Impeachment 3: The MF Has Been Impeached! The Trial Has Begun!

[GreyhoundFan]

"Trump accuses Democrats of avoiding Senate trial to protect Bidens"

Spoiler

President Trump on Tuesday accused Democrats of seeking to avoid an impeachment trial in the Senate to protect Joe Biden and his son Hunter, whose service on the board of a Ukrainian energy company while his father was vice president has come under scrutiny.

Trump weighed in on Twitter as an impasse continued over the timing and scope of an expected Senate trial. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has held back the two articles of impeachment — abuse of power and obstruction of Congress — passed this month by the House.

She and Senate Democrats are seeking guarantees that a Senate trial will include several witnesses, notably acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney and former national security adviser John Bolton, who declined to participate in the House impeachment proceedings. Democrats also are pushing for the release of documents relevant to Trump’s conduct toward Ukraine that the White House has refused to provide.

“The Democrats will do anything to avoid a trial in the Senate in order to protect Sleepy Joe Biden, and expose the millions and millions of dollars that ‘Where’s’ Hunter, & possibly Joe, were paid by companies and countries for doing NOTHING,” Trump said in his tweet. “Joe wants no part of this mess!”

Trump has previously insisted that a Senate trial include the Bidens as witnesses, along with the anonymous whistleblower whose complaint sparked the impeachment inquiry.

While records suggest that Hunter Biden was paid lucratively for his service on the board of the Burisma energy company, no evidence has emerged of any wrongdoing. There has also been no evidence that Joe Biden, now a Democratic presidential candidate, was paid in connection with his son’s service on the board. As part of his duties as vice president, Joe Biden was heavily involved in U.S. policy toward Ukraine.

As Trump tweeted from his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Fla., on New Year’s Eve, it remained unclear when a trial might start in the Republican-led Senate.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) is insisting that senators hear opening statements by House impeachment managers and lawyers for Trump before deciding whether to allow either side to call witnesses. McConnell has also indicated that it would be fine with him if Pelosi never transmits the articles of impeachment and a trial is not held.

At the heart of the Democrats’ case is the allegation that Trump tried to leverage a White House meeting and military aid, sought by Ukraine to combat Russian military aggression, to pressure Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to launch an investigation of Joe Biden and Hunter Biden, as well as a probe of an unfounded theory that Kyiv conspired with Democrats to interfere in the 2016 presidential election.

Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) continued late Monday night to push his party’s case for calling witnesses.

“So far, neither Senator McConnell nor any Republican Senator has articulated a single good reason why the trial shouldn’t have the witnesses or the documents we requested,” he said in a tweet. “The American people deserve to know the truth.”

Meanwhile, some House Democrats pressed the argument Tuesday that Pelosi should hold onto the articles of impeachment as long as necessary.

“We shouldn’t send them until we have assurances it’s going to be a fair and honest trial,” Rep. Dan Kildee (D-Mich.) said during an appearance on CNN, adding that he wants “assurances that the trial isn’t going to be a sham.”

To secure the witnesses they seek without a deal with McConnell, Senate Democrats would need to persuade at least four Republican senators to vote with them to call them.

On Monday, one of those whom Democrats would likely court, Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), indicated in a radio interview that she favors the process McConnell has outlined.

Collins told Maine Public that she is “open to witnesses” but thinks that decision should be made after opening arguments and an opportunity for senators to present written questions to both sides.

“I think it’s premature to decide who should be called until we see the evidence that is presented and get the answers to the questions that we senators can submit through the Chief Justice to both sides,” Collins said, referring to Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, who would preside over a Senate trial.

Lawmakers are scheduled to return to Washington next week.

Biden struggled over the weekend to explain his position on what he would do in response to a subpoena to testify in a Senate trial. For much of Saturday, he suggested he would defy such a subpoena, before changing course and saying he would abide by “any subpoena that was sent to me.”

That latter comment came even as Biden continued to insist there is no “legal basis” for him to be called as a witness in the impeachment proceedings.

Democrats have argued that the issue of the Bidens’ involvement in Ukraine is irrelevant to the question of whether Trump abused his power when he asked Zelensky to launch an investigation into the Bidens.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

[Dandruff]

In less than 1/2 hour it'll be 2020 (where I am) and Trump will still be impeached.  I imagine it's making a bit of a dent in his celebrations.

[smittykins]

I’m betting that the next “defense” will be “You know why Pelosi is holding the articles of impeachment?  It’s because she knows she HAS NO CASE!!1!1”

[GreyhoundFan]

 

[smittykins]

NM, didn’t read the full tweet.

Edited January 1, 2020 by smittykins

[fraurosena]

This is a pretty long article that documents the timeline of events and the Pentagon's growing concerns, but well worth the read. The info is damning. Again. 

Unredacted Ukraine Documents Reveal Extent of Pentagon’s Legal Concerns

Quote

"Clear direction from POTUS to continue to hold.”

This is what Michael Duffey, associate director of national security programs at the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), told Elaine McCusker, the acting Pentagon comptroller, in an Aug. 30 email, which has only been made available in redacted form until now. It is one of many documents the Trump administration is trying to keep from the public, despite congressional oversight efforts and court orders in Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) litigation. 

Earlier in the day on Aug. 30, President Donald Trump met with Defense Secretary Mark Esper and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to discuss the president’s hold on $391 million in military assistance for Ukraine. Inside the Trump administration, panic was reaching fever pitch about the president’s funding hold, which had stretched on for two months. Days earlier, POLITICO had broken the story and questions were starting to pile up. U.S. defense contractors were worried about delayed contracts and officials in Kyiv and lawmakers on Capitol Hill wanted to know what on earth was going on. While Trump’s national security team thought withholding the money went against U.S. national security interests, Trump still wouldn’t budge. 

Thanks to the testimony of several Trump administration officials, we now know what Trump was waiting on: a commitment from Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden. 

But getting at that truth hasn’t been easy and the Trump administration continues to try to obscure it. It is blocking key officials from testifying and is keeping documentary evidence from lawmakers investigating the Ukraine story. For example, this note from Duffey to McCusker was never turned over to House investigators and the Trump administration is continuing to try to keep it secret. 

Last month, a court ordered the government to release almost 300 pages of emails to the Center for Public Integrity in response to a FOIA lawsuit. It released a first batch on Dec. 12, and then a second installment on Dec. 21, including Duffey’s email, but that document, along with several others, were partially or completely blacked out.

Since then, Just Security has viewed unredacted copies of these emails, which begin in June and end in early October. Together, they tell the behind-the-scenes story of the defense and budget officials who had to carry out the president’s unexplained hold on military aid to Ukraine. 

The documents reveal growing concern from Pentagon officials that the hold would violate the Impoundment Control Act, which requires the executive branch to spend money as appropriated by Congress, and that the necessary steps to avoid this result weren’t being taken. Those steps would include notifying Congress that the funding was being held or shifted elsewhere, a step that was never taken. The emails also show that no rationale was ever given for why the hold was put in place or why it was eventually lifted. 

What is clear is that it all came down to the president and what he wanted; no one else appears to have supported his position. Although the pretext for the hold was that some sort of policy review was taking place, the emails make no mention of that actually happening. Instead, officials were anxiously waiting for the president to be convinced that the hold was a bad idea. And while the situation continued throughout the summer, senior defense officials were searching for legal guidance, worried they would be blamed should the hold be lifted too late to actually spend all of the money, which would violate the law. 

The emails also reveal key decision points, moments when senior officials hoped the hold might be lifted. This includes Vice President Mike Pence’s September meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, which a senior defense official expected would resolve the funding issue, raising the question: Why? What was supposed to come out of that meeting that would pave the way for Trump to lift the hold? What was Pence expected to communicate? 

But, the hold wasn’t immediately lifted after Pence’s meeting with Zelenskyy. Instead, the president finally released the money on Sept. 11, just as the whistleblower complaint was about to break into the open.  

As for how the story begins, it was in mid-June when Defense Department officials first heard the president had questions about the Ukraine money. 

June: “Do you have insight on this funding?”

According to new reporting from the New York Times, on June 19, Robert Blair, senior adviser to acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney called Russell Vought, the acting head of OMB and said, “We need to hold it up” in reference to the Ukraine military aid. 

That same day, Michael Duffey, the associate director of National Security Programs at OMB, emailed Elaine McCusker, a career civil servant who serves as acting Pentagon comptroller, about a Washington Examiner story on the $250 million the Defense Department had just announced it was sending to Ukraine. 

