Thursday Reads/Impeachment Hearings Live Blog

Trump talking points. He can’t even spell Zelensky.

Good Morning!!

Whew! Yesterday was a simply mind-boggling day that is guaranteed to go down in history–if Russia (and/or China, Turkey, North Korea) doesn’t succeed in winning a second term for Trump. Gordon Sondland threw everyone under the bus–he testified that “everyone was in the loop”–Trump, Mulvaney, Pompeo, Perry, Giuliani–and theirs was not an track in our foreign policy but the main track. And more is coming today.

The New York Times: Impeachment Inquiry Updates: Fiona Hill and David Holmes to Testify.

Who: Ms. Hill and Mr. Holmes will testify during a morning session. There is no afternoon session scheduled.

What: The House Intelligence Committee, led by its chairman, Representative Adam B. Schiff, Democrat of California, will continue to examine the case for impeaching Mr. Trump. The Republican minority, led by Representative Devin Nunes of California, will again work to poke holes in testimony implicating the president.

When and Where: The morning proceedings start at 9 Eastern in the House Ways and Means Committee chambers. It will most likely last until the afternoon.

NPR: What To Watch For In Impeachment Hearing With Fiona Hill, David Holmes.

[Fiona] Hill is expected to tell lawmakers about the concerns she had with the merits of the Ukraine affair, in which Trump sought concessions from Ukraine’s president in exchange for engagement and continued financial assistance that had been authorized by Congress.

The U.S. had been sending aid to Ukraine since it was invaded by Russia in 2014 to help its military against Russian and Russian-backed forces still operating in the east.

The national security establishment opposed the freeze of that aid for several weeks this summer.

Hill told impeachment investigators in her closed deposition that she resented the smear campaign run against the former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch by Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani.

Hill also is a key witness about the former national security adviser, John Bolton, who has been described as an important player in the Ukraine saga but from whom Congress has not heard directly….

[David] Holmes is a diplomatic staffer who went to lunch in July in Kyiv with the ambassador to the European Union, Gordon Sondland.

During that encounter, Sondland called Trump on his mobile phone to talk about the “investigations” that Trump wanted from his Ukrainian counterpart, Volodymyr Zelenskiy.

Holmes said in his deposition that Sondland t.old him Trump only cared about “big stuff” that affected him, like what Holmes called the “Biden investigation” Trump wanted from Ukraine.

Sondland says he didn’t know in real time that the investigation connected with the word “Burisma” — a Ukrainian company that for a time paid the son of former Vice President Joe Biden — was, in effect, code for the Biden family.

CNN has Hill’s opening statement: Former top Russia adviser to reject GOP claim that Ukraine meddled in US politics.

A former top White House official will offer on Thursday a full-throated rebuttal to the narrative pushed by President Donald Trump and his GOP allies about Ukraine’s role meddling in American politics, according to a source familiar with her testimony.

Fiona Hill, who served as Trump’s top Russia adviser until she left the administration this summer, will also warn the House Intelligence Committee as part of the impeachment inquiry that the Kremlin is prepared to strike again in 2020 and remains a serious threat to American democracy that the United States must seek to combat, the source said.

Yovanovitch testimony: November 16, 2019

In her brief opening statement, Hill will offer a strong pushback to the claims peddled by Trump, his personal attorney Rudy Giuliani and some congressional Republicans that Ukraine may have interfered in the 2016 elections to help Hillary Clinton.

Multiple witnesses have said that the moving forward on the 2016 election interference investigation — along with a probe into former Vice President Joe Biden and his son, Hunter — amounted to conditions placed on the country before roughly $400 million in military aid for the country was released and a key meeting in Washington between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky could take place.

Both Giuliani and Trump have urged the Ukrainian government to announce probes into any role the country may have had in the 2016 elections, something Trump brought up himself in his now-infamous July phone call with Zelensky.

But Hill in her testimony will argue that such a theory amounts to a fictional narrative at a time when the US should be focused on the real threat: Russia, which she warns could once again seek to interfere in the 2020 elections while the US is focused on Ukraine.

During Sondland’s testimony yesterday, Trump made a complete spectacle, screaming ineffectually at the assembled press on the White House lawn.

That is really really not normal. This man needs a complete neurological exam STAT. Speaking of Trump’s obvious dementia symptoms, Newsweek offers this quote from the new book by Anonymous: Trump Regularly ‘Can’t remember what he’s said or been told,’ White House Insider Says.

President Donald Trump regularly struggles to “remember what he’s said or been told,” an anonymous senior government official behind a new exposé on the inner workings of the White House has claimed.

Much of the nearly 260 pages of the anonymous official’s tome, A Warning, which hit bookshelves on Tuesday, has been dedicated to sounding the alarm about Trump’s alarming behavior.

