On Tuesday night the House released new evidence on Trump and Ukraine. Documents revealed that Giuliani was having Parnas and others follow Yanakovitch in Ukraine before her firing. And another document reveals Trump may have been more involved than previously known: “One of the new documents shows Mr. Giuliani saying that he had Mr. Trump’s blessing to seek a meeting with Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s president-elect, last spring, potential new evidence on the eve of the president’s impeachment trial.”
Mr. Giuliani has previously said he was acting at Mr. Trump’s direction in his dealings with Ukrainian officials, but the letter released on Tuesday is the first public document that says he was doing so.”
Greg Sargent breaks down the significance of these documents:
“They leave almost zero doubt that the scandal that got President Trump impeached will continue getting worse — substantially so — for him and his defenders. The Giuliani letter undercut Trump’s main defense: “Giuliani explicitly states that he was representing Trump “as a private citizen, not as the president of the United States,” and also that Giuliani was carrying out this mission with Trump’s “knowledge and consent.”
Sargent points out that the House Foreign Relations Committee is now asking the State Department to turn over any information about threats to Yanakovitch, what Pompeo knew, and how they responded. The chair issued a statement: “This unprecedented threat to our diplomats must be thoroughly investigated and, if warranted, prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”
Parnas went on Maddow Wednesday and Thursday nights for an interview. Parnas also gave an interview to the New York Times on Wednesday:
“asserting for the first time in public that the president was fully aware of the efforts to dig up damaging information on his behalf.”
“Text messages and call logs show that Mr. Parnas was in contact with Tom Hicks Jr., a donor and Trump family friend, and Joseph Ahearn, who raised money for pro-Trump political groups, about developments in the Ukraine pressure campaign.” “Mr. Parnas said that although he did not speak with Mr. Trump directly about the efforts, he met with the president on several occasions and was told by Mr. Giuliani that Mr. Trump was kept in the loop. Mr. Parnas pointed in particular to text messages, released by the House this week, in which Mr. Giuliani refers to an effort to obtain a visa for a former Ukrainian official who leveled corruption allegations against Mr. Biden.”
“Before taking his first trip to Ukraine in February 2019, Mr. Parnas said that he met with Mr. Giuliani at the Grand Havana Room, a smoke-filled private club high above Midtown Manhattan, and relayed a concern that he and an associate, Igor Fruman, lacked the diplomatic credentials to carry out their task. Mr. Parnas said he proposed that the president designate them “special envoys” to ensure their safety and access. Then, Mr. Parnas said, Mr. Giuliani walked away to call Mr. Trump, and returned with a new plan: He would represent Mr. Parnas and Mr. Fruman, as well as the president, a move that might afford their shared mission the confidentiality of attorney-client privilege. Mr. Giuliani has denied Mr. Parnas’s account.”
Here are some Parnas takeaways from the Washington Post: “a newly revealed document, a message from the Ukraine prosecutor: “I’m sorry, but this is all simply b——t,” Lutsenko wrote on March 13 in Russian. “I’m f—–g sick of all this. I haven’t received a visit. My [boss] hasn’t received jack all. I’m prepared to [thrash] your opponent. But you want more and more. We’re over. ” This shows that Trump was never concerned about corruption but about Biden, which Parnas said in the interview. He also implicated Bolton, Pence, Barr and Nunes as being “in the loop.”
The New York Times reports that in November 2018 Russia began hacking Burisma: “experts say the timing and scale of the attacks suggest that the Russians could be searching for potentially embarrassing material on the Bidens — the same kind of information that Mr. Trump wanted from Ukraine when he pressed for an investigation of the Bidens and Burisma, setting off a chain of events that led to his impeachment.”
On Wednesday evening the House voted to send the articles of impeachment to the Senate, and Pelosi named the impeachment managers.
The Senate opened its impeachment trial on Thursday, which John Roberts swearing in the senators and having them state their oath to render “impartial justice.”
On the same day the GAO rendered a verdict that the OMB broke the law by withholding the Ukraine funding.
On Friday the White House named Trump’s defense team, which will include Ken Starr and Alan Dershowitz.
We also learned that 8 Americans were injured in the Iran strike and evacuated, despite the administration saying there were no injuries.
Iran pulled out of all the rules and requirements in the 2015 nuclear deal. And Iraq voted on a non-binding resolution to force all American troops out of the country.
Analysis: “Iran’s announcement essentially sounded the death knell of the 2015 nuclear agreement. And it largely re-creates conditions that led Israel and the United States to consider destroying Iran’s facilities a decade ago, again bringing them closer to the potential of open conflict with Tehran that was avoided by the accord.”
