here.

Watch: GOP’s Matt Gaetz clams up after revealing Trump gave GOP lawmakers Watch: GOP’s Matt Gaetz clams up after revealing Trump gave GOP lawmakers a sneak peek at Ukraine call sneak peek at Ukraine call

AlterNet logoRep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) on Wednesday quickly clammed up after he accidentally revealed that he and his fellow Republican lawmakers got a sneak peek at the White House’s summary of a phone call between President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

During an interview with MSNBC’s Hallie Jackson, Gaetz tried to dismiss the incredibly damning summary of the call, which showed Trump repeatedly pressured Zelensky to open an investigation into potential 2020 rival Joe Biden.

In the course of defending the president, Gaetz said that he “had a chance to review the transcripts and chat with the president about them.”

View the complete September 25 article by Brad Reed from Raw Story on the AlterNet website here.

Director of National Intelligence sent whistleblower’s complaint about Trump to Barr’s DOJ — which declined to investigate

AlterNet logoThe Director of National Intelligence and the intelligence community’s inspector general both sent the whistleblower’s complaint against President Donald Trump to the U.S. Dept. of Justice, suggesting a criminal investigation be opened. The DOJ, under Attorney General Bill Barr, refused to prosecute the president.

“The department’s criminal division reviewed the matters and concluded that there was no basis for a criminal investigation into Mr. Trump’s behavior,” The New York Times reports. “Law enforcement officials determined that the transcript of the call did not show that Mr. Trump had violated campaign finance laws by soliciting from a foreign national a contribution, donation or thing of value.”

In fact, many legal experts believe the opposite.

View the complete September 25 article by David Badash on the New Civil RIghts Movement website here.

Memo: Trump asked Ukraine to work with Giuliani, Barr to investigate Biden

Axios logoThe White House on Wednesday released a memorandum of a July 25 call in which President Trump pressed the president of Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden. The memo notes that it is not a verbatim transcript.

The big picture: After discussing the Ukrainian election, Trump told President Volodymyr Zelensky he should work with his lawyer Rudy Giuliani and Attorney General Bill Barr to look into allegations that Joe Biden fired a Ukrainian prosecutor investigating his son. Trump has previously confirmed that he discussed these allegations against Biden — for which there is no evidence — with Zelensky. It was not previously known that Trump asked Zelensky to work with Barr.

“The other thing, There’s a lot of talk about Biden’s son, that Biden stopped the prosecution and a lot of people want to find out about that so whatever you can do with the Attorney General would be great. Biden went around bragging that he stopped the prosecution so if you can look into it … It sounds horrible to me.”

View the complete September 25 article on the Axios website here.

This is rare’: Every Republican senator just joined the Democrats to stand up to Trump

AlterNet logoSenate Republicans on Tuesday were united in demanding President Donald Trump’s administration turn over the whistleblower report as required by law.

“The Senate has *unanimously* agreed to Schumer’s resolution calling for the whistleblower complaint to be turned over the intelligence committees immediately,” Bloomberg’s Steven Dennis reported Tuesday.

“That’s every Senate Republican plus every Democrat now via unanimous consent agreeing to call on the Trump administration to cough up the whistleblower complaint, not just the phone call transcript,” he noted.

View the complete September 24 article by David Badash on the New Civil Rights Movement website here.

Trump offered Ukrainian president Justice Dept. help for Biden investigation, memo shows

Washington Post logoPresident Trump told his Ukrainian counterpart to work with the U.S. attorney general to investigate Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden and offered to meet with the foreign leader at the White House after he promised to conduct such an inquiry, according to a rough transcript of the call released Wednesday.

Those statements and others in a July 25 phone call between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky were so concerning that the intelligence community inspector general thought them a possible violation of campaign finance law. In late August, intelligence officials referred the matter to the Justice Department as a possible crime, but prosecutors concluded last week that the conduct was not criminal, according to senior Justice Department officials.

The document released Wednesday, in keeping with White House practice, is a memorandum of a telephone conversation and is not a verbatim account. A cautionary note on the memo of the call warns that the text reflects the notes and memories of officials in the Situation Room and that a number of factors “can affect the accuracy of the record.”

View the complete September 25 article by Devlin Barrett, Matt Zapotosky, Carol D. Leonnig and Josh Dawsey on The Washington Post website here.