Tag: Trump impeachment

Republicans plot counterattack for impeachment hearings

The GOP knows Trump will be watching the public testimony.

House Republicans are gearing up for a blockbuster showdown with Democrats as the impeachment probe enters its most visible phase yet, with GOP lawmakers and staffers from key committees plotting with leadership to launch their counterattack.

To prepare for this week’s public hearings, Republican leaders have moved one of President Donald Trump’s fiercest Hill defenders to the House Intelligence Committee and have lined up an explosive witness list for the upcoming proceedings, offering some clues into their defense strategy.

The transcripts released last week from closed-door interviews with impeachment witnesses also provide a window into how the GOP plans to approach the high-stakes hearings. Republicans will try to paint the Democratically led process as politically motivated and minimize Trump’s role in the quest to persuade Ukraine to investigate his political rivals.

Republicans, Democrats brace for first public testimony in impeachment inquiry

The Hill logoPresident Trump’s congressional allies and critics on Sunday doubled down on their respective positions on the impeachment inquiry as the House prepares to move into the public phase of the process.

Which witnesses should appear was a key topic after House Intelligence Committee ranking member Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) requested that former Vice President Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden be called to testify. Republicans also plan to call the whistleblower whose complaint helped spark the inquiry, among others.

Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney (D-N.Y.), a member of the Intelligence Committee, said that while some of the suggested Republican witnesses would likely be called, he saw no reason to have Hunter Biden as a witness.

View the complete November 10 article by Zack Budryk on The Hill website here.

GOP senators plan to tune out impeachment week

The Hill logoAs Washington gears up this week for the public phase of the impeachment inquiry, one group is largely tuning it out: Senate Republicans.

Several GOP senators say they either won’t watch the highly anticipated public hearings or haven’t been reading the steady release of transcripts from the House’s closed-door depositions with current and former administration officials.

The reasons vary — some say they don’t have enough time, while others say they distrust the House process. But the decision to disengage underscores the divide between the two sides of the Capitol: on one, impeachment appears all but inevitable; on the other, the potential jury is hanging back, for now.

View the complete November 10 article by Jordain Carney on The Hill website here.

How the State Dept.’s Dissenters Incited a Revolt, Then a Rallying Cry

New York Times logoShock, anger and sadness are giving way to pride among career diplomats that they are defending American ideals and holding the Trump administration accountable.

WASHINGTON — State Department Foreign Service officers usually express their views in formal diplomatic cables, but these days they are using closed Facebook groups and encrypted apps to convey their pride in Marie L. Yovanovitch, the ousted ambassador to Ukraine, whose House testimony opened the floodgates on the impeachment inquiry into President Trump.

#GoMasha is their rallying cry.

In private conversations, they trade admiring notes about career State Department officials like William B. Taylor Jr. and George P. Kent, who delivered damning testimony about a shadow Ukraine policy infected by partisan politics and presidential conspiracy theories, and William V. Roebuck, a senior diplomat in Syria who wrote a searing memo on how Mr. Trump abandoned the Kurds and upended American influence.

View the complete November 9 article by Michael Crowley, Lara Jakes and David E Sanger on The New York Times website here.

Key impeachment witnesses to know as public hearings begin

The Hill logoHouse Democrats are setting the stage for the public phase of their impeachment inquiry into President Trump’s dealings with Ukraine, with three key witnesses slated to appear starting Wednesday.

The impeachment inquiry so far has played out through closed-door hearings, press leaks and several published deposition transcripts. But with televised hearings ahead, Democrats hope to make their case to the public that Trump improperly used U.S. aid as leverage to pressure Ukraine into opening politically motivated investigations.

During their closed-door phase, Democrats had a mixed level of success bringing in witnesses to testify, despite White House orders not to comply. Here is a list of the key witnesses Democrats received depositions from and those they sought testimony from.

View the complete November 9 article by John Kruzel and Olivia Beavers on The Hill website here.

Trump tears into impeachment probe, witnesses in early Twitter spree

The Hill logoPresident Trump tore into the House’s impeachment investigation in an early Saturday morning tweetstorm as the inquiry is set to enter a new, public phase next week.

