Pelosi Impeachment Inquiry

DTB2 · Oct 16, 2020

Here4money said:
You should embrace capitalism and private enterprise like a real American, not criticize it like an unwashed mongrel commie.
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Sure, just give up their Section 230 immunity and we'll see.

Cuddles · Oct 16, 2020

DTB2 said:
Sure, just give up their Section 230 immunity and we'll see.
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overbearing government regulation, the crutch of socialism

Cuddles · Nov 9, 2020

Here4money said:
Among the revelations in the documents released Tuesday: a message from Giuliani to Parnas saying he had involved a person he called “no 1” — possibly Trump himself — in an effort to lift a U.S. visa ban on a former Ukrainian prosecutor who was planning to come to the United States to make claims about Biden.
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Here4money said:
oh lawd...inb4 no quid pro quo:
https://www.cnn.com/2019/10/18/politics/giuliani-shokin-state-visa-george-kent/index.html
Exclusive: Giuliani pushed Trump administration to grant a visa to a Ukrainian official promising dirt on Democrats

Washington (CNN)Career diplomat George Kent told congressional investigators in his closed-door testimony this week that Rudy Giuliani asked the State Department and the White House to grant a visa to the former Ukrainian official who Joe Biden had pushed to have removed when he was vice president, according to four people familiar with Kent's testimony.
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https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/...=Social&utm_source=Twitter#Echobox=1604942135

I was asked to lie about Hunter Biden, admits Ukrainian businessman

Hares Youssef claims he was promised a US visa in return for information that would damage Joe Biden’s presidential campaign, writes Manveen Rana

Cuddles · Jan 4, 2021

Cuddles · Jan 7, 2021

Cuddles · Jan 8, 2021

Cuddles · Jan 10, 2021

Here4money said:

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Cuddles · Jan 11, 2021

no quarter, no mercy

Cuddles · May 1, 2021

Here4money said:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-...r-complaints-from-giuliani-others-11570137147

Trump Ordered Ukraine Ambassador Removed After Complaints From Giuliani, Others
Marie Yovanovitch dismissed after Trump allies said she was blocking Biden probe and bad-mouthing president, people familiar with the matter say

WASHINGTON—President Trump ordered the removal of the ambassador to Ukraine after months of complaints from allies outside the administration, including his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, that she was undermining him abroad and obstructing efforts to persuade Kyiv to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden, according to people familiar with the matter.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/03/us/politics/trump-ukraine.html
Trump Envoys Pushed Ukraine to Commit to Investigations

WASHINGTON — Two of President Trump’s top envoys to Ukraine drafted a statement for the country’s new president in August that would have committed Ukraine to pursuing investigations sought by Mr. Trump into his political rivals, three people briefed on the effort said.

The drafting of the statement marks new evidence of how Mr. Trump’s fixation with Ukraine began driving senior diplomats to bend American foreign policy to the president’s political agenda in the weeks after the July 25 call between the two leaders.

The statement was drafted by Gordon D. Sondland, the United States ambassador to the European Union, and Kurt D. Volker, then the State Department’s envoy to Ukraine, according to the three people who have been briefed on it.

Mr. Volker spent Thursday on Capitol Hill being questioned by House investigators as Democrats pursued their impeachment inquiry into Mr. Trump’s actions. He disclosed a set of texts in September in which Bill Taylor, the top American diplomat in Ukraine, alluded to Mr. Trump’s decision earlier in the summer to freeze a military aid package to the country. He told Mr. Sondland and Mr. Volker: “I think it’s crazy to withhold security assistance for help with a political campaign.”

After speaking with Mr. Trump, Mr. Sondland texted back that there was no quid pro quo, adding, “I suggest we stop the back and forth by text.”

It was not clear if the statement drafted in August by Mr. Sondland and Mr. Volker came up in the closed-door session on Capitol Hill.

The statement was written with the awareness of a top aide to the Ukrainian president, as well as Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer and the de facto leader of a shadow campaign to push the Ukrainians to press ahead with investigations that could be of political benefit to Mr. Trump, according to one of the people briefed on it.

The statement would have committed Ukraine to investigating the energy company Burisma, which had employed Hunter Biden, the younger son of former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. And it would have called for the Ukrainian government to look into what Mr. Trump and his allies believe was interference by Ukrainians in the 2016 election in the United States to benefit Hillary Clinton.

The idea behind the statement was to break the Ukrainians of their habit of promising American diplomats and leaders behind closed doors that they would look into matters and never follow through.

It is unclear if the statement was delivered to Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian president, but no statement was released publicly under his name. Around that time, the Ukrainian officials indicated to the Americans that they wanted to avoid becoming more deeply enmeshed in American politics.

