Tag: Trump impeachment

Republicans fear Trump’s plan for a Senate trial would be ‘mutually assured destruction’: report

AlterNet logoSenate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell opposes the idea of calling witnesses during the likely trial on the impeachment articles of President Donald Trump, a new report from the Washington Post revealed on Wednesday.

Though the articles have not officially passed in the House of Representatives, the Senate is expecting to hold the trial in January.

In theory, the trial could give Trump what he desperately wants: a spectacular, fervent defense of his conduct and an opportunity to attack his perceived enemies. What would this mean in practice? He’d love to call witnesses like Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, former Vice President Joe Biden, and Hunter Biden. None of them have anything relevant to add about the nature of Trump’s conduct — they weren’t witnesses to the events at issue in the impeachment articles — but they would let the president distract from his own wrongdoing and smear the Democrats.

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Democrats seek leverage for Trump impeachment trial

The Hill logoSenate Democrats are quietly talking about asking Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) to hold articles of impeachment in the House until Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) agrees to a fair rules package for a Senate trial.

Democratic senators are concerned by talk among Senate Republicans of holding a speedy trial without witnesses, which would set up a shorter time frame than when the Senate considered President Clinton’s 1999 impeachment.

They want to hear from Trump’s advisers and worry that if they don’t use their leverage now, they’ll have little say over how a Senate trial is run.

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Trump’s impeachment mood morphs from anger to mockery

The president has started employing a joking, nonchalant public stance just as impeachment takes a more serious turn.

He’s started calling the case against him “impeachment lite.”

He’s increasingly coming around to arguments that he could swing the impeachment battle to help his party in 2020.

And he’s become so outwardly nonchalant about the Democratic impeachment push that he’s taken special joy in giving visitors a look at the private study off the Oval Office — playfully pointing out where one of President Bill Clinton‘s infamous dalliances with Monica Lewinsky occurred and ultimately triggered the 42nd president’s impeachment.

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Partisan battles erupt as Judiciary begins final phase of impeachment

Jerry Nadler told Republicans to “please keep in mind that — one way or the other — President Trump will not be president forever.”

The House Judiciary Committee began formal consideration of two impeachment articles against President Donald Trump on Wednesday night, a four-plus-hour partisan slugfest that changed few minds but yielded dozens of political attack lines that will be repeated endlessly in coming weeks.

Republicans blasted the process as unworthy of the storied Judiciary panel. They accused Democrats of a “political hit job,” “a rigged process” and a “naked partisan exercise” designed to remove a president whom they always opposed.

But Democrats hit back hard, calling Trump “the smoking gun” who engaged in a “constitutional crime spree.” And they said the quick pace of the impeachment proceedings is critical because of the “clear and present danger” Trump poses to the integrity of the 2020 presidential election.

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With scores to settle, Trump slams ‘crooked bastard’ Schiff over impeachment

President calls abuse of power, obstructing Congress articles ‘impeachment lite’

ANALYSIS — President Donald Trump went to Hershey, Pennsylvania, with a few scores to settle hours after House Democrats unveiled two articles of impeachment they appear poised to pass next week.

For more than an hour, Trump railed against House Intelligence Chairman Adam B. Schiff and Speaker Nancy Pelosi as a throng of supporters inside the Giant Center booed, cheered and laughed — depending on the insult of the moment. He dubbed Schiff a “dishonest guy” and a “crooked bastard” and claimed the speaker has “absolutely no control” over a caucus that has lurched dramatically to the left.

The president dropped false statements about a Justice Department inspector general report released earlier this week that found the agency’s 2016 probe of his campaign was riddled with errors but not driven by political biases against him. He also lied about a White House-produced summary of his July 25 call with Ukraine’s president, saying it was “word-for-word transcribed.” That summary features a disclaimer that it does not capture every word spoken by the two leaders.

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New book reveals why Trump should have been impeached years ago because of North Korea

AlterNet logoIn an ideal world, a president would be removed from office if they demonstrated an obvious basic lack of competency for the job, even if they were not engaged in any unethical or criminal activities. President Trump will be impeached for contempt of Congress and abuse of power, but he ought to be retired for the simple reason that his foolishness and stupidity is a danger to the country and to all of humanity. This can be seen in excerpts from Peter Bergen’s new book, Trump and his Generals: The Cost of Chaos. Bergen describes an Oval Office meeting on North Korea in mid-April 2017 in which Trump was shown a coffee table-sized model of North Korea’s nuclear facilities during a briefing on the regional threat they pose.

Trump was also shown a satellite image of the Korean peninsula at night, showing the lights of China and South Korea and the blackness of North Korea in between. Trump initially mistook the void for an ocean. When he was shown the bright lights of Seoul just 30 miles south of the demilitarized zone separating the two Koreas, the president asked: “Why is Seoul so close to the North Korean border?”

Indeed, why is a city of 9.8 million people located where it is located? Why not pick it up like a campsite and move it to a safer area?

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A day of history accentuates America’s divide and the distortions of truth in the Trump era

Washington Post logoFor only the fourth time in the nation’s history, congressional leaders on Tuesday put forward articles of impeachment against a president, but that milestone was the most predictable of events on a day that accentuated the degree to which the institutions of government are under stress and the citizens they serve are in conflict.

Amid the partisan breakdown over President Trump’s conduct in office, there was a rare statement of progress: a deal to cement a new U.S. trade agreement with Canada and Mexico, the only substantial legislative breakthrough of the year and one long sought by the president.

But in today’s hyper-polarized environment, agreement among elected leaders — once considered the norm — is now the anomaly. Instead, the House Democrats’ march to impeach Trump and the president’s continuing war with the FBI over the origins of the Russia investigation more clearly characterized the strained state of the nation and the rising prominence of distorting facts for political gain.

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Republicans consider skipping witnesses in Trump impeachment trial

The Hill logoSenate Republicans are weighing a speedy impeachment trial that could include no witnesses for President Trump’s legal team or for House Democrats.

The discussions come as the House is moving forward with articles of impeachment against Trump, teeing up a trial in the Senate that would start in January.

The White House has indicated publicly that it has a wish list of potential witnesses, including House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff(D-Calif.), Hunter Biden and the whistleblower who sparked the impeachment inquiry.

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Giuliani says Trump asked him to brief Justice Dept. and GOP senators on his Ukraine findings

Washington Post logoRudolph W. Giuliani, President Trump’s personal lawyer, said Tuesday that the president has asked him to brief the Justice Department and Republican senators on his findings from a recent trip to Ukraine ahead of a likely Senate impeachment trial.

“He wants me to do it,” Giuliani said in a brief interview. “I’m working on pulling it together and hope to have it done by the end of the week.”

However, it is unclear whether GOP senators or Justice Department officials want information from Giuliani, whose meetings in Europe last week with Ukrainian sources drew condemnation from Democratic lawmakers and winces even from some Republicans.

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Trump, allies aim to delegitimize impeachment from the start

President Donald Trump and his Republican allies spent weeks trivializing the House impeachment inquiryahead of Tuesday’s historic unveiling of formal charges against the president.

Where Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton treated the prospect of impeachment as a serious threat to their presidencies, Trump’s boosters have tried to brush off the whole thing. Believing that acquittal by the GOP-controlled Senate is all but certain, they’re out to convince voters to punish the president’s Democratic accusers — or at least tune out the Washington spectacle.

To that end, they have belittled the impeachment process with mockery, schoolyard taunts and an unyielding insistence that Trump did not a single thing wrong. They have stonewalled, refusing to allow witnesses to testify; protested by declining to send their own lawyers to hearings; and dished out the ultimate Trumpian insult: calling the proceedings boring.

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