Story 1: President Trumps Declares A National Emergency — Unleashes Full Power of United States Government — $50 Billion in New Funding To Deal With COVID-19 Pandemic — Videos
BREAKING: Donald Trump declares a national emergency
Trump declares National Emergency over coronavirus
Trump declares national emergency over coronavirus pandemic
Tucker: Regular life is all but suspended
Hannity: Major businesses working with Trump on coronavirus
Trump declares virus emergency; Pelosi announces aid deal
By LISA MASCARO, ZEKE MILLER, ANDREW TAYLOR and JILL COLVIN
President Donald Trump on Friday declared the coronavirus pandemic a national emergency in order to free up more money and resources. But he denied any responsibility for delays in making testing available for the new virus, whose spread has roiled markets and disrupted the lives of everyday Americans.
Speaking from the Rose Garden, Trump said, “I am officially declaring a national emergency,” unleashing as much as $50 billion for state and local governments to respond to the outbreak.
Trump also announced a range of executive actions, including a new public-private partnership to expand coronavirus testing capabilities with drive-through locations, as his administration has come under fire for being too slow in making the test available.
Trump said, “I don’t take responsibility at all” for the slow rollout of testing.
Late Friday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced a deal with the Trump administration for an aid package from Congress that aims at direct relief to Americans — free testing, two weeks of sick pay for workers, enhanced unemployment benefits and bolstered food programs.
“We are proud to have reached an agreement with the Administration to resolve outstanding challenges, and now will soon pass the Families First Coronavirus Response Act,” Pelosi announced in a letter to colleagues. The House was poised to vote.
The crush of late-day activity capped a tumultuous week in Washington as the fast-moving virus shuttered the capital’s power centers, roiled financial markets and left ordinary Americans suddenly navigating through self-quarantines, school closures and a changed way of life.
The White House was under enormous pressure, dealing with the crisis on multiple fronts as it encroached ever closer on the president.
Trump has been known to flout public health advice — eagerly shaking hands during the more than hour-long afternoon event — but acknowledged he “most likely” will be tested now after having been in contact with several officials who have tested positive for the virus. “Fairly soon,” he said.
Still, Trump said officials don’t want people taking the test unless they have certain symptoms. “We don’t want people without symptoms to go and do that test,” Trump said, adding, “It’s totally unnecessary.”
Additionally, Trump took a number of other actions to bolster energy markets, ease the financial burden for Americans with student loans and give medical professionals additional “flexibility” in treating patients during the public health crisis.
“Through a very collective action and shared sacrifice, national determination, we will overcome the threat of the virus,” Trump said.
Central to the aid package from Congress, which builds on an emergency $8.3 billion measure approved last week, is the free testing and sick pay provisions.
Providing sick pay for workers is a crucial element of federal efforts to stop the rapid spread of the infection. Officials warn that the nation’s healthcare system could quickly become overwhelmed with gravely sick patients, as suddenly happened in Italy, one of the countries hardest hit by the virus.
The ability to ensure paychecks will keep flowing — for people who stay home as a preventative measure or because they’re feeling ill or caring for others — can help assure Americans they will not fall into financial hardship.
Hopes for swiftly passing the package seemed to be fading throughout the day as talks dragged on and Trump dismissed it during as “not doing enough.”
Ahead of Trump’s new conference, Pelosi delivered a statement from the speaker’s balcony at the Capitol imploring the Trump administration and congressional Republicans to “put families first” by backing the effort to provide Americans with relief.
“Our great nation has faced crisis before,” Pelosi said. “And every time, thanks to the courage and optimism of the American people, we have prevailed. Now, working together, we will once again prevail.”
Pelosi and Mnuchin engaged in days of around-the-clock negotiations with cross-town phone calls that continued even as Trump was speaking, both indicating earlier they were close to a deal.
They both promised a third coronavirus package will follow soon, with more aggressive steps to boost the U.S. economy, which economists fear has already slipped into recession.
The financial markets closed on an upswing after one of the worst nosedives since the 1987 downturn.
For most people, the new coronavirus causes only mild or moderate symptoms, such as fever and cough. For some, especially older adults and people with existing health problems, it can cause more severe illness, including pneumonia.
The vast majority of people recover. According to the World Health Organization, people with mild illness recover in about two weeks, while those with more severe illness may take three to six weeks to be over it.
Trump said he was gratified that Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro tested negative for the virus, after the pair sat next to each other for an extended period of time last weekend at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club. A senior aide to Bolsonaro tested positive.
Trump’s daugher, Ivanka Trump, worked from home Friday after meeting with Australian Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton, now in isolation at a hospital after testing positive for the coronavirus. White House spokesman Judd Deere said she was evaluated by the White House Medical Unit and it was determined that because she was exhibiting no symptoms she does not need to self-quarantine.
Attorney General William Barr, who also met with the Australian official, was staying home Friday, though he “felt great and wasn’t showing any symptoms,” according to his spokeswoman Kerri Kupec.
Several lawmakers, including some close to Trump, have also been exposed to people who tested positive for the virus, and are self-isolating.
Among them are Republican Sens. Lindsey Graham and Rick Scott, who were at Trump’s club on the weekend. Graham announced Friday that he also met with the Australian official who has now tested positive. And GOP Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, who had previously isolated himself after a potential exposure at a conservative conference in Washington, said Friday he met with a Spanish official and is now self-quarantining.