DOD Secretary Esper contradicted Trump by saying that the military would not strike cultural sites.
Tuesday night Iran fired ballistic missiles into Iraqi bases that house the American military, a direct retaliation for killed Suleimani.
Wednesday morning Trump gave an address stating that the US will not retaliate.
David Sanger in the Times: The speech was, in many ways, the sound of muddled policy. It showed that after three years in office, Mr. Trump has yet to resolve the two conflicting instincts on national security that emerge from his speeches and his Twitter feed: bellicosity and disengagement.
Impeachment News
By Friday, after a week of back and forth dueling statements with McConnell, Pelosi said she would have the House send the impeachment articles to the Senate next week.
Iraqi protestors laid siege to the US embassy in Baghdad, sparked by a US airstrike against Iranian targets in Iraq.
Thursday night news broke that US drones killed Iran’s top military leader. Here is reporting on the initial justification: “Mr. Trump, speaking to reporters in a hastily arranged appearance at Mar-a-Lago, his Florida resort, asserted that Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, who directed Iranian paramilitary forces throughout the Middle East, “was plotting imminent and sinister attacks on American diplomats and military personnel, but we caught him in the act and terminated him.”… But General Milley, Mr. Pompeo, Mr. O’Brien and other senior administration officials did not describe any threats that were different from what American officials say General Suleimani had been orchestrating for years.”
The Washington Post’s initial report on the decision included this: “Trump was also motivated to act by what he felt was negative coverage after his 2019 decision to call off the airstrike after Iran downed the U.S. surveillance drone, officials said. Trump was also frustrated that the details of his internal deliberations had leaked out and felt he looked weak, the officials said.”
The New York Times reports that the Pentagon gave Trump a menu of retaliatory options, and that killing Suleimani was the extreme option “to make other possibilities appear more palatable.”: “By late Thursday, the president had gone for the extreme option. Top Pentagon officials were stunned.” The article quotes one unnamed official who said Suleimani actions were “business as usual.” It goes on to say “That official described the intelligence as thin and said that General Suleimani’s attack was not imminent “
3,500 troops are being sent immediately to the Middle East, most likley Kuwait “in one of the largest rapid deployments in decades.”
On Saturday Trump tweeted a threat to Iran that 52 targets have been identified for airstrikes if Iran retaliates: “targeted 52 Iranian sites (representing the 52 American hostages taken by Iran many years ago), some at a very high level & important to Iran & the Iranian culture, and those targets, and Iran itself, WILL BE HIT VERY FAST AND VERY HARD.” Many are pointing out that if this were to actually happen it would be considered a war crime against the Geneva Convention.
On Sunday he reiterated his plan to destroy cultural sites: “They’re allowed to kill our people. They’re allowed to torture and maim our people. They’re allowed to use roadside bombs and blow up our people,” the president said. “And we’re not allowed to touch their cultural site? It doesn’t work that way.”
In Other News
North Korea continued to make threats of a new missile tests.
John Roberts issues his annual report on the state of the judiciary: “Those principles leave no place for mob violence. But in the ensuing years, we have come to take democracy for granted, and civic education has fallen by the wayside. In our age, when social media can instantly spread rumor and false information on a grand scale, the public’s need to understand our government, and the protections it provides, is ever more vital. The judiciary has an important role to play in civic education.”
The New York Times reported on new details about the White House’s Ukraine scheme, further implicating Mulveney, Bolton, and Pompeo.
Meanwhile on Friday the Senate made no progress toward setting rules for the impeachment trial.
Trump submitted a letter Tuesday night, on the eve of his impeachment: “Fortunately, there was a transcript of the conversation taken, and you know from the transcript (which was immediately made available) that the paragraph in question was perfect. I said to President Zelensky: “I would like you to do us a favor, though, because our country has been through a lot and Ukraine knows a lot about it.” I said do us a favor, not me, and our country, not a campaign.”
The full House impeached Trump Wednesday night. No Republicans voted for either article. Two democrats voted against the first article, and three voted against the second.
Pelosi announced that the House will not send the articles to the Senate for trial, and she will not name impeachment managers, until the Senate presents its plan for a trial.
On Monday the Judiciary Committee held a hearing were democratic and republican lawyers made the case for and against impeachment, setting up a committee debate for later this week on articles.
