FUBAR – Capitol Hill Blue

Pompeo claims he will ‘follow the law’ on impeachment

October 6, 2019 by <a href="https://www.capitolhillblue.com/node/byline/jill-colvin-and-matthew-lee" rel="tag">JILL COLVIN and MATTHEW LEE</a>

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo delivers a speech at the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center in Athens, Saturday, Oct. 5, 2019. (Costas Baltas/Pool via AP)

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said the State Department intends to follow the law in the House impeachment investigation and vigorously defended President Donald Trump, dismissing questions about the president’s attempts to push Ukraine and China to investigate a Democratic political rival.

The Trump administration and House Democrats often disagree about what the law requires, leaving open the question of how Pompeo may interpret Democrats’ demands for key information about Trump’s handling of Ukraine.

Pompeo, speaking Saturday in Greece, said the State Department sent a letter to Congress Friday night as its initial response to the document request and added, “We’ll obviously do all the things that we’re required to do by law.” He has allowed Democrats to interview a series of witnesses next week. Among them is Gordon Sondland, the U.S. ambassador to the European Union, another key figure in the probe.

The administration has struggled to come up with a unified response to the quickly progressing investigation. Democrats have warned that defying their demands will in itself be considered “evidence of obstruction” and a potentially impeachable offense.

Pompeo has become a key figure in the Democrats’ investigation. He was on the line during the July phone call in which Trump pressed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden and his son, Hunter — sparking a whistleblower complaint and now the impeachment inquiry.

Pompeo had initially tried to delay a handful of current and former officials from cooperating with the inquiry and accused Democrats trying to “bully” his staffers.

On Saturday, Pompeo did not back off his defense of Trump’s call with Ukraine.

“There has been some suggestion somehow that it would be inappropriate for the United States government to engage in that activity and I see it just precisely the opposite,” he said.

Trump has offered a series of contradictory statements when it comes to the Democrats’ subpoena of White House records.

Asked Wednesday whether the White House intended to comply, Trump told reporters, “I always cooperate,” even as he dismissed the inquiry as “a hoax.” A day later, however, Trump had a different answer for the same question, saying he would instead leave the matter to his lawyers.

“That’s up to them to decide,” he said, “But the whole investigation is crumbling.”

By Friday, however, Trump confirmed reports the White House was preparing a letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., arguing that Congress cannot undertake an impeachment investigation without first having a vote to authorize it. Pelosi has insisted the House is well within its rules to conduct oversight of the executive branch under the Constitution regardless.

It was unclear Saturday when or if that letter would be sent.

Pompeo, meanwhile, made clear that the State Department had yet to turn over any document, but intended to follow a proper review. And he said he would do so faster than the Obama administration.

“I remember precisely once when I was on that side and we were looking for documents, I remember precisely how long it took for those documents to come across,” he said in an apparent reference to his experience as a congressman during the investigation into the 2012 attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya.

“We’re going to beat that. We’re going to be more responsive than the Obama administration was in the years that preceded this particular Congress,” he said.

A congressional aide familiar with Pompeo’s response confirmed that the State Department had indeed been in contact, even if Pompeo had failed to meet a Friday deadline to produce documents required by the subpoena.

Trump, meanwhile, continued to see the Saturday, denouncing the investigation as yet another “Witch Hunt!” and “a fraud against the American people!”

In a series of tweets Saturday, including several sent as his presidential motorcade ferried him back and forth to his Virginia golf course, Trump defended his conduct and lashed out at critics, including a past foil, Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah.

“I’m hearing that the Great People of Utah are considering their vote for their Pompous Senator, Mitt Romney, to be a big mistake. I agree! He is a fool who is playing right into the hands of the Do Nothing Democrats!” Trump wrote. He ended his tweet with an extraordinary call to impeach a senator from his own party.

Yet Romney was joined Saturday in his criticism by a second Republican senator, Susan Collins of Maine, who said “it’s not OK” for a president to encourage a foreign state to investigate a political rival.

Speaking after a firefighter memorial service in Maine, Collins said Trump made a “big mistake” when he piled on his outreach to Ukraine by publicly calling on China to investigate the Bidens.

Sen. Ben Sasse of Nebraska is the only other Republican senator to publicly criticize the president’s comments that further fueled an impeachment inquiry.

Lawmakers are focused on Trump’s efforts to push Ukraine to investigate the Bidens. A whistleblower complaint said that Trump sought to use military assistance for Ukraine as leverage to push the newly elected Zelenskiy to launch an inquiry into the 2020 Democratic hopeful.

Late Thursday, House investigators released a cache of text messages that showed top U.S. diplomats encouraging Zelenskiy to conduct an investigation linked to Biden’s family in return for granting a high-profile visit with Trump in Washington.

The release followed a 10-hour interview with one of the diplomats, Kurt Volker, who stepped down as special envoy to Ukraine after the impeachment inquiry had begun.

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Lee reported from Athens, Greece. Associated Press writer Mary Clare Jalonick contributed to this report.

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Copyright © 2019 Capitol Hill Blue

With Trump, putting America first is not an option

October 6, 2019 by DAVID CRARY

In this Aug. 7, 1974 file photo, Sen. Barry Goldwater, R-Ariz., center, speaks to reporters after meeting with President Richard Nixon at the White House to discuss Nixon’s decision on resigning. Flanked by Senate Republican Leader Hugh Scott of Pennsylvania, left and House GOP Leader John Rhodes of Arizona, right, Goldwater said Nixon has made “no decision” on whether to resign. (AP Photo)

On Aug. 7, 1974, three top Republican leaders in Congress paid a solemn visit to President Richard Nixon at the White House, bearing the message that he faced near-certain impeachment due to eroding support in his own party on Capitol Hill. Nixon, who’d been entangled in the Watergate scandal for two years, announced his resignation the next day.