Hospitals welcomed Trump’s emergency declaration, which they and lawmakers in Congress had been requesting. It allows the Health and Human Services Department to temporarily waive certain federal rules that can make it harder for hospitals and other health care facilities to respond to an emergency.
The American Medical Association said the emergency declaration would help ensure America’s health care system has sufficient resources to properly respond to the ongoing outbreak.
Trump has struggled to show he’s on top of the crisis, after giving conflicting descriptions of what the U.S. is doing to combat the virus. On Wednesday he announced he would ban travel to the U.S. from Europe, and on Friday he suggested extending that to the U.K. because of a recent rise in cases.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, infectious disease chief at the National Institutes of Health, said more tests would be available over the next week, but warned, “We still have a long way to go.”
Fauci said Friday, “There will be many more cases. But we’ll take care of that, and ultimately, as the president said, this will end.”
___
Associated Press writers Aamer Madhani, Alan Fram, Lauran Neergaard, Martin Crutsinger, Laurie Kellman, Michael Balsamo and Kevin Freking in Washington and Bill Barrow in Atlanta contributed to this report.
Story 1: President Trump Among The Globalist Elitists At World Economic Forum — Boom vs. Doom — A Conflict of Visions — Claim: The United States Is Back and Booming — Reality: Big Government Spending Parties Budget Busters on Verge of Bubble Busting and Global Recession — The Party Is Over — Big Spender — Videos
The party’s over
It’s time to call it a day
They’ve burst your pretty balloon
And taken the moon away
It’s time to wind up the masquerade
Just make your mind up the piper must be paid
The party’s over
The candles flicker and dim
You danced and dreamed through the night
It seemed to be right just being with him
Now you must wake up, all dreams must end
Take off your makeup, the party’s over
It’s all over, my friend
The party’s over
It’s time to call it a day
Now you must wake up, all dreams must end
Take off your makeup, the party’s over
It’s all over, my friend
The minute you walked in the joint
I could see you were a man of distinction
A real big spender
Good lookin’ so refined
Say, wouldn’t you like to know what’s goin’ on in my mind?
So let me get right to the point
I don’t pop my cork for every man I see
Hey big spender,
Spend a little time with me
Wouldn’t you like to have fun, fun, fun
How’s about a few laughs, laughs
I could show you a good time
Let me show you a good time!
The minute you walked in the joint
I could see you were a man of distinction
A real big spender
Good lookin’ so refined
Say, wouldn’t you like to know what’s goin’ on in my mind?
So let me get right to the point,
I don’t pop my cork for every guy I see
Hey big spender
Hey big spender
Hey big spender
Spend, a little time with me
Yes
Donald Trump tells Davos audience he rejects environmental ‘prophets of doom’ as grim-faced Greta Thunberg looks on before she tells delegates ‘our house is still on fire’ and ‘to act as if you loved your children’
Donald Trump gave first keynote address to leaders at the World Economic forum in Davos on Tuesday
He called on countries to ‘reject the prophets of doom’ on the environment, calling them ‘foolish’
Remark was a swipe at teenage activist Greta Thunberg, who was sitting in the audience as he spoke
Thunberg gave a speech insisting ‘our house is still on fire’, before adding: ‘What will you tell your children?’
Donald Trump urged world leaders at Davos to ‘reject the environmental prophets of doom’ during his keynote address to the World Economic Forum on Tuesday.
The US President branded climate activists ‘the heirs of yesterday’s foolish fortune tellers’ while rattling off a list of projections that he said failed to come true, including overpopulation in the 1960s and the ‘end of oil’ in the 1990s.
Trump’s remarks were a clear swipe at 17-year-old Greta Thunberg who was sitting in the audience for his speech and had earlier chastised world and business leaders for ‘doing nothing’ to stop climate change.
He then touted America’s fossil fuel revolution in the form of shale gas and oil, inviting European leaders to invest.
In her own speech just a few minutes afterwards, Greta urged leaders to immediately stop investing in fossil fuels, and to pull subsidies for companies making energy from them.
Trump rejects environmental ‘prophets of doom’ in Davos speech
Donald Trump gave the first keynote address to the World Economic Forum in Davos on Sunday, telling world leaders to reject ‘prophets of doom’ on the environment and calling them ‘foolish’
Trump insisted that ‘now is a time for optimism’ as he touted the American shale oil and gas revolution, while encouraging European leaders to invest
The remark was swipe at teen climate activist Greta Thunberg, who sat in the audience during his speech (pictured)
Greta had earlier in the day accused world leaders of failing to do anything to protect the climate, ahead of a second address due to take place this afternoon
Greta, who was due to give her own address shortly after Trump, was pictured leaving the auditorium while the US President was still on stage behind her
Donald Trump speaks to waiting members of the media following his keynote address at Davos on Tuesday morning
Also in the auditorium listening to the speech was Trump’s daughter Ivanka (left) and her husband Jared Kushner (centre)
Trump used his speech to tout the US shale gas and oil revolution which has made America the largest producer of oil and gas in the world, before inviting European leaders to buy it
Greta had walked out while Trump was still stood on stage in order to deliver her address to a smaller audience, in which she insisted on the need for greater action on the climate.