Here is a more descriptive take on what happened Monday: “Procedural skirmishes dominated the first several hours of today’s hearing, but they pale in comparison to the stakes of the broader impeachment inquiry. As Democrats have moved from the dramatic accounts offered in the Intelligence Committee to the far drier presentations in the Judiciary Committee, they seemed to have conceded that the moment for persuading the public on the case for impeachment has largely passed—at least in the House.”
On Tuesday the House released a draft of two articles of impeachment, one for abuse of power over the Ukraine scheme and one for obstruction of congress.
Lawfare’s initial analysis says the House Democrats made political concession by keeping the scope narrow and therefore did not go far enough: “By focusing narrowly on Ukraine, the House risks forfeiting the ability to tell the full story of Trump’s efforts to leverage the power of the presidency to target his political opponents.”
Reporting by the New York Times details internal Democrat deliberations about whether to include an article of impeachment over obstruction of justice the Mueller uncovered: “The final decision, agreed to by all six committee leaders, came down to this: The vast majority of Democrats agree that the allegations of wrongdoing toward Ukraine are overwhelming and pressing as well as a continuing threat to the nation. The same could not be said of attempts by Mr. Trump to interfere with Mr. Mueller’s work.”
The House Judiciary committee began debating the articles Wednesday evening, with markup of the amendments beginning on Thursday, lasting 14 hours until 11pm. At that point, Chairman Nadler said the vote would happen on Friday morning to allow members to “search their consciences” before making a decision.
The final vote happened Friday morning, with both articles passing on a straight party line vote.
Russia News
Also on Monday the Justice Department Inspector General released his long awaited report on the FBI’s behavior during the 2016 election: “We did not find documentary or testimonial evidence that political bias or improper motivation influenced” officials’ decision to open the investigation, the report said. Nor did he find that the Steele dossier had a part in opening the investigation.
Here is a key quote from the IG report: “We did not find documentary or testimonial evidence that political bias or improper motivation influenced Priestap’s decision to open Crossfire Hurricane. The evidence also showed that FBI officials responsible for and involved in the case opening decisions were unanimous in their belief that, together with the July 2016 release by WikiLeaks of hacked DNC emails, the Papadopoulos statement described in the FFG information reflected the Russian government’s potential next step to interfere with the 2016 U.S. elections. These FBI officials were similarly unanimous in their belief that the FFG information represented a threat to national security that warranted further investigation by the FBI. Witnesses told us that they did not recall observing during these discussions any instances or indications of improper motivations or political bias on the part of the participants, including Strzok. … We . . . concluded that the FBI had sufficient predication to open full counterintelligence investigations of Papadopoulos, Page, Flynn, and Manafort in August 2016.”
And then Wittes’s take: “Note an interesting feature of this passage. The investigation was not an investigation of the Trump campaign. It was four investigations of individuals—Carter Page, George Papadoupolos, Paul Manafort, and Michael Flynn—associated with the campaign but about whom there was specific reason for concern. In other words, investigators were not spying on the Trump campaign. They had concerns about specific people and their relationship with Russia, just as the FBI has always said.”
Comey: “On Monday, we learned from a report by the Justice Department’s inspector general, Michael Horowitz, that the allegation of a criminal conspiracy was nonsense. There was no illegal wiretapping, there were no informants inserted into the campaign, there was no “spying” on the Trump campaign…. Those of us who knew that truth had to remain silent while a torrent of smears and falsehoods flowed from the White House, from some congressional committee chairmen, the attorney general and Fox News personalities. “
After the IG report, Barr criticized the IG and FBI director Wray.
Immigration News
According to a report by the Texas Tribune: “Newly obtained government documents show how the Trump administration’s now-blocked policy to separate all migrant children from parents led social workers to frantically begin tracking thousands of children seized at the southern border and compile reports on cases of trauma. …Reports of traumatized children were forwarded to the Department of Homeland Security’s Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties… the office failed to assist children whose suffering was documented in hundreds of similar complaints the office received last year.”
The article also reports that separations, though rare, were happening earlier than is generally known. An email dated September 2016: “The best thing that could happen is for the OFO to stop the practice of family separation,” a child refugee field specialist added to the top of an email containing instructions for reunifying families that he sent to colleagues on Sept. 20, 2016.
The House Democrats released their Impeachment Report on Tuesday. Here is the full document.
On Thursday Pelosi announced that the House will begin drafting impeachment articles.
