The Formal Impeachment Inquiry of Trump

#Mojo Cartoons

 

What would these guys know about impeachment?

17 former Watergate prosecutors: impeach Trump
Seventeen former special prosecutors who investigated the Watergate scandal have weighed in on the unspooling Ukraine saga, and they believe that President Donald Trump should be impeached.

In a joint op-ed published in the Washington Post on Thursday afternoon, the lawyers — including former federal attorneys and previous head of the Washington, DC, bar — note that Richard Nixon had three articles of impeachment filed against him: one of obstruction of justice, another for abuse of power, and one for contempt of Congress. That fits Trump to a tee, the 17 former special prosecutors say.

“In our considered view, the same three articles of impeachment could be specified against Trump, as he has demonstrated serious and persistent abuses of power that, in our view, satisfy the constitutional standard of ‘high crimes and misdemeanors,’” they wrote.

They outline five main reasons for impeachment:

1. Trump’s own public statements. They specifically mention those calling for China and Ukraine to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden, a top 2020 political rival for the president. It’s these comments that mainly led House Democrats to open an impeachment query against the president.
2. What former special counsel Robert Mueller found in his Trump-Russia probe. Mueller outlined 10 episodes that may have amounted to obstruction of justice. The former special counsel didn’t say Trump broke the law, but he didn’t clear him, either.
3. The White House’s partial transcript of Trump’s call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. In the transcript, Trump asks for a “favor” right after his counterpart requests military aid. That has led many to believe the president wanted a quid pro quo: Look into the Bidens before the US delivers the long-promised support.
4. Trump’s refusal to cooperate with the House-led impeachment inquiry. On Tuesday, the White House sent a scathing letter to Democrats saying they considered the investigation to be a political hit job and wouldn’t work with the probe in any way.
5. New evidence showing that US government employees were in on the aid-for-probe scheme. Text messages that just-resigned special envoy for Ukraine Kurt Volker gave to the House last week showed that he, US ambassador to the EU Gordon Sondland, and US ambassador to Ukraine Bill Taylor all coordinated to pass the message on to Ukraine’s leadership.

This is a big deal. These are nearly 20 people who looked into Nixon’s impeachable conduct and determined that Trump’s actions meet the same standard. (Nixon resigned from office before he could actually be impeached.)

Of course, the op-ed is unlikely to change any Republican minds, and those who want to see Trump gone will likely be disappointed by a future vote to convict the president in the GOP-led Senate. But what these lawyers have done is asked one all-important question necessary to pose to all Republicans: Why do they think they know better than those most familiar with Watergate?

 

Trump’s Favorite Impeachment Lawyer Is ...Trump Himself

President Donald Trump has slowly but surely bent the Office of the White House Counsel to his will.

Asawin Suebsaeng
White House Reporter
Politics Editor
Published 10.12.19 4:56AM ET

On Tuesday, the Office of the White House Counsel delivered an eight-page letter to Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) rejecting the very legitimacy of the impeachment inquiry threatening this presidency.

The letter was notable not for the conclusion it reached—few suspected that the administration was going to cooperate with House Democrats—but for the broadsides and rhetorical flourishes it featured. That’s because this letter wasn’t fully written by lawyers.

It was crafted, in large part, by President Donald Trump himself.

According to two people familiar with the process, White House Counsel Pat Cipollone had multiple meetings with President Trump in the days leading up to the issuance of the letter. During those meetings with Cipollone, the president would get especially animated when names such as Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), chair of the House Intelligence Committee leading the probe into the whistleblower complaint, came up. The sources said that Trump enthusiastically suggested adding various jabs at Democratic lawmakers and would request that their “unfair” treatment of him be incorporated into the letter.

The result was what Bob Bauer, who served as President Obama’s White House counsel, called a “remarkable” and “extraordinarily political document.”

Trump had also privately consulted on the letter with Rudy Giuliani, his notably pugnacious personal lawyer who is at the center of the Ukraine and Biden-related scandal engulfing the administration. Trump talked to Giuliani about how he and the White House should proceed in fighting back and challenging the legitimacy of the impeachment probe, one of the sources noted. Reached for comment on Thursday evening, the former New York mayor and Trump confidant repeatedly declined to confirm or deny this.

