Tag: Trump impeachment

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.

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.

Bolton and Trump Met Privately Over Withheld Aid, White House Official Testified

New York Times logoJohn R. Bolton, who left the White House in September, has emerged as perhaps the most conspicuous witness who has evaded House Democrats as they build their case.

WASHINGTON — John R. Bolton, President Trump’s national security adviser, met privately with the president in August as part of a bid to persuade Mr. Trump to release $391 million in security assistance to Ukraine, a senior National Security Council aide told House impeachment investigators last month.

The meeting, which has not been previously reported, came as Mr. Bolton sought to marshal Mr. Trump’s cabinet secretaries and top national security advisers to convince the president that it was in the United States’ best interest to unfreeze the funds to help Ukraine defend itself against Russia. But Mr. Bolton emerged with Mr. Trump unmoved, and instructed the aide to look for new opportunities to get those officials in front of Mr. Trump.

“The extent of my recollection is that Ambassador Bolton simply said he wasn’t ready to do it,” said the aide, Timothy Morrison, referring to Mr. Trump, according to a transcript of his testimonyreleased by House Democrats on Saturday.

View the complete November 16 article by Nicholas Fandos and Sheryl Gay Stolberg on The New York Times website here.

Russia Loves the Impeachment Hearings Because GOP Is Parroting Kremlin Propaganda

Vladimir Putin could not possibly envision a sweeter gift than Ukraine falling away from the West into the welcoming—albeit bloodied—hands of the Kremlin.

As Russia’s state media watch impeachment proceedings against U.S. President Donald J. Trump they’re loving what they see. They don’t think the man they brag about getting elected is in much danger. They listen in delight as Republicans parrot conspiracy theories first launched by  Russians. And they gloat about the way Trump removed U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch, because they blame her for promoting democratic “color revolutions” that weakened Moscow’s hold on the former Soviet empire. Best of all, from the Kremlin’s point of view, they see Trump pushing Ukraine back into the Russian fold.

So while the historical impeachment inquiry, after two days of public hearings, has been deemed by some pundits to lack “pizzazz,” the Kremlin is  having a ball. Instead of disseminating their usual conspiracy theories, the Russians watch gleefully as the Republicans do that for them. From the long-debunked “Crowdstrike” cyber plot positioning Ukraine as the fall guy for what undoubtedly was Russian interference in the 2016 elections, to anti-Semitic conspiracy theories centering around Jewish financier and philanthropist George Soros, rivers of Russian dezinformatsiya are flowing down from the President of the United States and the GOP, through the impeachment hearings, to Trump’s cult-like devotees.

The Kremlin also enjoys the Trump-GOP treatment of the Mueller report as a colossal hoax, or even a joke, letting Russian President Vladimir Putin off the hook, and putting him in a position to make light of the whole matter.

View the complete November 16 article by Julia Davis on the Daily Beast website here.

Senior national security official ties key official more closely to Trump on Ukraine in impeachment inquiry

Washington Post logoA former White House national security official told House investigators that Gordon Sondland, ambassador to the European Union, was acting at President Trump’s behest and spoke to a top Ukrainian official about exchanging military aid for political investigations — two elements at the heart of the impeachment inquiry.

Tim Morrison, the top Russia and Europe adviser on the National Security Council, testified that between July 16 and Sept. 11, he understood that Sondland had spoken to Trump about half a dozen times, according to a transcript of his sworn Oct. 31 deposition released by House committees Saturday. Trump has said he does not know Sondland well and has tried to distance himself from the E.U. ambassador, whom Trump put in charge of Ukraine policy along with two others, even though Ukraine is not part of the European Union.

“His mandate from the president was to go make deals,” Morrison said of Sondland.

View the complete November 16 article by Colby Itkowitz, Karoun Demirjian, Michael Kranish and Shane Harris on The Washington Post website here.

A Friday night surprise: David Holmes throws a wrench in Trump’s impeachment defense

Washington Post logoFormer U.S. ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch’s testimony was the big public spectacle on Friday. The bigger news in the Ukraine scandal appears to have come later in the day in a private deposition.

It came from David Holmes, an aide to top U.S. diplomat in Ukraine William B. Taylor Jr. Taylor said this week that Holmes overheard President Trump speaking with Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland the day after Trump’s call with Ukraine’s president in July.

And it turns out Holmes fills in a number of key details that Taylor didn’t.

View the complete November 16 article by Aaron Blake on The Washington Post website here.

Trump’s central argument against impeachment crumbled under the weight of Marie Yovanovitch’s testimony

AlterNet logoIn the morass of conflicting and often incomprehensible Republican defenses of Donald Trump, there is just one that seemed like it might have legs — especially after Rep. Will Hurd, R-Texas, spoke during Wednesday’s impeachment hearing. That would be the claim that Trump withheld military aid from Ukraine not to strong-arm that nation’s leaders into boosting his re-election campaign, but because of a generalized opposition to “corruption” in that nation. This was laughable on its face, since Trump’s clear and public stance throughout his political career has been pro-corruption. But sure, it might be enough to bamboozle some Americans who don’t follow politics closely and somehow missed hearing that their president is a grifter.

Friday’s hearing, which featured Marie Yovanovitch, the former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, should be enough to kill the last remaining tendrils of any good-faith claim that Trump was motivated by some — don’t laugh now — deeply felt objection to corruption in Ukraine.

“In her time in Kyiv, Ambassador Yovanovitch was tough on corruption, too tough on corruption for some, and her principled stance made her enemies,” House Intelligence Chair Adam Schiff, D.-Calif., said in his opening statement. “And Ambassador Yovanovitch did not just ‘piss off’ corrupt Ukrainians, like the corrupt former prosecutor general Yuri Lutsenko, but also certain Americans like Rudy Giuliani, Donald Trump’s personal attorney, and two individuals, now indicted, who worked with him, Igor Fruman and Lev Parnas.”

View the complete November 15 article by Amanda Marcotte from Salon on the AlterNet website here.