Tag: Trump Ukraine extortion scheme

The GOP’s only impeachment witness on Wednesday contradicted his own previous testimony

  • Jonathan Turley, a law professor who appeared as a Republican witness in Wednesday’s impeachment hearings, made a number of claims that directly contradicted his previous statements and testimony.
  • On Wednesday, Turley argued there was no proof that President Donald Trump broke a specific law related to the Ukraine scandal and therefore should not be impeached.
  • But in 1998, Turley made the opposite case, telling Congress during former President Bill Clinton’s impeachment hearings that Clinton’s actions didn’t need to violate any laws in order to be impeachable conduct.
  • “While there’s a high bar for what constitutes grounds for impeachment, an offense does not have to be indictable,” he wrote in a 2014 op-ed for The Washington Post.

Jonathan Turley, a professor at George Washington University Law School, testified on Wednesday that he didn’t see any proof that President Donald Trump committed a crime and that Trump therefore should not be impeached.

Turley was one of four legal experts — and the only one invited by the Republicans — who testified in the House Judiciary Committee’s first public impeachment hearing about Trump.

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Giuliani, Facing Scrutiny, Travels to Europe to Interview Ukrainians

New York Times logoPresident Trump’s personal lawyer has been in Budapest and Kyiv this week to talk with former Ukrainian prosecutors for a documentary series intended to debunk the impeachment case.

WASHINGTON — Even as Democrats intensified their scrutiny this week of Rudolph W. Giuliani’s role in the pressure campaign against the Ukrainian government that is at the heart of the impeachment inquiry, Mr. Giuliani has been in Europe continuing his efforts to shift the focus to purported wrongdoing by President Trump’s political rivals.

Mr. Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer, met in Budapest on Tuesday with a former Ukrainian prosecutor, Yuriy Lutsenko, who has become a key figure in the impeachment inquiry. He then traveled to Kyiv on Wednesday seeking to meet with other former Ukrainian prosecutors whose claims have been embraced by Republicans, including Viktor Shokin and Kostiantyn H. Kulyk, according to people familiar with the effort.

The former prosecutors, who have faced allegations of corruption, all played some role in promoting claims about former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., a former United States ambassador to Ukraine and Ukrainians who disseminated damaging information about Mr. Trump’s campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, in 2016.

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Impeachment trial timing hangs over 2020 Senate calendar

January schedule is filled with question marks

The Senate has released its calendar for 2020, but the year will begin with a giant question mark because of a possible impeachment trial.

The month of January is missing from the schedule entirely.

A copy of the calendar, obtained by CQ Roll Call, also includes a notation that the weeklong Presidents Day recess is “subject to Senate floor activity.”

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How Schiff Used Trump And Mulvaney’s Own Words To Impeach Them

With the release of the Ukraine report from the House Intelligence Committee on Tuesday, Chair Adam Schiff and his colleagues laid out the damning case for impeaching President Donald Trump in excruciating detail. Much of it, however, has been publicly known as transcripts of the inquiry depositions and public hearings revealed the key facts of Trump’s effort to induce Ukraine into investigating his political rivals while withholding military aid and White House meeting.

But because of Trump’s stonewalling — which itself features as a pillar of the president’s misconduct in the report — Republicans have argued that Schiff and the Democrats haven’t persuasively made the case that Trump was a part of the effort to leverage official acts in exchange for the political investigations. While extensive evidence strongly suggests that Trump was at the center of the scheme, not one witness’ testimony tied Trump directly to the quid pro quo.

The Ukraine report, however, gets around this fact by pointing to key statements not as a part of the inquiry itself, but made in public by White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney and Trump himself.

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‘You should have recused yourself’: Lawyer for Lev Parnas explains why Nunes’ participation in House impeachment hearings is a huge conflict of interest

AlterNet logoDuring the House Intelligence Committee’s recent impeachment hearings, Rep.  Devin Nunes of California was among President Donald Trump’s most vociferous and combative defenders. The Intelligence Committee’s lengthy, comprehensive impeachment report, released on Tuesday, shows that Nunes was hardly an impartial observer — and the famous criminal defense attorney Joseph A. Bondy, who is representing indicted Rudy Giuliani associate Lev Parnas, asserted the GOP congressman had no business participating in the hearings.

Information in the House Intelligence report vividly illustrates why Nunes should have recused himself from the House Intelligence hearings: a series of conversations with Rudy Giuliani associate Lev Parnas, who was recently arrested for alleged campaign finance violations. In other words, Nunes’ participation was — according to Bondy — a huge conflict of interest.

Journalist Natasha Betrand has posted, on Twitter, a partial timeline of those Nunes/Parnas conversations: the two of them, AT&T records show, spoke several times on April 12, 2019. Bertrand, posting the information, tweeted, “More calls between Devin Nunes and Lev Parnas, including one that lasted 8 minutes on April 12.”