“President Trump took the unprecedented step of providing the public transparency by declassifying and releasing the record of his call with President Zelenskyy of Ukraine. The record clearly established that the call was completely appropriate and that there is no basis for your inquiry,” the Cipollone-signed, grievance-riddled letter reads. “The fact that there was nothing wrong with the call was also powerfully confirmed by Chairman Schiff’s decision to create a false version of the call and read it to the American people at a congressional hearing, without disclosing that he was simply making it all up.”

A White House spokesperson did not provide comment for this story.

That Trump has leaned so heavily on his own intuition in crafting the legal response to his impeachment crisis has come as no surprise to those who know him. The president has—however misguidedly—long thought of himself as more keen and cunning than his advisers. And from his rise in real estate and reality TV through his ascendance to the presidency he has shuddered at those individuals who have sought to curb his impulses, even when they’ve argued that those impulses bend the limits of the law.

And yet, Trump’s current go-with-your-gut approach stands out to many as a uniquely risky gamble. When his White House was navigating Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into 2016 election-meddling, the president early on leaned on two grey-bearded attorneys—Ty Cobb and John Dowd—and Don McGahn, a White House counsel with deep connections in Republican circles. Beyond that, he brought in Emmet Flood, a Washington, D.C., attorney well-steeped in special and independent counsel investigations, having lived through one himself.

Those lawyers are now gone. And Trump seems inclined to do little to buff up the ranks. The one person that is reportedly being added to his legal team is a former member of Congress, Trey Gowdy, who, the president says, can’t even start until January because of ethics laws.

Gowdy’s apparent restriction is particularly problematic given the fact that Democratic lawmakers wish to hold an impeachment vote before the year’s end.

Because the president has chosen to surround himself predominantly with loyalists, his administration has often been beset by fissures between the more trusted advisers and the institutionalists.

In mid-2017, for example, Giuliani showed up at the entrance of the Department of Justice unannounced, and called Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein’s office to insist on a meeting, The Washington Post reported and a source familiar with the incident confirmed. The president’s personal lawyer was there to talk about one of his clients, Iranian-Turkish gold trader Reza Zarrab. But Rosentein declined to take the meeting.

Trump himself grew so distrustful and unfriendly toward McGahn by the end of McGahn’s tenure that he’d even ask those close to him, “is [Don] wearing a wire?” according to a source with knowledge of the comment. (Axios was first to report this suspicion earlier this year.) Victoria Toensing and Joe diGenova, two informal legal advisers to the president who also sought to aid Giuliani on some of the Ukraine effort, are Trump superfans. And when news leaked out that Gowdy was being hired, they went on record to bash the decision.

Veterans of past White House counsel’s offices say they aren’t surprised by the current landscape inside the White House. Few well-respected attorneys in the nation’s capital have evinced any desire to work with the president. “At every level it is fraught with risk,” said one. And the president appears to have no desire to consider legal counsel that diverts from his own primal political desires.

“The lesson he learned from all that was fight, fight, fight,” said a former senior official in the White House Counsel's Office. “Not to follow the Ty Cobb and Emmet Flood approach and just get through it, which is what worked. That approach, the Cobb-Flood approach, is what White House counsels have done in the past, which is to try to accommodate, to get it behind you, to not give up the stuff you really want but the stuff you don’t need. That’s not the lesson he learned.”

Past administration staffers cautioned the damage being done is not just visible in the short term. By attaching his name to the eight-page letter, Cipollone will make it harder to craft future legal documents that will inevitably have to be issued in the course of the impeachment proceedings. “There is no reason that any of the other letters coming from him will be assumed to be written in good faith,” said the former senior White House Counsel’s Office official.

And then there is the damage to the office itself. As Bauer noted, the White House counsel is not the president’s lawyer but the lawyer for the presidency. Cipollone and his staff can and should reflect Trump’s wishes but they must do so within clear professional and legal boundaries.

“There are some very manageable lines and I don’t think those lines have been at all observed here,” said Bauer.

