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A career Defense Department official, Ms. Cooper will give insight into efforts to release the aid to Ukraine.
November 20, 2019Read More
Former Vice President Joe Biden is getting a little ahead of himself.Hours before the fifth Democratic debate was set to begin, Biden’s campaign on Wednesday sent out a fundraising email obviously not intended for release until the debate ended. The message hit inboxes roughly eight hours early.”I’m leaving the fifth Democratic debate now,” read the very first sentence of this email, sent long before the debate even started. “I hope I made you proud out there and I hope I made it clear to the world why our campaign is so important.” Well, he made clear why sending prepared emails at a time that actually makes sense is so important, at least.> Looks like Biden’s campaign has accidentally sent a post-debate fundraising email out early. It suggests he may target Warren again tonight. > > “We need more than plans… We need to reach across the aisle and demand that our leaders do what’s right.” pic.twitter.com/7YSvzy1bGm> > — Jess Bidgood (@jessbidgood) November 20, 2019Spoiler alert: expect some more slams on Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) from Biden this evening, something supporters were presumably supposed to have already seen before they read, “we need more than plans” in his emailWith the White House having accidentally sent talking points to Democrats at least two times in recent months, should Biden defeat President Trump in 2020, the White House tradition of totally incompetent email use may continue for years to come.More stories from theweek.com Ken Starr on the Sondland testimony: ‘It’s over’ Putin says the Ukraine scandal has distracted the U.S. from Russian election meddling: ‘Thank God’ Sondland just obliterated Trump and put the entire White House in peril
November 20, 2019Read More
Rep. Sean Maloney (D-N.Y.) brought the fireworks late during U.S. Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland’s public impeachment testimony Wednesday.Maloney drew applause from the audience after he got Sondland to admit that hypothetically President Trump would be the one to benefit from an investigation into his domestic rivals, such as former Vice President Joe Biden.> “There we go, that wasn’t so hard!” Maloney exclaims, prompting a smattering of applause from public present in the room. https://t.co/n5SOKrylbi> > — Olivia Gazis (@Olivia_Gazis) November 20, 2019But things got more heated when Sondland expressed displeasure with Maloney’s line of questioning, arguing that he had done his best to be forthright during the hearing. Maloney took that comment and ran with it. He grilled Sondland about how Wednesday’s testimony was the ambassador’s third opportunity to provide truthful information to Congress referring to his initial deposition and then an amended version of that testimony. “All due respect sir, we respect your candor, but let’s be really clear what it took to get it out of you,” Maloney said. Yikes. > After @RepSeanMaloney finally gets Sondland to admit Trump stood to benefit from Biden investigations, the audience breaks out in applause > > Sondland then tells Maloney he “resents” what Maloney did & has been “forthright” > > “This is your 3rd try to do so,” Maloney retorts. pic.twitter.com/gOW38FPJLP> > — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) November 20, 2019More stories from theweek.com Ken Starr on the Sondland testimony: ‘It’s over’ Putin says the Ukraine scandal has distracted the U.S. from Russian election meddling: ‘Thank God’ Sondland just obliterated Trump and put the entire White House in peril
November 20, 2019Read More
The president of the Music City Boal, played in Nashville, will attend IU’s game against Michigan to scout the Hoosiers.
November 20, 2019Read More
The United States ambassador to the European Union told the impeachment inquiry his efforts to press Ukraine to announce investigations were ordered by President Trump, and top officials knew.
November 20, 2019Read More
Ex-President Evo Morales continues to influence politics from exile in Mexico City as the interim president moves toward new elections. The death toll has risen to 30 in the post-election violence.