(Scroll down for her full speech)
In a swipe at the President’s pledge to join the ‘trillion trees’ initiative, she said that it is no good planting trees across Africa ‘while at the same time forests like the Amazon are being slaughtered at an infinitely higher rate’.
‘I wonder, what will you tell your children was the reason to fail and leave them facing a climate chaos you knowingly brought upon them?’ she asked.
Parroting her remarks from when she addressed the conference last year, she added: ‘Our house is still on fire. Your inaction is fuelling the flames by the hour.
‘We are still telling you to panic, and to act as if you loved your children above all else.’
Meanwhile Trump insisted that technical innovation, not restricting economic growth, is the way forward. ‘Fear and doubt is not a good thought process,’ he said. ‘This is not a time for pessimism but a time for optimism.’
Greta then gave her own speech to a smaller audience in which she urged world and business leaders to immediately stop investing in and subsidising fossil fuels
Parroting her remarks from Davos a year ago, Thunberg said ‘our house is still on fire, and your inaction is fuelling the flames’, before adding: ‘What will you tell your children was the reason to fail?’
Donald Trump gave a thumbs up to reporters as he arrived at Davos, wearing special anti-slip covers on his shoes as he walked across the snowy ground
Donald Trump arrives at the World Economic Forum in Davos
Trump was flown to Davos from Zurich on board Marine One (pictured close to the camera) ahead of his address on Tuesday
Trump waves to the media as he is surrounded by security at Davos on Tuesday
Trump arrived in Zurich on board the presidential jet, Air Force One, on Tuesday morning
Trump gave an insight into his thoughts as he headed to the conference, saying he aims to bring ‘hundreds of billions of dollars’ back to the US
‘Without treating this as a real crisis we cannot solve it,’ she said. ‘It will require much more than this, this is just the very beginning.’
Thunberg is due to speak again around 1pm local time.
The forum’s own Global Risks report published last week warned that ‘climate change is striking harder and more rapidly than many expected’ with global temperatures on track to increase by at least three degrees Celsius (5.4 degrees Fahrenheit) towards the end of the century.
There are no expectations that Trump and Thunberg, who have exchanged barbs through Twitter, will actually meet, but the crowded venue and intense schedule mean a chance encounter cannot be ruled out.
When Trump and his entourage walked through UN headquarters last year at the annual General Assembly, a photo of the teenager staring in apparent fury at the president from the sidelines went viral.
Sustainability is the buzzword at the forum, which began in 1971, with heel crampons handed out to participants to encourage them to walk on the icy streets rather than use cars, and the signage paint made out of seaweed.
Trump’s opposition to renewable energy, his withdrawal from the Paris climate accord negotiated under his predecessor Barack Obama, and the free hand extended to the fossil fuel industry puts him at odds with the entire thrust of the event.
U.S. President Donald Trump delivers a speech next to World Economic Forum founder Klaus Schwab at the conference
President Donald Trump talks with reporters falling his speech at the World Economic Forum
Greta Thunberg (pictured today) has told the World Economic Forum in Davos that leaders have ‘done nothing’ to fight climate change, despite increased awareness
The 17-year-old climate activist spoke on the opening morning of the conference ahead of a keynote address by climate change sceptic Donald Trump (pictured arriving in Switzerland)
Security is high around Davos as 3,000 world and business leaders are expected in the Alpine town during the three-day meeting
‘Climate change is a hot topic at Davos,’ said Chris Williamson, chief business economist at IHS Markit, adding there had been a ‘change in the atmosphere’ and realisation that climate change represented a downside risk for the economy.
EU Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen said at a welcome ceremony in Davos that ‘for too long, humanity took away resources from the environment and in exchange produced waste and pollution’.
Business leaders attending the forum will be keen to tout their awareness on climate change but are likely also to be concerned by the state of the global economy whose prospects, according to the IMF, have improved but remain brittle.
The IMF cut its global growth estimate for 2020 to 3.3 percent, saying that a recent truce in the trade war between China and the US had brought some stability but that risks remained.
‘We are already seeing some tentative signs of stabilisation but we have not reached a turning point yet,’ said IMF chief Kristalina Georgieva.
Activists meanwhile will be pressing for much more concrete action to fight inequality, after Oxfam issued a report outlining how the number of billionaires has doubled in the past decade and the world’s 22 richest men now have more wealth than all the women in Africa.
Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner arrive at World Economic Forum event
Also expected at the conference are 1,200 environmental protesters who have spent three days walking there from the nearby town of Landquart
Ahead of the World Economic Forum, Greta gave a speech in the Swiss city of Lausanne in which she promised world leaders ‘you haven’t seen anything yet’
Klaus Schwab, Founder and Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum, pictured during his welcoming address to leaders on Monday night
Other key priorities will be exploring how to battle biodiversity loss, narrow the digital divide between the internet haves and have nots and step up the fight against pandemics in the face of vaccine hesitancy and drug resistance.
‘I am angry about the state of the world but I am also determined to engage and provide solutions and deliver,’ WWF director general Marco Lambertini told AFP. ‘There needs to be healthy balance between these two sentiments.’
The risk of global conflict will also loom large after the spike in tensions between the United States and Iran, following the killing of Iranian commander Qasem Soleimani in a US drone strike.
But a planned appearance by Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif – which could have paved the way for a showdown or even meeting with Trump – has been cancelled.
