Tag: Trump White House

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.

Acting Director of National Intelligence admits he went to the White House first with the complaint

AlterNet logoActing Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire was handed the whistleblower’s complaint in his first week on the job, having just taken over for Dan Coats, who resigned on July 29, 2019, only four days after the call between Donald Trump and Ukraine’s President-elect Volodymyr Zelensky in which Trump asked Zelensky for a “favor.”

The whistleblower complaint is packed with damaging information, including the allegation that the White House removed the call records from traditional national security computers to a secret server, away from public records. You can read the full complaint below.

Now that the complaint has been declassified and turned over to Congress, as is required by law, acting DNI Maguire is free to answer questions from members of the House Intelligence Committee, chaired by Rep. Adam Schiff. In his first line of questioning, Schiff was able to establish that Maguire’s first action was to take the complaint to the White House to see if it was covered by executive privilege, despite obvious, glaring conflicts of interest. Maguire also said he sought advice from the Office of Legal Counsel, which reports to the Department of Justice and Attorney General Bill Barr, who is also a subject of the complaint.

View the complete September 26 article by Jen Hayden from the Daily Kos 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.

Meet the Trump-appointed IG at center of whistleblower drama

The Hill logoMichael Atkinson is the latest prosecutor thrust to the center of a Trump-era political controversy.

Atkinson, who has been the inspector general of the intelligence community for a little more than a year under President Trump, is described as a no-nonsense, serious and nonpartisan career prosecutor who showed a strong commitment to the law throughout his nearly two-decade career at the Department of Justice.

“In my experience, he was a well-respected prosecutor. A very good, committed, dedicated prosecutor,” said one person who worked with Atkinson in the U.S. attorney’s office in D.C.

View the complete September 26 article by Morgan Chalfant on The Hill website here.

Lawmakers express concern after reading whistleblower report

Members urge patience, even public release of the complaint so the American people can see it for themselves

Some lawmakers expressed concerns Wednesday evening after reading a divisive whistleblower report that House and Senate Intelligence committee members were allowed to review in secure Capitol rooms.

Democratic lawmakers and even a Republican said the complaint raised concerns, but many urged patience and called for public release of the complaint so the American people could see it for themselves. The complaint was delivered to the Intelligence panels before the House voted 421-0 Wednesday evening to adopt a nonbinding resolution urging the administration to make the complaint itself available to Congress.

Sen. Ben Sasse told NBC News, “there’s obviously some really troubling things here.” But the Nebraska Republican urged caution and careful deliberation, saying both parties should “slow down” before Democrats begin using the word impeach, or Republicans begin to “circle the wagons.”

View the complete September 25 article by Chris Cioffi on The Roll Call website here.

Trump White House accidentally sends Ukraine talking points to House Democrats — then demands the email be ‘recalled’

AlterNet logoWith House Speaker Nancy Pelosi — after months of adamant opposition to impeaching President Donald Trump — having changed her mind this week in response to the Ukraine scandal, the White House is making sure it has its talking points in order.  Those Ukraine talking points have been sent to House Democrats in a document titled “What You Need to Know: President Trump’s Call With President Zelensky,” and Politico’s Andrew Desiderio has posted screenshots of the document on Twitter.

According to reports, Trump asked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to help dig up dirt on a political opponent, former Vice President Joe Biden, and his son Hunter Biden during a phone conversation on July 25. And the White House, in its list of talking points, tries to make the conversation sound innocent.

In the document, the White House claims that the press has been promoting “flat-out falsehoods about the call” — for example, the White House denies that Trump urged Zelensky to investigate Joe Biden and Hunter Biden, and that Trump threatened to withhold military aid to Ukraine if they weren’t investigated. The White House insists that during the conversation, there was “no mention of the aid package to Ukraine at all.”

View the complete September 25 article by Alex Henderson on the AlterNet website here.

Acting director of national intelligence threatened to resign if he couldn’t speak freely before Congress on whistleblower complaint

Washington Post logoThe acting Director of National Intelligence threatened to resign over concerns that the White House might attempt to force him to stonewall Congress when he testifies Thursday about an explosive whistleblower complaint about the president, according to current and former U.S. officials familiar with the matter.

The revelation reflects the extraordinary tensions between the White House and the nation’s highest-ranking intelligence official over a matter that has triggered impeachment proceedings against President Trump.

The officials said Joseph Maguire, who was thrust into the top intelligence post last month, warned the White House that he was not willing to withhold information from Congress, where he is scheduled to testify in open and closed hearings on Thursday.

View the complete September 25 article by Greg MIller, Shane Harris and Karoun Demirjian on The Washington Post website here.

Director of National Intelligence sent whistleblower’s complaint about Trump to Barr’s DOJ — which declined to investigate

AlterNet logoThe Director of National Intelligence and the intelligence community’s inspector general both sent the whistleblower’s complaint against President Donald Trump to the U.S. Dept. of Justice, suggesting a criminal investigation be opened. The DOJ, under Attorney General Bill Barr, refused to prosecute the president.

“The department’s criminal division reviewed the matters and concluded that there was no basis for a criminal investigation into Mr. Trump’s behavior,” The New York Times reports. “Law enforcement officials determined that the transcript of the call did not show that Mr. Trump had violated campaign finance laws by soliciting from a foreign national a contribution, donation or thing of value.”

In fact, many legal experts believe the opposite.

View the complete September 25 article by David Badash on the New Civil RIghts Movement website here.

Trump offered Ukrainian president Justice Dept. help for Biden investigation, memo shows

Washington Post logoPresident Trump told his Ukrainian counterpart to work with the U.S. attorney general to investigate Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden and offered to meet with the foreign leader at the White House after he promised to conduct such an inquiry, according to a rough transcript of the call released Wednesday.

Those statements and others in a July 25 phone call between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky were so concerning that the intelligence community inspector general thought them a possible violation of campaign finance law. In late August, intelligence officials referred the matter to the Justice Department as a possible crime, but prosecutors concluded last week that the conduct was not criminal, according to senior Justice Department officials.

The document released Wednesday, in keeping with White House practice, is a memorandum of a telephone conversation and is not a verbatim account. A cautionary note on the memo of the call warns that the text reflects the notes and memories of officials in the Situation Room and that a number of factors “can affect the accuracy of the record.”

View the complete September 25 article by Devlin Barrett, Matt Zapotosky, Carol D. Leonnig and Josh Dawsey on The Washington Post website here.

Mike Pence’s biographer confirms Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump are trying to dump the vice president: ‘That’s all real’

AlterNet logoPresident Donald Trump is purposefully humiliating his vice president with a series of loyalty tests as his daughter and son-in-law scheme to find a replacement as his 2020 running mate, according to a new biography.

Journalist Tom LoBianco, who has covered Mike Pence’s political career since its very beginning, previewed his new biography, “Piety & Power,” on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”

“Over the summer he had two terrible events in July,” LoBianco said. “The weird thing where he flies out to New Hampshire, gets called back to the last minute. Then they send him to a detention camp and there is a terrible video of him with a grim face, which should have been Trump. That should have been the president, not the vice president, that’s what VP’s aides and allies are telling me. They see that as Trump yanking on the leash.”

View the complete September 23 article by Travis Gettys from Raw Story on the AlterNet website here.