“The President has asked about this funding release, and I have been asked to follow-up with someone over there to get more detail. Do you have insight on this funding?”

Mark Sandy, OMB’s  deputy associate director for national security programs, was copied on the email and told the House Intelligence Committee that he remembered receiving it and being made aware that the president had questions about the Ukraine funding on June 19.  

As Laura Cooper, who oversees Ukraine policy at DoD, testified to the House Intelligence Committee, the president wanted to know if U.S. companies would be providing Ukraine any of the equipment, what other countries were doing to contribute, and where the U.S. funding came from. Defense Department officials collected the answers and sent them back up the food chain and then over to the White House. 

They explained that the vast majority of companies providing the equipment were American. They told the White House that the United Kingdom, Canada, Lithuania and Poland all contribute military training and equipment to Ukraine, and that the European Union also provides an enormous amount of economic support. As for the third question, it was the trickiest to answer because of its “strange phrasing,” Cooper said. Her office answered: The money comes from Congress and it has strong bipartisan support. 

The questions didn’t stop there. Blair wanted to know the status of the funding, meaning: Was the money out the door already? 

On June 25, McCusker answered:

“Only $7M of the $250M has been obligated to date.”

An attachment showed the equipment the money was going to buy, including counter-artillery radars, sniper rifles, grenade launchers, secure communications and cyber support, night vision devices, humvees and medical equipment. It also listed the U.S. companies expected to supply it. 

According to the Times, Blair emailed Mulvaney on June 27, telling him the Ukraine money could be held but to “expect Congress to become unhinged.”

July: “Given the sensitive nature of the request …”

Hours after Trump concluded his infamous July 25 call with Zelenskyy, during which he asked the Ukrainian president to investigate Biden, Duffey sent an email to top senior defense officials, which was released in full to the Center for Public Integrity. The letter advised the Pentagon to suspend any future military aid for Ukraine.

“Based on guidance I have received and in light of the Administration’s plan to review assistance to Ukraine, including the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative, please hold off on any additional DOD obligations of these funds, pending direction from that process. I understand that DOD will continue its planning and casework during this period and that this brief pause in obligations will not preclude DOD’s timely execution of the final policy direction.

We intend to formalize the pause with an apportionment footnote to be provided later today. 

Given the sensitive nature of the request, I appreciate your keeping that information closely held to those who need to know to execute the direction. Please let me know if you have any questions.” 

McCusker followed up in an email to OMB asking if this had gone through the Defense Department’s general counsel, indicating an early concern about the legality of these actions. When it released this email to the Center for Public Integrity, the Justice Department redacted this simple question from McCusker.

It was on July 25 that Sandy implemented the first hold on the Ukraine funding by inserting a footnote in a budget document. This first hold extended through Aug. 5. The Pentagon made clear that this first pause would not jeopardize its ability to spend the money by the end of the fiscal year. 

The next day, July 26, John Rood, head of policy at the Defense Department, sent his boss, Defense Secretary Mark Esper, a readout from the “Ukraine Deputies Small Group” meeting. This is the meeting convened by the National Security Council where we know, thanks to Cooper’s congressional testimony, that the national security community voiced its “unanimous support” for resuming the funding and Cooper raised the Defense Department’s concern about the urgency of the matter due to the legal requirement to spend all of the money by the end of the fiscal year. 

The readout includes this line, which makes it clear the hold on Defense and State Department Ukraine funding came at the president’s direction:

OMB noted that the President’s direction via the Chief of Staff in early July was to suspend security assistance to Ukraine including by blocking the $115 [Foreign Military Financing] congressional notification and by halting execution of the $250M FY19 USAI programs.

An assistant to Esper let officials know the secretary had read the summary of the meeting and “has no further questions.” 

August: “What is the status of the impoundment paperwork?”

As August began, the Defense Department had told OMB and the White House its concerns about the legality of the hold and how, as the clock ticked toward the end of the fiscal year, it would become increasingly difficult for the Pentagon to spend the Ukraine funding in time. If it wasn’t all spent by Sept. 30, in violation of the law, the money would return to the U.S. Treasury, in what is known as an “impoundment.” While pressure was mounting as the month began, that red line had not yet been crossed, but it would be soon. 

On Aug. 6, Duffey sent McCusker an email telling her he planned to extend the hold on the Ukraine funding by reinserting the same footnote into the budget document. The footnote still noted that the pause would not prevent the Defense Department from spending the money before the fiscal year ended, if the hold was lifted.

McCusker wrote back asking to whom Duffey spoke to confirm that the additional pause would not affect the ultimate execution of the program. 

“Good catch,” Duffey wrote back and then asked with whom he should check in.

On Aug. 9, McCusker wrote to senior OMB officials, including Sandy and Duffey:

“As we discussed, as of 12 AUG I don’t think we can agree that the pause ‘will not preclude timely execution.’ We hope it won’t and will do all we can to execute once the policy decision is made, but can no longer make that declarative statement.”

The Pentagon’s warning: We’re running out of time. 

The Justice Department chose to black this out when it released the email last month:

Duffey followed up with a number of questions, mostly about whether the money could be shifted to other programs if the decision was made not to spend it on Ukraine. McCusker told him that reprogramming was possible but that it was very unlikely to get approved on Capitol Hill because Congress had not only approved the Pentagon’s request for $200 million for Ukraine military assistance, but had added $50 million, indicating that bipartisan support for the program was overwhelming. 

On Aug. 12, understanding that the hold on Ukraine funding was going to be extended again, McCusker sent Duffey proposed language to be included in the next footnote to reflect the growing risk to the program. It read:

“Based on OMB’s communication with DOD on August 12, 2019, OMB understands from the Department that this additional pause in obligations may not preclude DOD’s timely execution of the final policy direction but that execution risk increases with continued delays.” (emphasis added)

But the next time the hold was extended, the footnote did not include any text that indicated the growing risk to the funding — the language that the Defense Department thought should be included. It was also redacted in the documents publicly released last month. 

The emails show there was supposed to be an Aug. 16 meeting between Trump, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Esper at Trump’s New Jersey golf resort where they would discuss Ukraine. Talking points were prepared and shared among officials.

Media reports show Trump met with his national security team that day in Bedminster to discuss Afghanistan. For those talks, Trump and Pompeo were joined by Vice President Mike Pence, National Security Adviser John Bolton, Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Joseph Dunford and CIA Director Gina Haspel.

While there was an expectation that it would be on the day’s agenda, an Aug. 17 email from Duffey to McCusker says,

“Sounds like Ukraine was not discussed.” 

As the month wore on, the emails show officials bending over backwards to make every conceivable accommodation to keep the process moving without actually being able to obligate the funding. The idea was that as soon as the funds were given the green light, there would be zero delay, and presumably, impoundments could be avoided. 

But tension began to build between the Defense Department and OMB toward the end of August as the funding hold complicated all of the contractual processes that needed to take place in order to buy the equipment for Ukraine. OMB was pushing the Defense Department to micromanage down to the lowest level — the field contracting offices — in an apparent effort to buy time and keep the process on track even though the hold was upending everything. The Pentagon was growing frustrated. 

On Aug. 20, OMB issued another footnote, extending the hold through Aug. 26. It did not include any language flagging the growing risk. 

In an Aug. 21 email to her DOD colleagues, McCusker notes that members of the House Appropriations Committee traveled to Ukraine earlier that month and sent the Pentagon a request for information regarding the funding. 

On Aug. 26, Duffey let McCusker know that the funding hold was being extended again. 

McCusker responded, “What is the status of the impoundment paperwork?”

To which Duffey, replied, “I am not tracking that. Is that something you are expecting from OMB?” 

McCusker: “Yes, it is now necessary — legal teams were discussing last week.”

The Justice Department redacted McCusker’s side of this exchange. 

In an email to Duffey later that morning, McCusker’s frustration is palpable. For starters, DOD still hasn’t gotten the footnote extending the hold, so technically the Pentagon should start obligating the money. Plus, Mark Paoletta, OMB’s general counsel, “appears to continue to consistently misunderstand the process and the timelines we have provided for funds execution,” McCusker said. (Again, this detail was redacted by the Trump administration in its court-compelled FOIA release.)

McCusker asks Duffey: “Are you working with him and can you help? Starting on 19 AUG, the footnotes have put our ability to execute at risk.”

