Donald Trump Impeachment Campaign
There is no doubt who is first among equals: Schiff, 59, has been the unquestioned leader of the congressional investigation of Trump’s alleged scheme to coerce the Ukrainian government into investigating his political rivals by withholding nearly $400 million in military aid. Nadler, 72, headed the second phase of the House impeachment inquiry, laying the constitutional foundation for the adoption of the two articles — alleging abuse of power and obstruction of Congress — and shepherding them to the House floor.
Joining Schiff and Nadler are Reps. Jason Crow (D-Colo.), Val Demings (D-Fla.), Sylvia Garcia (D-Tex.), Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) and Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.). All seven managers have professional backgrounds in the law. Demings, 62, is the only non-lawyer, but she is steeped in law enforcement, having served as the first female chief of the Orlando Police Department. Garcia, 69, one of two freshmen on the managers’ team, is a former state senator and longtime municipal judge in Houston.
Lofgren, 72, is participating in her third impeachment. She worked as a congressional staffer during the 1974 impeachment proceedings against President Richard M. Nixon and served on the Judiciary Committee during the 1998 proceedings against Clinton. While she is best known on Capitol Hill for her immigration expertise, Lofgren also has broad experience in constitutional matters and is a trusted Pelosi ally.
Jeffries, 49, has emerged as one of his party’s chief messengers as chairman of the House Democratic Caucus. But before embarking on his congressional career, Jeffries worked as a corporate litigator in New York and has long served on the Judiciary Committee. There he worked closely with Republicans — and Trump son-in-law and White House adviser Jared Kushner — to advance a major criminal justice reform bill in 2018.
Crow, 40, is the only manager who did not serve on any of the investigating committees, but he has national security credentials as a former Army Rangers officer and member of the House Armed Services Committee. He also practiced law before his 2018 election to Congress and was a key member of a group of seven freshmen who spoke up at a critical juncture in September to support the launching of an impeachment inquiry.
2019-11-16 White House official concerned by ‘unusual’ reference in Trump’s call to Ukraine’s president “I certainly noted that the mention of those specific investigations seemed unusual as compared to other discussions with foreign leaders,” Jennifer Williams, the official in the vice president’s office, told impeachment investigators, according to a transcript of her deposition released by the three House committees leading the impeachment probe. She told investigators that she noted a mention of Ukrainian energy firm Burisma, which had employed former Vice President Joe Biden’s son Hunter, on the July 25 phone call between Trump and Zelenskiy. The company was not mentioned in the rough transcript of the call that was released by the White House.
2019-11-18 Chief justice orders delay in House fight for Trump records Roberts’ order Monday contains no hint about what the court ultimately will do. The high court has a separate pending request from Trump to block a subpoena from a New York prosecutor for Trump’s tax returns. Last week, Trump made an emergency appeal to ask the Supreme Court to block the enforcement of a subpoena issued by a House committee to Trump’s accountants. The House has until Thursday to respond, Roberts said. Without some intervention by the high court, a ruling by the federal appeals court in Washington, D.C., in favor of the House was set to take effect Wednesday. Earlier Monday, the House said it would agree to a brief halt for the orderly filing of legal briefs, while opposing any lengthy delay. The House Committee on Oversight and Reform would have been able to try to enforce the subpoena to the Mazars USA accounting firm .
2019-11-18 70% of Americans say Trump’s actions tied to Ukraine were wrong: POLL A slim majority of Americans, 51%, believe Trump’s actions were both wrong and he should be impeached and removed from office. But only 21% of Americans say they are following the hearings very closely. In addition to the 51%, another 19% think that Trump’s actions were wrong, but that he should either be impeached by the House but not removed from office, or be neither impeached by the House nor convicted by the Senate. The survey also finds that 1 in 4 Americans, 25%, think that Trump did nothing wrong.
Still, nearly 1 in 3, 32%, say they made up their minds about impeaching the president before the news broke about Trump’s July phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, in which Trump urged his Ukrainian counterpart to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden and his son, Hunter.
2019-11-15 What you need to know about the Trump impeachment hearings: A quid pro quo and Trump’s defense Trump wanted two things: First, he wanted Ukraine to prove a theory that its own corrupt politicians in 2016 tried to sway American voters in favor of Democrat Hillary Clinton. While some Ukrainian politicians did support Clinton over Trump in largely public ways, U.S. intelligence and a bipartisan Senate inquiry found that Russian operatives — at the behest of their government — engaged in a far more widespread, invasive and secretive campaign to sway voters in support of Trump. Second, Trump wanted Ukraine to investigate one of his 2020 political rivals, former Vice President Joe Biden, and his son Hunter for his work on the board of Ukrainian energy company Burisma.
