Tag: Trump sleaze

Nearly 300 national security officials call for impeachment inquiry against Trump

AlterNet logoNearly 300 former U.S. national security and foreign policy officials have signed an open letter calling for an impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump’s dealings with Ukraine.

The signatures were gathered by National Security Action, an organization founded by officials from the Obama administration concerned about Trump’s “reckless leadership,” but the list includes many others who served as career officials in Republican and Democratic administrations, reported the Washington Post.

“To be clear, we do not wish to prejudge the totality of the facts or Congress’ deliberative process,” the statement says. “At the same time, there is no escaping that what we already know is serious enough to merit impeachment proceedings.”

View the September 27 article by Travis Gettys from Raw Story on the AlterNet website here.

Timeline: The alarming pattern of actions by Trump included in whistleblower allegations

Washington Post logoSix weeks after it was submitted, a complaint from an intelligence community whistleblower has been declassified and released publicly. The seven-page document details a series of actions, meetings and conversations over a months-long period in which President Trump and his lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani sought to encourage an investigation into former vice president Joe Biden by officials in Ukraine.

Part of the complaint centers on a July 25 call between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, a rough transcript of which was released Wednesday. The whistleblower complaint, filed more than a month earlier, accurately captures the content of that call, lending validity to the rest of the assertions in the complaint.

With that in mind, we’ve pulled out the significant dates mentioned in the whistleblower complaint to give a sense of how the effort by Trump and Giuliani to elicit an investigation in Ukraine unfolded. Events not included in the whistleblower complaint itself are in italics. All quotes are from the whistleblower complaint.

View the complete September 26 article by Philip Bump on The Washington Post website here.

Former Ukraine prosecutor says Hunter Biden ‘did not violate anything’

Washington Post logoKIEV, Ukraine —  A former top Ukrainian prosecutor, whose allegations were at the heart of the dirt-digging effort by Rudolph W. Giuliani, said Thursday he believed that Hunter Biden did not run afoul of any laws in Ukraine.

“From the perspective of Ukrainian legislation, he did not violate anything,” former Ukrainian prosecutor general Yuri Lutsenko told The Washington Post in his first interview since the disclosure of a whistleblower complaint alleging pressure by President Trump on Ukraine’s president, Volodymr Zelensky.

Lutsenko’s comments about Hunter Biden — which echo what he told Bloomberg News in May — were significant, because Trump and his personal attorney Giuliani have sought to stir up suspicions about both Hunter and former vice president Joe Biden’s conduct in Ukraine in recent weeks. Joe Biden is leading Trump in many opinion polls ahead of the 2020 election.

View the complete September 26 article by Michael Birnbaum, David L. Stern and Natalie Gryvnyak on The Washington Post website here.

Trump writes the GOP impeachment playbook: Scorched earth. But will it work?

Washington Post logoPresident Trump on Thursday excoriated an unidentified whistleblower and the White House aides who informed their complaint as “almost a spy” and likened their work to treason — part of a scorched-earth strategy he is directing for the Republican Party at the outset of an impeachment showdown.

Trump has acted impulsively and indignantly as he wages an all-out political war to defend himself from allegations that he abused his power to solicit foreign interference in his 2020 reelection bid.

And in a testament to how completely he controls the Republican Party, many GOP officeholders and conservative media figures have followed Trump’s cues by joining his attempts either to attack the anonymous whistleblower, discredit the explosive accounts in their complaint, or malign the media for covering it.

View the complete September 26 article by Robert Costa and Philip Rucker on The Washington Post website here.

How the White House and Justice learned about whistleblower

WASHINGTON (AP) — The White House and the Justice Department learned about a CIA officer’s concerns about President Donald Trump around the same time the individual filed a whistleblower complaint that is now at the center of an impeachment inquiry, according to a U.S. official and another person familiar with the matter.

The new details help flesh out the timeline of how alarm bells about Trump’s call with the Ukraine leader, in which he pressed for an investigation of a political rival, reverberated across the U.S. government and inside the upper ranks of its intelligence and law enforcement agencies. The details are fueling objections by Democratic lawmakers that the administration stonewalled them for weeks about the phone call and took extraordinary measures to suppress it from becoming public.

The intelligence official initially filed a complaint about Trump’s Ukraine dealings with the CIA, which then alerted the White House and the Justice Department. On Aug. 12, the official raised a separate flag, this time with the intelligence community’s inspector general, a process that granted the individual more legal “whistleblower” protection.

View the complete September 27 article by Eric Tucker, Michael Balsamo and Zeke Miller on the Associated Press website here.

Nancy Pelosi: An Extremely Stable Genius

When asked if it was possible that impeachment might backfire, the Speaker of the House insisted that politics has nothing to do with it. “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “He has given us no choice.”