She also tells Duffey that the Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC) is now asking questions, in addition to House Appropriators. The question from SASC is:

“Has OMB directed DOD/DSCA to halt execution of all or any part of FY19 funds for the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative? If so, when, and what was the reason given?” 

On Aug. 27, Chewning, Esper’s chief of staff, shares with McCusker an Aug. 26 email he received from L3 Harris Technologies, one of the defense contractors waiting on the Ukraine money. The company has learned of the “hold” and wants to know what’s going on. 

McCusker responds to Chewning saying,

“Recognizing the importance of decision space, but this situation is really unworkable made particularly difficult because OMB lawyers continue to consistently mischaracterize the process — and the information we have provided. They keep repeating that this pause will not impact DOD’s ability to execute on time.” (emphasis added)

Her response was redacted by the Justice Department:

As frustration mounted, the Pentagon considered ratcheting up its warnings and prepared a draft letter from the deputy defense secretary to Vought, the acting director of OMB. McCusker shared the letter with Duffey on Aug. 27 just to let him know it was in the works. The entirety of the one-page letter was redacted in the emails released to CPI. Here are the key sections: 

“As you know, in a series of footnotes to its apportionment documents, the Office of Management and Budget has directed the Department to pause its obligation of USAI funding temporarily, pending completion of an ‘interagency process to determine the best use of such funds.’ These footnotes make the affected funding legally unavailable for obligation during the period of the directed pause. As a result, we have repeatedly advised OMB officials that pauses beyond Aug. 19, 2019 jeopardize the Department’s ability to obligate USAI funding prudently and fully, consistent with the Impoundment Control Act. 

The latest OMB-directed pause ended on August 26, 2019, and has not been extended. Accordingly, the Department is resuming its obligation of USAI funding. We believe that OMB’s imposition of any further delays in obligating USAI funding will trigger the ICA’s requirement to transmit to Congress a special message proposing rescission or deferral of funding for the USAI.”

A new footnote was signed by Duffey later that day, extending the hold yet again. 

In the meantime, after weeks of trying to keep the president’s hold on the Ukraine money within a tight circle of administration officials, word of it was getting out. It had now reached Capitol Hill, U.S. defense contractors and officials in Ukraine. 

Finally, on Aug. 28, the situation burst into the open, when POLITICO broke the story.

Talking points were hashed out and Paoletta, the OMB general counsel, forwarded them around. The final talking point read:

“No action has been taken by OMB that would preclude the obligation of these funds before the end of the fiscal year.”

When McCusker read this, she wrote to Duffey,

“I don’t agree to the revised TPs — the last one is just not accurate from a financial execution standpoint, something we have been consistently conveying for a few weeks.” 

Her reaction to the talking points was redacted in the FOIA release last month:

The talking points were also discussed internally at the Defense Department. McCusker told a group of senior defense officials:

OMB continues to ignore our repeated explanation regarding how the process works. We can not release funds for obligation until they can obligate, so the process has stopped for those cases whose lines are ready to execute. 

The draft [deputy secretary of defense] memo to the OMB director says: ‘Although we will proceed to take all necessary preparatory steps, please be advised that we can no longer confirm that USAI funds will be fully and prudently obligated before they expire on September 30, 2019.’ 

This is due to OMB actions. I am sure I am missing some nuance here?

On Aug. 29, Chewning let McCusker know:

“Sec State and Sec Def will discuss with POTUS tomorrow. We should wait on communicating anything more privately.”

On Aug. 30, after the meeting with the president took place, Duffey told McCusker, “Clear direction from POTUS to hold.” He let her know that he’d soon be sending new paperwork extending the hold.

September: “You can’t be serious. I am speechless.”

Meanwhile, Chewning told senior defense officials that Esper had told him that no decision came out of his meeting with Trump. The Defense Department had prepared another strongly worded letter to OMB, to be signed by David Norquist, the deputy defense secretary, that would again remind OMB that DOD could no longer guarantee that it could spend all of the Ukraine money before it expired on Sept. 30. 

“Hi All, 

I spoke to the boss. No decision on Ukraine. VP meeting with Zelensky in Poland is next step. We can discuss further on Tuesday. Until then, hold on the USAI memo to OMB.”

With news that another extension was coming, McCusker emailed Chewning:

“Do you believe DOD is adequately protected from what may happen as a result of the Ukraine obligation pause? I realize we need to continue to give the WH has [sic] much decision space as possible, but am concerned we have not officially documented the fact that we can not promise full execution at this point in the [fiscal year]. 

Chewning wrote back:

The Ukrainian PM speaks with VPOTUS on Tuesday. We expect the issue to get resolved then. If not, I think we need to send the letter. 

Pence met with Zelenskyy in Poland on Sept. 1. While Trump reportedly instructed Pence to communicate that U.S. military aid was still being withheld and to push for more aggressive action on corruption, Pence’s staff has claimed the vice president did not understand corruption to mean “investigate Joe Biden” as other officials in the administration understood at the time. Pence’s visit came and went and another extension of the hold was implemented on Sept. 5. 

On Sept. 7, McCusker asked Duffey again, “When will impoundment paperwork be processed?”

On Monday morning, Sept. 9, McCusker sent Duffey another email. 

“The amounts identified as not being able to ‘fully’ obligate by the end of FY total ~$120M based on the current hold. If the hold continues this amount will grow.” 

Duffey, adding OMB and Pentagon lawyers to the recipients list, and in a formal and lengthy letter that was quite different from the way he’d addressed McCusker all summer, chastised her and the Defense Department for dropping the ball, saying that if and when the hold is lifted, and DOD finds itself unable to obligate the funding, it would be DOD’s fault. 

“As you know, the President wanted a policy process run to determine the best use of these funds, and he specifically mentioned this to the SecDef the previous week. OMB developed a footnote authorizing DoD to proceed with all processes necessary to obligate funds. If you have not taken these steps, that is contrary to OMB’s direction and was your decision not to proceed. If you are unable to obligate the funds, it will have been DoD’s decision that cause any impoundment of funds.”

Essentially: You guys screwed up. Not us. 

McCusker responded:

“You can’t be serious. I am speechless.”

This exchange, as well as the larger trove of unredacted emails, raises new questions about the Dec. 11 letter from OMB General Counsel Paoletta to the General Accountability Office (GAO), a congressional investigative office. The unredacted emails show the Pentagon’s repeated and clear warnings to OMB that by mid-August it could no longer guarantee that the funds could be fully executed within the fiscal year. But, Paoletta’s letter stated, “at no point during the pause in obligations did DOD [Office of General Counsel] indicate to OMB that, as a matter of law, the apportionments would prevent DOD from being able to obligate the funds before the end of the fiscal year.” 

What’s more, McCusker shared with Duffey the draft letter from the deputy defense secretary to OMB’s acting director informing OMB of the Pentagon’s concern that the law required notification to Congress through “a special message proposing rescission or deferral of funding.” In contrast, Paoletta’s letter to GAO claimed the suspension was “not a deferral of funds,” but instead simply “a pause in spending to assess facts and ensure programmatic effectiveness.”

Finally, on Sept. 11, Duffey emailed McCusker to tell her: The hold is lifted. When she asked him why, Duffey responded, “Not exactly clear but president made the decision to go. Will fill you in when I get details.” 

With the hold lifted, McCusker’s team worked fast to get the money out the door, but, in the end, $35.2 million of the Ukraine funding lapsed and required new congressional legislation to make it available again. 

“Glad to have this behind us,” Duffey told McCusker.  

 

[fraurosena]

Please Rufus, make it so. If anyone can get the Senate to convict and remove Trump, it's Giuliani.

Giuliani would love to represent Trump at Senate impeachment trial

[link to video]

[GreyhoundFan]

"4 ways the McConnell-Pelosi impasse over a Senate trial could end"

Spoiler

The holiday break is wrapping up, but there doesn’t seem to be an end in sight to the stalemate between House Democrats and Senate Republicans over how to hold President Trump’s Senate impeachment trial.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) is withholding the articles of impeachment from the Senate and not naming House lawmakers to prosecute the case (called managers) until Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) agrees on parameters of a trial that she views as fair. “We cannot name managers until we see what the process is on the Senate side,” she has said. But McConnell has said that he’s working in “total coordination” with White House lawyers and that there is no such thing as fair in a political body, so why even try? “This is a political exercise,” he has said.