The whistleblower described his colleagues on the call as “deeply disturbed” by Trump’s demands and detailed an internal effort internally to “lock down” all records of the discussion.
2019-11-13 Trump impeachment inquiry: Who testified before Congress and what they said
2019-10-01 What’s New in the Impeachment Case The House subpoenaed the Defense Department and the Office of Management and Budget for documents about the Trump administration’s decision to withhold $391 million in security aid for Ukraine.
George Kent, a deputy assistant secretary of state and Ukraine expert, did not appear for a scheduled deposition with House Democrats, and several other witness interviews scheduled for this week are in doubt. Still, two key figures from the State Department were confirmed for depositions: Gordon Sondland, the United States ambassador to the European Union, on Tuesday, and Marie Yovanovitch, the former American ambassador to Ukraine, on Friday.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo missed a Friday deadline to produce documents, even as the State Department continues talks with the House.
We asked our colleague Charlie Savage what was at stake here: “It was predictable that the Trump administration would balk at turning over the subpoenaed documents related to the Ukraine matter — including many internal White House communications that any administration would see as covered by executive privilege,” he told us. “But the subpoena will likely also allow the House, if it chooses, to link an impeachment article about obstruction directly to the Ukraine scandal.”
More on that note: The Miami Herald reported today that two Florida businessmen who helped connect Rudy Giuliani to Ukrainian politicians would not comply with a request for documents and depositions from the three House committees conducting the impeachment investigation.
Over the weekend, we learned that a new whistle-blower with “firsthand knowledge” has provided information related to President Trump’s dealings with Ukraine. His lawyers are also representing the first whistle-blower, and say that both are now legally protected from retaliation.
2019-10-22 Here’s what could happen if Trump survives impeachment — but Republicans lose the Senate in 2020 “In a Senate trial to adjudicate articles of impeachment approved by the House,” Drucker observes, “at least a handful of vulnerable Senate Republicans risk the wrath of grassroots conservatives if they vote to convict and remove Trump from office. The same group, staring down impeachment with the 2020 primary season drawing near, could just as easily alienate general election voters with a vote to acquit the president.” Drucker specifically mentions McSally, Gardner, Collins and Ernst in his op-ed. And he also cites Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina as an example of Republican vulnerability in 2020.
Sen. Doug Jones has a different problem: he is a Democrat seeking reelection in a Republican-dominated southern state. “Sen. Doug Jones, up for reelection in deep red Alabama, is walking the same tightrope as Republicans who are running for another term in blue and purple states,” Drucker observes.
2019-10-22 Trump breaks his pattern — and retreats on all fronts It won’t be possible to undo the damage from the Ukraine admission, although Mulvaney made a very unsuccessful attempt to reverse his position during a Sunday appearance on Fox News. Yet, as the New York Times reports, the decision on the G-7 conference proved even more immediately untenable. By Saturday night, the president was convinced they he couldn’t stick by his decision on the G-7 and reversed himself on Twitter. He blamed the media and the Democrats, of course, but it was Republican pushback that forced his hand. The same can be said of his decision to leave some troops in Syria, where his announced withdrawal had caused immediate humanitarian and geopolitical catastrophes.
These three reversals, on Syria, Ukraine and his Doral resort are significant because they represent a break from the crisis management style Trump learned from his old friend Roy Cohn.
2019-10-22 Democrats’ impeachment framework takes shape with Pelosi’s ‘fact sheet’ “President Trump has betrayed his oath of office, betrayed our national security and betrayed the integrity of our elections for his own personal political gain,” the document states, according to The Hill. The fact sheet includes three categories—the shakedown, the pressure campaign, and the cover up—that pertain to the role Trump and several of his top officials played in attempting to extort Ukraine and then cover their tracks.
By placing most of their focus on Trump’s Ukraine scandal, Democrats hope to simplify the corruption narrative for the American public. But by making abuse of power their main article of impeachment, observers say they’re trying to wedge Republicans into a tight spot. Former Florida Republican David Jolly told MSNBC Monday that he found it difficult to believe someone like Utah Sen. Mitt Romney would be able to vote against that article. Former Justice Department spokesperson Matt Miller agreed. “They’re not playing for impeachment,” Miller said of Democrats, “they’re playing for removal from office.”
2019-10-21 After Repeated Violations of Constitution’s Anti-Corruption Law, Trump Dismisses Emoluments Clause as ‘Phony’ The president dismissed the Constitution’s anti-corruption clause—which his plan would have violated—as “phony.” “You people, with this phony Emoluments Clause,” Trump told reporters at a White House press conference on Monday The clause bars any president from accepting payments from any state or foreign government.