Venezuela’s opposition leader Juan Guaido – who declared himself acting president last year – will be attending the forum in defiance of a travel ban imposed by the regime of President Nicolas Maduro.
‘OUR HOUSE IS STILL ON FIRE’: GRETA’S FULL SPEECH
One year ago I came to Davos and told you that our house is on fire. I said I wanted you to panic.
I’ve been warned that telling people to panic about the climate crisis is a very dangerous thing to do. But don’t worry. It’s fine. Trust me, I’ve done this before and I assure you it doesn’t lead to anything.
And for the record, when we children tell you to panic we’re not telling you to go on like before.
We’re not telling you to rely on technologies that don’t even exist today at scale and that science says perhaps never will.
We are not telling you to keep talking about reaching ‘net zero emissions’ or ‘carbon neutrality’ by cheating and fiddling around with numbers.
We are not telling you to ‘offset your emissions’ by just paying someone else to plant trees in places like Africa while at the same time forests like the Amazon are being slaughtered at an infinitely higher rate.
Planting trees is good, of course, but it’s nowhere near enough of what needs to be done, and it cannot replace real mitigation or rewilding nature.
Let’s be clear. We don’t need a ‘low carbon economy.’ We don’t need to ‘lower emissions.’ Our emissions have to stop. And until we have the technologies that at scale can put our emissions to minus then we must forget about net zero — we need real zero.
Because distant net zero emission targets will mean absolutely nothing if we just continue to ignore the carbon dioxide budget — which applies for today, not distant future dates. If high emissions continue like now even for a few years, that remaining budget will soon be completely used up.
The fact that the USA is leaving the Paris accord seems to outrage and worry everyone, and it should. But the fact that we’re all about to fail the commitments you signed up for in the Paris Agreement doesn’t seem to bother the people in power even the least.
Any plan or policy of yours that doesn’t include radical emission cuts at the source starting today is completely insufficient for meeting the 1.5-degree or well-below-2-degrees commitments of the Paris Agreement.
And again — this is not about right or left. We couldn’t care less about your party politics.
From a sustainability perspective, the right, the left as well as the centre have all failed. No political ideology or economic structure has been able to tackle the climate and environmental emergency and create a cohesive and sustainable world. Because, in case you haven’t noticed, that world is currently on fire.
You say children shouldn’t worry. You say: ‘Just leave this to us. We will fix this, we promise we won’t let you down.’
And then — nothing. Silence. Or something worse than silence. Empty words and promises which give the impression that sufficient action is being taken.
All the solutions are obviously not available within today’s societies. Nor do we have the time to wait for new technological solutions to become available to start drastically reducing our emissions.
So of course the transition isn’t going to be easy. It will be hard. And unless we start facing this now together, with all cards on the table, we won’t be able to solve this in time.
In the days running up to the 50th anniversary of the World Economic Forum, I joined a group of climate activists who are demanding that you, the world’s most influential business and political leaders, begin to take the action needed. We demand that at this year’s World Economic Forum participants from all companies, banks, institutions and governments:
We don’t want these things done by 2050, 2030 or even 2021, we want this done now.
It may seem like we’re asking for a lot. And you will of course say that we are naïve. But this is just the very minimum amount of effort that is needed to start the rapid sustainable transition.
So either you do this or you’re going to have to explain to your children why you are giving up on the 1.5-degree target.
Giving up without even trying.
Well I’m here to tell you that unlike you, my generation will not give up without a fight.
The facts are clear, but they’re still too uncomfortable for you to address. You just leave it because you think it’s too depressing and people will give up. But people will not give up. You’re the ones who are giving up.
Last week I met with coal miners in Poland who lost their jobs because their mine was closed. And even they had not given up. On the contrary, they seem to understand the fact that we need to change more than you do.
I wonder, what will you tell your children was the reason to fail and leave them facing a climate chaos you knowingly brought upon them? The 1.5-degree target? That it seemed so bad for the economy that we decided to resign the idea of securing future living conditions without even trying?
Our house is still on fire. Your inaction is fuelling the flames by the hour. We are still telling you to panic, and to act as if you loved your children above all else.
Starting in November, the ECB will make 20 billion euros ($21.9 billion) of net asset purchases per month for as long as it takes for the euro zone’s inflation and growth outlooks to return to satisfactory levels.
The smaller increments but open-ended timescale of this second package (QE-II) surprised many, and was well below the 60 billion euro per month implemented at the beginning of QE-I in 2015.
The shape and size of the European Central Bank’s new bond-buying programcaught market participants off guard, with some now predicting it’ll be years until the euro zone is back to anything approaching normality.
Starting in November, the ECB will make 20 billion euros ($21.9 billion) of net asset purchases per month for as long as it takes for the euro zone’s inflation and growth outlooks to return to satisfactory levels. The purchasing will only end “shortly before” the next rate hike.
ECB President Mario Draghi pointed out Thursday that a major reason for the re-launch of net asset purchases was that inflation expectations remained consistently below the ECB’s target of just below 2%, but implored governments to deploy fiscal policy to supplement his actions.
WATCH NOW
VIDEO02:53
Here are the new measures the ECB is taking to stimulate the euro zone economy
This will be the second round of quantitative easing (QE) from the ECB, the first coming four years ago in response to the calamitous euro zone debt crisis.