Could a similar drama unfold in later stages of the impeachment process that Democrats have now initiated against President Donald Trump? It’s doubtful. In Nixon’s time, there were conservative Democrats and moderate Republicans. Compromise was not treated with scorn.

In today’s highly polarized Washington, bipartisan agreement is a rarity. And Trump has taken over the Republican Party, accruing personal rather than party loyalty and casting the GOP establishment to an ineffectual sideline.

“In the past in the U.S., party members would dissociate themselves from disgraced leaders in order to preserve the party and their own reputations,” said professor Nick Smith, who teaches ethics and political philosophy at the University of New Hampshire. “But now President Trump seems to have such a personal hold on the party — more like a cult leader than a U.S. president — that the exits are closed as the party transforms into his image.”

The delegation that visited Nixon was headed by Sen. Barry Goldwater of Arizona, the GOP’s unsuccessful presidential candidate in 1964. Goldwater, who had a long tenure as a party elder, was joined by Sen. Hugh Scott of Pennsylvania, a Republican known for his strong support for civil rights, and Rep. John Rhodes of Arizona — the GOP leaders in their respective chambers.

They told Nixon there were no longer enough Republican votes to spare him from impeachment, given the release two days earlier of a 1972 tape recording contradicting Nixon’s tenacious denial of any role in cover-up of the Watergate break-in.

“He’d been proclaiming his innocence and suddenly they’ve got this evidence showing he’s been lying all this time,” said Thomas Schwartz, a history and political science professor at Vanderbilt University. “We don’t have the equivalent of that now.”

For now, though, Trump has a firewall in the form of Republicans who see more harm in opposing him than supporting him. Cal Jillson, a political science professor at Southern Methodist University, cited the increased political polarization of recent years as a reason why most Republican officials will stick with Trump “as long as their own status is not in danger.”

“For the president’s partisans in Congress, it’s ‘our guy on his worst day is better than your guy on his best day,’” Jillson said. “They stick with him to get the judicial appointments, the tax cuts.”

That would change if Trump’s troubles become so serious that congressional leaders think it will affect them and their party, Jillson said.

“Everyone among the Republicans in Congress has a beef with the president but they’re afraid of him,” said Jillson. “If he weakens, that fear will subside.”

The Watergate scandal overlapped with late stages of the Vietnam War, which had bedeviled both Nixon and his Democratic predecessor, Lyndon Johnson. In that era, Congress was more powerful in relation to the executive branch than it is now, with more leaders of national stature, several experts suggested.

Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Public Policy Center, suggested that with the death last year of Arizona Sen. John McCain, there’s no Republican currently in Congress who could replicate Goldwater’s 1974 role.

“Who would go and be credible with Donald Trump, so that he would listen?” she asked. “Mitt Romney? Mitch McConnell? Lindsay Graham? Trump will turn on any of them the minute they say something uncongenial.”

A key then-and-now difference, Jamieson said, is that Goldwater represented the same conservative constituency as Nixon and conveyed the message that Nixon was losing its support.

Trump, she said, has a different relationship with his base than Nixon did with his: The base is loyal to Trump personally, rather than to a party establishment.

During Trump’s first two years in office, one of the few Republicans in Congress to tangle regularly with him was Sen. Jeff Flake of Arizona, who decided not to seek reelection in 2018. In a column in The Washington Post on Oct. 1, Flake lambasted his fellow Republicans still in Congress for failure to break with Trump and oppose his reelection.

“At this point, the president’s conduct in office should not surprise us. But truly devastating has been our tolerance of that conduct,” Flake wrote. “From the ordeal of this presidency, perhaps the most horrible — and lasting — effect on our democracy will be that at some point we simply stopped being shocked.”

David Gibbs, a political science professor at the University of Arizona, recalled that Nixon had won reelection by a landslide in 1972, and yet many people who supported him, including Republicans in Congress, were willing to turn against him as evidence of a Watergate conspiracy accumulated.

In contrast, Gibbs now sees the United States as divided 50-50 along the “tribal lines” of Democrats versus Republicans, with Trump’s base remaining loyal no matter what sort of negative picture is painted by his critics.

“The two sides are roughly evenly matched, with neither one able to deliver a knockout blow, and thus there’s political paralysis,” Gibbs said. “The hyper-partisan tribalism makes bipartisan consensus for removing a president virtually impossible.”

Another big change since 1974 is the proliferation of media outlets and the advent of social media, which is used by Trump himself and partisans on all sides to promote their agendas and demonize opponents. Nixon had neither the equivalent of Fox News to support him nor the soapbox of Twitter to accuse his detractors of treason and witch-hunting.

The changing media landscape “has resulted in a political and news environment that moves at light speed compared with the Watergate era,” said David Cohen, a University of Akron political science professor. “The sheer information we are inundated with daily is like drinking out of a fire hose and it is impossible to swallow it all.”

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Copyright © 2019 Capitol Hill Blue

GOP stands silent or supports Trump’s latest stunts

October 4, 2019October 4, 2019 by <a href="https://www.capitolhillblue.com/node/byline/nicholas-riccardi-and-lisa-mascaro" rel="tag">NICHOLAS RICCARDI and LISA MASCARO</a>

Republican U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson, of Wisconsin, claims he sees nothing wrong with what president Donald Trump is doing. (AP Photo/Scott Bauer)

Republican leaders are reacting in two ways to President Donald Trump’s public call for another foreign government, China, to investigate his political rival: silence and support.

Several House and Senate leaders stayed mum Thursday as Trump escalated the controversy that has fueled an impeachment inquiry and plowed through another norm of American politics. Foreign interference in elections has long been viewed as a threat to U.S. sovereignty and the integrity of democracy, and soliciting foreign help in an election is illegal.