The drafting of the statement, which came in the weeks after the July 25 phone call between Mr. Trump and Mr. Zelensky, was an effort to pacify Mr. Trump and Mr. Giuliani and normalize relations between the two countries as Ukraine faced continuing conflict with Russia. Mr. Sondland and Mr. Volker believed that Mr. Giuliani was “poisoning” Mr. Trump’s mind about Ukraine and that eliciting a public commitment from Mr. Zelensky to pursue the investigations would induce Mr. Trump to more fully support the new Ukrainian government, according to the people familiar with it.

Mr. Giuliani said he was aware of the statement but that it was not written at his behest. He said the statement would include a commitment to investigations of Burisma and the circumstances around the 2016 election.
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Here4money said:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nati...e0c88a-eb6d-11e9-9c6d-436a0df4f31d_story.html

At least four national security officials raised alarms about Ukraine policy before and after Trump call with Ukrainian president

At least four national security officials were so alarmed by the Trump administration’s attempts to pressure Ukraine for political purposes that they raised concerns with a White House lawyer both before and immediately after President Trump’s July 25 call with that country’s president, according to U.S. officials and other people familiar with the matter.

The nature and timing of the previously undisclosed discussions with National Security Council legal adviser John Eisenberg indicate that officials were delivering warnings through official White House channels earlier than previously understood — including before the call that precipitated a whistleblower complaint and the impeachment inquiry of the president.

At the time, the officials were unnerved by the removal in May of the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, by subsequent efforts by Trump’s lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani to promote Ukraine-related conspiracies, as well as by signals in meetings at the White House that Trump wanted the new government in Kiev to deliver material that might be politically damaging to Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden.

Those concerns soared in the call’s aftermath, officials said. Within minutes, senior officials including national security adviser John Bolton were being pinged by subordinates about problems with what the president had said to his Ukrainian counterpart, Volodymyr Zelensky. Bolton and others scrambled to obtain a rough transcript that was already being “locked down” on a highly classified computer network.

But new details about the sequence inside the White House suggest that concerns about the call and events leading up to it were profound even among Trump’s top advisers, including Bolton and then-acting deputy national security adviser Charles Kupperman. Bolton and Kupperman did not respond to requests for comment.

Officials said that within hours of the 9 a.m. conversation, a rough transcript compiled by aides had been moved from a widely shared White House computer network to one normally reserved for highly classified intelligence operations. According to the whistleblower’s complaint, White House lawyers “directed” officials to move the transcript to the classified system. At the same time, officials were seeking ways to report what they had witnessed, an undertaking complicated by the lack of a White House equivalent to the inspector general positions found at other agencies.

As a result, one official who had listened on the call went “immediately” to Eisenberg. By the end of the next day, at least two others who had either heard the call or seen the rough transcript had also done so, said a person familiar with the matter.

It is not clear whether Eisenberg took any action either after the warnings he received earlier in July or after the Trump-Zelensky conversation. One official said Eisenberg vowed he would “follow up,” a message interpreted to mean that he intended to investigate the matter and perhaps relay the dismay up the ranks to White House counsel Pat Cipollone.

The absence of any clear action by Eisenberg or others may have contributed to decisions by White House insiders to relay their concerns to a CIA employee who assembled the information they supplied into a whistleblower complaint that he submitted Aug. 12 to the U.S. intelligence community’s inspector general.

Those involved in sounding alarms “were not a swamp, not a deep state,” said a former senior official. Rather, they were White House officials “who got concerned about this because this is not the way they want to see the government run.”

Officials traced the origins of their initial concerns about Trump and Ukraine to the abrupt and unexplained removal of the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, after she became the target of a right-wing smear campaign that accused her — with no apparent evidence — of undermining Trump and his policies.

NSC officials were alternately baffled and alarmed by the behavior of Giuliani, who had agitated for Yovanovitch’s removal and proceeded to declare on cable television interviews that he was pressing Ukraine to reopen a corruption probe of an energy company that had paid Hunter Biden, the former vice president’s son, as much as $100,000 a month to serve as a board member.

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Here4money said:
https://www.cnn.com/2019/10/11/politics/marie-yovanovitch-testimony-ukraine/index.html

Former US ambassador to Ukraine says Trump wanted her removed and blames 'unfounded and false claims'

Yovanovitch told lawmakers at a closed-door deposition that she was informed by Deputy Secretary of State John Sullivan there had been "a concerted campaign against me" and that Trump had lost confidence in her, adding that the State Department had "been under pressure from the President to remove me since the Summer of 2018."

Yovanovitch said she believed she had been removed because of "unfounded and false claims by people with clearly questionable motives," a reference to the effort led by Trump's personal attorney and former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani and his associates to remove her as ambassador.

Yovanovitch appeared Friday after the White House and State Department had directed her not to attend, according to a statement from the three Democratic committee chairmen leading the impeachment inquiry. In response, the chairmen issued a subpoena to compel her testimony.

Her deposition is a key part of the Democrats' impeachment inquiry into the President and Ukraine, which has been fueled by a whistleblower complaint alleging the President sought help from Ukraine to investigate his political rival and the White House tried to cover it up. Yovanovitch suggested some of those associates had financial motivations for pushing her out.