Shweta Singh, managing director of global macro at TS Lombard, said the second round of asset purchases would likely have a “milder impact than QE-I, when borrowing costs were higher, fragmentation across the euro area was severe and domestic risks were far greater.”
“Crucially, there may be much less scope this time for the euro to edge lower and thus boost inflation expectations, while the pool of eligible assets that the ECB can buy has shrunk since QE-I was launched.”
QE infinity?
The smaller increments but open-ended timescale of this second package (QE-II) surprised many, and was well below the 60 billion euro per month implemented at the beginning of QE-I in 2015. The open-ended commitment to continue until the inflation outlook improves carries several implications.
“The sequencing reference also signals that there would only be a short gap between the end of QE and the onset of rate hikes,” Ken Wattret, chief European economist at IHS Markit, said in a note Thursday.
“As we believe rate hikes are well down the line — we have the first DFR (deposit facility rate) hike only in late 2022, with an even later start increasingly likely — this implies a very long period of net asset purchases.”
The ECB forecasts inflation at 1.5% in 2021 which is still below what the ECB regards as “sufficiently close to, but below, 2%,” Berenberg senior European economist Florian Hense pointed out in a note.
“Thus, the ECB seems highly unlikely to raise rates before 2022 — unless inflation were to surprise a lot on the upside,” Hense projected.
“The asset purchase program could therefore last for at least 24 months with a total volume of 480 billion euros. More likely it will last longer.”
WATCH NOW
VIDEO02:36
ECB rate cut a disappointment, strategist says
Barclays head of economic research Christian Keller anticipates that the asset purchase program will continue at least until the end of 2020.
“We expect the ECB will remain accommodative for a very prolonged period of time. We continue to think that risks to the EA (euro area) growth outlook are skewed to the downside and we do not expect core inflation will re-accelerate in the near term,” Keller said in a research note Thursday.
“As the euro area has arguably entered the mature stage of its economic cycle, we expect interest rates to stay low for a prolonged period and firms’ pricing strategies to remain conservative, and we believe fiscal policy is unlikely to reflate the euro area economy.”
Against this backdrop, Barclays economists do not expect businesses to feel immediate pressure to increase final output prices, and therefore project that core consumer prices are unlikely to catch up to levels consistent with the ECB’s medium-term price stability target. Keller thus expects underlying prices to remain on a “slow recovery trend.”
‘Strong signal for governments’
ECB policymakers unanimously agreed that fiscal policy rather than monetary policy should be the main tool to combat the economic downturn. The duration of the QE program may hinge on the willingness of national governments to take action.
Draghi on Thursday urged “governments with fiscal space” to act in “an effective and timely manner.”
Ana Andrade, Europe analyst at The Economist Intelligence Unit, said in a statement that the open-ended nature of the asset purchase program will be a “strong signal for governments, as it will increase their fiscal space.”
“It could potentially lead them to engage on more fiscal stimulus,” she added.
WATCH NOW
VIDEO01:51
Stronger European growth will ultimately come from fiscal policy, economist says
Hense agreed that by lowering funding costs further, governments may find it easier to finance a “modest fiscal expansion” and the policy might nudge countries with some extra fiscal space, such as Germany, to use it.
“On their own, purchases of 240 billion (euros) in one year will raise the balance sheet of the eurosystem by circa 2 percentage points of GDP (gross domestic product) in a year from its current level of close to 40%.”
Story 2: Radical Extremist Democrat Socialists (REDS) and Big Lie Media Failed Coup with Unconstitutional Impeachment of Trump Based On Big Lie Propaganda Smear Campaign — American People Will Find Trump Not Guilty and Vote Democrats Out of Office — Videos
Jay Sekulow on Senate trial: I’m confident with where this is going
Graham sounds off on Dems: They’re on a crusade to destroy Trump
WATCH: Cipollone says obstruction of Congress charge is ‘ridiculous’ | Trump impeachment trial
WATCH: Trump attorney slams House Democrats’ handling of impeachment | Trump impeachment trial
WATCH: Trump attorney says there’s no ‘there there’ in Democrats’ case | Trump impeachment trial
U.S. Senate: Impeachment Trial (Day 2)
Impeachment trial of President Trump | Jan. 21, 2020 (FULL LIVE STREAM)
Schiff slammed for ‘parody’ of Trump call transcript
WATCH: Rep. Adam Schiff’s full opening statement on whistleblower complaint | DNI hearing
Trump accuses Adam Schiff of ‘making up’ conversation with Ukraine
Hannity: Impeachment will have real consequences for the presidency and America
Impeachment, Democrats, and those 90,000 documents
For weeks, Democrats have been demanding to see new witnesses and documents for the Senate impeachment trial of President Trump. Mostly they have emphasized witnesses. But on Tuesday, the first full day of the trial, the Democratic House managers seemed to turn up the call for documents, claiming that President Bill Clinton provided tens of thousands of pages of documents for his impeachment trial in 1999.
“In the Clinton case, the president provided all of the documents — more than 90,000 pages of them — before the trial took place,” the managers said in a statement released Tuesday morning. “[Majority Leader Mitch] McConnell’s resolution rejects that basic necessity.”
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi backed up the managers. “For the Clinton trial, witnesses were deposed and the president provided more than 90,000 documents,” she said Tuesday.