But Trump found support in his willingness to openly challenge that convention. Vice President Mike Pence made clear he backed the president and believes he is raising “appropriate” issues. Other allies agreed.

“I don’t think there’s anything improper about doing that,” GOP Sen. Ron Johnson, chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, said of Trump’s call on China to investigate the business dealings of Hunter Biden, the son of leading Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden.

The responses followed a familiar pattern in the age of Trump. As the president broke another political barrier, his party leaders made no public effort to rein him in. Critics have argued that reaction has only emboldened the president, while doing lasting damage to the party and the presidency. Trump allies argue the president’s rule-breaking rhetoric is not as important as his policies, which they support.

But the silence this time also reflects a sharper dilemma for Republicans. As Democrats pursue an impeachment investigation, Republicans have been struggling with how best to shield themselves — and the unpredictable president who may decide their political fortunes — from the steady drip of new revelations. With little guidance from the White House, lawmakers have tried to say as little as possible, blame Democrats or express vague optimism about the investigative process. Trump’s remarks Thursday demonstrated the limits of that strategy.

Standing outside the White House, Trump defended himself against allegations that he privately pressured Ukraine to investigate the Bidens by inviting a geopolitical rival to launch a probe.

“China should start an investigation into the Bidens,” Trump said after being asked about trade negotiations with the country.

Shortly afterward, speaking at an event in Arizona, Pence argued that the Bidens’ ties to Ukraine are of interest to the American people.

“There are legitimate questions that ought to be asked. We will continue to ask them because the American people have a right to know whether or not the vice president of the United States or his family profited from his position,” he said.

One of the party’s most vulnerable senators, Arizona’s Martha McSally, stood at Pence’s side at the stop in Scottsdale. McSally has blasted Democrats for launching an impeachment investigation focused on Trump’s pressure on Ukraine, but has not commented on the whistleblower report and the loose transcript of the phone call that prompted the probe. Her office had no comment about whether she thought Trump’s statement Thursday was appropriate.

In North Carolina, Sen. Thom Tillis, whom Democrats hope to topple in 2020, also stood by the president. Tillis has said he remains unconvinced that the evidence revealed so far exceeds the threshold necessary for impeachment.

“We’ll see what comes out of their impeachment inquiry. They’re not drawing up articles of impeachment yet,” Tillis told The Associated Press in an interview Monday. “What I’ve said is if they’re basing this entire process on a now public, unredacted transcript and the whistleblower complaint, certainly that doesn’t rise to a level of impeachment, in my opinion.”

Asked about his reaction to the public statements Thursday, Tillis’ office responded with a statement: “Democrats and the mainstream media are using anything and everything to justify impeaching the president and removing him from office.”

At a town hall meeting in western Iowa, Sen. Joni Ernst was asked about Trump’s Ukraine call and request for foreign intervention. “We’re going to move onto another question, but what I would say is we can’t determine that yet,” Ernst said. She said the Senate Intelligence Committee would evaluate it.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s office did not respond to a request for comment. Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, chairman of the powerful finance committee, also declined to comment, but his office pointed to the senator’s August request for the Trump administration to investigate Hunter Biden’s business dealings in China.

The office of Sen. Cory Gardner of Colorado, widely considered the most vulnerable Republican senator, issued a statement that didn’t reference Trump’s request of China. “The Senate Intelligence Committee is a serious and respected body that is looking into this in a bipartisan fashion,” the statement said.

The offices of several other senators up for reelection next year alongside the president, including Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, also did not respond.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a Democrat, tweeted, “Once again, @realDonaldTrump has called on a foreign country to interfere in our elections – just the latest example of him putting his personal political gain ahead of defending the integrity of our elections.”

House Democrats are investigating Trump’s July 25 call to Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, in which Trump pressed the newly elected leader to look into the Biden family.

Hunter Biden served on the board of a Ukrainian gas company at the same time his father was leading the Obama administration’s diplomatic dealings with Kyiv. Though the timing raised concerns among anti-corruption advocates, there has been no evidence of wrongdoing by either the former vice president or his son.

Notably, the office of Utah Sen. Mitt Romney, who had called reports of Trump’s requests “troubling” last week, referred to that statement in saying he had no additional comment Thursday.

Still, at almost the same time as Trump’s comments, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy called on Pelosi to end the impeachment inquiry, saying it’s unclear whether it would be fair to Trump.

“Anything less than a thorough, transparent and fair process would represent a supreme insult to our Constitution and the millions of Americans who rely on their voices being heard,” he wrote.

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Riccardi reported from Denver. Associated Press writers Scott Bauer in Madison, Wis.; Sara Burnett in Chicago; Jonathan J. Cooper in Phoenix; Scott McFetridge in Des Moines, Iowa; Lindsay Whitehurst in Salt Lake City; and Gary D. Robertson in Raleigh, N.C., contributed to this report.

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Copyright © 2019 Capitol Hill Blue

Trump adds ‘formal objection’ to his impeachment antics

October 4, 2019October 4, 2019 by <a href="https://www.capitolhillblue.com/node/byline/zeke-miller-and-jonathan-lemire" rel="tag">ZEKE MILLER and JONATHAN LEMIRE</a>

President Donald Trump. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)

The White House is preparing to formally object to Democrats’ impeachment inquiry as soon as Friday, saying it won’t cooperate with the probe because it was initiated without a vote of the House.

The White House Counsel’s Office was preparing to send a letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi objecting to the form of the impeachment investigation, a person familiar with the matter said late Thursday, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss the letter before its dissemination.

Pelosi last week announced that the House was beginning the formal inquiry but didn’t seek the consent of the full chamber, as was done for impeachment investigations into former Presidents Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton.

Rudy Giuliani, the president’s personal attorney, confirmed that the letter was forthcoming.