He retweeted 17 messages in roughly an hour hammering Democrats over the probe, including a handful specifically going after some witnesses who have already testified behind closed doors.

“STU: ‘The #democrats know they can’t remove @realDonaldTrump from office but they’ll go ahead with the #impeachment process anyways because they detest him!’” Fox Business host Stuart Varney said in a post retweeted by Trump.

View the complete November 9 article by Trl Axelrod on The Hill website here.

Bolton Said to Know of ‘Many Relevant Meetings’ on Ukraine, but Will Not Testify

New York Times logoA lawyer for John R. Bolton said he had information to share with impeachment investigators. But, so far, he will not defy the White House.

WASHINGTON — John R. Bolton, President Trump’s former national security adviser, knows about “many relevant meetings and conversations” connected to a pressure campaign on Ukraine that House impeachment investigators have not yet been informed of, his lawyer told lawmakers on Friday.

The lawyer, Charles J. Cooper, tucked the tantalizing assertion into a letter to the chief House lawyer in response to committee chairmen who have sought Mr. Bolton’s testimony in their impeachment inquiry but expressed unwillingness to go to court to get an order compelling it.

Mr. Cooper did not elaborate on what meetings or conversations he was referring to, leaving it to House Democrats to guess at what he might know.

View the complete November 8 article by Nicholas Fandos, Michael D. Shear and Peter Baker on The New York Times website here.

Impeachment strains longstanding bipartisan support for Ukraine

Consensus built on keeping Ukraine inside the Western European camp

The bipartisan backing for Ukraine in its long face-off with Russia has been a hallmark of Congress’ role in foreign policymaking for decades. Congress — both parties — has generally been willing to confront Moscow more forcefully over its treatment of Ukraine than the Trump, Obama or George W. Bush White Houses.

But with U.S. policy toward Ukraine the centerpiece of the impeachment inquiry, President Donald Trump’s antipathy toward Kyiv out in the open, and Republicans not wanting to break with their GOP president publicly over Ukraine policy, concern is rising that this longstanding bipartisan consensus to keep Ukraine inside the Western European camp could erode.

Indeed, the career diplomats and military officers who have given depositions to the House Intelligence Committee in the past several weeks said — separate from any presidential misconduct — that they feared if Ukraine’s new president did Trump’s bidding and announced an investigation of Democratic presidential candidate and former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter, that it would do precisely that — kill the bipartisan support for Ukraine in Congress.

View the complete November 8 article by Rachel Oswald on The Roll Call website here.

Trump encounters GOP resistance to investigating Hunter Biden

The Hill logoA push by President Trump and conservatives to dig into Hunter Biden’s work in Ukraine is running into stumbling blocks from an unusual corner: congressional Republicans.

Some Republicans believe Trump’s impeachment trial or a separate Senate committee inquiry could lay the groundwork for investigating former Vice President Joe Biden and his son, who have both emerged as a fixation for Trump and his top allies as they look for a foothold in the impeachment battle.

Trump escalated the effort on Thursday when he tweeted that the Bidens “must testify” — raising the specter that the president’s lawyers or GOP senators could try to drag them into the public impeachment trial.

View the complete November 8 article by Jordain Carney on The Hill website here.

House GOP looks to protect Trump by raising doubts about motives of his deputies

Washington Post logoHouse Republicans’ latest plan to shield President Trump from impeachment is to focus on at least three deputies — U.S. Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland, Trump’s lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani, and possibly acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney — who they say could have acted on their own to influence Ukraine policy.

All three occupy a special place in the Ukraine narrative as the people in most direct contact with Trump. As Republicans argue that most of the testimony against Trump is based on faulty secondhand information, they are sowing doubts about whether Sondland, Giuliani and Mulvaney were actually representing the president or freelancing to pursue their own agendas. The GOP is effectively offering up the three to be fall guys.

Since House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) initiated the impeachment inquiry Sept. 24, congressional Republicans have struggled to come up with a consistent and coherent explanation for why Trump tried to coerce a foreign leader to investigate the president’s domestic political rivals.

View the complete November 7 article by Karoun Demirjian and Rachael Bade on The Washington Post website here.