Before we begin to grapple with the gravity of the impeachment inquiry that is now upon us, can we acknowledge yet again the extreme weirdness of our times? If, through the distorting mists of time, the heroes and antiheroes of the Watergate saga seem positively Shakespearean in their stature—Nixon raging on the heath, his cunning satraps devising their poisoned betrayals—what to make of today’s dramatis personae of Kiev and Washington, Presidents Zelensky and Trump, one a comic actor turned fledgling statesman, the other a real-estate grifter turned . . . political grifter? Scholars of the Volodymyr Zelensky filmography will recall his appearances in “Love in the Big City 2” and “Rzhevsky Versus Napoleon.” And they will credit his work in the television show “Servant of the People,” in which he played the President of Ukraine, a role that set him on the path to being the actual President of Ukraine. Zelensky is an expressive comic artist. And so it is not hard to imagine his mask of terrorized bewilderment as he held a telephone to his ear in July and listened to the ex-star of “The Apprentice” deliver an implicit threat to deprive his country of military aid and diplomatic standing if he failed to interfere in the 2020 U.S. Presidential election on Trump’s behalf. This is our reality.

Into this reality has stepped, if belatedly, Nancy Pelosi, Democrat of California, Speaker of the House. Continue reading “Nancy Pelosi: An Extremely Stable Genius”

Trump furiously demands info on the whistleblower — and issues suggested execution threat: reports

AlterNet logoThe New York Times’ Maggie Haberman is reporting that at a United Nations event on Thursday, President Donald Trump angrily demanded to know who gave information to the government whistleblower who made a complaint about his July 25 conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

Haberman told CNN that when Trump was speaking at a UN breakfast at the Intercontinental Hotel in New York City, he railed against the media as well as former Vice President Joe Biden. Trump is facing an impeachment inquiry in the U.S. House of Representatives over reports that he asked Zelensky to dig up dirt on his political rival as well as Biden’s son, Hunter Biden.

Haberman, describing Trump’s remarks at the UN event, told CNN, “The president, from the outset, was hot about the whistleblower, hot about the Bidens, hot about the media, referred to the media as scum, said other things about the Biden family and then said there was nothing wrong with his phone call — before he was several minutes into his remarks — and said the whistleblower didn’t hear the call, and he wanted to know who the whistleblower had heard things from. He said that was, quote, ‘close to a spy.’”

View the complete September 26 article by Alex Henderson on the AlterNet website here.

Watch: Devin Nunes attempt to defend Trump backfires after president’s acting intel chief slaps down his question

AlterNet logoRep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) tried to get acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire to go along with his nefarious theory about the intelligence community whistleblower’s complaint against President Donald Trump — but it massively backfired when the acting DNI wouldn’t play ball.

During an exchange with Maguire, Nunes pointed out that most intelligence community whistleblower complaints do not get aired out in public as they have been for the past two weeks like the one levied against the president.

“Are you aware of any cases like this that were put into the spotlight?” Nunes asked. “Would this be the way to handle it out in the public like this?”

Maguire admitted that he did not know of any other cases that had been handled like this — but then slapped down the entire premise of Nunes’s question.

View the complete September 26 article by Brad Reed from Raw Story on the AlterNet website here.

How Donald Trump Triggered an Unprecedented Impeachment Fight

Abigail Spanberger didn’t go to Washington to impeach the President.

Over the course of her first nine months in Congress, she said so over and over. She was there to serve her constituents near Richmond, Va., who wanted safe streets and health care and good-paying jobs. As her colleagues ranted about Russia and racism, she kept saying she was focused elsewhere–until Donald Trump did something she felt she couldn’t ignore.

Spanberger, a former CIA officer, was elected as a Democrat last November to represent a House district that went for Trump by a 7-point margin in 2016. Supporting impeachment could hurt her image as a moderate more focused on getting things done than on partisan crusades, and put her re-election at risk. But on Sept. 23, she joined other centrist colleagues and, for the first time, endorsed impeachment proceedings after a whistle-blower reportedly complained that the President had pressured a foreign leader to investigate one of Trump’s top rivals in the 2020 election. “It wasn’t that my mind was changed, it’s that we were presented with new information,” Spanberger told TIME as she cut across the Capitol lawn the next day.

View the complete September 26 article by Molly Ball on the Time website here.

Trump’s false claims about Hunter Biden’s China dealings

Washington Post logo“When Biden’s son walks out of China with $1.5 billion in a fund, and the biggest funds in the world can’t get money out of China, and he’s there for one quick meeting and he flies in on Air Force Two, I think that’s a horrible thing. I think it’s a horrible thing.”

— President Trump, remarks with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Sept. 25, 2019

“Ask how his son made millions of dollars from Ukraine, made millions of dollars from China, even though he had no expertise whatsoever.”

— Trump, in remarks to reporters with British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, Sept. 24

“The son took money from China — a lot of money from China.”

— Trump, remarks to reporters at the United Nations, Sept. 23

We’ve been writing a lot about Trump’s false claims concerning Ukraine, Joe Biden and Biden’s son, Hunter. Now let’s turn our attention to Trump’s repeated suggestions that Hunter struck it rich with a sketchy deal in China.

View the complete September 26 article by Glenn Kessler on The Washington Post website here.