That means it’s a real possibility that Congress comes back next week and there is no Senate trial starting up soon, as expected. So how could this impasse end? Here are four possibilities, ranked from least to most likely.

4. There is no Senate trial — at least not in 2020

Could there just be no Senate trial to acquit or convict Trump?

This is a trial that Republicans never wanted in the first place. Not a single Senate Republican has said that they think Trump deserved to be impeached. “Fine with me,” McConnell has said about Pelosi holding back the articles of impeachment.

Or what if Democrats held back the impeachment articles and the naming of House prosecutors until Democrats won back the Senate in the 2020 elections? (Which, by the way, is a big risk. They’ll need to win in states that voted for Trump in 2016.)

Or what if McConnell decided to hold a trial without the articles, or without House Democrats as prosecutors? That’s really out there in terms of constitutional law, but everything about this impeachment process has been norm-breaking.

Why this might not happen: No Senate trial is the least likely option just because it’s so far-fetched. The consensus among legal experts is that the Constitution requires a Senate trial to happen after the House impeaches a president. Senators decide whether to acquit or convict the president on the impeachment charges (in this case, abuse of power and obstruction of Congress), and if they convict him, he’s removed from office.

3. Pelosi gets her way …

… And McConnell agrees at the outset to call witnesses.

Let’s pause to understand the mechanics of how senators set up this trial. Before the trial gets started, senators vote on the parameters. It takes a majority vote to approve the rules. But they can make a decision later to vote on whether to add witnesses, and The Washington Post has reported that McConnell is hoping that after hearing opening arguments from both sides, Senate Republicans will just want to vote and be done with the trial. (If all Senate Democrats stick together, it will take defections from four Republican senators to get a majority on board with anything.)

There have been a couple of pieces of news over the holidays that could give Pelosi and Senate Democrats even more leverage to get what they want in a Senate trial:

• A federal judge threw out a lawsuit that former national security adviser John Bolton had said would determine whether he testified in the House’s impeachment inquiry. (The House impeached Trump without waiting for this suit to play out.) So now, Democrats could argue that the courts aren’t going to weigh in and that Bolton should be available to share what he knows.
• Newly released emails from the White House and Pentagon have driven home key aides’ role in holding up military aid for Ukraine under still-mysterious circumstances, bolstering an argument by Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) that people such as Bolton and acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney should testify in a Senate trial. “This new evidence also raises questions that can only be answered by having the key Trump administration officials … testify under oath in a Senate trial,” Schumer said in a statement Thursday.
• Two Senate Republicans have expressed reservations about McConnell’s wishes for a purely political trial. Sen. Lisa Murkowski (Alaska) said she’s “disturbed” by it, and Sen. Susan Collins (Maine) said it’s “inappropriate” for any senator to prejudge.

Why this might not happen: It’s hard to see McConnell suddenly acquiescing to Democrats’ demands. It might sound cynical, but his mind-set is that he has a right to hold a trial however a majority of senators want, and that probably means however Republicans — and Trump — want.

2. McConnell gets his way …

… And he gets to hold the trial in a way that benefits Trump. He’s not out there saying exactly how he wants that to look, but we could assume that means a quick one without any witnesses or new evidence.

McConnell isn’t ruling out witnesses. But it appears he’s doing everything he can to avoid calling them, so as to prevent people with potentially damaging information on Trump and Ukraine, such as Mulvaney or Bolton, from testifying. He also probably doesn’t want Trump to get his preferred way and have his attorneys cross-examine people such as former vice president Joe Biden or the whistleblower whose complaint is at the heart of the impeachment inquiry.

Why this might not happen: Although McConnell controls the majority in the Senate, this isn’t the likeliest option because there’s an argument that he and Trump want the trial more than Democrats do.

Trump sees a trial in the Republican-controlled Senate as a chance to exonerate himself and maybe even to undermine the Democratic-led House impeachment. A GOP Senate aide told The Fix that it’s possible that some red-state Senate Democrats vote to acquit Trump, which would go a long way toward Trump being able to argue that opposition to his impeachment was technically bipartisan. (Two Democrats voted against impeaching him in the House.)

1. They come up with some kind of compromise

But what would that look like, given the differences between the two sides over witnesses? Josh Chafetz, a constitutional expert at Cornell Law School, said that there are smaller things on which senators could compromise to get the trial started and that the big thing can be addressed later on. They could compromise on how long the trial should be (two weeks? six weeks?) and whether new evidence can be presented.

“In other words, witnesses/no witnesses isn’t a binary: there are a lot of smaller procedural trade-offs that can be made,” Chafetz wrote in an email to The Fix.

That still doesn’t solve the broader problem of how to break the impasse between Pelosi and McConnell over witnesses, but it’s a start.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"Trump floats yet another scam designed to rig his trial"

Spoiler

You may not remember this, but there was a time a few weeks ago when President Trump was claiming he badly wanted an impeachment trial in the Senate because, unlike the House’s proceedings, the trial would be “fair” to him.

The president even loudly boasted that it would play to his benefit, because it would feature “witnesses” such as former vice president Joe Biden and his son Hunter. They have nothing whatsoever to do with the corrupt conduct for which Trump has been impeached, but calling them might allow Trump to keep smearing Biden with lies in advance of the 2020 election.

Since then, we’ve learned that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) isn’t so sure this is a good idea, because it could produce an unpredictable circus. Worse, it might mean Democrats call the witnesses they want, which must be prevented at all costs, because those witnesses actually do have direct knowledge of Trump’s corrupt freezing of military aid to Ukraine, which he did to extort its president into doing his political dirty deeds.

So McConnell wants a quick trial, with no witnesses — and no new revelations. And Trump reportedly understands his point of view.

Trump is now drawing attention to still another possibility: The notion that the Senate might vote to dismiss the charges against him even before any trial takes place.

The president just tweeted out an extensive quote from one of his media allies, and one of the key points raised is that Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) plans to introduce a motion to dismiss the trial entirely, on the grounds that House Democrats have not yet submitted articles of impeachment.

Hawley himself has floated this plan:

To my knowledge, this is the first time Trump has drawn attention to this idea.

The first question it raises is this: If Trump were so sure that a trial would play in his favor, why would he be positively disposed to seeing it dismissed at the ouset? Wasn’t he going to put on a great show at his trial of parading forth the Bidens, that is, the real criminals in this whole saga?

Indeed, you have to ask why Trump and McConnell aren’t eager to hear testimony from both the Bidens and the witnesses that Democrats want, who include acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney and former national security adviser John Bolton.

If Trump froze the military aid for purely reasonable foreign policy purposes, and if all of his demands that Ukraine investigate the Bidens were grounded in legitimate claims about them — which the president and his GOP defenders keep claiming — wouldn’t a trial with witnesses on both sides be a boon to him?

Of course it wouldn’t. Because all the stuff about the Bidens is made up, and the witnesses Democrats want directly interacted with Trump over his corrupt freezing of the aid and, at a trial, they’d have to testify about this under oath. And on top of this, a fusillade of new revelations has shown that inside the administration, concern about the illegality, propriety and potentially awful consequences of the aid freeze were much deeper than previously known.

Indeed, instead of a trial that includes witnesses that both sides want, Trump and McConnell appear to prefer a trial with no witnesses at all, and, now, possibly even a dismissal before any trial happens. Strange, isn’t it?

Finally, it will be amusing to see how eager vulnerable Republican senators such as Susan Collins (Maine), Cory Gardner (Colo.), Thom Tillis (N.C.) and Martha McSally (Ariz.) are to take a vote to dismiss the trial against Trump.

If they do, Democrats are already vowing to make them pay in their reelection campaigns, by relentlessly pointing out that they shirked their constitutional duty, all to help Trump escape accountability.

Amusingly enough, by positively floating the idea of a dismissal, Trump has now tied his own wishes tightly to such an outcome, making it impossible for those Republicans to support dismissal without getting tarred for doing Trump’s corrupt bidding.

So if those vulnerable Republicans balk, it will be a key tell that the politics of letting Trump off with a sham trial are more challenging for Republicans than they’re letting on.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

Lindsey is such an ass: "Top Republican suggests changing Senate rules to begin Trump impeachment trial within days"

Spoiler

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey O. Graham suggested Sunday that Republicans should try to change Senate rules governing impeachment if House Speaker Nancy Pelosi continues to withhold the charges against President Trump — an unlikely 11th-hour bid to begin a trial within days without the actual documents.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) was unequivocal in a Senate floor speech on Friday that “we can’t hold a trial without the articles; the Senate’s own rules don’t provide for that.” But Graham (R-S.C.), a close ally of Trump, floated the idea of a unilateral GOP move, saying he would work with McConnell to allow the Senate to proceed without the two charges against Trump for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress.

