Meadows brushes off Sondland testimony
North Carolina Rep. Mark Meadows, one of Trump’s most vocal Republican supporters in the House, brushed off concerns about Sondland’s testimony.
“It’s interesting that from your vantage point you’re wanting to focus on Ambassador Sondland instead of on Volker, who was the Ukrainian envoy who actually talked to the Ukrainians who actually had the responsibility when you talk to him,” he said.
Sondland changes testimony, acknowledges delivering quid pro quo message to Ukraine
U.S. Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland told House impeachment investigators this week that he now remembers telling a top aide to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy that Ukraine would not receive U.S. military assistance until it committed to investigating the 2016 election and former Vice President Joe Biden, according to a person with knowledge of Sondland’s testimony.
Sondland’s latest testimony represents an update to depositions he gave in October to the three House committees leading the impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump. Sondland said that by the beginning of September, he “presumed that the aid suspension had become linked to the proposed anti-corruption statement.”
Sondland also said he now remembered a Sept. 1 conversation with Andriy Yermak, a top Zelenskiy adviser, in Warsaw in which he told Yermak that “the resumption of U.S. aid would likely not occur until Ukraine provided the public anti-corruption statement that we had been discussing for many weeks.”
Read the full story here.
Impeachment investigators seek testimony from Mulvaney
House impeachment investigators want to depose acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney on Friday, Nov. 8.
In a letter sent to Mulvaney Tuesday requesting his testimony, the three committee chairmen wrote that they believe he has “substantial first-hand knowledge and information relevant to the House’s impeachment inquiry.”
“Specifically, the investigation has revealed that you may have been directly involved in an effort orchestrated by President Trump, his personal agent, Rudolph Giuliani, and others to withhold a coveted White House meeting and nearly $400 million in security assistance in order to pressure Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to pursue investigations that would benefit President Trump’s personal political interests, and jeopardized our national security in attempting to do so,” the chairmen continued.
The White House previously made it clear it does not intend to comply with the inquiry.
GOP senators disagree with Rand Paul’s call for outing whistleblower
Some of Sen. Rand Paul’s Republican colleagues say they disagree with his call for the media to reveal the identity of the whistleblower whose complaint sparked the House impeachment inquiry.
“I believe in personal privacy, particularly as it relates to a whistleblower, and think that would be most unfortunate,” Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, told reporters Tuesday when asked about the Kentucky Republican’s remarks.
Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, also said she disagreed with Paul’s comments.
“Whistleblowers are entitled to protection under the law,” Collins said. “The intelligence community whistleblowers play a very important role, and to try to reveal the name of this individual to me is contrary to the intent of the whistleblower law.
“Now, I do think the whistleblowers should be answering questions, and it’s my understanding that he has agreed to do so if they’re submitted to him even by Republican members, and I would say especially by Republican members,” Collins continued, adding, “If there’s information about him that casts doubt over the veracity of what he’s saying, that’s fair game, but I do not support revealing his identity.”
Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., said that while he understands why his Republican colleagues are suspicious of the secrecy surrounding the House Democrats’ handling of the inquiry, “I think the whistleblower statute is there for a reason, and I think we need to respect the law where whistleblowers are concerned.”
“But I just think part of it is the atmosphere around this that the Democrats in the House have created just makes all of this very suspect because of the secrecy of it, and I think the more transparent the process is the better off everyone is,” Thune added. “And that’s why … some of our colleagues are saying the whistleblower, we need to be more transparent, need more information, and a person ought to be able to face his accusers.”
Paul called for the media to out the whistleblower in an appearance at President Donald Trump’s campaign rally in Lexington, Kentucky, on Monday night, saying, “I say tonight to the media, do your job and print his name.”
Whistleblower Protections Caucus co-chairs denounce effort to unmask whistleblower
After Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) called on the media and fellow members of Congress to reveal the whistleblower’s name at Monday night’s Trump rally, NBC News reached out to the co-chairs of the Senate Whistleblower Protection Caucus for their reaction.
Sen. Wyden (D-Ore.) told NBC News on Tuesday, “I’m co-chair of the Whistleblower Caucus and I believe publicly outing a whistleblower will forever keep others from speaking truth to power. If you are serious about protecting whistleblowers you must do it regardless of who is president.”
A spokesman for Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) says the senator “didn’t watch the rally,” adding that Grassley’s comments yesterday before the rally “pretty much covered it.”
Grassley had told reporters earlier on Monday that it’s “strictly up to the whistleblower” to decide whether or not to come forward.
Raskin: Yovanovitch was ‘set up for a comprehensive smear campaign’
Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., a member of the Judiciary and Oversight committees, alleged in a CNN interview Tuesday that former Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch “was basically set up for a comprehensive smear campaign by Rudy Giuliani and his henchmen” and “she was told by lots of people this was happening to her.”
Discussing his takeaways from the depositions of Yovanovitch and former Pompeo aide Michael McKinley, Raskin added that McKinley “tried to get Secretary of State Pompeo to speak out on behalf of Ambassador Yovanovitch, and he refused to do it.” McKinley “testified that he could not believe that there was this, you know, campaign of smears and lies against her, and the State Department would not stand up for her. And he said basically he ended up resigning in protest, saying that he had never seen anything like this in 37 years in his service in the State Department.”
Yovanovitch’s ouster “sets the stage for is all of the financial and political schemes that the president was executing along with Giuliani and his henchmen,” Raskin alleged.
“So the president has tried to say, ‘Well, this is just about one phone call, and it was a perfect phone call,’ Raskin said. ‘It was a perfectly unlawful phone call, but it’s not just about a phone call. It’s about a whole campaign to run a — not a parallel shadow foreign policy, but a perpendicular foreign policy, was working across purposes with Ambassador Yovanovitch, who was leading a campaign against corruption in Ukraine. And in fact, it was the president’s deputies who were reviving corruption and trying to exploit the traditional corruption that took place in that country.”
Asked about Sen. Rand Paul’s demand that the identity of the whistleblower be revealed, Raskin said attempts “to demonize and vilify the whistleblower is a scapegoating tactic that, again, is a distraction from the merits of the case.”
“And you’ll notice the president’s defenders are doing everything they can to distract people from what actually happened there because there’s almost complete agreement on it,” he said. “Nobody is telling any story other than the president organized this shakedown against the Ukrainian government and then tried to cover it up afterwards.”
OPINION: Trump and Giuliani’s impeachment defense pushes America closer to a ‘mafia state’
Neither President Donald Trump nor his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani deny the underlying facts of the allegations at the heart of the impeachment inquiry. This seems like a relatively crazy thing to do, given that Democrats are out for blood — but they really have no choice given how much is already public. So instead of denying the facts, Trump’s defense appears to be: Yes, we did it, but there was nothing wrong with it.
The “there was nothing wrong with it” defense does triple duty: It gives Trump’s surrogates something to argue, it muddies the water and confuses people with its sheer audacity, and — most important — it pushes the United States one step closer to becoming what the Hungarian scholar Bálint Magyar calls a “mafia state” to describe the kind of autocracies we see springing up in the former Soviet Union.
We’ve been talking about Trump and Giuliani running a “shadow” foreign policy alongside (and often in conflict with) the official State Department foreign policy. But Masha Gessen, relying on Magyar’s work, explains that we are “using the wrong language” to describe what Giuliani was doing in Ukraine. A president, who is the chief foreign policy official in the nation, cannot, by definition, run a shadow foreign policy. What the president can do, however, is destroy the institutions that traditionally conduct foreign policy, in this case, the State Department, staffed by career diplomats.
Read the full opinion piece here.