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Nadler hints Trump impeachment inquiry could expand beyond Ukraine

House Judiciary’s first impeachment hearing punctuated by partisan bickering

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler on Wednesday raised the possibility that the impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump could be expanded beyond its current narrow scope of a July 25 phone call between Trump and the Ukrainian president.

In his opening remarks at his panel’s first impeachment hearing, the New York Democrat invoked former Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.

“The Russian government engaged in a sweeping and systematic campaign of interference in our elections. In the words of Special Counsel Robert Mueller, ‘the Russian government perceived it would benefit from a Trump presidency and worked to secure that outcome,’” Nadler said. “The president welcomed that interference.”

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GOP Impeachment ‘Report’ Recycles Fox News Arguments

House Republicans have released a report attempting to rebut the impeachment inquiry against President Donald Trump — revealing a patchwork of spin, distortions, and outright denials of reality. But more than that, the document echoes the talking points that Fox News has made throughout the entire Trump-Ukraine scandal.

From the start, of course, this story has been laundered from Fox News into Trump’s brain, beginning with the smear campaigns against Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, then-U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch, and other figures who have been caught up in the presidential scandal. Indeed, many of this new document’s purportedly factual (but easily debunked) claims about the impeachment inquiry can also be found in Fox host Sean Hannity’s recent “e-book” guide for talking to relatives over the holidays — though what Hannity wrote in just two-and-a-half pages, House Republicans stretched out to 123 pages.

Fundamentally, the House GOP report engages in Fox’s tried-and-true strategy of constructing an alternate reality in which the impeachment witnesses are said to have proved the exact opposite of what they actually testified about, such as claiming that “none of the Democrats’ witnesses testified to having evidence of bribery, extortion, or any high crime or misdemeanor,” even after multiple people laid out in detail the Trump administration’s quid pro quo demand that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky investigate the Bidens. (And yet still, the report claims: “The evidence does not establish that President Trump pressured Ukraine to investigate Burisma Holdings, Vice President Joe Biden, Hunter Biden, or Ukrainian influence in the 2016 election for the purpose of benefiting him in the 2020 election.”)

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Folksy John Kennedy gets serious pushback on Ukraine mess

The Louisiana Republican has pushed a discredited theory that Ukraine meddled in the 2016 election.

Sen. John Kennedy has long been known as a folksy, straight shooter on Capitol Hill. But now his legacy may be something else altogether: The guy who spread a debunked conspiracy theory about Ukraine.

As the House moves forward with its impeachment inquiry, President Donald Trump’s staunch allies have attempted to shift the focus to Ukraine. And Kennedy has emerged as the most prominent senator in this process, making Sunday show appearances that have perplexed his Senate colleagues by offering some level of equivalency between Russian and Ukrainian influence in 2016.

“I draw a completely different conclusion from his,” Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) said. “And it’s my understanding he has now changed his mind a bit. But as a member of the Intelligence Committee I have seen no evidence at all that the Ukrainians were involved. And indeed it is more likely that this is part of Russian disinformation campaign, in my judgment.”

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GOP tries to connect dots on Biden and Ukraine, but comes up short

Washington Post logo“Did you know that Joe Biden called Ukrainian President Poroshenko at least three times in February 2016 after the president and owner of Burisma’s home was raided on February 2nd by the state prosecutor’s office?”

— Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), senior Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, in a question directed at witnesses at the impeachment inquiry, Nov. 19, 2019

“It is my understanding that on February 4, 2016, the Ukrainian Prosecutor General’s Office, under the direction of Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin, announced the seizure of property from the Ukrainian natural gas company Burisma Holdings’ founder, Mykola Zlochevsky. The seizure occurred pursuant to a raid on Mr. Zlochevsky’s home on February 2, 2016.”

— letter from Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Nov. 21, 2019 Continue reading “GOP tries to connect dots on Biden and Ukraine, but comes up short”

A Mysterious ‘-1’ and Other Call Records Show How Giuliani Pressured Ukraine

New York Times logoHouse Democrats’ impeachment report showed the president’s personal lawyer executing an irregular foreign policy.

WASHINGTON — In the two days before President Trump forced out the American ambassador to Ukraine in April, his personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani was on the phone with the White House more than a dozen times.

Phone records cited in the impeachment report released Tuesday by the House Intelligence Committee illustrate the sprawling reach of Mr. Giuliani’s campaign first to remove the ambassador, Marie L. Yovanovitch, then to force Ukraine’s new government to announce criminal investigations for Mr. Trump’s political gain.

That effort accelerated through the spring and summer into a full-court press to force Ukraine’s new president to accede to Mr. Trump’s wishes or risk losing $391 million in military assistance desperately needed to hold off Russian-led forces waging a separatist war in eastern Ukraine.

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