The suggestion, while unlikely due to the high threshold of votes required for changing Senate impeachment rules, underscores the pressure some Trump allies feel as the president stews over the impeachment delay.

“Well, we’re not going to let Nancy Pelosi use the rules of the Senate to her advantage,” Graham said on Fox News’ “Sunday Morning Futures,” later adding: “My number one goal is [to] not let the speaker of the House become the majority leader of the Senate. . . . If we don’t get the articles this week, then we need to take matters [into] our own hands.”

After the House impeached Trump on Dec. 18, Pelosi (D-Calif.) decided to withhold the articles of impeachment to try to help Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) in his negotiations with McConnell for witnesses the White House blocked from testifying in the House, including acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney. Former national security adviser John Bolton balked at cooperating in the House probe.

McConnell, however, has refused to budge, scoffing at the strategy and telling Pelosi she can keep the articles if she wants — that he would focus on “ordinary business” in the Senate, including nominations.

But Trump has been eager to get a trial over with and a likely acquittal vote in the Republican-led Senate, a possible reason for Graham to try to find a way to start the trial without the articles.

Senate rules suggest such a move would be difficult, if not impossible. It would take 60 votes to pass a resolution on impeachment outside a trial and 67 votes to change the impeachment rules. That threshold would require Democratic support, since McConnell has only 53 Republicans — and Democrats would be loath to undercut Pelosi.

The idea could be moot in a matter of days. Multiple Democratic officials expect Pelosi to transmit the articles of impeachment to the Senate as soon as this week — though Pelosi’s office said Friday that no decision has been made and declined to detail her plans.

Some Democrats are concerned about Republican accusations that they’re playing political games with impeachment to try to dictate the Senate process. Democrats are also carefully balancing the decision to play hardball with McConnell with their own insistence that impeachment is “an urgent matter” because, they argue, Trump has become a national security threat to the nation.

The comments by Graham, who said his goal “is to start this trial in the next coming days” and hopes to finish by the end of January, also reflect the pressure on Pelosi. Congressional Republicans plan to focus their criticism on the speaker this week to force her to transmit the articles, a strategy they highlighted Sunday.

“It’s now been almost three weeks, and she hasn’t taken any action,” Rep. John Ratcliffe (R-Tex.) told Fox News. “She’s let that progressive, socialist, Democratic mob walk her into a box canyon. She’s put a gun to her own head and she’s looking for Mitch McConnell to give her a way out, and he’s not going to do that.”

Senior Democrats, including two who appeared on the Sunday shows before lawmakers returned from the two-week congressional recess, have defended the strategy. Pelosi’s top ally, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.), said on CNN’s “State of the Union” that the maneuver has been successful in highlighting the positions of Senate Republicans on the trial — and holding them accountable.

“One success this has already had is flushing out McConnell, showing he is working in cahoots with the president — that he has made himself an active participant in the president’s coverup,” said Schiff, who is expected to be named as an impeachment manager in the Senate. “So the American people needed to see that, and now they do.”

Likewise, Schumer said on ABC’s “This Week” that Pelosi “has done a very good job here,” predicting that if she’d sent the articles in December, “McConnell could have well just voted for dismissal the day before or after Christmas.” Other senior Democratic officials have privately suggested the hold was worth the wait even if they don’t get a commitment from McConnell on witnesses, since the party has been able to spotlight what they view as a rigged Senate process.

“Now, in the last two weeks, where we haven’t had the articles, lots of new evidence that bolsters our case for witnesses — for witnesses and documents has come out,” Schumer said. “. . . So, the bottom line is very simple. We need the truth, not a coverup, not a sham, not to have some nationally televised mock trial where there’s no evidence.”

Schumer suggested it was a matter of time before the articles were transmitted, saying “when these articles come over, the focus will be on four Republican senators” — referring to Sens. Susan Collins (Maine), Lisa Murkowski (Alaska), Mitt Romney (Utah) and Lamar Alexander (Tenn.). And he implored them to join Democrats backing their bid for witnesses with firsthand knowledge, arguing that it’s not the same as voting to convict Trump — just a vote to ensure a fair process.

“And I hope, pray, and believe there’s a decent chance that four Republicans will join us,” he said.

The crux of the Democrats’ case is the allegation that Trump tried to leverage a White House meeting and military aid, sought by Ukraine to combat Russian military aggression, to pressure Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to launch an investigation of former vice president Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden, as well as a probe of an unfounded theory that Kyiv conspired with Democrats to interfere in the 2016 presidential election.

Schumer articulated a new defense for Democrats’ demands that McConnell commit to hearing from key witnesses before they begin the trial. McConnell often argues that the Senate should follow the impeachment process for Trump as it did for former president Clinton 21 years ago. In that case, the Senate did not decide on testimony from witnesses until after the trial began.

But Schumer noted that in Clinton’s case, all the relevant witnesses eventually called in the trial had already been deposed as part of independent counsel Kenneth Starr’s investigation. In this situation, individuals such as Bolton and Mulvaney, who have firsthand information of the internal White House deliberations, have not been questioned.

“Where, but in ‘Alice in Wonderland,’ do we hear all the arguments, and then maybe have the evidence, the witnesses, and the trial?” Schumer asked, later adding that Trump’s top men “are eyewitness to the main charge against the president, that he withheld the aid for political benefit to himself.”

 

[GreyhoundFan]

 

[fraurosena]

I'm betting most people are forgetting that the House can still investigate, and probably is right now. Now Bolton has publicly stated he will testify if subpoenaed, I would love for that to happen...  by the House. Can you imagine that hearing -- and the apoplexy that will grip the trumplicans as he testifies?

[WiseGirl]

[GreyhoundFan]

"Impeachment live updates: McConnell says Pelosi being ‘contemptuous of the American people’ for holding on to articles of impeachment"

Spoiler

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) on Tuesday accused House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) of being “contemptuous of the American people” as tensions flared over the continuing impasse on President Trump’s impeachment trial.

Pelosi has held on to the articles of impeachment as Democrats seek guarantees about the scope of a trial in the Senate, including witnesses. Earlier Tuesday, Trump highlighted objections to the prospect of testimony from former national security adviser John Bolton, as Bolton’s announcement that he is prepared to appear at a trial continued to roil Capitol Hill.

The crux of the Democrats’ case is the allegation that Trump tried to leverage a White House meeting and military aid, sought by Ukraine to combat Russian military aggression, to pressure Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to launch an investigation of former vice president Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden, as well as a probe of an unfounded theory that Kyiv conspired with Democrats to interfere in the 2016 presidential election.

,,,

 

[GreyhoundFan]

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"McConnell’s coverup for Trump cannot make this one thing disappear"

Spoiler

We live in endlessly absurd times. And one peril of being surrounded by full-saturation absurdity is that we often fail to register just how monumentally ridiculous each individual absurdity that confronts us really is.

Case in point: Now that former national security adviser John Bolton has announced that he’d testify at President Trump’s impeachment trial if subpoenaed, Senate Republicans are gravitating toward a see-no-evil, hear-no-evil defense: We don’t need Bolton’s testimony, because we already know Trump is innocent — and we already know we’re acquitting him.

That’s ridiculous enough on its own. But at the core of this emerging defense is another absurdity so spectacular that it’s almost impossible to do it justice with mere words.

It is a reasonable possibility that Bolton has a level of direct knowledge of Trump’s thinking and motives in freezing military aid to Ukraine — one of the most corrupt acts at the core of this whole scandal — that exceeds that of any other living human being.

Yet Republicans are claiming they don’t need to hear from him, even though they have argued for literally months that Trump obviously didn’t have any corrupt purpose in freezing that aid, because no one can persuasively claim direct knowledge of Trump’s thinking and motives in doing so.

Bolton could very well supply the very direct knowledge Republicans have claimed to want for months. But Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and other Republicans are showing no interest. This paragraph from the New York Times’ write-up is truly something to behold:

McConnell appeared unmoved by the development, and there was no immediate clamor from rank-and-file Republicans for him to change his stance. Instead, the loudest voices in the party on Monday were from a group of Republican senators who spent the day trumpeting a newly introduced resolution that would alter Senate rules to allow the chamber to dismiss the House case without a trial.