While the anonymous author, who is described only as a “senior official in the Trump administration” admits they are not “qualified to diagnose the president’s mental acuity,” they can say that “normal people who spend any time with Donald Trump are uncomfortable by what they witness.”

“He stumbles, slurs, gets confused, is easily irritated, and has trouble synthesizing information, not occasionally but with regularity,” the official warns.

Often, they say, “the president also can’t remember what he’s said or been told.”

“Americans are used to him denying words that have come out of his mouth,” the senior official writes. “Sometimes this is to avoid responsibility.”

However, they say it often “appears Trump genuinely doesn’t remember important facts.”

One clear example of that, the official recalls, is when the president claimed he was not sure if he had “ever even heard of a Category 5” hurricane, despite having been briefed on at least four other Category 5 hurricanes during his time in office.

“Was he forgetting these briefings?” the author questions. “Or more problematic, was he not paying attention at all? These are events that affect millions of Americans, yet they don’t seem to stick in his brain.”

The official writes that while Trump has often claimed to be highly intelligent, they say they have “seen the president fall flat on his face when trying to speak intelligently” on a number of topics on which he claims to be an expert.

“You can see why behind closed doors his own top officials deride him as an ‘idiot’ and a ‘moron’ with the understanding of a ‘fifth or sixth grader,'” the unnamed senior official says.

More at the link.

One of the biggest reveals from Sondland’s testimony was that Mike Pompeo was involved in the entire Ukraine affair. The New York Times: Pompeo Emerges as a Major Trump Enabler in Ukraine affair.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has for months deflected questions about whether the Trump administration demanded political favors from Ukraine in exchange for military aid. He has refused to explain why he recalled the American ambassador, declared that it was “inappropriate” for his diplomats to testify before Congress and declined to hand over documents to impeachment investigators.

On Wednesday, Gordon D. Sondland, the American ambassador to the European Union, filled in the blanks: He said Mr. Pompeo and his top aides “knew what we were doing, and why,” and recited emails he wrote to Mr. Pompeo about the quid pro quo demanded by President Trump. “Everyone was in the loop,” Mr. Sondland said.

Mr. Sondland’s testimony has undercut any notion that Mr. Pompeo, the administration’s most powerful national security official, was not a participant in Mr. Trump’s efforts to pressure Ukraine. It also firmly places him at the center of one of the nation’s biggest foreign policy controversies in nearly two decades, since the debate over the intelligence that led to the war in Iraq.

Whatever Mr. Pompeo’s future plans, Mr. Trump’s secretary of state is now tied intimately to the Ukraine controversy. Even before Mr. Sondland’s testimony, Mr. Pompeo was rumored to be seeking an exit from the State Department, perhaps to run for a Senate seat in Kansas, his adopted home state, with an eye toward a presidential bid once Mr. Trump leaves the stage.

Lock. Him. Up.

I’ll end with two breaking news stories.

AP: AP source: FBI has asked for interview with whistleblower

The FBI last month requested an interview with the whistleblower whose complaint fueled the impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump and Ukraine, a person familiar with the situation said Wednesday.

An agent from the FBI’s Washington field office reached out to the whistleblower’s lawyers last month to seek an interview about the substance of the complaint, according to this person, who insisted on anonymity to discuss the request with The Associated Press.

The person said it was clear from the FBI that the whistleblower was not regarded as the target of any investigation but rather a potential witness. It was not immediately clear what specifically the FBI might be looking into. The requested interview has not taken place.

Could this be related to the reportedly ongoing counterintelligence investigation?

The New York Times: Prosecutors Subpoena Trump Fund-Raisers Linked to Giuliani Associates.

Federal prosecutors in Manhattan issued subpoenas in recent weeks to several players in President Trump’s fund-raising apparatus as part of an investigation into two associates of Rudolph W. Giuliani who have been charged with violating campaign finance laws, according to people familiar with the investigation.

The subpoenas went to a lobbying firm run by a top fund-raiser for Mr. Trump, Brian Ballard, and to two people who have helped raise money for America First Action, a super PAC created to support the president and allied candidates, the people said.

Mr. Ballard and the America First fund-raisers worked to varying extents with Mr. Giuliani’s associates Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, American citizens who helped Mr. Giuliani wage a pressure campaign on Ukraine that is now at the center of the impeachment inquiry into Mr. Trump.

The recent activity by prosecutors and F.B.I. agents shows that they have cast a wide net as they collect evidence about Mr. Parnas and Mr. Fruman, who were arrested last month. It also comes as the same prosecutors look into whether Mr. Giuliani, Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, violated a federal lobbying law in some of his dealings with Ukrainians.

Lock Giuliani up with Pompeo.

Please treat this post as an open thread/live blog for today’s hearings.