"With respect to Mayor Giuliani, I have had only minimal contacts with him -- a total of three that I recall. None related to the events at issue," she said, according to her prepared statement. "I do not know Mr. Giuliani's motives for attacking me. But individuals who have been named in the press as contacts of Mr. Giuliani may well have believed that their personal financial ambitions were stymied by our anti-corruption policy in Ukraine."

She was unexpectedly pulled from her position in the spring, and her ousting was cited in the whistleblower's complaint as having raised red flags about whether the President was abusing his office by soliciting foreign interference in the election to help find dirt on former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter.

get fucked Donnie
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Here4money said:
oh lawd...inb4 no quid pro quo:

https://www.cnn.com/2019/10/18/politics/giuliani-shokin-state-visa-george-kent/index.html
Exclusive: Giuliani pushed Trump administration to grant a visa to a Ukrainian official promising dirt on Democrats

Washington (CNN)Career diplomat George Kent told congressional investigators in his closed-door testimony this week that Rudy Giuliani asked the State Department and the White House to grant a visa to the former Ukrainian official who Joe Biden had pushed to have removed when he was vice president, according to four people familiar with Kent's testimony.

Kent, the deputy assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, testified that around January 2019 Giuliani requested a visa for former Ukrainian prosecutor-general Viktor Shokin to travel to the United States. Shokin had been pushed out of his position as Ukraine's top prosecutor in 2016 after pressure from Western leaders, including Biden, over concerns that he was not pursuing corruption cases.
Giuliani has previously told CNN he wanted to interview Shokin in person because the Ukrainian promised to reveal dirt on Democrats.

Kent told congressional investigators the State Department had objected to the request, and State did not grant the visa. Giuliani, Kent said, then appealed to the White House to have State reverse its decision. Shokin's visa was never granted, although Giuliani eventually spoke with Shokin over Skype.

Details from those interviews were included in a cache of documents Giuliani delivered to the State Department earlier this year, in hopes that the administration would investigate those claims. The State Department inspector general eventually turned the documents over to congressional investigators.

According to a write-up of his interview with Shokin included in the documents, Giuliani claimed that Shokin "believes the current Ambassador Marie L.
Yovanovitch denied his visa" and noted that Yovanovitch was "close to Mr. Biden." In her recent testimony to the House Intelligence Committee, Yovanovitch said she has met Biden "several times over the course of our many years in government, neither he nor the previous Administration ever, directly or directly, raised the issue of either Burisma or Hunter Biden with me."

Giuliani's efforts to push a smear campaign against Yovanovitch ultimately led to her removal from her post in May.
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Here4money said:
https://thehill.com/homenews/admini...-there-was-no-doubt-trump-wanted-quid-pro-quo

NSC official testified there was 'no doubt' Trump pushed quid pro quo

A White House official who was on President Trump's call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky told Congress there was “no doubt” that Trump had invoked a quid pro quo, according to transcripts released Friday as part of Democrats' impeachment inquiry.

Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, a Ukraine specialist on the National Security Council (NSC) who was on the controversial July 25 phone call, told House lawmakers the message from Trump was clear.

"The demand was, in order to get the White House meeting, they had to deliver an investigation,” Vindman testified.
That assessment was backed by Fiona Hill, formerly Trump’s top Russia analyst at the NSC, who told lawmakers it was widely understood that investigating Burisma — the Ukrainian energy giant that had employed former Vice President Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden — was code for investigating the Bidens.

Vindman said Trump mentioned Burisma by name on the July 25 call.

“This is very much repeating things that Rudy Giuliani was saying in public on television,” Hill said.

Both Vindman and Hill told House investigators last month that Giuliani, the president's personal attorney, was a liability to diplomats managing U.S. foreign policy in Kiev — and should therefore be avoided.

Vindman said he told Kurt Volker, former special envoy to Ukraine, on “a couple occasions” that “there was a lot of risk involved with trying to deal with Mr. Giuliani,” according to the transcript of his Oct. 29 deposition.

And Hill said she’d given Volker similar advice, warning it wasn’t “a good idea” to meet with the former New York City mayor, whose multifaceted agenda in Ukraine included efforts to oust a veteran U.S. diplomat; pressure Ukrainian leaders to find dirt on Trump’s political rivals; and drum up business opportunities for his financial partners.

“[Volker] said that he thought that he would be able to … reason with him and to, you know, kind of … manage this,” Hill said. “Well, we did not think that this was manageable.”

That view was shared by John Bolton, Trump’s now-former national security adviser, who had characterized Giuliani as “a hand grenade” who would ultimately “blow everybody up,” Hill testified.

“Ambassador Bolton had said repeatedly that nobody should be meeting with Giuliani,” Hill said during her deposition on Oct. 14.