November 20, 2019Read More
Things were not looking great for President Trump on Wednesday as the U.S. ambassador to the European Union, Gordon Sondland, testified before the House Intelligence Committee. Even by Fox News’ generous assessment, Sondland had all but “[taken] out the bus and [run] it over President Trump, Vice President Pence, Mike Pompeo, John Bolton, Rudy Giuliani, Mick Mulvaney.”But Eric Trump, not to be discouraged, saw the hearing not as a “bombshell” that all but ensures “articles of impeachment,” but as an opening. The president’s second son boldly took to Twitter to respond to the Sondland testimony … with an ad for his family’s winery:> It is a perfect day for a nice bottle of this. These people are — insane…. @TrumpWinery pic.twitter.com/lkMVEorYKb> > — Eric Trump (@EricTrump) November 20, 2019You know what they say: When life hands you lemons, use the opportunity to sell some Cabernet Sauvignon.More stories from theweek.com Ken Starr on the Sondland testimony: ‘It’s over’ Putin says the Ukraine scandal has distracted the U.S. from Russian election meddling: ‘Thank God’ Sondland just obliterated Trump and put the entire White House in peril
November 20, 2019Read More
U.S. Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland delivered Wednesday the most explosive and damaging testimony of the week-old impeachment hearings into President Trump’s alleged Ukraine bribery and extortion scheme. Frequently struggling to contain a smirk, Sondland methodically dismantled nearly every strained Republican talking point offered in defense of Trump’s conduct and offered little in the way of wiggle room under often confused and halting cross examination from GOP counsel Steve Castor and others.Unlike prior witnesses, Sondland had spoken personally with both the president and his personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, and used his recollections to confirm the president’s worst-case scenario: that Trump ordered Giuliani to execute an extortion and bribery scheme which would force the new president of Ukraine to announce phony investigations into former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter as well as Ukraine’s imagined interference in the 2016 presidential election. Sondland said that he, former Ukraine envoy Kurt Volker, and Energy Secretary Rick Perry were operating “under the express direction of the president” in carrying out the scheme.Sondland had extensive documentary evidence that a White House visit — which committee chairman Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) was careful to characterize as “an official act” — was conditioned on the announcement of these investigations. And he argued that by early September, he had realized that the weeks-long hold placed on nearly $400 million in military assistance to Ukraine was also contingent on Zelensky going on TV and announcing the investigations.Not content merely to knife his former comrades in smarm, Sondland also chose to highlight the Trump administration’s efforts to obstruct the impeachment inquiry in general, and to prevent him in particular from giving accurate testimony. Announcing that he is “not a note-taker,” the ambassador complained that he couldn’t access his own State Department records “that in fairness … should have been made available.” This was an early clue that Sondland was about to turn decisively against his Trumpworld patrons and that he did not intend to go down for these crimes without taking a lot of other people with him. If this were a movie, that was the moment where the camera would have cut to Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) loosening his tie. (That moment came later.)Sondland sought to distance himself from Giuliani. He said that “if I had known of all of Mr. Giuliani’s dealings or of his associations with individuals now under criminal indictment,” that he would not have agreed to work with him to extract phony investigations from the Ukrainian government. He said that “relevant decisionmakers at the National Security Council and State Department knew the important details” of their efforts, and produced emails to prove it.That’s a clear shot across the bow for Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney, among others, who Sondland insisted were “in the loop” throughout the escapade. Sondland had more bad news for Pompeo when he revealed that Kurt Volker had spoken to Giuliani on Sept. 24, long after the scandal broke, at the explicit direction of Pompeo himself. Sondland even had a Whatsapp message to prove it.The ambassador also confirmed that President Trump instructed him to “talk to Rudy” about what was needed for Ukrainian President Volodymr Zelensky to secure a phone call and a White House visit. He noted that “Mr. Giuliani emphasized that the president wanted a public statement from President Zelensky committing Ukraine to look into corruption issues. Mr. Giuliani specifically mentioned the 2016 election (including the DNC server) and Burisma as two topics of importance to the President.”Later, he noted that “He had to announce the investigations. He didn’t actually have to do them, as I understood it.” In other words: Trump himself knew that there was nothing to these allegations and all he wanted was the political damage inflicted on Democrats.Sondland, in essence, tossed a number of high-ranking officials including the president and the secretary of state, under an oncoming bus in broad daylight and then held their blood-smeared political corpses up for an international audience on live television. Republicans, both in the room and elsewhere, were shell-shocked. If you were watching Fox News in the immediate aftermath of Sondland’s first bloc of testimony this morning, you knew that it was both explosive and very bad for President Trump. Even Clinton inquisitor Ken Starr admitted that “it doesn’t look good substantively for the president.”Republicans were left flailing. Nunes did his tiresome shtick about Hunter Biden and Ukrainian election interference. Castor tried desperately to get Sondland to say that his Sept. 9 phone call with the president was exculpatory, without success. Sondland, for his part, was clearly trying to justify