“Put it this way,” he added, “the White House counsel never wants to come across as anywhere close to the way Donald Trump’s doctor did in 2016.”

—With additional reporting by Betsy Swan

 

...I can think of three reasons:

1. Times change.
2. Everybody's a comedian deep down inside.
3. Because Jesus.

 

Just following order

Link

The U.S. ambassador to the European Union, Gordon Sondland, intends to tell Congress this week that the content of a text message he wrote denying a quid pro quo with Ukraine was relayed to him directly by President Trump in a phone call, according to a person familiar with his testimony.

Sondland plans to tell lawmakers he has no knowledge of whether the president was telling him the truth at that moment. “It’s only true that the president said it, not that it was the truth,” said the person familiar with Sondland’s planned testimony, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomatic matters.

 

Source is eh but the question is good.

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/...-have-vote-open-official-impeachment-inquiry/

Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) on Saturday posed a series of questions to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) regarding the partisan-fueled impeachment inquiry, asking why she is “scared to have a vote to open an official impeachment inquiry.”

 

once close to all the facts are known, the republican in the house may have a very difficult time not voting for impeachment inquiries

prior to all the facts are known, a few democrat rep are vulnerable to attacks during the inquiry itself

if the house vote overwhelmingly, including with republican support for formal impeachment, it send a strong message to everyone including the senate

....

she isn’t scared, she is having her ways - being aggressive, hoping for the other side to move over, protecting certain members on her side and even hedging

Using the same emotionally trigger language - Since such a vote isn’t needed to start formal impeachment inquiries, why the rush? Why is Jim Jordan scared to wait for when more fact are established?

 

I thought it was so clear. Everyone said the transcript was enough. The President admitted to it. So let's go. Let's do this already.

I think Pelosi and Co. are scared. An investigation is needed immediately if the President shouldn't be serving in office. She is negligent otherwise, because the investigation will allow them to get even more information. But remember. People are saying they have enough evidence. He admitted it right? Supposedly? So common. It really is on the Dems to start this. **** or get off the pot.

 

They already started it where u been?

 

Following Syria mostly. Did the house formally vote to start impeachment? My bad, I missed that story.

 

It is clear for about 51% of the population (a big jump from 30ish). But the Republican has already put a stake down that that's not enough. So more damning evidences, if they exists, are needed to potentially move the Republican toward the side of impeachment and removal.

I'm not understanding your 2nd paragraph. Tell me more about that. What do you mean if the POTUS shouldn't be serving in office? How is she negligent?

 

I agree that they should move forward quickly but they are also following a process.

If they didnt the narrative would be that there was no process.note they are trying to discredit the process and existence of one. Do you think the president is immune and unlimited?

Also if trump and etc are not cooperating that will slow things down. Imagine that...they want a vote but dont want all the facts out? You want to vote on this not knowing it all? Take trumps word huh he sure does seem to be on the up and up when it comes to honesty. Real straight shooter. :rolleyes

Why cant they move forward? Well why cant trump cooperate? Nothing to hide right?
Also it seems like some kind of huge news coming out every day. Again dont you want to know that?

In general trump is creating some nasty precedence ..where "its ok to do xyz" as president. He is line stepper to be sure and withholding money to get a foreign state to help you politically is pretty close to over the line for my taste buds. Him trying to double down and get china into it is one step away from the saudi arabia party and the qatar party and the russia party here on usa. We are already getting that foreign influence in nba....gaming etc.

You cool with that?
Where are you from? What flag do you support?

 

Like Benghazi or her Emails? ha

Chip Chip Chip, everyday for the next 400 days... a new revelation, a new subpoena, a little tax story, a little business story, a little sex story, dead Kurds, staff resignations, Trump throwing that formally loyal staffer under the bus, SDNY, the New York Attorney General.... it's going to be tortuous

 

Voting to start an impeachment inquiry isn't something mandated for them. They can vote once they have concluded the information gathering. Your whining about wanting a vote is crying that they aren't following rules which don't even exist.

 

Exactly vote after the case is built, not before, let the Republicans who changed the rules in 2015 stew in their own pot.

DD

 

this. the republican majority changed the rules in 2015
now they in the minority they weep and cry