But the isolation campaign met with limited success for one simple reason: Trump, in an Oval Office meeting in May, had told several top diplomats — including Volker and Gordon Sondland, Trump’s ambassador to the E.U. — that Giuliani would be his point man on Ukrainian policy.

“He just kept saying, ‘Talk to Rudy, talk to Rudy,'” Sondland told lawmakers during his deposition last month.

Volker testified that he did just that, delivering a warning to Giuliani that he shouldn’t trust a former Ukrainian prosecutor, Yuriy Lutsenko, whom the State Department had long considered to be corrupt and self-serving. But the message fell flat, and Giuliani, Volker testified, emerged as “a problem” for diplomats seeking to root out corruption and strengthen ties with Kiev.

“The negative narrative about Ukraine which Mr. Giuliani was furthering was the problem,” Volker testified on Oct. 3. “It was impeding our ability to build the relationship the way we should be doing.”

The new details emerged this week as Democrats leading the impeachment investigation shift from weeks of closed-door depositions to a public phase of the process, to feature several televised hearings next week. As part of that transition, they’re releasing the verbatim transcripts of the 15 witness depositions they’ve conducted privately since the inquiry was launched on Sept. 24.

The transcripts for Vindman and Hill were the latest releases in that process. Both of them provided new ammunition for Democrats, who have accused Trump of abusing his office in pressing Zelensky to open investigations into the 2016 elections and Biden — both of which would have helped Trump politically heading into the 2020 elections.

Aside from his association with Lutsenko, Giuliani was also in contact with John Solomon, an opinion columnist, formerly with The Hill, who wrote a series of pieces earlier this year promoting allegations of corruption by former Vice President Joe Biden, as well as debunked theories that it was Ukraine, not Russia, that had interfered in the 2016 elections.

Another Solomon column, based on an interview with Lutsenko, accused Marie Yovanovitch, the former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, of providing Lutsenko with a “do-not-prosecute” list. Vindland testified that there wasn’t a shred of truth to that account.

"All the key elements were false,” he said.

Hill also testified that Giuliani — along with a pair of business partners with Ukrainian ties, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman — were tapping Giuliani’s proximity to Trump in order to boost their own financial prospects.

“My view in looking at this, is that individuals — private individuals like Mr. Giuliani and his business associates — are trying to appropriate presidential power or the authority of the president, given the position that Mr. Giuliani is in, to also pursue their own personal interests,” she said.

Giuliani was also eroding morale in the State Department, multiple diplomats have testified, particularly after he helped to orchestrate the removal of Yovanovitch, who was recalled to Washington in May. Hill called it “a real turning point” for the diplomatic corps.

“There was no basis for her removal,” Hill testified. “The accusations against her had no merit whatsoever. This was a mishmash of conspiracy theories.”

Giuliani’s attorneys did not respond Friday to questions seeking comment.
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Here4money said:
Trump now claiming Shchiff is doctoring transcripts. No dangerous rhetoric there, no sir.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/poli...1f0d60-0472-11ea-8292-c46ee8cb3dce_story.html

Live updates: Democrats release transcripts of testimony from three officials ahead of first impeachment inquiry public hearing

Democrats on Monday released the testimony of three Trump administration officials, two days before public hearings are set to begin in the House impeachment inquiry.

In one of the testimonies, Laura Cooper, a senior defense official, told House impeachment investigators last month that the Pentagon sought clarification from the Trump administration on July 18 about the holdup of aid to Ukraine.

Cooper, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for Russia, Ukraine and Eurasia, said that at a July 23 meeting, the Office of Management and Budget told agencies that “the White House chief of staff has conveyed that the president has concerns about Ukraine and Ukraine security assistance.”

Transcripts of the testimony of Catherine Croft and Christopher Anderson, two State Department Ukraine specialists, were also released Monday.

Hours earlier, President Trump lashed out anew at the investigation, claiming without any evidence that House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.) had doctored transcripts from closed-door depositions.

Democrats have chosen the top U.S. diplomat to Ukraine, William B. Taylor Jr., and the deputy assistant secretary of state responsible for Ukraine, George Kent, as their lead witnesses on Wednesday as they seek to build the case that Trump improperly pressed Ukraine for an investigation of former vice president Joe Biden and his son Hunter at a time when U.S. military aid was being withheld.

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/tr...es-trump-directed-freeze-aid-ukraine-n1080256

Pentagon official testifies Trump directed freeze on aid to Ukraine
Asked if the president was authorized to order that type of hold, Laura Cooper said there were concerns that he wasn’t.

Laura Cooper, the top Pentagon official overseeing U.S. policy regarding Ukraine, told House impeachment investigators last month that President Donald Trump directed the relevant agencies to freeze aid to Ukraine over the summer, according to a transcript of her testimony released Monday.