his partipation in the scheme as part of a sincere effort to, as he put it repeatedly, “break the logjam” that was holding up the White House meeting and the aid. Your mileage may vary on the extent to which you believe him about that.Republicans also seized on Sondland’s admission that he had no direct proof that the aid was being held up and became fixated on proving that Sondland’s work with Perry, Giuliani, and Volker was totally normal and not part of an “irregular channel,” which Sondland also maintains. But it all added up to very little, and the demeanor of Nunes, Jordan and others suggested that they were all coping with the realization that one of the key participants in a criminal conspiracy involving the president just basically admitted to everything on camera.There’s really only one move from here for the Republicans. They can no longer credibly claim that Trump did not attempt to condition at least a White House visit on the announcement of phony investigations. The public wasn’t buying it before today, with 70 percent of Americans believing that the President did something wrong, and they certainly won’t be more inclined to believe it after Sondland’s testimony. Republicans, instead, will have to argue that Giuliani himself was freelancing this whole affair, and that Trump never ordered him to extort the Ukrainians into announcing these investigations. Democrats, curiously, have not actually subpoenaed Giuliani, and so Republicans could theoretically spend hours grandstanding about how no one yet has any concrete, documentary evidence that Trump ordered his personal lawyer to do these things.Yet doing so will risk flipping Giuliani, who has loudly and repeatedly proclaimed on national television about all the incriminating text messages he has. Giuliani’s new centrality to the proceedings points to a contradiction in the Republican defense strategy from the get-go. On the one hand, the White House and the State Department are withholding all cooperation in the impeachment hearings. They are hiding Mulvaney. They are hiding Perry. They are hiding Pompeo. They are hiding Trump himself, of course. No documents. No cooperation. Total stonewalling.On the other hand, Nunes and Jordan and others have made sure to complain about how Democrats won’t call people like Hunter Biden and Alexandra Chalupa to testify about Burisma and Republican fever dreams related to the 2016 election. Democrats at this point really should be willing to make that trade — Biden and Chalupa for Mulvaney, Giuliani, Perry and the president himself, provided the latter cohort goes first. Call the bluff.There’s no reason to wrap everything up by Christmas. Democrats are doing real damage to President Trump, and Republicans are in obvious disarray. Every day, seemingly, brings fresh revelations about both wrongdoing and attempted cover-ups. And most important, the American people deserve to know the full truth about what transpired.What I really want to know, though, is what Sondland will be drinking on his flight to Brussels tonight after publicly playing Judas to President Trump. I’m guessing it will be a Screwdriver.Want more essential commentary and analysis like this delivered straight to your inbox? Sign up for The Week’s “Today’s best articles” newsletter here.More stories from theweek.com Ken Starr on the Sondland testimony: ‘It’s over’ Putin says the Ukraine scandal has distracted the U.S. from Russian election meddling: ‘Thank God’ White House and Trump campaign officials are reportedly ‘freaking out’ about Sondland’s testimony
November 20, 2019Read More
WASHINGTON — During her two years serving in the Trump administration, Nikki Haley, the former ambassador to the United Nations, managed to toe a tougher line on Russia than her boss while also never straying from his good graces.”We don’t trust Russia. We don’t trust Putin,” Haley said in an interview in July 2018, days after President Donald Trump met with the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, in Helsinki. “They’re never going to be our friend.”By the time Haley left the administration nearly a year ago, she seemed to have perfected an almost impossible dance: distancing herself from some of the president’s most criticized positions while staying publicly loyal. She managed to leave on her terms and on good terms with the president.It was a balancing act that did not go without notice, and Haley, a woman of color and a former governor of South Carolina, was widely seen as preserving her options for a return to politics, perhaps as a post-Trump presidential candidate.Last summer, she challenged the president once more after he had trumpeted the fact that the Baltimore home of Rep. Elijah Cummings, a critic of Trump, had been broken into.”This is so unnecessary,” Haley wrote on Twitter in August, infuriating the president, according to aides.But now, Haley appears to have made the political calculation to go all in supporting the president, rather than defining herself in contrast to him.In a media blitz timed to the release of her new book, “With All Due Respect: Defending America With Grit and Grace,” Haley has consistently echoed White House talking points about how there is no case for impeachment and unequivocally defended Trump’s character.”In every instance I dealt with him, he was truthful, he listened and he was great to work with,” Haley told NBC’s Savannah Guthrie.In her book, Haley does not criticize the president but does take on two targets who have fallen out of favor with him and with whom she clashed repeatedly: John Kelly, the former chief of staff, and Rex Tillerson, the former secretary of state.She praises the president as a leader who always treated her with respect and describes an honest relationship in which he would sometimes change course based on her counsel.In describing the announcement of her resignation in October 2018, when Trump praised her for her service, she writes that the president was “the man I’d seen many times, the man he too often doesn’t let the country see.”She even tries to explain his continuing flattery of Putin, describing a conversation with him after the Helsinki meeting.”To his credit,” she writes, “the president soon