Trump allies have suggested for days that without a formal vote, the House is merely conducting standard oversight, entitling lawmakers to a lesser level of disclosure from the administration. The Justice Department raised similar arguments last month, though that was before Pelosi announced the impeachment investigation.

In a letter Thursday to House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, Pelosi argued, “There is no requirement under the Constitution, under House Rules, or House precedent that the whole House vote before proceeding with an impeachment inquiry.”

There’s no clear-cut procedure in the Constitution for launching an impeachment inquiry, leaving many of these questions about obstruction untested in court, said Allan Lichtman, a history professor at American University.

“There’s no specification in the Constitution in what does and does not constitute a more formal impeachment inquiry or investigation,” he said. “One can argue if they’re in an impeachment investigation, they’re in an impeachment.”

Giuliani dismissed the entire premise of the impeachment inquiry, which is centered on Trump asking Ukraine to investigate his possible political rival, former Vice President Joe Biden.

“The president was not tasking Ukraine to investigate a political opponent,” Giuliani told The Associated Press on Thursday. “He wanted an investigation into a seriously conflicted former vice president of the United States who damaged the reputation of the United States in Ukraine.”

Democrats have sought to use their declared impeachment investigation to bolster their case to access all sorts of documents from the administration, most recently secret grand jury information that underpinned special counsel Robert Mueller’s report on Russian interference in the 2016 election. They have also threatened to use the administration’s refusal to turn over documents and make witnesses available to potentially form an article of impeachment over “obstruction” of the congressional inquiry.

Where courts have generally required congressional oversight requests to demonstrate a legitimate legislative purpose, impeachment requests could be wide-ranging.

It is unclear if Democrats would wade into a lengthy legal fight with the administration over documents and testimony or if they would just move straight to considering articles of impeachment.

Pelosi has sought to avoid a vote on the impeachment probe for the same reason she resisted, for months, liberal calls to try to remove the president: It would force moderate House Democrats to make a politically risky vote.

The White House, meanwhile, is trying to force the question on Democrats, as it seeks to raise the political cost for their impeachment investigation and to animate the president’s supporters ahead of the 2020 election.

Lemire reported from New York.

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Copyright © 2019 Capitol Hill Blue

Trump calls on China to investigate Bidens

October 3, 2019October 3, 2019 by JILL COLVIN

President Donald Trump speaks to the media. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)

Ensnarled in an impeachment investigation over his request for Ukraine to investigate a chief political rival, President Donald Trump Thursday called on another nation to probe former Vice President Joe Biden: China.

“China should start an investigation into the Bidens,” Trump said in remarks to reporters outside the White House. Trump said he hadn’t directly asked Chinese President Xi Jinping to investigate Biden and his son Hunter but said it’s “certainly something we could start thinking about.”

Trump and personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani have also tried to raise suspicions about Hunter Biden’s business dealings in China, leaning on the writings of conservative author Peter Schweizer. But there is no evidence that the former vice president benefited financially from his son’s business relationships.

Trump’s requests for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy to dig up dirt on Biden, as well as Giuliani’s conduct, are at the center of an intelligence community whistleblower complaint that sparked the House Democratic impeachment probe last week.

Trump’s comments came as he publicly acknowledged that his message to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and other officials was to investigate the 2020 Democratic presidential contender. Trump’s accusations of impropriety are unsupported by evidence.

“It’s a very simple answer,” Trump said of his call with Zelenskiy. “They should investigate the Bidens.”

Trump has sought to implicate Biden and his son in the kind of corruption that has long plagued Ukraine. Hunter Biden served on the board of a Ukrainian gas company at the same time his father was leading the Obama administration’s diplomatic dealings with Kyiv. Though the timing raised concerns among anti-corruption advocates, there has been no evidence of wrongdoing by either the former vice president or his son.

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Copyright © 2019 Capitol Hill Blue

Trump’s escalating public temper tantrums

October 3, 2019October 3, 2019 by <a href="https://www.capitolhillblue.com/node/byline/kevin-freking-and-jonathan-lemire" rel="tag">KEVIN FREKING and JONATHAN LEMIRE</a>

President Donald Trump with Finnish President Sauli Niinisto the White House. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

“Are you talking to me?”

Jaw thrust forward and ready to rumble, President Donald Trump plowed his way through a day of questions Wednesday about his controversial phone call with Ukraine’s leader, his private anger about the House impeachment effort bursting into full public view.

“Did you hear me? Did you hear me? Ask him a question,” the president, pointing to his counterpart from Finland, irritably told a reporter who pressed Trump to answer a question during a surreal and scorching White House news conference.

For days, the president had seethed about the Democrats’ rapidly moving inquiry that threatens to overwhelm his presidency. He insisted he did nothing wrong in what he repeatedly dubbed “a perfect call” with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, in which he asked for an investigation of political opponent Joe Biden. Trump’s rage behind closed White House doors found myriad targets: Democrats, the media, his own staff, the faltering performances of Republicans trying to defend him on television.

Though the president had let off some steam on Twitter, it took until Wednesday’s meetings with Finnish President Sauli Niinisto for Trump to erupt. Lacking a strong White House response team or many allies willing to make his case, while always believing that he is his own best spokesman, Trump became a one-man war room as the afternoon went on.

The news conference, taking place in the East Room on an unseasonably warm early October day in Washington, started innocently enough.

It featured the usual talk about strong cooperation between the two nations. Trump offered America’s condolences for an attack the day before at a vocational school in Finland in which a man wielding a sword and a firearm killed a woman and wounded nine others.

But Niinisto, who appeared bewildered in the Oval Office hours earlier during a previous Trump tirade, found his footing at the news conference. He seemed to send a subtle message when he remarked how he had spent part of his time in Washington prior to his White House meeting by visiting a couple of museums.