Cooper, during Oct. 23 testimony before the three House committees leading the impeachment inquiry into Trump's Ukraine dealings, testified that she and other Pentagon officials had answered questions about the Ukraine assistance in the middle of June — so she was surprised when one of her subordinates told her that a hold had been placed on the funds after an interagency meeting in July.

“I got, you know, I got a readout from the meeting — there was discussion in that session about the — about OMB [Office of Management and Budget] saying that they were holding the Congressional Notification related to” Ukraine, Cooper testified, according to the transcript.

Cooper, according to the transcript of her testimony, described the hold as "unusual."

Cooper said that she attended a meeting on July 23, where "this issue" of Trump's "concerns about Ukraine and Ukraine security assistance" came up. She said the president's concerns were conveyed by acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney.

Days later, on July 26, she testified that she found out that both military and humanitarian aid had been impacted.

Asked if the president was authorized to order that type of hold, Cooper said there were concerns that he wasn't.

"Well, I'm not an expert on the law, but in that meeting immediately deputies began to raise concerns about how this could be done in a legal fashion because there was broad understanding in the meeting that the funding — the State Department funding related to an earmark for Ukraine and that the DOD funding was specific to Ukraine security assistance. So the comments in the room at the deputies' level reflected a sense that there was not an understanding of how this could legally play out. And at that meeting the deputies agreed to look into the legalities and to look at what was possible," she said, according to the transcript.

At the next meeting with national security personnel, she said she told attendees "there were two legally available mechanisms should the President want to stop assistance" — a presidential rescission notice to Congress or for the Defense Department to do “a reprogramming action.”

“But I mentioned that either way, there would need to be a notification to Congress,” she said, according to the transcript.

Asked if that happened, Cooper said, "That did not occur."

Investigators have zeroed in on the testimony of several key figures in the Ukraine affair — including Bill Taylor, the top U.S. diplomat in Ukraine, and George Kent, a deputy assistant secretary of state who worked on Ukraine and five other countries — to support the allegation that the Trump administration froze aid intended for Ukraine as part of an attempt to pressure the country to open probes that would benefit Trump politically.

The freeze on military aid to Ukraine — which Cooper’s testimony corroborates — is a crucial part of the narrative that Democrats have woven together in attempting to prove that the president sought a quid pro quo with Ukraine.

Top Republicans, including Trump himself, have said there couldn't have been a quid pro quo because, they claim, the Ukrainians were not aware that military aid was being withheld in the first place.

However, Cooper testified that she had concluded from conversations she'd had with Kurt Volker, the then-U.S. special envoy to Ukraine, and Taylor, that that couldn't possibly be true.

"I knew from my Kurt Volker conversation and also from sort of the alarm bells that were coming from Ambassador Taylor and his team that there were Ukrainians who knew about this," she said, according to the transcript.

Cooper also testified that there was a concerted effort within the executive branch to try to get the president to lift the hold.

“My sense is that all of the senior leaders of the U.S. national security departments and agencies were all unified in their — in their view that this assistance was essential, that we could work with the government of Ukraine to tackle corruption, and they were trying to find ways to engage the President on this,” Cooper said.

She said she discussed the frozen aid with Volker on Aug. 20.

"So in that meeting he did mention something to me that, you know, was the first about somehow an effort that he was engaged in to see if there was a statement that the government of Ukraine would make that would somehow disavow any interference in U.S. elections and would commit to the prosecution of any individuals involved in election interference. And that was about as specific as it got," she said.

The transcript of Cooper's closed-door testimony was just the latest document made public as the probe moves to a new phase. House Democrats last week released transcripts of testimony from Taylor, Kent, Volker, U.S. Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland and ousted U.S. ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch.

The testimony of those key figures have largely established a narrative that suggests the Trump administration sought to tie the nearly $400 million in military and security aid to Ukraine as well as the prospect of a coveted White House meeting to demands that Volodymyr Zelenskiy announce probes into former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden and a conspiracy related to the 2016 election.

In a statement, the chairs of the three committees leading the inquiry — House Intelligence Committee Chair Adam Schiff, D-Calif.; House Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Eliot Engel, D-N.Y.; and House Oversight Committee acting Chair Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y. — said Cooper testified that Trump "through the Office of Management and Budget, directed the freeze on hundreds of millions of dollars of critical military aid for Ukraine, against the judgment of career officials in the Department of Defense, Department of State, and other relevant agencies."

They also said that she had "raised concerns, as did others on several occasions, to senior U.S. government officials about the legality of withholding the congressionally-authorized money, and the challenges that White House delays would put on spending it."

Cooper's testimony was delayed by five hours after a group of House Republicans who don't sit on the committees that questioned her stormed the secure room where her deposition was taking place.
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Here4money said:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/11/16/big-developments-david-holmess-testimony/

A Friday night surprise: David Holmes throws a wrench in Trump’s impeachment defense

Former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch’s testimony was the big public spectacle on Friday. The bigger news in the Ukraine scandal appears to have come later in the day in a private deposition.