“All of the documents in the Clinton trial were turned over prior to the trial,” said lead impeachment manager Rep. Adam Schiff when arguments before the Senate began. “All 90,000 pages of them, so they could be used in the House’s case.”
So a question: Where did the figure of 90,000 pages, or documents, come from? Did Clinton helpfully cooperate with the House Republicans who were trying to remove him from office 20 years ago?
It turns out Schiff, Pelosi, and their colleagues were not telling the whole story. They got the 90,000 figure, apparently, from Clinton’s rebuttal to the Starr report — the report independent counsel Kenneth Starr turned over to Congress on Sept. 9, 1998, after seven months of investigating the Monica Lewinsky affair. In that rebuttal, given to Congress on Sept. 11, Clinton’s lawyers wrote: “During the past four and a half years, the President has … produced more than 90,000 pages of documents and other items” to investigators.
But not to Congress. The Clinton situation was entirely different from the one Schiff and his fellow Democrats face today. Starr was an independent counsel with full law enforcement powers, and his office issued many grand jury subpoenas pushing Clinton, who often resisted fiercely, to turn over the 90,000 documents over the course of four and a half years, covering the Whitewater, Travelgate, Filegate, and Lewinsky investigations.
“If memory serves me correctly, I don’t think he voluntarily gave us anything,” said Sol Weisenberg, a former Starr prosecutor, in a conversation Tuesday.
With Trump, the House has been involved in a different process. Speaker Nancy Pelosi chose not to seek the appointment of a special counsel to investigate the Trump-Ukraine matter. (The old independent counsel law under which Starr was appointed expired years ago; a Trump-Ukraine special counsel investigation might have operated along the lines of the Robert Mueller Trump-Russia investigation.) Instead, House Democrats conducted a hurried investigation that did not involve a grand jury or engage in the type of fighting for documents that Starr did.
The House did issue a subpoena for documents directed at White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney on Oct. 4, 2019. The subpoena seemed almost certain to stir conflict, calling “for documents and communications that are highly delicate and would typically be subject in almost any White House to claims of executive privilege,” according to the New York Times.
The White House declined to provide the documents, arguing that the House impeachment process did not formally exist because the House had not at that point taken a formal vote beginning the process.
And when the White House did not turn over documents, the House did … nothing.
“Did the House take any steps to remedy that?” asked Trump lawyer Patrick Philbin on the Senate floor Tuesday. “Did they try to dispute that? Did they go to court? Did they try to resolve that problem? No. Because as we know, all they wanted to do was issue a subpoena and move on.”
Now, Democrats say they really, really want documents. After all, they claim, Bill Clinton turned over those 90,000 documents for his impeachment trial. How could Trump do less? It sounds persuasive — until one finds out what really happened way back in 1998
n a newly released impeachment brief, Democratic House managers argue that President Trump must be removed “immediately” to protect the integrity of the current presidential race. “The Senate must use that remedy now to safeguard the 2020 U.S. election,” the managers write.
“The Senate should immediately remove President Trump from office to prevent further abuses,” they continue. “He is an immediate threat to the nation and the rule of law. It is imperative that the Senate convict and remove him from office now.”
Democrats insist on Trump’s immediate removal because, they argue, he was the knowing beneficiary of Russian help in the 2016 election, and if he is not thrown out of office right now, he will do it again. But in making their argument, Democrats put forward two critical mischaracterizations about Trump, Republicans, and 2016. One is flat-out wrong, while the other is misleading.
The one that is flat wrong is the Democrats’ assertion that Trump wanted Ukraine to investigate “a debunked conspiracy theory that Russia did not interfere in the 2016 presidential election to aid President Trump, but instead that Ukraine interfered in that election to aid President Trump’s opponent, Hillary Clinton.”
The problem is, the theory does not hold that Russia “did not interfere” in the 2016 election. There is a mountain of evidence that Russia interfered, and that has been the conclusion of every investigation into the matter, beginning with the first congressional inquiry, by the House Intelligence Committee under then-chairman Devin Nunes. The theory is that in addition to Russian interference, some people in Ukraine, including some government officials, also tried to influence the U.S. election. It was not a government-run effort, and it was on a far smaller scale than the Russian project, but it happened.
Trump and his supporters have long pointed to the example of Ukraine’s interior minister, former prime minister, and ambassador to the U.S. taking to social media to condemn Trump during the campaign. They also point to a Ukrainian Parliament member’s attacks on Paul Manafort and efforts to publicize a “black ledger” that contained an unverified allegation about Manafort being paid in cash for work in Ukraine. They also point to connections between anti-Trump figures in Ukraine and Fusion GPS, the American opposition research firm behind the sensational and false Steele dossier. Finally, they point to the mysterious actions of a Democratic National Committee employee who kept in touch with anti-Trump elements in Ukraine.
None of that is definitive, but it is also not debunked. And it is not a denial of Russian interference but a recognition that in addition to that interference, some in Ukraine also tried to influence the election.
Nevertheless, in the brief, Democrats make repeated reference to their own supposition — that Trump and Republicans embraced “the theory that Ukraine, rather than Russia, interfered in the 2016 election.” They even suggest that Trump and Republicans, in embracing a theory that they did not, in fact, embrace, were parroting Russian propaganda.