Tuesday Reads: Public Impeachment Hearings Begin Tomorrow

Good Morning!!

Tomorrow should be an interesting day, as the impeachment inquiry goes public for the first time. NPR has all the details: Impeachment Hearing FAQ: Who Will Testify And How The Questioning Will Work.

Public impeachment hearings begin Wednesday, and the first round of witnesses includes three career public servants who have testified behind closed doors that President Trump did link military aid and a White House meeting for Ukraine with a promise to investigate one of the president’s domestic political opponents….

The first hearing is on Wednesday beginning at 10 a.m. ET. The second hearing is scheduled for 9 a.m. ET on Friday. You can watch live on NPR.org and listen to special coverage on many local public radio stations….

The three witnesses who will appear:

William Taylor, the top diplomat in Ukraine, told investigators that he learned shortly after he was tapped for his post that there was a parallel foreign policy channel set up that he believed undermined U.S. national security interests.

George Kent,the deputy assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, described how Rudy Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer, went against the traditional bipartisan approach regarding U.S. support for Ukraine in an effort to push for political investigations.

Marie Yovanovitch was ousted from her post as the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine in May after a campaign led by Giuliani to criticize her performance and alleged lack of support for the president’s policies. She recounted in her closed-door testimony that she was told by Ukrainians to “watch my back” because Giuliani’s associates were pushing their business interests and viewed her as an obstacle.

More at the NPR link.

The Washington Post: Career federal employees are the protagonists in the impeachment drama — at risk to themselves.

Rank-and-file bureaucrats who work in the federal agencies that handle national security will defy the directive of the White House to stay quiet, instead describing what they saw as they went about, in their view, just doing their jobs.

Their role in recounting to the public how President Trump and his allies attempted to enlist Ukraine to investigate his political rivals will not come without risk. All but one of the 11 career Foreign Service staff, military officers and Pentagon officials who first testified in closed-door depositions in the Capitol basement are still in government.

They’re back at work following the extraordinary private testimony they gave starting Oct. 3 in the impeachment inquiry into the president they work for. For now, they’ve faced no efforts to punish them for telling House investigators that normal diplomacy was bypassed by a rogue foreign policy to benefit Trump politically, their lawyers say. However, former Ukraine ambassador Marie Yovanovitch, who is scheduled to testify publicly on Friday, is close to retirement and told House investigators that she felt “threatened” by the president — and worried about her pension and her employment.

Top White House political appointees failed to comply with subpoenas to testify. So the accounts of longtime professional staff have driven the fact-finding by the House Intelligence Committee. Their testimony provides a striking contrast with some aides who have left the Trump administration in frustration — only to keep their observations private.

“The American people do not know the extent to which they now benefit from these anonymous professionals in the federal government,” said Timothy Naftali, a historian at New York University and former director of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum. “The way to understand how the Trump team subverted national security is to understand the experts, the neutral professionals who are describing how foreign policy is supposed to be conducted.”

CNN examines the Russian reactions to the impeachment drama: Putin has relished US political chaos. He may now fear Trump’s impeachment.

On Russian state television, tightly controlled by the Kremlin, support for Donald Trump in his current impeachment battle is absolute. After all it is Russia, they sometimes joke, that got the US president elected in the first place!

Of course, allegations of meddling in the 2016 US presidential election, which swept Trump into office, are officially denied in Russia. But they are often referenced, even on serious television news shows, with a sarcastic wink.

“Have you lost your minds that you want to remove OUR Donald Ivanovich,” bawls Vladimir Soloviev, host of “Evening,” a pro-Kremlin current affairs program which has been focusing on the US impeachment proceedings….

“The chaos brought by Trump into the American system of government is weakening the United States,” Karen Shakhnazarov, CEO of Mosfilm Studio and a regular guest on Russian state television, tells the studio audience.

“America is getting weaker and now Russia is taking its place in the Middle East. Suddenly, Russia is starting to seriously penetrate Africa. So, when they say that Trump is weakening the United States — yes he is and that’s why we love him. The more problems they have, the better for us,” Shakhnazarov says

Read the rest at CNN.

The New York Times has a great background article on the Ukraine matter. It’s long and involved, so I’ll just post the link here for anyone who wants to read it: Trump, Ukraine and Impeachment: The Inside Story of How We Got Here.

As usual, the White House is in chaos in the lead-up to public hearings. The Washington Post reports: White House infighting flares amid impeachment inquiry.

The White House’s bifurcated and disjointed response to Democrats’ impeachment inquiry has been fueled by a fierce West Wing battle between two of President Trump’s top advisers, and the outcome of the messy skirmish could be on full display this week, according to White House and congressional officials.

Acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney has urged aides not to comply with the inquiry and blocked any cooperation with congressional Democrats. Top political aides at the Office of Management and Budget, which Mulvaney once led, have fallen in line with his defiant stance, the officials said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to talk freely about the behind-the-scenes developments.

Mulvaney’s office blames White House counsel Pat Cipollone for not doing more to stop other government officials from participating in the impeachment inquiry, as a number of State Department officials, diplomats and an aide to Vice President Pence have given sworn testimony to Congress.

Cipollone, meanwhile, has fumed that Mulvaney only made matters worse with his Oct. 17 news conference, when he publicly acknowledged a quid pro quo, essentially confirming Democrats’ accusations in front of television cameras and reporters. Cipollone did not want Mulvaney to hold the news conference, a message that was passed along to the acting chief of staff’s office, according to two senior Trump advisers, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. A Mulvaney aide said a team of White House lawyers prepared him for the news conference and never said he should not do it.

Head over to the WaPo to read the rest.

Adam Schiff released more transcripts yesterday, breaking more news.

Betsy Swan at the Daily Beast: Mulvaney’s OMB Held Up Lethal Ukraine Aid in 2017 for Fear of Russian Reaction.

Under Mick Mulvaney’s leadership, the Office of Management and Budget temporarily put a hold on the delivery of anti-tank missiles to Ukraine in 2017 because of concerns their arrival would upset Russia, according to former White House official Catherine Croft….

Croft told congressional impeachment investigators that after the Trump administration greenlit the delivery of Javelin missiles to Ukraine in late 2017—the first delivery of lethal aid to the country since Russian separatists seized territory in its Eastern region in 2014—Mulvaney’s office held it up.

“Did you understand why?” asked the congressional staffer questioning her.

“I understood the reason to be a policy one,” she replied.

“What was the policy one?”

“In a briefing with Mick Mulvaney, the question centered around the Russian reaction,” she continued.

“What was the concern about the Russian reaction?” asked the staffer.

“That Russia would react negatively to the provision of Javelins to Ukraine,” she said.

NBC News: Pentagon official testifies White House directed freeze on aid to Ukraine.

Laura Cooper, the top Pentagon official overseeing U.S. policy regarding Ukraine, told House impeachment investigators last month that President Donald Trump directed the relevant agencies to freeze aid to Ukraine over the summer, according to a transcript of her testimony released Monday.

Cooper, during Oct. 23 testimony before the three House committees leading the impeachment inquiry into Trump’s Ukraine dealings, testified that she and other Pentagon officials had answered questions about the Ukraine assistance in the middle of June — so she was surprised when one of her subordinates told her that a hold had been placed on the funds after an interagency meeting in July.

“I got, you know, I got a readout from the meeting — there was discussion in that session about the — about OMB [Office of Management and Budget] saying that they were holding the Congressional Notification related to” Ukraine, Cooper testified, according to the transcript.

Cooper, according to the transcript of her testimony, described the hold as “unusual.”

Cooper said that she attended a meeting on July 23, where “this issue” of Trump’s “concerns about Ukraine and Ukraine security assistance” came up. She said the president’s concerns were conveyed by acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney.

Days later, on July 26, she testified that she found out that both military and humanitarian aid had been impacted.

Asked if the president was authorized to order that type of hold, Cooper said there were concerns that he wasn’t.

You can also read a lengthy summary of the latest transcripts at Politico: ‘Alarm bells’: What Cooper, Croft and Anderson told impeachment investigators.

Also at Politico, Laura Glover has an interesting piece on how the Senate could end up removing Trump: There’s a Surprisingly Plausible Path to Removing Trump From Office.

By most everyone’s judgment, the Senate will not vote to remove President Donald Trump from office if the House impeaches him. But what if senators could vote on impeachment by secret ballot? If they didn’t have to face backlash from constituents or the media or the president himself, who knows how many Republican senators would vote to remove?

A secret impeachment ballot might sound crazy, but it’s actually quite possible. In fact, it would take only three senators to allow for that possibility.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has said he will immediately move to hold a trial to adjudicate the articles of impeachment if and when the Senate receives them from the House of Representatives. Article I, Section 3, of the Constitution does not set many parameters for the trial, except to say that “the Chief Justice shall preside,” and “no Person shall be convicted without the Concurrence of two thirds of the Members present.” That means the Senate has sole authority to draft its own rules for the impeachment trial, without judicial or executive branch oversight….

…according to current Senate procedure, McConnell will still need a simple majority—51 of the 53 Senate Republicans—to support any resolution outlining rules governing the trial. That means that if only three Republican senators were to break from the caucus, they could block any rule they didn’t like. (Vice President Mike Pence can’t break ties in impeachment matters.) Those three senators, in turn, could demand a secret ballot and condition their approval of the rest of the rules on getting one.

So . . . what stories are you following today?