“You have here a great democracy. Keep it going on,” he told the president.

Trump soon turned to trade. The president, as he often does, complained about the trade deficit in goods with EU countries, which hit $169.3 billion last year.

“We’re gonna have to start doing something with the European Union because they have not been treating this country right for many, many years. And they know it,” Trump said.

But Niinisto tried to emphasize a different story: “Well, we all know Europe needs USA, but I say that USA needs also Europe,” Niinisto said. “We know the price of everything. We should recognize also the value of everything. We share the same values: democracy, human rights, rule-based order. And in that we are very similar.”

But those grand sentiments soon gave way to questions about dirty politics.

Furious about the impeachment inquiry, Trump said he was under attack for three years, blasted the completed special counsel’s Russia probe and said he was considering filing a major lawsuit, though he didn’t say who it would be against.

“We’ve been investigating the corruption having to do with what they did to my people,” Trump said. “They destroyed many people. They came down to Washington to do a great job and they left home, they left Washington dark.”

He said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi hands out subpoenas like they’re cookies. “Every day, you get subpoenas.”

His ire only grew when one reporter, Jeff Mason from Reuters, asked Trump to make clear what he wanted the president of Ukraine to do with regard to former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter.

Trump dodged with a non-answer, saying he did not like giving money to a corrupt country. “I don’t like being the sucker country,” he said. “European countries are helped far more than we are and those countries should pay more to help Ukraine.”

But when the reporter followed up about what he wanted Ukraine to do about the Bidens, Trump angrily tried to stop the inquiry, backing away from the podium and asking, “Are you talking to me?” while trying to badger Mason to stop.

Preferring to take his questions in informal settings, like the White House lawn against the backdrop of a whirring helicopter, making it easier to skip inquiries he didn’t like, Trump seemed ill-prepared to handle Mason’s follow-ups.

“Did you hear me? Did you hear me? Ask him a question,” Trump ordered, pointing to Niinisto.

Minutes later, the news conference ended and Trump stalked off the stage, again alone.

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Copyright © 2019 Capitol Hill Blue

As angry Trump rants, calm Democrats subpoena

October 3, 2019October 3, 2019 by <a href="https://www.capitolhillblue.com/node/byline/lisa-mascaro" rel="tag">LISA MASCARO</a>, <a href="https://www.capitolhillblue.com/node/byline/mary-clare-jalonick-and-jonathan-lemire" rel="tag">MARY CLARE JALONICK and JONATHAN LEMIRE</a>

President Donald Trump in Washington. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

Agitated and angry, President Donald Trump squared off against House Democrats, packing his increasingly aggressive impeachment defense with name-calling and expletives. Quietly but just as resolutely, lawmakers expanded their inquiry, promising a broad new subpoena for documents and witnesses.

Democratic leaders put the White House on notice that the wide-ranging subpoena would be coming for information about Trump’s actions in the Ukraine controversy, the latest move in an impeachment probe that’s testing the Constitution’s system of checks and balances. They said they’d be going to court if necessary.

Amid the legal skirmishing, Wednesday was a day of verbal fireworks.

The president complained that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was handing out subpoenas “like cookies,” railed against a government whistleblower as “vicious” and assailed the news media as corrupt and the “enemy.” All that alongside a presidential tweetstorm punctuated with an accusation that congressional Democrats waste time and money on “BULL—-.”

Pelosi said Democrats had no choice but to take on the most “solemn” of constitutional responsibilities to put a check on executive power after the national security whistleblower’s complaint that recently came to light. The administration and Congress are on a collision course unseen in a generation after the whistleblower exposed a July phone call the Republican president had with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy in which Trump pressed for an investigation of Democratic political rival Joe Biden and his family.

“We take this to be a very sad time” for the American people and the country, Pelosi said. “Impeaching the president isn’t anything to be joyful about.”

Standing beside her, intelligence committee Chairman Adam Schiff accused Trump of “an incitement to violence” with his attacks on the unnamed whistleblower, who is provided anonymity and other protections under federal law. He said the investigation is proceeding “deliberately” but with a sense of “urgency.”

Unlike Trump, Schiff never raised his voice but said firmly: “We’re not fooling around here.”

Pelosi, in a “Good Morning America” interview that will air Thursday, said Trump is “scared” of the impeachment inquiry and the arguments that can be made against him.

Democrats are now talking of basing an impeachment charge of obstruction on the White House’s slow-walking of documents and testimony _ administration actions that echo the months of resisting Congress in its other investigations into special counsel Robert Mueller’s report and Trump’s business dealings.

Ahead of the new subpoena, the chairmen of three House committees accused the administration of “flagrant disregard” of previous requests for documents and witnesses and said that refusal could be considered an impeachable offense.

The standoff took on a defiant tone this week when Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said he would not stand for Democrats “bullying” his employees into appearing before the congressional committees, even as he acknowledged that he, too, had been among those U.S. officials listening on the line during the Trump’s phone call with the Ukraine leader.

Pompeo’s admission is complicating his situation, and House leaders now consider him a “witness” to Trump’s interaction with Ukraine.

One former State Department official, Kurt Volker, a former special envoy to Ukraine, will appear Thursday for a closed-door interview with House investigators. He is said to be eager to tell his side of the story. That’s ahead of next week’s deposition of ousted U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Maria “Masha” Yovanovitch.

The circumstances of Yovanovitch’s sudden recall from Ukraine are the subject of conspiracy speculation, and the State Department’s Inspector General Michael Steve Linick sought an “urgent” meeting Wednesday to brief staff of several committees.

During that private session, Linick told them he received a packet of materials from the State Department’s Counsel T. Ulrich Brechbuhl, according to one person granted anonymity to discuss the closed-door session.

Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., said the package contained information from debunked conspiracy theories about Ukraine’s role in the 2016 election. Trump has long pursued those theories, a topic he discussed with Zelenskiy in the phone call that sparked the impeachment inquiry.

It was unclear where the package originated, but it was in a White House envelope and included folders from Trump hotels, according to another person familiar with the briefing, a Democrat. That person said the White House sent the envelope to Pompeo and it contained notes from interviews that took place in the New York City office of Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani with various Ukrainians about the debunked conspiracies.

“It raises more questions than it answers,” said Raskin.

Brechbuhl has also been called to give a deposition to the House.

Trump, in appearances in the Oval Office and a joint press conference with the president of Finland, displayed an unusual show of anger as he defended what he has called his “perfect” phone call with Zelenskiy and decried the impeachment inquiry.

He demanded that a reporter pressing him on his dealings with Ukraine move on, labeling the journalist “corrupt.” Earlier in the day he said even though he popularized the phrase “fake news,” he now preferred to say “corrupt” news. “This is a hoax,” Trump said.

Later he called himself, as he has before, a “very stable genius” who always watches what he says in conversations.

Trump has tweeted in recent days that he wants to “find out about” the whistleblower and question him or her, though the person’s identity is protected by the Whistleblower Protection Act.

Schiff’s spokesman acknowledged that the whistleblower had gone to the intelligence committee before filing the formal complaint but said the staff advised the person to contact an inspector general and seek counsel, and at no point did the committee review or receive the complaint in advance.

Trump suggested, without any evidence, that Schiff “probably helped write” the whistleblower’s complaint. The whistleblower’s lawyers said the person had never met or spoken with Schiff about the matter.

The new subpoena coming Friday from House Oversight and Reform Chairman Elijah Cummings will be directed toward acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney and request 13 separate batches of documents concerning the July call and related matters. The call came against the backdrop of a $250 million foreign aid package for Ukraine that was being readied by Congress but stalled by Trump.

The whistleblower alleged in August that the White House tried to “lock down” Trump’s July 25 phone call with the new Ukrainian president because it was worried about the contents being leaked to the public. The acting director of national intelligence eventually made the complaint public.

In recent days, it has been disclosed that the administration similarly tried to restrict information about Trump’s calls with other foreign leaders, including Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Salman, by moving memos onto a highly classified computer system.

In Russia, Putin said scrutiny over the phone call showed that Trump’s adversaries are using “every excuse” to attack him.

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Associated Press writers Matthew Lee in Rome, Angela Charlton in Kyiv, Ukraine, and Laurie Kellman, Zeke Miller, Jonathan Lemire, Alan Fram and Matthew Daly in Washington contributed to this report.

Volker: What role did he play in Ukraine debacle?

October 3, 2019October 3, 2019 by ERIC TUCKER

Former U.S. special representative to Ukraine Kurt Volker. (AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky)

Kurt Volker was little known outside of foreign policy circles as the special U.S. envoy to Ukraine until last week, when the whistleblower complaint against President Donald Trump recast the once obscure diplomat as a central figure in the unfolding impeachment inquiry.

Volker is scheduled to testify in private Thursday to congressional investigators who want to ask about any role he may have played in Trump’s efforts to press Ukrainian officials for damaging information about the son of former Vice President Joe Biden.

Volker resigned Friday after being asked to testify to Congress about the complaint, which describes how Trump in a July 25 phone call repeatedly prodded Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy for an investigation of Biden and his son, while his administration delayed the release of military aid to help Ukraine fight Russia-backed separatists. The complaint says Volker met in Kyiv with Zelenskiy and other Ukrainian political figures a day after the call and he provided advice about how to “navigate” Trump’s demands.

“I think he was doing the best he could,” said retired senior U.S. diplomat Daniel Fried, who described the actions of his former colleague as trying to guide Ukrainians on “how to deal with President Trump under difficult circumstances.”

Volker’s role, along with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s confirmation that he was also on Trump’s July 25 call, deeply entangles the State Department in the impeachment inquiry now shadowing the White House.

The State Department said Volker has confirmed that he put a Zelenskiy adviser in contact with Rudy Giuliani, at the Ukraine adviser’s request, and Giuliani has said he was in frequent contact with Volker.

Separately, The Associated Press reported on Wednesday that Volker met last year with a top official from the same Ukrainian energy firm that paid Biden’s son Hunter to serve on its board. The meeting occurred even as Giuliani pressed Ukraine’s government to investigate the company and the Bidens’ involvement with it.

Pompeo accused the congressional investigators of trying to “bully” and “intimidate” State Department officials with subpoenas for documents and testimony, suggesting he would seek to prevent them from providing information. But the committee managed to schedule the deposition with Volker as well as one next week with Marie Yovanovitch, who was U.S. ambassador to Ukraine until she was removed from the post last spring.

The spotlight is an unlikely place for Volker, who was brought into the Trump administration by Trump’s first secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, to serve as envoy for Ukraine. He worked in a volunteer capacity and had retained his job as head of the John McCain Institute for International Leadership at Arizona State University.

Though his name may not have been known before last week to most Americans, Volker had a long diplomatic career, often working behind the scenes. He was a principal deputy assistant secretary for European and Eurasian affairs before becoming the U.S. ambassador to NATO in 2008.

In his most recent role as envoy to Ukraine, he spoke openly of U.S. support for Ukrainian sovereignty. Last year, he criticized the expansion of Russian naval operations and Russia’s resistance to full deployment of a U.N. peacekeeping mission in eastern Ukraine to monitor the fight against the Russia-backed separatists.

Pompeo himself mentioned Volker during an appearance in Rome on Wednesday when he confirmed his participation in the call, saying he had been focused on “taking down the threat that Russia poses” in Ukraine and to help the country build its economy.

Fried described Volker as a “dedicated public servant and professional, a problem solver.”