The other mischaracterization in the Democratic brief is the assertion that, in 2016, Trump “welcomed Russia’s election interference.” The brief quotes special counsel Robert Mueller’s report that the Trump campaign welcomed Russian help because it “expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts.”
That’s not wrong — Trump did, in fact, welcome Russia-based leaks — but grossly out of context. The context is this: Trump welcomed Russia-based leaks about the Clinton campaign because the media were enthusiastically embracing and repeating Russia-based leaks about the Clinton campaign. Print, internet, TV, everyone, was accepting, repeating, and amplifying the material released by WikiLeaks from the Russian hack of top Clinton campaign official John Podesta.
Perhaps people have forgotten how prominently media organizations featured the Russia-based material. If they have, here are a dozen examples of headlines, just from the New York Times and just from the few weeks immediately before the 2016 election:
“CNN Cuts Ties to Analyst as Emails Show She Tipped Off Clinton Allies” (11/1/16)
“Leaks Lay Bare a Longtime Clinton Adviser’s Unflinching Straight Talk” (10/29/16)
“Chelsea Clinton’s Frustrations and Devotion Shown in Hacked Emails” (10/28/16)
“Donations to Foundation Vexed Hillary Clinton’s Aides, Emails Show” (10/26/16)
“‘We Need to Clean This Up,’ Clinton Aide Frets in Newly Public Email” (10/26/16)
“A Constellation of Influencers; Behind the Curtain at Teneo” (10/23/16)
“Genial Clinton Emerges in Hacked Transcripts of Goldman Sachs Talks” (10/15/16)
“Leaked Emails About Clinton Hearten Rival” (10/12/16)
“Emails Disclose Clinton’s Strain to Hone Message” (10/11/16)
“Clinton Aides Were Wary of de Blasio, Emails Show” (10/10/16)
“Leaked Speech Excerpts Show Clinton at East With Wall Street and Free Trade” (10/7/16)
(The headlines are from the paper’s print edition, as preserved in the Nexis database; slightly different headlines might exist in web editions.)
The New York Times editorial board even argued that the WikiLeaks disclosures showed Clinton should have been more open with the public in the months before the election. “Fuller disclosure would clearly have helped her when it came to her lucrative speeches to Wall Street,” the paper wrote in an editorial headlined, “A WikiLeaks Lesson for Mrs. Clinton.” “Imagine if months ago, Mrs. Clinton had done her own giant information release.”
Of course, the New York Times was not the only media organization to trumpet the Russia-based leaks. They all trumpeted the Russia-based leaks. Everyone was complicit. And that is what makes the Democratic charge against Trump so misleading. He wasn’t welcoming something that everyone else was condemning. He was welcoming something that everyone else was welcoming, too. And now, in retrospect, that is a terrible offense, part of the foundation for removing the president from office?
Neither mischaracterization in the Democratic brief is a mistake; Democratic prosecutors know full well what actually happened. But the mischaracterizations are necessary to build the case against the president, to show that he had corrupt motives in the Ukraine matter. They are, of course, not the entire case, but they are important. And they are wrong.
Executive privilege is the right of the president of the United States and other members of the executive branch to maintain confidential communications under certain circumstances within the executive branch and to resist some subpoenas and other oversight by the legislative and judicial branches of government in pursuit of particular information or personnel relating to those confidential communications. The right comes into effect when revealing information would impair governmental functions. Neither executive privilege nor the oversight power of Congress is explicitly mentioned in the United States Constitution.[1] However, the Supreme Court of the United States has ruled that executive privilege and congressional oversight each are a consequence of the doctrine of the separation of powers, derived from the supremacy of each branch in its own area of Constitutional activity.[2]
The Supreme Court confirmed the legitimacy of this doctrine in United States v. Nixon in the context of a subpoena emanating from the judiciary, instead of emanating from Congress.[3]The Court held that there is a qualified privilege, which once invoked, creates a presumption of privilege, and the party seeking the documents must then make a “sufficient showing” that the “presidential material” is “essential to the justice of the case”. Chief JusticeWarren Burger further stated that executive privilege would most effectively apply when the oversight of the executive would impair that branch’s national security concerns.[3] Regarding requests from Congress (instead of from the courts) for executive branch information, as of a 2014 study by the Congressional Research Service,[4] only two federal court cases had addressed the merits of executive privilege in such a context, and neither of those cases reached the Supreme Court.[5]
In addition to which branch of government is requesting the information, another characteristic of executive privilege is whether it involves a “presidential communications privilege” or instead a “deliberative process privilege” or some other type of privilege.[4] The deliberative process privilege is often considered to be rooted in common law, whereas the presidential communications privilege is often considered to be rooted in separation of powers, thus making the deliberative process privilege less difficult to overcome.[4][6] Generally speaking, presidents, congresses and courts have historically tended to sidestep open confrontations through compromise and mutual deference in view of previous practice and precedents regarding the exercise of executive privilege.[4]
Deliberative process privilege is a specific instance of the more general principle of executive privilege. It is usually considered to be based upon common law rather than separation of powers, and its history traces back to the English crown privilege (now known as public-interest immunity).[6] In contrast, the presidential communications privilege is another specific instance of executive privilege, usually considered as being based upon separation of powers, and for that reason it is more difficult to overcome than deliberative process privilege.[4] A significant requirement of the presidential communications privilege is that it can only protect communications sent or received by the president or his immediate advisors, whereas the deliberative process privilege may extend further down the chain of command.[4]
In the context of privilege assertions by United States presidents, law professor Michael Dorf has written: “In 1796, President George Washington refused to comply with a request by the House of Representatives for documents related to the negotiation of the then-recently adopted Jay Treaty with the Kingdom of Great Britain. The Senate alone plays a role in the ratification of treaties, Washington reasoned, and therefore the House had no legitimate claim to the material. Therefore, Washington provided the documents to the Senate but not the House.”[7]
President Thomas Jefferson continued the precedent for this in the trial of Aaron Burr for treason in 1809. Burr asked the court to issue a subpoena duces tecum to compel Jefferson to testify or provide his private letters concerning Burr. Chief Justice John Marshall, a strong proponent of the powers of the federal government but also a political opponent of Jefferson, ruled that the Sixth Amendment to the Constitution, which allows for these sorts of court orders for criminal defendants, did not provide any exception for the president. As for Jefferson’s claim that disclosure of the document would imperil public safety, Marshall held that the court, not the president, would be the judge of that. Jefferson refused to personally testify but provided selected letters.
