Impeachment Day 23: Trump’s Troops Hunker Down, Fear Betrayal
Today’s word is “no.” As in no, the Office of Management and Budget, the State Department, the Department of Defense, the Vice President, and the President’s lawyer, won’t comply with subpoenas.
While they’re busy trying to ignore House investigators, the White House lawyers are searching high and low, hoping to unmask the whistle-blower who shed light on Trump’s Ukraine dealings. The New York Times says some staffers fear that there really just a hunt for scapegoat in progress.
The White House counsel’s letter informing the House of Representatives (as the Lawfare blog calls it) “that, on the basis of a unilateral and unsupportable judgment about its merits, the president is washing his hands of the impeachment inquiry” is being cited as the excuse for all the non-cooperation.
A law professor at George Mason University, Ilya Somin (a libertarian who has been active in the Cato Institute) characterized the letter as something that would prompt him to fail any student who submitted it. Yes, it’s that bad.
Trump is now reduced to random acts of lunacy in the hope of delaying the inevitable.
He’s decided to add an imaginary clause to the Constitution requiring the entire House to vote on initiating any impeachment inquiry. Speaker Nancy Pelosi says nope.
Holding a floor vote gives Democrats nothing, it's more delay and it dignifies a frivolous, bad-faith argument. None of these characters will suddenly proclaim, "The House has spoken, I shall comply forthwith!" They'll just come up with new bogus excuses.
A floor vote would also allow the administration to pressure Republicans to go on the record. They’re also saying nope, at least in private.
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The steady drip, drip, drip of evidence of White House malfeasance continues.
We learned today about Rudy Giuliani privately urging President Trump in 2017 to extradite a dissident Turkish cleric living in exile in the United States. Getting hold of Fethullah Gulen was a top priority for Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Back in November 2017, the Wall Street Journal reported that Trump’s former national security adviser, Michael Flynn, was under investigation for involvement in an alleged plot to kidnap Gulen and fly him to an island prison in Turkey in return for $15 million.
From the Washington Post:
The former New York mayor brought up Gulen so frequently with Trump during visits to the White House that one former official described the subject as Giuliani’s “hobby horse.” He was so focused on the issue — “it was all Gulen,” recalled a second former official — that White House aides worried that Giuliani was making the case on behalf of the Turkish government, former officials said.
“We’re not going to arrest [Gulen] to do a solid for Erdogan,” the second official said, describing the internal thinking.
However, Trump appeared receptive to the idea, pressing his advisers about Gulen’s status, the people said.
One former senior administration official recalled that Trump asked frequently about why Gulen couldn’t be turned over to Turkey, referring to Erdogan as “my friend.”
Former Texas congressman Pete Sessions has been subpoenaed by a New York federal grand jury seeking records and other information on his interactions Giuliani, and two Giuliani associates charged over a scheme to funnel foreign money to U.S. politicians.
The subpoena seeks records about Sessions’s dealings with Giuliani and two business associates, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, who before their arrest had been helping Giuliani investigate Democratic presidential candidate and former vice president Joe Biden.
Parnas and Fruman were charged last week with violating campaign finance law in an ongoing investigation that has ensnared the president’s personal lawyer because of his relationship with the two men. The subpoena indicates the investigation remains active, with investigators keen to determine whether Giuliani committed any wrongdoing.
CNN is reporting that the investigation into Giuliani’s business dealings includes a counterintelligence probe, based on questions concerning the financial sources for the work that brought him to Ukraine.
In late May, acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney stepped in to remove career specialists who the White House believed wouldn't go along with a plan to lean on Ukraine's leaders to launch investigations that might help Trump in the 2020 election.
From NPR:
The White House removed the core of its Ukraine policy team in the spring and replaced it with "three amigos" considered more reliable for the plan to pressure Kyiv, a senior U.S. diplomat was described as telling House investigators on Tuesday.
That's according to the account Rep. Gerry Connolly, D-Va., gave to reporters about the closed-door deposition by George Kent, the deputy assistant secretary in the State Department's European and Eurasian Bureau.
Acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney organized the May 23 meeting at which the personnel moves were decided, according to Connolly's description.
That conference yielded the crew described as the new "three amigos" assigned the Ukraine portfolio: Gordon Sondland, ambassador to the European Union; Kurt Volker, then an envoy to Ukraine for its peace negotiations; and Energy Secretary Rick Perry.
The New York Times has yet another story about the “best people” being employed by the President relating to this mess:
A former top White House foreign policy adviser told House impeachment investigators this week that she viewed Gordon D. Sondland, the United States ambassador to the European Union, as a potential national security risk because he was so unprepared for his job, according to two people familiar with her private testimony.
The adviser, Fiona Hill, did not accuse Mr. Sondland of acting maliciously or intentionally putting the country at risk. But she described Mr. Sondland, a hotelier and Trump donor-turned-ambassador, as metaphorically driving in an unfamiliar place with no guardrails and no GPS, according to the people, who were not authorized to publicly discuss a deposition that took place behind closed doors.
https://twitter.com/CahnEmily/status/1184515186738257921?s=20
Upcoming witness Michael McKinley, the senior advisor to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo who quit last week, will be telling House committees about the sad state of existence for diplomats in the Trump administration.
McKinley will outline how his concerns culminated with the recall of the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, a punitive action he and many other rank-and-file diplomats viewed as wholly unjustified.
“The unwillingness of State Department leadership to defend Yovanovitch or interfere with an obviously partisan effort to intervene in our relationship with Ukraine for the political benefit of the president was too much for him,” said the person, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to be candid.
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Last but not least, an investigation by ProPublica has confirmed assertions by former Trump attorney Michael Cohen about the practice of having two sets of books for the Trump properties.
ProPublica reviewed records for four properties: 40 Wall Street, the Trump International Hotel and Tower, 1290 Avenue of the Americas and Trump Tower. Discrepancies involving two of them — 40 Wall Street and the Trump International Hotel and Tower — stood out.
There can be legitimate reasons for numbers to diverge between tax and loan documents, the experts noted, but some of the gaps seemed to have no reasonable justification. “It really feels like there’s two sets of books — it feels like a set of books for the tax guy and a set for the lender,” said Kevin Riordan, a financing expert and real estate professor at Montclair State University who reviewed the records. “It’s hard to argue numbers. That’s black and white.”
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