The GOP response to news of a potential witness with the direct knowledge Republicans have fake-lamented the absence of for months is to lurch even more aggressively toward not having any trial at all. Why have a trial when Trump’s acquittal is preordained, as McConnell has explicitly stated is the case?

Meanwhile, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) absurdly tweeted that the Senate doesn’t need to hear from Bolton, because it should be restricted to only considering evidence the House possessed when it impeached Trump.

Rubio somehow forgot to mention that the reason Bolton — and others with direct knowledge of Trump’s freezing of military aid to extort Ukraine, one thing for which he was impeached — didn’t testify to the House is because Trump refused to allow it.

Indeed, Trump refused to allow it precisely because Bolton and those others — who include acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney — have direct knowledge of that corrupt act. Bolton privately met with Trump to urge him to release the military aid, which likely means he discussed Trump’s rationale with him.

Bolton was reportedly “aghast” at the aid freeze. And he has long let it be known that he’s prepared to speak to his personal conversations with Trump about it.

What Republicans have said

Back when Ambassador Gordon Sondland revealed that he personally informed a top aide to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that the military aid was conditioned on carrying out Trump’s corrupt political deeds, Republicans endlessly asserted this was only “hearsay.”

In claiming this, Republicans widely took refuge behind Sondland’s claim that he had only “presumed” the aid was conditional. Sens. Kevin Cramer (N.D.) and Mike Braun (Ind.) both scoffed that this was only an “opinion.” Republicans madly hyped Sondland’s testimony that Trump never directly and explicitly told him to use the frozen aid to extort Ukraine.

That has always been a ridiculous defense: Sondland was acting at Trump’s direction all throughout, and Trump actually did direct Sondland, using mafia boss language, to convey to Ukraine that it must do his bidding, even as Ukraine was still desperately awaiting that aid.

But all that aside, the key point is that, now that it’s plausible Bolton can fill in the very hole Republicans themselves have claimed to want filled in, they don’t want to hear from him.

To be clear, we don’t know what Bolton would say. He might not further incriminate Trump in this regard. But that’s not even necessary to begin with: The extensive fact set that has already been firmly established is overwhelmingly damning on its own.

Trump used the power of his office to pressure a foreign leader to help him absolve Russia of sabotaging the 2016 election on his behalf, and help him rig the next one by smearing the potential opponent he plainly fears the most. And he corruptly had the White House and other agencies defy lawful subpoenas for witnesses and documents, obstructing Congress’ efforts to get to the bottom of all of it.

Bolton can only add to that record. Even if he surprises everyone and doesn’t testify to Trump’s corruption in freezing the aid, it won’t subtract from it.

Here’s the bottom line. Even if Senate Republicans successfully head off witnesses and rush through an acquittal, the whole affair will be forever stained by the indelible fact that they could only exonerate Trump by refusing to permit a full reckoning — and refusing to hear the very sort of testimony they themselves claimed to want for months.

That’s one fact that McConnell’s coverup cannot make disappear.

 

[fraurosena]

Sweet Rufus.

Trump allies fear ‘clown show’ if Jim Jordan or Matt Gaetz join impeachment defense team — but they might anyway

Quote

President Donald Trump’s fiercest allies aren’t expected to join his defense team in the Senate impeachment trial, but don’t expect them to quietly sit on the sidelines.

Trump allies have considered adding Reps. Mark Meadows, Jim Jordan and John Ratcliffe to the president’s official legal team, but advisers fear they’ll “grandstand” and turn the Senate trial into a “clown show,” reported Politico.

Three sources familiar with the situation say there seems to be no prohibition against House members serving on the president’s official defense team, but there’s not much appetite for that among Trump’s current lawyers.

“They’re not needed,” said one friend of the president.

One GOP lawmaker placed the odds of House members joining the defense team at about two on a scale of one to 10, but Trump has been talking for weeks about enlisting their help.

White House counsel Pat Cipollone opposes their involvement, and so do some Senate Republicans and Trump allies, but one White House aide said they would at least aggressively defend the president on television.

Under the trial rules, only Trump’s defense team and House Democrats’ impeachment managers will be allowed to debate on the floor, while Senators will be limited in what they’re allowed to say.

That’s why some hardline conservatives — like Meadows, who’s pushing for Rep. Matt Gaetz — want a seat at the defense table.

“He had one of the greatest performances in the Judiciary, and I say performances because he brought the truth,” Meadows said last week. “Listen, everybody wants to have their day in the sunshine. This is not a time to play politics, this is a time to put your best team on there, and I think Matt Gaetz would be one of them.”

Meadows himself has been mentioned as a possible member of the defense team, along with Jordan, Ratcliffe and Rep. Doug Collins — who all gave table-pounding performances during the public impeachment inquiry.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy specifically pushed for Collins, Jordan and Ratcliffe last month on Fox News, saying the president had been impressed with their performance in public hearings.

“You want people that have been through this, understand it, been in the hearings, even when they were in the basement,” he said.

The fact that House trumplicans are pushing for a couple of their own as members of the defense team is striking. Do they believe that there isn't enough blind support for Trump in the House, and they feel the need to stack the odds? 

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"The Republican clown car runs out of gas"

Spoiler

The loons are out in the cold.

The House impeached President Trump weeks ago, but far-right Republican lawmakers gathered on a frigid morning outside the Capitol on Wednesday to relive their glory days defending Trump against the charges. At a lectern glazed with ice, they shouted out some of their greatest hits.

“Coup attempt! … No basis for this impeachment!” offered Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.).

“Wooo!” cheered 75 or so conservative demonstrators, assembled by FreedomWorks as part of an “activist fly-in.” Each wore a yellow windbreaker bearing an emblem with an Angry Birds-worthy cartoon eagle and the words “Trump Defense Force/Presidential Protectors.”

Rep. Jody Hice (R-Ga.) took a turn. “Unfair impeachment hearing! … All based on hearsay … He has not committed any crimes!”

“Amen!” called out one of the protesters. They wore MAGA caps and ski caps and carried various signs showing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) in a witch hat or saying “America stopped hunting witches in 1693” and “Hey Democrats, go impeach yourself!”

Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.) blew a kiss to the activists. “This is all about Nancy Pelosi continuing her charade that she started in the basement,” he reprised, a tear from his cold-stung eyes splashing onto his lapel.

“Trump! Trump! Trump!” crowed the Angry Birds.

The speaking lineup also listed voluble Rep. Matt Gaetz, but the Floridian skipped the icy adventure. Just as well: They were ostensibly there to hasten Trump’s acquittal in the Senate, but why should anybody listen?

For the moment, the loons are out in the cold in more ways than one.

“Trump’s House warriors likely sidelined in Senate trial,” reported a Politico headline Wednesday. “Some Republicans and allies of the president are afraid the House lawmakers could turn the trial into a circus.” One Trump adviser expressed fear House Republicans would create a “clown show.”

That’s to be expected when you send in the clowns.

The banishment of the House clown car from Senate proceedings is promising: Maybe there could be a legitimate trial, after all?

Early signs haven’t been favorable. Pelosi failed in her attempt, by delaying delivery of the impeachment articles, to force the Senate to allow witnesses. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) declared that he has the votes to force through trial rules on a party-line vote without a commitment to have witnesses. (Senators approved rules for President Bill Clinton’s impeachment trial 100 to 0.)

But a few GOP senators — Mitt Romney (Utah), Lisa Murkowski (Alaska) and Susan Collins (Maine) — have at least made noises about hearing eventually from former Trump national security adviser John Bolton. And Sen. Joe Manchin III (W.Va.), as Trump-friendly a Democrat as there is, pointed out that it would be ridiculous for the president, after declaring that House proceedings were unfair, to insist on using only the House record for the trial. “I can’t see how anybody, Democrat or Republican, cannot vote to have John Bolton testify,” Manchin told CNN. “And if we don’t get that, then it’s a sham of a trial.”

Even Trump seemed to turn down the crazy on Wednesday. After bumbling toward war with Iran for several days with ever-escalating threats, he opted against an immediate military response to Iran’s symbolic (and apparently nonlethal) missile attack against Iraqi bases where U.S. troops are housed.

