Impeachment Saturday Extra: Even More Damning Evidence
This was not a good week for the current occupant of the White House. Republican disruptions punctuating otherwise boring testimony at the public impeachment hearings of the House Intelligence Committee didn’t work out as planned.
Credit Democratic Congressman Adam Schiff for running a tight ship, leaving the GOP with nothing more than bleating about their victimhood-- caused by the rules they crafted back when they were the majority.
Then Individual #1 couldn’t keep his mouth shut, resulting in what was widely considered to be another item for articles of impeachment, namely his comments about about Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch as she was testifying.
No matter what network people were watching, the evilness of the administration was apparent, as suggested by this commentary in the The Week:
Fox News doesn't seem to think the second day of impeachment hearings is going great for President Trump so far.
Chris Wallace, in particular, praised ousted Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch's "powerful" testimony describing how she felt devastated after Trump trashed her as "bad news" on a call with a foreign leader and after being pushed out of her position due to what she characterized as smears by Rudy Giuliani and others.
"I think if you are not moved by the testimony of Marie Yovanovitch today, you don't have a pulse," Wallace said.
https://twitter.com/rebeccaballhaus/status/1195723753537331202?s=20
There were significant developments on Friday in addition to the public impeachment hearings for the House Intelligence Committee.
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One can only guess at what the staff at the White House was thinking when they released the much vaunted call memo of the April 21 conversation between President Trump and President-elect Zelenskyy.
It didn’t match up with a White House issued read out released shortly after the call took place. Specifically, the Friday release didn’t mention this nugget from April:
[Trump] “expressed his commitment to work together with President-elect Zelenskyy and the Ukrainian people to implement reforms that strengthen democracy, increase prosperity, and root out corruption,”
The newer version of the conversation was just pleasantries. The reason? Trump didn’t follow the outline of topics prepared for him by the National Security Council.
From the New York Times:
National Security Council aides had prepared the briefing materials and the news release together, an administration official said. But when Mr. Trump ignored their suggestion to bring up corruption, long a widespread issue in Ukraine, no one updated the release before the White House sent it to reporters, added the official, who was not authorized to discuss the matter and spoke on the condition of anonymity.
https://twitter.com/NatashaBertrand/status/1195499969156993026?s=20
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A deposition by career diplomat David Holmes provided a first person-account of President Trump’s July 26 phone call with with Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland.
https://twitter.com/JuliaDavisNews/status/1195500627713036295?s=20
Suffice it to say that his opening statement to the House Committee wasn’t good news for the administration. And there are reportedly two other witnesses who heard the same conversation.
From the Washington Post:
Holmes mentions that Trump defenders have argued that perhaps Trump himself wasn’t personally involved in the quid pro quos. He also mentions a GOP argument that was prominent during Wednesday’s hearing featuring Taylor and top State Department aide George Kent: that the witnesses didn’t have firsthand knowledge of some of the key events.
“I came to realize I had firsthand knowledge regarding certain events on July 26,” he said, referring to the date of his overhearing the Sondland-Trump call, “that had not otherwise been reported and that those events potentially bore on the question of whether the president did, in fact, have knowledge that those officials were using the levers of our diplomatic power to induct the new Ukrainian president to announce the opening of a particular criminal investigation.”
It’s worth noting that, despite early GOP attempts to portray Holmes as a partisan — on Friday they promoted a photo of him shaking hands with Barack Obama — he won an award in 2014 after raising concerns about Obama’s Afghanistan policy. Holmes, who served in Afghanistan, was awarded for his “constructive dissent.”
Oh darn, another “unelected bureaucrat” (as the president likes to call civil servants) with a backbone and standards of ethics.
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Rudy Giuliani’s indicted sidekick, Lev Parnas, is mighty unhappy about being dismissed as a nobody by the President. So unhappy, in fact, that he might turn state’s evidence.
The problem for prosecutors with Parnas is that the guy is a sleazeball and con artist whose credibility could easily be challenged in a jury trial.
So Parnas is doing what he can to better his odds, namely talking to the press and offering bits of evidence corroborating his potential testimony.
CNN ran with the backstory on the pictures taken with President Trump at the White House's annual Hanukkah party last year with two Soviet-born businessmen from Florida, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman.
At one point during the party that night, Parnas and Fruman slipped out of a large reception room packed with hundreds of Trump donors to have a private meeting with the President and Giuliani, according to two acquaintances in whom Parnas confided right after the meeting.
Word of the encounter in the White House last December, which has not been previously reported, is further indication that Trump knew Parnas and Fruman, despite Trump publicly stating that he did not on the day after the two men were arrested at Dulles International Airport last month.
Eventually, according to what Parnas told his confidants, the topic turned to Ukraine that night. According to those two confidants, Parnas said that "the big guy," as he sometimes referred to the President in conversation, talked about tasking him and Fruman with what Parnas described as "a secret mission" to pressure the Ukrainian government to investigate Joe Biden and his son Hunter.
https://twitter.com/gianabanan/status/1195361583238713344?s=20
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