Tag: Trump impeachment

‘Get your facts straight!’ Fox News host blasts conservative guest live on air for bogus claim about impeachment

AlterNet logoFox News’ Chris Wallace slammed conservative pundit Katie Pavlich on air, telling her to “Get your facts straight” after she tried to claim all kinds of made-up facts in her defense of Donald Trump. In question was Pavlich’s revisionist retelling of how the Democratic House’s impeachment inquiry was hampered by obstruction. In Pavlich’s imagineering, the Democratic Party is breaking with impeachment tradition by pushing an incomplete case, “and every impeachment beforehand, the witnesses that were called had been called in the House before being brought to the Senate. So there are questions here about the process.”

That’s not true. It’s not even a little bit true, and Wallace cut Pavlich off to tell her as much: “They hadn’t all been called in the House, and in the Clinton impeachment, they’d been called by the general independent counsel. They had not been called by the House.”

Right-wing pundit Katie Pavlich is just the kind of dumb that Trump’s Republican Party loves: willing to toe any line of misinformation, no matter how many obvious facts and contradictions there are. Appearing on Fox News with conservative luminaries such as Brett Baier, Pavlich was promoting the old conservative trope that the difference between Clinton’s impeachment trial and Trump’s is that the Democratic Party keeps trying to add new things to it, because it’s going so terribly. The basis of this bit of bullshit is that Donald Trump’s White House has refused to allow anyone to testify, while his Department of Justice has done more work trying to cover up his criminal behavior than any of the actual work it’s supposed to do as a department. Continue reading.

Schumer slams ‘absurd’ GOP proposal to read Bolton manuscript in classified setting

The Hill logoSenate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) on Tuesday slammed a proposal floated by GOP senators to review former national security adviser John Bolton’s unpublished book manuscript in a classified setting, calling the idea “absurd.”

Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.) on Monday night said the White House should give senators access to Bolton’s draft book, which claims President Trumplinked security assistance for Ukraine with an investigation of former Vice President Joe Biden. Lankford said the manuscript could be viewed in the Senate’s sensitive compartmented information facility (SCIF).

The highly secure room located in the basement level of the Capitol Visitor Center is usually used for classified briefings or to review sensitive intelligence and national security documents. Continue reading.

Fox News Personalities Who Promoted Bolton Now Scorn Him

Fox News host Brian Kilmeade offered up a novel and deeply ironic retort to The New York Times’ Sunday night bombshell that President Donald Trump told then-national security adviser John Bolton military aid to Ukraine was conditioned on officials there aiding “investigations into Democrats including the Bidens,” which the paper reported based on descriptions by multiple sources of an unpublished manuscript of a forthcoming Bolton book.

“The one thing the president should take from this,” he said on Monday morning’s Fox & Friends, is that “he’s got to do a better job vetting his staff to find out if they actually want to work for him or not, or they actually want to leak out information about him.”

But if anyone could be said to have vetted Bolton for a top position in Trump’s administration, it was Fox. Continue reading.

‘Bizarro world’: Trump baffles the internet by sending Pam Bondi to defend him — after she gave a pass to his fake university

AlterNet logoFormer Florida attorney general Pam Bondi, possibly best-known for refusing to join a fraud investigation into Trump University that ultimately led to the President of the United States forking over $25 million, is right now defending President Trump on national TV during the Senate impeachment trial.

As many on social media noted, Bondi refused to join that investigation that led to a $25 million payment from the president, but was only too happy to accept a $25,000 donation from Donald Trump for her re-election campaign, just as she was deciding on whether or not to investigate him.

Bondi rocketed to the number two trending item on Twitter within minutes of speaking. Continue reading.

McConnell struggles to maintain GOP unity post-Bolton

The Hill logoSenate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) is struggling to maintain control of President Trump’s impeachment trial following news of former national security adviser John Bolton’s bombshell manuscript. 

McConnell on Monday deflected growing calls, including from fellow GOP senators, to allow testimony from Bolton and other potential witnesses, which could prolong the trial and deal a massive blow to Trump and Republicans.

Senate debate over whether to call additional witnesses was upended Sunday following a New York Times report revealing that Bolton claims in a draft of his forthcoming book that Trump told him directly he wanted to freeze U.S. assistance to Ukraine to spur an investigation of former Vice President Joe Biden. Continue reading.

Trump’s impeachment defense: Who is paying the president’s lawyers?

Washington Post logoAs President Trump faces mounting legal bills from his impeachment trial, he is drawing on national party coffers flush with donations from energized supporters — unlike the last president to be impeached, who left the White House “dead broke.”

The Republican National Committee is picking up the tab for at least two of Trump’s private attorneys in the ongoing trial, an arrangement that differs from the legal fund President Bill Clinton set up, only to see it fail to raise enough to cover his millions of dollars in bills before he left office.

The law firms of Trump’s lead lawyer, Jay Sekulow, and attorney Jane Raskin have received $225,000 from the RNC through November, according to the most recent campaign finance reports. The party will pay the duo for their work this month and probably into February as the trial continues, according to people familiar with the arrangement who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal financing. Continue reading.

Rep. Meadows Threatens ‘Repercussions’ If Senators Vote Against Trump

A member of Donald Trump’s official impeachment team warned Monday that Republican senators who vote against Trump at the impeachment trial will pay a serious political price.

Rep. Mark Meadows (R-NC), a close Trump ally, told CBS News, “I mean listen, I don’t want to speak for my Senate colleagues. But there are always political repercussions for every vote you take.”

“There is no vote that is higher profile than this,” he added. Continue reading.

Mitt makes his move

The occasional Trump critic is in the middle of an internal GOP fight over the impeachment trial.

After staying relatively quiet throughout the House’s impeachment inquiry, Sen. Mitt Romney now finds himself in the middle of an increasingly bitter debate in his own party.

The Utah Republican has long been open to hearing from former national security adviser John Bolton and other witnesses in President Donald Trump’s impeachment trial, a position shared by Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska). The trio has searched for a fourth crucial vote to win a majority, but up until Sunday, those appeals seemed to be going nowhere.

Yet following a New York Times report that Trump told Bolton that frozen Ukrainian aid would be restored only if officials in Ukraine announced an investigation into Joe Biden and his son, Romney’s push for witnesses has some life — and some Republicans are displeased. Continue reading.

A ‘minor player’ and a ‘shiny object’: Trump’s legal team tries to explain away Rudy Giuliani

Washington Post logoFor months, there have been whispers and prognostications about whether President Trump’s impeachment legal team would throw his most visible personal attorney under the bus. It got to the point where Rudolph W. Giuliani quipped that if it did, he had very good (health) insurance.

Trump’s legal team may not have thrown Giuliani under the bus Monday, but it sure seemed to try to push him to the side — somewhat implausibly.

Trump lawyer Jane Raskin appeared on the Senate floor to offer a lengthy defense of Giuliani’s work, all while emphasizing that he was a “minor player” and a “shiny object” that Democrats were using to distract people. Continue reading.

Starr Mocked Over ‘Ridiculous’ Impeachment Argument

Bringing Ken Starr on to President Donald Trump’s impeachment defense team seemed like a terrible idea from the start, and on Monday afternoon, the former independent counsel showed why.

As the former independent counsel who pushed for a slew of impeachment charges against former President Bill Clinton, Starr is in the odd position of having vigorously and publicly advocated for removing a chief executive under much less serious accusations that Trump now faces. So inevitably, his defense was going to draw accusations of hypocrisy.

Yet somehow, he didn’t seem to foresee this and try to mitigate the damage. Continue reading.