In a statement from the Grand Foyer of the White House, Trump, using military chiefs as his backdrop, offered plenty of bombast (“our missiles are big”) and outrageous partisanship (“the missiles fired last night at us … were paid for with the funds made available by the last administration”). But he stuck to the teleprompter — struggling with difficult words such as “accomplishments” and “Soleimani” — and presented no repercussions for Iran other than more economic sanctions.

Maybe the Senate trial could likewise be a serious undertaking? Certainly, some Republican senators — Ron Johnson (Wis.) and John Neely Kennedy (La.) come to mind — are no more responsible than their GOP colleagues across the Rotunda. But Pelosi’s delay, though unsuccessful in its primary aim, has given time for more corroborating evidence to trickle out about Trump’s involvement in the Ukraine affair. Lawsuits have pried loose more documents; Rudolph W. Giuliani’s indicted associate Lev Parnas has been freed by a court to share evidence with House investigators; vice-presidential aide Jennifer Williams has supplemented her testimony with classified material; and Bolton has come forward.

It is still possible that a small combination of moderate, conscientious or endangered Senate Republicans will yet insist on obtaining some of the evidence Trump blocked the House from getting. That would be a much better look for them than joining their hotheaded House colleagues out in the cold with the Angry Birds.

 

[Audrey2]

Time for me to get the Spock ears out. Republicans, would you be okay with these articles of impeachment if Obama did exactly what Trump did? (Rhetorical question- he would have been impeached and McConnell would have rallied Senate Republicans to convict him.)

[GreyhoundFan]

 

[fraurosena]

"So much for that." But that was yesterday.

Today however...

 

[GreyhoundFan]

I guess Rudes has chewed through his restraints again. (quotes from his column are italicized) : "Rudy Giuliani’s amazingly bad column asking the Supreme Court to strike down Trump’s impeachment"

Spoiler

Rudolph W. Giuliani has been rather quiet in recent weeks, but he decided to speak out Thursday via a column published by the Daily Caller News Foundation. In the column, Giuliani, a former prosecutor who became mayor of New York and is now President Trump’s overseas fixer, decides to don a different cap: constitutional scholar.

The result is … something.

The column is an impeachment defense of Trump cloaked in a plea for the Supreme Court to actually declare his impeachment unconstitutional. Let’s walk through it:

While the Constitution does give the House broad discretion in impeachments, there are limits. The most explicit of these is that impeachment can only be for, “Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.” (Art. II, Sec. 4, U.S. Constitution) However, the articles for impeachment voted on by this entirely partisan Democratic Congress, which are currently being unconstitutionally withheld from the Senate, charge no such offenses. In fact, abuse of power and obstruction of Congress are not crimes of any kind, high or low.

Here is the first time Giuliani will suggest that the Constitution requires statutory crimes to impeach a president, but it won’t be the last.

However you feel about Democrats not directly accusing Trump of a crime in the articles of impeachment — and I’ve suggested it might not be optimal from a strategic standpoint — there is basically no dispute among constitutional scholars that the Constitution doesn’t require them to. “High crimes” doesn’t refer to very bad crimes; it means misdeeds related to high office. And “misdemeanors” doesn’t mean a crime that isn’t a felony, as it does in the American criminal code; it refers broadly to offenses. Even Jonathan Turley, the constitutional scholar Republicans called as an expert on impeachment, said a crime was not required to impeach a president.

With that extremely faulty premise out of the way, Giuliani continues to describe House Democrats in very colorful terms:

The chairmen who conducted the hearings were like a rogue judge who announced in advance Trump will be executed, but they will still grant him a trial of some kind. Their proceedings made a mockery of due process, violating almost every right granted to an accused.

This would be true, except for the fact that the person in the metaphor is executed, while Trump is unlikely to face any punishment at all. Impeachment is merely the referral of a president for trial in the Senate, where Trump will in all likelihood be acquitted because it requires 67 votes and there are only 47 Democrats.

And now to the meat of Giuliani’s column:

Indeed, the Constitution is silent on the Supreme Court’s role in an impeachment except to provide that it is presided over by the chief justice. However, the Constitution is also silent on the court’s power to declare federal and state laws and government action unconstitutional. It was determined by former Chief Justice John Marshall that judicial review is implicit as the only logical answer to constitutional standoffs between the legislative and executive branches or between the federal and state governments. The reasoning of Marbury v. Madison certainly supports the court having the power to declare an impeachment as unconstitutional if it is an overreach of the carefully balanced separation of powers.

The logic here, such as it exists, is this: The Constitution does not address whether the Supreme Court can strike down an impeachment, and thus it’s an open constitutional question that the court can decide upon. But it’s not clear in this case what the constitutional dispute would even be, since the Constitution rather clearly doesn’t require actual crimes for impeachment.

The net effect would be that the Supreme Court would be inserting itself into the highest of high-profile disputes between the legislative and executive branches, even though it definitely doesn’t have to and even though Trump is essentially being accused of things people have been impeached for previously.

Perhaps the biggest problem with Giuliani’s idea, though, is that the Supreme Court appears to have already settled this issue. In its 1993 decision in Walter Nixon v. United States, the court unanimously ruled that it couldn’t review how the Senate conducts impeachment trials because the Constitution says, “Senate shall have sole Power to try any impeachments." As the whether that would apply to the House impeaching in the first place? The Constitution also says, “The House of Representatives ... shall have the sole Power of Impeachment.”

Giuliani, though, thinks there is a compelling reason for such an extraordinary intervention:

If this impeachment is not declared illegal it would remove the constitutional limitation of crimes on the power to impeach. It would allow the House to impeach for policy differences or political leverage.

The first sentence here is a bit inscrutable, but it sounds like Giuliani is saying the court must act because otherwise Congress could impeach for things that aren’t crimes. This, again, is already the case.

And now, the conclusion:

Although there would be an immense amount of political benefit for Trump if there were to be a lengthy Senate trial, proving the vast crimes committed by Democrats during this baseless inquiry, it would be far better for the Supreme Court to reestablish the 229-year constitutional balance between our branches of government.

Then, once again, we can be a government of laws.

I wonder if Trump knows that his personal lawyer is trying to deprive of him of such a tremendously beneficial process.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

An interesting read: "George Conway and Neal Katyal: How Pelosi should play her impeachment cards"

Spoiler

George T. Conway III is a lawyer in New York and an adviser to the Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump super PAC. Neal Katyal, a law professor at Georgetown University, is the author of “Impeach: The Case Against Donald Trump” and previously served as the acting solicitor general of the United States.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has announced that she plans to transmit the articles of impeachment to the Senate, but that does not mean she has lost in the seeming standoff with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) over whether to call witnesses at the Senate trial. McConnell has said “there’s no chance the president’s going to be removed from office” and “there will be no difference between the president’s position and our position.” In response, Pelosi still has cards in her hand — if she plays them — because the House approved two articles of impeachment against President Trump.

The first article of impeachment effectively charges the president with shaking down Ukraine; the second impeaches him for his unprecedented obstruction of Congress. That gives the speaker room to maneuver. She could choose to tweak her announcement and send only the second article, on obstruction, for trial. Or she could transmit them both — along with a House-approved provision advising the Senate that if it fails to obtain adequate witnesses and documents, the House will reopen the investigation into Article I and subpoena that material itself.

Separating the two articles — our preferred approach — would make perfect sense. When it comes to the second article, all the evidence about Trump’s obstruction is a matter of public record. There’s nothing more to add, so the second article is ripe for trial. But as to the first, although there is plenty of evidence demonstrating Trump’s guilt, his obstruction has prevented all of the evidence from coming to light.

Since the House voted to approve the articles of impeachment last month, new revelations of Trump’s involvement have emerged, including emails showing that aid was ordered withheld from Ukraine 91 minutes after Trump’s supposedly “perfect” phone call with President Volodymyr Zelensky. Trump’s former national security adviser, John Bolton, has said he is willing to testify before the Senate if subpoenaed, and Bolton’s lawyer has said he has new information, yet McConnell has balked at assurances that Bolton would be called.

How can one conduct a “trial” without knowing this evidence? As lawyers, we have never heard of a trial without witnesses. Both past impeachment trials of presidents featured witnesses — including 41 in the impeachment of President Andrew Johnson. And the lack of witnesses is particularly striking given the shell game Trump and his Republican colleagues have played. In the House, Trump prevented executive branch employees from testifying, but said some of them would be able to testify in the Senate. Now that we are in the Senate, Republicans say these folks should have testified in the House. Lewis Carroll would be pleased.