“In all of the years I’ve worked with him, we never had a partisan conversation,” Fried said. “He’s an utter professional.”

Trump’s gang plays stalling game against impeachment

October 2, 2019 by <a href="https://www.capitolhillblue.com/node/byline/lisa-mascaro" rel="tag">LISA MASCARO</a>, <a href="https://www.capitolhillblue.com/node/byline/mary-clare-jalonick-and-jonathan-lemire" rel="tag">MARY CLARE JALONICK and JONATHAN LEMIRE</a>

Letter from Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to Rep. Eliot Engel, D-N.Y., Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Tuesday, Oct. 1, 2019 in Washington. (AP Photo/Wayne Partlow)

Setting a defiant tone, the Trump administration resisted Congress’ access to impeachment witnesses, even as House Democrats warned such efforts themselves could amount to an impeachable offense.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo tried to delay five current and former officials from providing documents and testimony in the impeachment inquiry that could lead to charges against President Donald Trump. But Democrats were able to set closed-door depositions for Thursday for former special envoy to Ukraine Kurt Volker and next week for ousted U.S. Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch.

The escalating exchange of accusations and warnings on Tuesday signaled yet another stiffening in the confrontation between the executive and legislative branches amid the Democrats’ launching of the impeachment inquiry late last week. That followed a national security whistleblower’s disclosure of Trump’s July phone call seeking help from the new Ukrainian president in investigating Democratic political rival Joe Biden and Biden’s son Hunter.

In a Tuesday evening tweet, Trump cast the impeachment inquiry as a coup “intended to take away the Power of the People, their VOTE, their Freedoms, their Second Amendment, Religion, Military, Border Wall, and their God-given rights as a Citizen of The United States of America!” In fact, a coup is usually defined as a sudden, violent and illegal seizure of government power. The impeachment process is laid out in the U.S. Constitution.

Pompeo said the Democrats were trying to “intimidate” and “bully” the career officials into appearing and claimed it would be “not feasible” as demanded. House investigators countered that it would be illegal for the secretary to try to protect Trump by preventing the officials from talking to Congress.

Some Trump supporters cheered Pompeo’s muscular response to the Democrats. But it also complicated the secretary’s own situation, coming the day after it was disclosed that he had listened in during Trump’s July phone call with Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelenskiy that helped trigger the impeachment inquiry.

“Any effort to intimidate witnesses or prevent them from talking with Congress — including State Department employees — is illegal and will constitute evidence of obstruction of the impeachment inquiry,” said three House chairmen, Adam Schiff of the intelligence committee, Eliot Engel of Foreign Affairs, and Elijah Cummings of Oversight.

They said that if he was on Trump’s call, “Secretary Pompeo is now a fact witness in the House impeachment inquiry.” And they warned, “He should immediately cease intimidating Department witnesses in order to protect himself and the President.”

On Wednesday, the State Department’s inspector general is expected to brief congressional staff from several House and Senate appropriations, oversight, foreign affairs and intelligence committees on their requests for information and documents on Ukraine, according to an aide familiar with the planning. The inspector general acts independently from Pompeo.

The committees are seeking voluntary testimony from the current and former officials as the House digs into State Department actions and Trump’s other calls with foreign leaders that have been shielded from scrutiny.

In halting any appearances by State officials, and demanding that executive branch lawyers accompany them, Pompeo is underscoring Attorney General William Barr’s expansive view of White House authority and setting a tone for conflicts to come.

“I will use all means at my disposal to prevent and expose any attempts to intimidate the dedicated professionals,” Pompeo wrote.

When issuing a separate subpoena last week as part of the inquiry, the chairmen of the three House committees made it clear that stonewalling their investigation would be fought.

“Your failure or refusal to comply with the subpoena shall constitute evidence of obstruction of the House’s impeachment inquiry,” the three chairmen wrote.

Democrats often note that obstruction was one of the impeachment articles against Richard Nixon, who resigned the presidency in 1974 in the face of almost certain impeachment.

Volker played a direct role in arranging meetings between Rudy Giuliani, who is Trump’s personal lawyer, and Zelenskiy, the chairmen said.

The State Department said that Volker has confirmed that he put a Zelenskiy adviser in contact with Giuliani, at the Ukraine adviser’s request.

The former envoy, who has since resigned his position and so is not necessarily bound by Pompeo’s directions, is eager to appear as scheduled on Thursday, said one person familiar with the situation, but unauthorized to discuss it and granted anonymity. The career professional believes he acted appropriately and wants to tell his side of the situation, the person said.

Yovanovitch, the career diplomat whose abrupt recall from Ukraine earlier this year raised questions, is set to appear next week. The Democrats also want to hear from T. Ulrich Brechbuhl, a counselor at the State Department, who also listened in on the Trump-Zelenskiy call, they said.

It’s unclear whether Pompeo will comply with the committees’ request for documents by Friday. He had declined to comply with their previous requests for information.

Pompeo, traveling in Italy to meet with the country’s president and prime minister, ignored shouted question about the impeachment inquiry on Tuesday.

The House investigators are prepared for battle as they probe more deeply into the State Department to try to understand why the administration sought to restrict access to Trump’s conversations with foreign leaders.

The whistleblower alleged in an Aug. 12 letter to Congress that the White House tried to “lock down” Trump’s July 25 phone call with the new Ukrainian president because it was worried about the contents being leaked to the public.

“It’s going to be one heck of a fight to get that information,” Schiff told House Democrats during a conference call over the weekend, according to a person granted anonymity to discuss the private session.

As Trump continued to rage against the impeachment inquiry, there was little evidence of a broader White House response. And few outside allies were rushing to defend the president.