It came from David Holmes, an aide to top U.S. diplomat in Ukraine William B. Taylor Jr. Taylor said this week that Holmes overheard President Trump speaking with Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland the day after Trump’s call with Ukraine’s president in July.

And it turns out Holmes fills in a number of key details that Taylor didn’t.

Below are some key points from his opening statement, which CNN obtained.

1. Sondland’s testimony continues to crumble
At three distinct points, we have seen Sondland’s testimony called into question. The first time was when other witnesses said he talked about a quid pro quo with Ukrainian officials on July 10, which Sondland soon confirmed via clarified testimony. The second was this week, when Taylor disclosed that Holmes had overheard a Sondland call with Trump on July 26 that Sondland had failed to mention and in which Trump asked about the investigations he was asking for. “Sondland will address any issues that arise from this in his testimony next week,” his lawyer said Wednesday.

And now Holmes undermines a central claim in Sondland’s testimony: That Sondland didn’t know that Trump and his personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani’s interest in investigating a Ukrainian company that employed Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden had anything to do with the Biden family.

“I noted that there was ‘big stuff’ going on in Ukraine, like a war with Russia,” Holmes says of his conversation with Sondland on July 26, “and Ambassador Sondland replied that he meant ‘big stuff’ that benefits the president, like the ‘Biden investigation’ that Mr. Giuliani was pushing.”

The quote about the “Biden investigation” is key. Sondland said in his deposition that he had pushed for an investigation into Burisma Holdings, which had employed Hunter Biden, but that he didn’t know there was any connection to the Bidens.

“But I did not understand, until much later,” Sondland said as of late May, “that Mr. Giuliani’s agenda might have also included an effort to prompt the Ukrainians to investigate Vice President Biden or his son or to involve Ukrainians, directly or indirectly, in the President’s 2020 reelection campaign.”

That was tough to swallow, though, given that Giuliani’s efforts to target the Bidens were reported by the New York Times in early May — and that Trump himself lodged his Biden conspiracy theory publicly on May 19. Yet even as of August, Sondland claimed in his testimony, “I did not know until more recent press reports that Hunter Biden was on the board of Burisma.” Sondland explained in his testimony that he hadn’t read the news coverage, even though aides compiled it for him and he was focused on Ukraine policy during this time.

Holmes’s testimony quotes Sondland explicitly referring to this as the “Biden investigation” in July, which suggests there was a reason the ambassador’s testimony didn’t make sense. Sondland will testify alongside others on Wednesday, and his hot seat just got significantly hotter.

2. Another quid pro quo confirmation
Holmes says Taylor told him that on a June 28 call he had with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky and the “three amigos” — Sondland, special envoy to Ukraine Kurt Volker and Energy Secretary Rick Perry — “it was made clear that some action on a Burisma/Biden investigation was a precondition for an Oval Office meeting.”

This detail, notably, was not part of Taylor’s own testimony, though Taylor quickly came to believe that such a meeting was indeed conditioned on Ukraine launching such an investigation.

Taylor testified that on the June 28 call, before Zelensky was added to the line, Sondland said he didn’t want interagency officials on the call, because “he wanted to make sure no one was transcribing or monitoring as they added President Zelensky to the call.”

Taylor added: “Also, before President Zelensky joined the call, Ambassador Volker separately told the U.S. participants that he, Ambassador Volker, planned to be explicit with President Zelensky in a one-on-one meeting in Toronto on July 2. In that meeting, Ambassador Volker planned to make clear what President Zelensky should do to get the White House meeting.”

Taylor didn’t indicate in his opening statement what Volker said he planned to tell Zelensky.

3. He was spurred by GOP defenses of Trump
Holmes’s account is something he says he didn’t consider to be relevant — until he saw some of the defenses of Trump.

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.”

Holmes doesn’t directly say that his testimony contradicts the GOP’s arguments, but it’s certainly suggested. And it makes his full deposition, which we have yet to see, worth paying close attention to.
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Here4money said:
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/17/in-trump-nixon-impeachment-comparison-pelosi-talks-resignation.html

Pelosi says Trump’s actions are worse than Richard Nixon’s and suggests he should resign

In a CBS interview broadcast on Sunday, U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi alluded to Nixon’s resignation after the Watergate scandal.

Pelosi, the top Democrat in Congress, told reporters last week that Trump’s pressure on Ukraine to investigate one of his potential opponents in the 2020 election “makes what Nixon did look almost small.”

Nixon is the only U.S. president who has resigned from office.

U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is amplifying her unfavorable comparison of President Donald Trump to fellow Republican Richard Nixon, saying that disgraced president at least cared enough about the country to leave office before his impeachment.

The top Democrat in Congress told reporters last week that Trump’s pressure on Ukraine to investigate one of his potential opponents in the 2020 election “makes what Nixon did look almost small.”

In a CBS interview broadcast on Sunday, she alluded to Nixon’s resignation after the Watergate scandal involving a break-in at Democratic Party headquarters and the subsequent cover-up.