Other senators, including Florida Republican Marco Rubio, have said that the record in the Senate must be limited to the evidence generated in the House. This is a terrible argument, but it underscores the need for the House either to obtain a commitment from the Senate to gather the evidence or to warn that it will do it itself.

McConnell claims he is adhering to the rules in the impeachment of President Bill Clinton. But there’s one big difference: Clinton didn’t gag all the witnesses and documents in the House and the predecessor investigation; as a result, there was a full record before the Senate. And there were, in fact, witnesses who were deposed as part of the Senate trial nonetheless. This time, the reason this evidence wasn’t generated in the House has everything to do with the defendant in the impeachment case itself. That is the case for sending up the second article now, to put the spotlight on Trump’s obstructionism.

The core of the second article is captured by the principle that no one is above the law in the United States. Indeed, no president, not even Richard M. Nixon, has ever tried to block all witnesses and documents in an impeachment inquiry. Nixon thought about it but backed down quickly. The impeachment here is not just about Ukraine. It’s about a president who thinks he does not even have to submit to a constitutionally authorized congressional inquiry. This stance is particularly galling because Trump’s attorney general, William P. Barr, gave Trump a temporary get-out-of-jail-free card after special counsel Robert S. Mueller III found several instances of potential obstruction of justice; Barr claimed that the president could only be impeached, not indicted. Yet now the shell game continues — with Trump turning around and saying he can’t be impeached and investigated either.

Holding the first article back and letting the second go forward would be a powerful and precise response to McConnell’s unprecedented attempts to avoid committing to a real trial. It makes practical sense but also highlights what’s at stake here. Trump would be forced to undergo two impeachment trials instead of one — but that’s a fair price for him to pay for his attempts to hide evidence from the American people.

If, alternatively, Pelosi sent both articles up with a formal note that the House would step back in if the Senate failed to proceed appropriately, that would be a fair price for McConnell to pay. The speaker would, essentially, be guaranteeing that Trump would face another investigation because of McConnell’s insistence on a sham trial, one that fails to call willing witnesses or deal with relevant, if potentially damaging, evidence.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"Pelosi says Trump ‘impeached for life’ despite McConnell’s ‘gamesmanship,’ ‘coverup’"

Spoiler

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said Sunday that President Trump is “impeached for life” regardless of “any gamesmanship” by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), whom she accused of orchestrating a “coverup” of Trump’s actions as the Senate waits for the House to transmit the articles of impeachment.

Challenging McConnell to hold a serious trial that includes testimony from witnesses, Pelosi did not rule out the possibility that the House would subpoena former national security adviser John Bolton if the Senate chooses not to. She repeatedly chastised McConnell for signaling that he is not interested in fully weighing the House’s charges.

“Dismissing is a coverup. Dismissing is a coverup. If they want to go that route again, the senators who are thinking now about voting for witnesses or not — they will have to be accountable for not having a fair trial,” Pelosi said on ABC News’s “This Week.”

The speaker delivered her comments only days before a Senate impeachment trial is expected to begin — the third time a U.S. president will have faced potential removal from office following impeachment by the House.

Pelosi said she will meet with House Democrats on Tuesday morning to discuss the timing of a vote on impeachment managers — the half-dozen lawmakers who will prosecute the case and transmit the charges to the Senate. A trial could start as early as Wednesday, if the House acts quickly, though lawmakers and aides have speculated that it will not begin in earnest until the following week.

The House passed two articles of impeachment on Dec. 18 — for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. Pelosi surprised observers by not immediately transmitting the charges to the Senate, a strategy aimed at pressuring McConnell into naming fairer terms for the trial.

Sunday’s interview took place after Pelosi moved to end the three-week standoff, signaling in a letter to colleagues on Friday that she would transmit the articles to the Senate this week, even without any clarity from McConnell on how the trial would be conducted.

The speaker on Sunday accused McConnell of a coverup for signing on to a resolution to allow the Senate to dismiss impeachment charges if the House did not transmit them within 25 days of their approval.

The potential lack of witnesses and documentation in a Senate impeachment trial would be another “coverup,” she said, defending her decision to withhold the articles even though it did not produce the concessions she sought from McConnell.

“We wanted the public to see the need for witnesses, witnesses with firsthand knowledge of what happened, [and] documentation,” she said.

After “This Week” host George Stephanopoulos noted that McConnell “didn’t budge on witnesses at all,” Pelosi said he would be “accountable to the American people for that.”

“They take an oath to have a fair trial,” she said. ” … Now the ball is in their court to either do that or pay a price for not doing it.”

Senate Republicans have rallied behind the precedent set during President Bill Clinton’s 1999 impeachment trial, in which the case for removal was presented and rebutted before decisions were made about calling witnesses or seeking further evidence.

Pelosi dismissed comparisons to 1999 for “at least six reasons … the biggest one is that the witnesses [who eventually testified] were all deposed” before their public testimony.

“The evidence was there,” she said. “It was just a question of bringing it more to the forefront.”

McConnell’s no-witness trial strategy has been complicated by several developments in the past two weeks.

Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) has said that she is working with a small group of Republicans to ensure that the trial includes witnesses.

And Bolton announced this month that if the Senate subpoenas him, he “is prepared to testify.” In the fall, he rebuffed requests to serve as a witness during the House inquiry.

Pelosi said the House hasn’t “eliminated the possibility” of subpoenaing Bolton if the Senate does not but said, “We’ll see what they do.”

The speaker also did not rule out the possibility of the House drafting further articles, saying again: “Let’s just see what the Senate does.”

Stephanopoulos noted that just before the show began, Trump posted a tweet calling Pelosi “Crazy Nancy” and deriding House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.).

“It’s Sunday morning, [and] I’d like to talk about some more pleasant subjects than the erratic nature of this president,” Pelosi said in response. “But he has to know that every knock from him is a boost. … Everything he says is a projection. When he calls someone crazy he knows that he is. Everything he says, you can just translate it back to who he is.”

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) suggested on Fox News’s “Sunday Morning Futures” that Pelosi deliberately held off sending the articles to the Senate to delay a trial that will require Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), a 2020 presidential candidate, to attend in person. McCarthy argued that this would boost former vice president Joe Biden, one of Sanders’s rivals, in the run-up to the Feb. 3 Iowa Democratic caucuses.

“What this does is this benefits Joe Biden,” McCarthy said, adding that Sanders “will be stuck in a chair.”

McCarthy did not mention the other Democratic senators vying for their party’s presidential nomination — Elizabeth Warren (Mass.), Amy Klobuchar (Minn.), Michael F. Bennet (Colo.) and Cory Booker (N.J.) — who also will have to attend the impeachment trial in person.

On the same show, Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) said he wanted Biden’s son Hunter to testify, but did not mention any other possible witnesses.

When it comes to deciding which witnesses, if any, would testify, Scott said that would be decided after the trial was underway.

“We’re going to follow the Senate rules. We’re not going to follow Nancy Pelosi’s rules,” Scott said. “We’re going to listen to both sides, then we’ll make a decision.”

Former Trump strategist Stephen K. Bannon, for his part, said Trump should allow his staffers to testify in exchange for having Joe and Hunter Biden, as well as others, such as the initial CIA whistleblower whose complaint is at the center of the impeachment inquiry, appear before senators in the trial.

The House impeachment inquiry focused in part on whether the president improperly pressured Ukraine’s president to investigate Hunter Biden’s ties to Ukraine’s largest private gas company, Burisma, and whether his father sought to protect Burisma’s owner while serving as vice president. No evidence of criminal wrongdoing by the Bidens has surfaced, but Trump and other Republicans say they ought to be questioned.

“I think those witnesses need to be called,” Bannon said, adding that Bolton and acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney could also appear during the trial. “Bring them. What do they have to show? Donald Trump did nothing wrong.”

Before midday, Trump tweeted: “Why should I have the stigma of Impeachment attached to my name when I did NOTHING wrong? Read the Transcripts! A totally partisan Hoax … Very unfair to tens of millions of voters!”

Trump claimed that three Democrats voted with Republicans to oppose impeachment.

In fact, only two Democrats voted against the charge of abuse of power, while three voted against the charge of obstruction of Congress.

One of the Democrats who voted against both articles, Rep. Jeff Van Drew (N.J.), has since switched parties and become a Republican.