issued additional remarks, saying he had misspoken.” She adds: “I was glad he made that clarification, and I understood what he had been trying to do. He was trying to keep communication open with Putin.”She also credits Trump with learning from the experience of Charlottesville, Virginia, and handling synagogue shootings in Pittsburgh and near San Diego “with great sensitivity and appropriateness.”Haley’s loyalty to Trump’s view of the world has been rewarded with a presidential endorsement. “Make sure you order your copy today, or stop by one of her book tour stops to get a copy and say hello. Good luck Nikki!” Trump wrote on Twitter.For Haley, an Indian American Tea Party activist who became a two-term governor of South Carolina known better as a voice of moderation on racial issues in the South, the reaction to her tweet about Cummings was a rude reminder of how she risks losing the Trump base when she puts distance between herself and the president.Trump, aides said, wanted to respond to her himself but was talked out of doing it. Instead, Kellyanne Conway, a top adviser who is close with Vice President Mike Pence, shot back at Haley in a tweet that was sanctioned from the top. “THIS is so unnecessary Trump-PENCE2020,” Conway wrote, an allusion to the rumors that Haley had been positioning herself to replace Pence on the ticket in 2020.Haley remains close with the president’s daughter Ivanka and her husband, Jared Kushner, and they warned her to be more careful talking about President Trump, according to two people familiar with the conversation. A spokeswoman for Haley denied such a warning.Her subsequent pivot can be seen as a recognition of the reality confronting anyone contemplating a future in today’s Republican Party — there is little future after distancing yourself from Trump.”It is Trump’s party today and, more likely than not, it will be Trump’s party 10 years from now,” said Kevin Madden, a political strategist and former adviser to Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign. “Trump will cast a long shadow over the party’s profile and will be a litmus test for the party’s most active base voters for years to come.”For Republicans like Haley, Madden said, the relationship with Trumpism would continue to be a balancing act.”Stray too far and you run the risk of inviting scorn from his biggest defenders,” he said. “Go lockstep with him and, as we’ve seen with the 2018 midterm test and the 2019 contests in key states like Virginia, the potential is there to alienate voters in suburbs who are making and breaking elections right now.”Haley has been relatively removed from public life in the year since she left the administration. She joined the board of Boeing and is reportedly being paid $200,000 a speech on the speaking tour.But her forays into politics show someone who is tacking toward Trump while leaving herself room for daylight between them in the future.She has held a fundraiser for the president and plans to do more, according to an aide. Haley, who still lives in New York City but plans to return to South Carolina after her son graduates from high school, has also started a nonprofit organization called Stand for America.The group’s website describes America’s prosperity being threatened by “socialist schemes” of higher taxes, regulations and “unsecure borders,” echoing the language and themes of Trump’s own reelection campaign. She has campaigned for Republicans like Sens. Joni Ernst of Iowa and Cory Gardner of Colorado.But she also appears to be stirring the pot on Twitter in a way that is intended to grab Trump’s attention and stay in the news.On Monday, she targeted George Conway, the outspoken, Trump-hating husband of Kellyanne Conway, who has drawn the president’s own ire.”George Conway is the last person that can call someone ‘trash’. Pathetic,'” Haley wrote on Twitter, criticizing Conway for an attack on Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., who emerged during the first week of televised impeachment hearings as a moderate turned Trump defender.”You’ll say anything to get the vice-presidential nomination, won’t you?” George Conway fired back.Haley, who declined to comment for this article, has in the past denied that she is seeking to replace Pence.But White House advisers loyal to Pence have long faulted Haley for stoking the rumors that she could potentially replace him on the 2020 ticket — something they see as beneficial to an out-of-office politician who needs a way to stay relevant until the next presidential race.Some have noted with frustration that it was Pence who first advocated Haley joining the administration, even though she had been tacitly critical of Trump during her 2016 response to President Barack Obama’s final State of the Union address and had supported Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida during the 2016 Republican primary.For now, friends said, with plenty of time for another pivot down the line, supporting Trump makes sense.”Having that tweet from Donald Trump is going to be very, very important, promoting the book,” said Bakari Sellers, the former South Carolina state legislator who ran unsuccessfully for lieutenant governor and is now a CNN commentator. “She got what she wanted.”Sellers, a Democrat who said he considered Haley a friend, said that in her balancing act he saw someone who had plenty of time to recalibrate. Haley, he predicted, would have a longer political story to tell.”Donald Trump is going to be a footnote in her political career,” Sellers predicted. “It won’t be defining.”This article originally appeared in The New York Times.(C) 2019 The New York Times Company
November 20, 2019Read More
Agents asked to speak with him last month but never did, though the bureau made clear to his lawyers that he was not the target of a continuing investigation.
November 20, 2019Read More
Syrian government troops shelled a camp hosting displaced people near the Turkish border in the country’s northwest Wednesday, killing at least 15 people and wounding others, Syrian opposition activists said. Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human…
November 20, 2019Read More
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