Trump has long measured allies’ loyalty by their willingness to fight for him on TV, and he complained bitterly this week that few had done so. And those who did, including House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy on CBS’ “60 Minutes,” he believed had flubbed their appearance, according to a person not authorized to publicly discuss private conversations.

Though there has been growing discontent with Giuliani in the West Wing and State Department, where some officials blame him for leading Trump into the Ukraine mess, the president continued to stand by his personal lawyer.

Giuliani, who hired former assistant special Watergate prosecutor Jon Sale a day after being hit with his own subpoena, continued to push false Biden corruption accusations and promised to fight against Democratic investigators.

The Ukraine matter remains the central focus as Democrats investigate whether Trump’s suggestion that the east European country’s new president be in touch with Giuliani and Barr to “look into” Biden amounts to a solicitation of foreign interference in the upcoming 2020 election.

The call unfolded against the backdrop of a $250 billion foreign aid package for Ukraine that was being readied by Congress but stalled by the White House.

Ukraine’s president told reporters Tuesday he has never met or spoken with Giuliani.

Zelenskiy insisted that “it is impossible to put pressure on me.” He said he stressed the importance of the military aid repeatedly in discussions with Trump, but “it wasn’t explained to me” why the money didn’t come through until September.

Not all business was halted between the White House and Congress. Even as the impeachment confrontation boiled, House Democrats briefed White House staffers on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s prescription drug legislation. Lowering drug costs is a top policy priority for both the speaker and the president. Joe Grogan, a top Trump domestic policy adviser, called it a “very productive start.”

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Associated Press writers Matthew Lee in Rome; Angela Charlton in Kyiv, Ukraine; and Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar in Washington contributed to this report.

Impeachment fever swamps gun control efforts

October 2, 2019October 2, 2019 by KATHLEEN RONAYNE

Rep. Gabby Giffords, speaks during a news conference to announce the introduction of bipartisan legislation to expand background checks for sales and transfers of firearms, on Capitol Hill in Washington. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

After back-to-back mass shootings in Ohio and Texas this summer, gun control burst back on the scene as a major political issue for Democrats. Now it risks taking a back seat as impeachment fever overtakes Washington.

Gun control advocates are determined to prevent that from happening.

Ten White House hopefuls will be in Las Vegas for a forum on gun policy on Wednesday, almost two years to the day after a gunman killed 58 people at a country music festival on the Las Vegas Strip in the deadliest mass shooting in modern American history. The event is being hosted by MSNBC, March for Our Lives and Giffords, the advocacy organization set up by former Arizona congresswoman Gabby Giffords, who was shot and gravely wounded during a constituent meeting in 2011.

The forum is an effort to keep gun violence front and center of the debate and gives 2020 presidential candidates a chance to showcase their plans to combat the epidemic. Polls show that a majority of Americans favor stricter gun laws, while even more support specific proposals like universal background checks. But negotiations between President Donald Trump’s administration and lawmakers have halted over background checks legislation, an effort that faced long odds even before the impeachment inquiry began.

“Impeachment sucks everything out of the room. Certainly it’s the focus of Trump’s attention,” said Jack Citrin, a professor emeritus of political science at the University of California-Berkeley. “If you need to reach some kind of bipartisan agreement and one party is determined to throw the president out of office, rightly or wrongly, it’s a little hard to see how that builds the kind of goodwill that’s necessary on this or any other issue.”

Ariel Hobbs, a 21-year-old student organizer with March for Our Lives in Houston, said her group wants “to hear from the candidates that they are taking this seriously and they understand they can no longer ignore America’s gun violence epidemic.” She doesn’t think the impeachment inquiry is a reason for lawmakers to stop their push for a bipartisan solution.

The 10 candidates slated to participate in the forum are former Vice President Joe Biden; New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker; South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg; former Obama Housing Secretary Julián Castro; California Sen. Kamala Harris; Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar; former Texas Rep. Beto O’Rourke; Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders; Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren; and businessman Andrew Yang.

O’Rourke recast his campaign around gun control after the August shooting in his hometown of El Paso, Texas, where a gunman targeting Hispanics killed 22 people. O’Rourke even vowed to ban assault weapons, saying at a debate in Houston in September, “Hell, yes, we’re gonna take your AR-15, your AK-47, and we’re not going to allow it to be used against your fellow Americans anymore.”

One expert said he doesn’t see a downside for O’Rourke or any of his fellow presidential candidates to talk about impeachment alongside other issues like gun control.

“If (O’Rourke) is pointing out that because of impeachment, the president has decided not to work at all on an issue that involves people’s lives, he could make the argument if he wanted that this is itself an impeachable offense,” said Michael Green, a history professor at the University of Las Vegas-Nevada focused on state and national politics. “If you are trying to get your base, your base probably does not mind the idea of impeachment.”

Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut has been leading negotiations with the White House on a background checks deal and will attend the forum. The conversations have gone silent in the past two weeks, but he’s told the White House that he’s still willing to talk. Trump himself has accused Democrats of ignoring other issues to focus on impeachment.

“The Democrats are so focused on hurting the Republican Party and the President that they are unable to get anything done because of it, including legislation on gun safety, lowering of prescription drug prices, infrastructure, etc. So bad for our Country!” he tweeted Sept. 24.

Murphy says reaching consensus may still be possible.

“I think that the president is going to have some pressure to show that impeachment isn’t consuming him, and a breakthrough on a background checks deal that nobody thought was possible would probably be a pretty good tonic for the administration right now,” he said.

While his fellow Democrats may not be keen on the idea of giving Trump a win, Murphy said he’ll keep pushing because gun control remains top of mind for voters.

“Our party needs to find mechanisms to keep our focus on the issues that matter to voters, and guns is right at the top of that list,” he said. “The forum is an effort to try to keep the primary dialogue focused on an issue that is absolutely going to be top of mind for swing voters.”