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), whose lawsuit against the president over the Emoluments Clause was reopened last month by a federal appeals court, was among the critics of Trump’s dismissal of constitutional law. “The emoluments clauses, which the president just called ‘phony,’ are of course the original anti-corruption provisions the framers put into the Constitution centuries ago,”
Trump has also been sued by 200 congressional Democrats and the attorneys general of Maryland and Washington, D.C. over alleged emoluments violations. Both cases are slowly moving through federal appeals courts, but no action has been taken by Democrats yet to stop the president from profiting off his position.
2019-10-18 There is No Way Trump Should Survive This Scandal
2019-10-18 Mulvaney Admits to a Quid Pro Quo With Ukraine Democrats are right when they say that Trump’s attempt to get Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden’s son is impeachable, regardless of whether a quid pro quo was involved. But as Kevin Drum recently pointed out, impeachment is a political process and it is “absolutely critical that Trump is shown to have withheld vital military aid to an ally unless they agreed to help Trump in his reelection campaign.” That is why a lot of people were surprised when Trump’s acting chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, basically affirmed that withholding military aid to Ukraine was, in fact, a quid pro quo. He went on to suggest that we should all “get over it” because everybody does it. To the extent that Zelensky was aware that he was being offered a quid pro quo, Trump made it clear that it involved both an investigation into the conspiracy theory and Joe Biden. The president’s own words confirm that.
2019-10-17 Why Impeaching Trump at Home Could Save Justice Abroad U.S. officials can’t promote the rule of law overseas if our lawless president isn’t held to account. For the last several decades, two obscure offices in the U.S. Department of Justice’s Criminal Division have taken the American justice system on a global tour to developing countries. Through the International Criminal Investigative Training Assistance Program (ICITAP), founded in 1986, and Office of Overseas Prosecutorial Development, Assistance and Training (OPDAT), founded in 1991, the United States sends its own prosecutors, law enforcement and corrections officers to work with its foreign counterparts to promote the rule of law. The mission of the programs has been to help countries that lacked effective policies, laws, and judicial systems to investigate and prosecute criminals.
The mere existence of these programs has symbolized America’s role as a world leader and the standard-bearer of democracy—a model to which other nations aspire. They provide a noble service: our experienced missionaries have spent thirty years travelling the globe to teach others that their governments, like ours, could operate without corruption.
2019-10-16 President Obama Was Right and Justice Alito Was Wrong In the Citizens United ruling, a majority on the Supreme Court ruled that money equals speech, and therefore, the First Amendment prohibits the government from restricting independent expenditures by corporations and associations. It would be interesting to know whether they envisioned that the First Amendment protected the free speech rights of unidentified Russian businessmen. The indictment against Rudy Giuliani’s Ukraine-connected buddies, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, reads: Parnas, Fruman and other defendants “conspired to circumvent the federal laws against foreign influence by engaging in a scheme to funnel foreign money to candidates for federal and state office so that the defendants could buy potential influence with the candidates, campaigns, and the candidates’ governments.”
Back in 2010, just a few months after the ruling in the Citizens United case was released, President Obama took the unprecedented step of criticizing a Supreme Court decision during his state of the union speech. By saying, “I don’t think American elections should be bankrolled by…foreign entities,” he was prescient in a way that few people understood at the time.
2019-10-14 Emoluments, Tax Fraud, Obstruction of Justice, Electoral Misconduct, Financial Fraud (misuse of campaign funds, just one), Foreign Relations Violations, etc., etc. All the investigations that the 6 House Committees have been dragging their feet on since January 2017. Nadya Marina Connolly Williams 1436 Grant Avenue, Apt. 10; San Francisco, CA 94133 Cell: (415) 845-9492; Home: (415) 362-0162 E-mail: nadyanomad@gmail.com Director of Communication, Veterans For Peace, San Francisco Chapter 69. Associate Member since 2003 of Veterans For Peace, the only veterans organization in the world recognized by the United Nations.
2019-10-10 Facts are Friends, An Informed Electorate is Trump’s Worst Enemy
2019-10-08 Jimmy Carter’s impeachment advice for Trump: Tell the truth for a change
2019-10-06 Legal Team Says It Represents a Second Whistle-Blower Over Trump and Ukraine An intelligence official with “firsthand knowledge” has provided information related to President Trump’s dealings with Ukraine and is now protected from retaliation as a whistle-blower, lawyers representing the official said on Sunday, confirming that a second individual has come forward in the matter. Much is unknown about the official, who has been interviewed by the intelligence community’s inspector general but has not filed a formal complaint.
2019-08-30 Roots Action – Trump Impeachment FAQ
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