“I mean, what the president did was so much worse than even what Richard Nixon did, that at some point Richard Nixon cared about the country enough to recognize that this could not continue,” Pelosi said on CBS’ “Face the Nation.”

Nixon, whose name has become synonymous with scandal and ignominy for many Americans, resigned in 1974 after the House Judiciary Committee approved articles of impeachment against him but before the full House voted on the issue, and he was not impeached.

He is the only U.S. president who has resigned from office.

Pelosi for months resisted calls from her more liberal Democratic lawmakers to initiate impeachment proceedings, but said Trump’s call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy compelled her to open the inquiry against the president.

Since launching the proceedings on Sept. 24, Pelosi has not been in the room as the House Intelligence Committee held public hearings on Trump’s impeachment. However, her voice is loud and clear on the outside, where she drives messaging in a nuanced but sharp manner.

Her Nixon comparison came amid the trial of longtime Trump ally Roger Stone, a self-proclaimed “dirty trickster” who worked for Nixon’s re-election campaign and has Nixon’s face tattooed on his back. Stone was convicted on Friday of lying to Congress, obstruction and witness tampering during the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election.

Trump and his supporters have attacked the impeachment probe as politically motivated. Trump says his call with Zelenskiy was “perfect” while Republican lawmakers criticize the impeachment process as unfair.

“Do you have any evidence at all that the president did anything criminal or illegal? And the answer is no,” Republican U.S. Representative Chris Stewart said on ABC’s “This Week.”

The president has “every opportunity to present his case,” Pelosi told CBS, including coming before the intelligence panel.

“If the president has information that demonstrates his innocence in all of this, which we haven’t seen,” she said. “If he has information that is exculpatory -that means ex, taking away, culpable, blame -then we look forward to seeing it.”

She accused Trump of bribery last week in having his aides dangle a White House meeting, then $400 million in suspended U.S. security assistance, if Zelenskiy announced an investigation into a Democratic 2020 political rival, former Vice President Joe Biden. Bribery is one of three articles of impeachment in the U.S. Constitution.

In the CBS interview, taped on Friday, the House speaker called Trump an “imposter” whose insecurity drove his real-time Twitter attack on former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch as she testified in the impeachment inquiry.

“Everywhere Marie Yovanovitch went turned bad,” Trump said on Friday as she testified, an extraordinary moment that Democrats said amounted to witness intimidation.

Republicans at the hearing expressed support for Yovanovitch’s public service and some later openly criticized Trump’s actions. “I find the president’s tweet unfortunate,” Representative Mike Turner, a Republican on the intelligence panel, said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

“He made a mistake,” Pelosi told CBS. “He knows her strength. And he was trying to undermine it.”
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Here4money said:
all roads lead to Russia...

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...ate-parnas-got-1-million-from-russia-u-s-says

Giuliani Ally Parnas Got $1 Million From Russia, U.S. Says

Rudy Giuliani’s associate Lev Parnas got $1 million from an account in Russia in September, a month before he was charged with conspiring to funnel foreign money into U.S. political campaigns, according to U.S. prosecutors who asked a judge to jail him for understating his income and assets.

“The majority of that money appears to have been used on personal expenses and to purchase a home,” prosecutors said in a court filing Wednesday. Parnas failed to disclose the payment to the government, prosecutors said.

The payment raises provocative new questions about the nature of the work Parnas and his associate Igor Fruman were doing and who they were doing it for. Much about what they did remains unclear.

The pair was charged, in part, with working on behalf of one or more Ukrainian government officials to seek the removal of then-U.S. ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch. They have pleaded not guilty to all charges.

Bloomberg and other news organizations have also reported that Parnas was added to the legal team of Dmitry Firtash, a Ukrainian oligarch fighting extradition to the U.S.

Giuliani and his lawyer didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.

There was little detail or explanation about the source or purpose of the payment to Parnas in the court filing. Prosecutors said the money was sent to an account in the name of Parnas’s wife, Svetlana Parnas. It appeared “to be an attempt to ensure that any assets were held in Svetlana’s, rather than Lev’s, name,” prosecutors claimed.

The payment came the same month that Parnas and Fruman received the first of two requests for documents from Congressional committees investigating the Trump administration’s actions in Ukraine. The pair initially refused to comply with the requests, and were arrested days later on a jet bridge at Dulles International Airport near Washington D.C., as they sought to board a plane with one-way tickets to Vienna. Parnas’s lawyer has subsequently said his client is willing to comply with the congressional investigation.

Parnas, a U.S. citizen who was born in Ukraine, could face at least five years in prison on the counts with which he has already been charged, but prosecutors have said he remains under investigation and will likely face more charges.

Parnas and Fruman are also accused of using an unnamed Russian national as the source of funds for political donations to curry favor with state and federal officials for support in starting a retail marijuana business. The government didn’t say whether the same Russian was the source of the $1 million payment in September.