Lawfare speculates on how the Senate trial might unfold based on the rules as written: “The bottom line is that this trial will be all about who can count to 51—and all about how active the chief justice wants to be in determining the default rulings if senators fail to do so. “
There is news this week that the IG report on 2016 election will not support the conspiracy theories that the GOP has been pushing, and the Barr’s hand-picked investigator “could not offer evidence to the Justice Department’s inspector general to support the suspicions of some conservatives that the case was a setup by American intelligence”
The Trump Administration finally approved a rule its FDA proposed that will cut food stamps from 700,000 by imposing work requirements on able bodied adults without children: “Under the rules effective April 1, 2020, an area eligible for a waiver would have to have a 24-month average unemployment rate that is not only 20 percent above the national average but also at least 6 percent.”
An internal White House review shows that they were seeking a legal justification for witholding the aid months after Trump already ordered the hold: “In the early August email exchanges, Mulvaney asked acting OMB director Russell Vought for an update on the legal rationale for withholding the aid and how much longer it could be delayed. Trump had made the decision the prior month without an assessment of the reasoning or legal justification, according to two White House officials. Emails show Vought and OMB staffers arguing that withholding aid was legal, while officials at the National Security Council and State Department protested. OMB lawyers said that it was legal to withhold the aid, as long as they deemed it a “temporary” hold, according to people familiar with the review.”
Trump had Defense Secretary Esper fire the Navy Secretary over the dispute over the Navy SEAL Gallagher keeping his position in the SEALs.
Trump issued a formal order threat Gallagher not be punished, which is what Spencer had suggested last week.
Here is Ignatius on the firing: “the Gallagher case illustrates how an irascible, vengeful commander in chief is ready to override traditional limits to aid political allies in foreign policy, law enforcement and now military matters.”
A federal judge has ruled the Don McGahn must testify before the House and adhere to the subpoena.
The New York Times uncovered documents that show Giuliani pursued business deals with the same Ukrainian officials he was pushing to investigate the Bidens and 2016 election: “His discussions with Ukrainian officials, including the country’s top prosecutor, who assisted him on the dirt-digging mission, proceeded far enough along that he signed at least one retainer agreement, on his company letterhead.”
Trump visited troops in Afghanistan for Thanksgiving. He announced that talks with the Taliban were resuming, but his statements about a cease fire were at odds with where the negotiations now stand, so his statement only sowed confusion.
On Tuesday Vindman and Pence aid Jennifer Williams testified in open hearings. As did Volker and Tim Morrison.
On Wednesday Sondland testified and said that Trump has established a quid pro quo arrangement with Ukraine. This was seen as surprising, even blockbuster testimony, because Sondland’s opening statement blew up Trump’s defenses against the quid pro quo. Wittes even argues that Sondland admitted that Trump committed bribery.
On Thursday Fiona Hill testified, in what may be the last day of open hearings before an impeachment vote. Hill warned against politicians who “promote politically driven falsehoods that so clearly advance Russian interests,” meaning the idea that Ukraine was involved in 2016 election interference. She also said that Trump involved US foreign policy in a “domestic political errand.”
It appears that the House will not get testimony from Giuliani, Pence, Pompeo and Bolton, leaving some gaps in the record. Even Trump-critical Republican House members like Will Hurd are saying their is not enough evidence to justify impeachment.
The New York Times reports that the Ukraine conspiracy theory that Trump is still pushing about the 2016 election was developed and propagated by Russian intelligence.
Emails reveal that Pompeo was in communication with Giulliani in March during the time when they were trying to oust Ambassador Yanakovitch and spread the Ukraine 2016 conspiracy theory.
Lindsay Graham asked the State Department to hand over documents that will help him investigate Biden and Ukraine.
In this piece, Frum attempts to analyze the GOP defense and mindset for impeachment: “The accusations against Trump are direct and intelligible to any open mind. The defense of Trump resembles the Star Wars saga: a universe of storytelling, in multiple parts, much of it comprehensible only if you venture beyond the visual franchise to a huge appendix of fan fiction and Wikipedia pages.
“The House Republicans’ underlying argument is too jumbled and confusing even to be agreed with. It can only be absorbed. It is to be repeated, not to be analyzed. It is not even really an argument at all. It is a hypnotic litany, a creed of faith—a faith all the more compelling for defying sense and experience.
“At Fox News, on talk radio, and on the web, American conservatives have built a communications system that effectively consolidates in-group identity. Much of the time, the talkers and listeners do not themselves understand what they are saying. They use key words and phrases as gang signs: badges of identity that are recognized without necessarily being understood.”
In other news:
Trump intervened on a Navy decision to demote a SEAL who was accused and acquitted of war crimes. The Secretary of the Navy is so far refusing to accept Trump’s twitter statement as a order.