Prosecutors asked the judge to revoke Parnas’s bail, saying he also lied about his income. While he presented varying pictures of his financial condition to authorities on three different occasions, prosecutors say he never disclosed the $1 million payment, or a $200,000 escrow deposit he had made on a $4.5 million Boca Raton property -- and that he really received $200,000 for his work on Firtash’s legal team, not the $50,000 he claimed.

“Parnas poses an extreme risk of flight, and that risk of flight is only compounded by his continued and troubling misrepresentations,” prosecutors said.

The government was responding to Parnas’s request for less strict bail conditions. He asked to be allowed some time each day outside his apartment while he is under home detention.

Parnas’s lawyer, Joseph Bondy, declined to comment and said he would respond to the prosecutors with his own filing.
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Here4money said:
And the House couldn't call witnesses not approved by the WH. Those who were brave enough risked legal retaliation by the White House.

https://lawandcrime.com/impeachment...to-let-lev-parnas-speak-at-impeachment-trial/

Trump White House Really Doesn’t Want to Let Lev Parnas Speak at Impeachment Trial

Indicted Rudy Giuliani business associate Lev Parnas, much like Michael Cohen, isn’t a person one should blindly trust as truthful. Parnas has been accused of committing multiple federal crimes, and telling people what they want to hear is an easy way to make people forget that. On the other hand, Parnas clearly does have receipts on the Ukraine affair and shouldn’t be completely dismissed, as the White House plans to do.

We already know where President Donald Trump stands on John Bolton’s testimony, but the Wall Street Journal, citing “people working with the [Trump impeachment] legal team,” reported Monday that the White House will do what it can to ensure Parnas’s testimony isn’t included at the impeachment trial in the Senate:

White House officials would also block any attempt to include testimony from Lev Parnas in the Senate trial, the people said. Mr. Parnas, an associate of Rudy Giuliani, the president’s personal attorney who was working on his behalf in Ukraine, offered new allegations last week that have inflamed the debate about whether senators should call witnesses in the president’s trial, which opens Tuesday.

On what legal basis? There can be none, says Supreme Court lawyer Neal Katyal.

On what possible legal basis? The venerable “the defendant is scared of actual evidence” rule?

Parnas isn’t even a govt employee.

But the White House and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) are openly coordinating on all things impeachment trial. Witnesses Democrats want to testify will be subject first to a vote in the Republican-controlled Senate, and there’s no guarantee that the Senate will vote to include Parnas’s testimony in the trial.

After months of a holding pattern given the ongoing criminal case against him in the Southern District of New York, Parnas sent the news cycle into overdrive when he appeared on cable news networks for interviews. In those interviews, he said that Trump — and many others — “knew exactly what was going on” in Ukraine, namely: efforts to get former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch fired; efforts to dig up dirt on the Bidens; efforts to get Ukraine to announce investigations of the Bidens.

“[Trump] was aware of all of my movements. I wouldn’t do anything without the consent of Rudy Giuliani or the president,” he said.

Parnas’s attorney Joseph Bondy frequently uses the hashtag #LetLevSpeak on Twitter. He did so as recently as Sunday when demanding that witnesses be called and asking, “What does @gop fear?”

Your dog don’t hunt, @sendavidperdue. Lev Parnas has first-hand information about the Ukranian quid pro quo. And, @TheJusticeDept relies on cooperating witnesses every day in securing indictments & convictions. What does @GOP fear? Call the witnesses. #LevRemembers #LetLevSpeak https://twitter.com/thehill/status/1218959584271962113 …

Law&Crime reached out to Bondy for comment about the White House’s plan to block Parnas’s testimony. We will update this story if we receive a response.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/29/nyregion/giuliani-yovanovitch-search-warrant-ukraine.html
Firing of U.S. Ambassador Is at Center of Giuliani Investigation
Prosecutors want to scrutinize Rudolph W. Giuliani’s communications with Ukrainian officials about the ouster of the ambassador, Marie L. Yovanovitch.

wo years ago, Rudolph W. Giuliani finally got one thing he had been seeking in Ukraine: The Trump administration removed the U.S. ambassador there, a woman Mr. Giuliani believed had been obstructing his efforts to dig up dirt on the Biden family.

It was a Pyrrhic victory. Mr. Giuliani’s push to oust the ambassador, Marie L. Yovanovitch, not only became a focus of President Donald J. Trump’s first impeachment trial, but it has now landed Mr. Giuliani in the cross hairs of a federal criminal investigation into whether he broke lobbying laws, according to people with knowledge of the matter.

The long-running inquiry reached a turning point this week when F.B.I. agents seized telephones and computers from Mr. Giuliani’s home and office in Manhattan, the people said. At least one of the warrants was seeking evidence related to Ms. Yovanovitch and her role as ambassador, the people said.

Cuddles · May 28, 2021