In 1833, President Andrew Jackson cited executive privilege when Senator Henry Clay demanded he produce documents concerning statements the president made to his cabinet about the removal of federal deposits from the Second Bank of the United States during the Bank War.[8]
During the period of 1947–49, several major security cases became known to presidents. There followed a series of investigations, culminating in the famous Hiss–Chambers case of 1948. At that point, the Truman Administration issued a sweeping secrecy order blocking congressional efforts from FBI and other executive data on security problems.[citation needed] Security files were moved to the White House and Administration officials were banned from testifying before Congress on security related matters. Investigation of the State Department and other cases was stymied and the matter left unresolved.
During the Army–McCarthy hearings in 1954, Eisenhower used the claim of executive privilege to forbid the “provision of any data about internal conversations, meetings, or written communication among staffers, with no exception to topics or people.” Department of Defense employees were also instructed not to testify on any such conversations or produce any such documents or reproductions.[9] This was done to refuse the McCarthy Committee subpoenas of transcripts of monitored telephone calls from Army officials, as well as information on meetings between Eisenhower officials relating to the hearings. This was done in the form of a letter from Eisenhower to the Department of Defense and an accompanying memo from Eisenhower Justice. The reasoning behind the order was that there was a need for “candid” exchanges among executive employees in giving “advice” to one another. In the end, Eisenhower would invoke the claim 44 times between 1955 and 1960.
The Supreme Court addressed executive privilege in United States v. Nixon, the 1974 case involving the demand by Watergatespecial prosecutorArchibald Cox that President Richard Nixon produce the audiotapes of conversations he and his colleagues had in the Oval Office of the White House in connection with criminal charges being brought against members of the Nixon Administration for breaking into the Watergate complex. Nixon invoked the privilege and refused to produce any records.
The Supreme Court did not reject the claim of privilege out of hand; it noted, in fact, “the valid need for protection of communications between high Government officials and those who advise and assist them in the performance of their manifold duties” and that “[h]uman experience teaches that those who expect public dissemination of their remarks may well temper candor with a concern for appearances and for their own interests to the detriment of the decisionmaking process.” This is very similar to the logic that the Court had used in establishing an “executive immunity” defense for high office-holders charged with violating citizens’ constitutional rights in the course of performing their duties. The Supreme Court stated: “To read the Article II powers of the president as providing an absolute privilege as against a subpoena essential to enforcement of criminal statutes on no more than a generalized claim of the public interest in confidentiality of nonmilitary and nondiplomatic discussions would upset the constitutional balance of ‘a workable government’ and gravely impair the role of the courts under Article III.” Because Nixon had asserted only a generalized need for confidentiality, the Court held that the larger public interest in obtaining the truth in the context of a criminal prosecution took precedence.
Once executive privilege is asserted, coequal branches of the Government are set on a collision course. The Judiciary is forced into the difficult task of balancing the need for information in a judicial proceeding and the Executive’s Article II prerogatives. This inquiry places courts in the awkward position of evaluating the Executive’s claims of confidentiality and autonomy, and pushes to the fore difficult questions of separation of powers and checks and balances. These ‘occasion[s] for constitutional confrontation between the two branches’ are likely to be avoided whenever possible. United States v. Nixon, supra, at 692.[10]
In November 1982, President Ronald Reagan signed a directive regarding congressional requests for information. Reagan wrote that if Congress seeks information potentially subject to executive privilege, then executive branch officials should “request the congressional body to hold its request in abeyance” until the president decides whether to invoke the privilege.[11][12]
Prior to becoming attorney general in 1991, Deputy Attorney GeneralWilliam P. Barr issued guidance in 1989 about responding to congressional requests for confidential executive branch information. He wrote: “Only when the accommodation process fails to resolve a dispute and a subpoena is issued does it become necessary for the president to consider asserting executive privilege”.[13][11]
The Clinton administration invoked executive privilege on fourteen occasions.
In 1998, President Bill Clinton became the first president since Nixon to assert executive privilege and lose in court, when a federal judge ruled that Clinton aides could be called to testify in the Lewinsky scandal.[14]
Later, Clinton exercised a form of negotiated executive privilege when he agreed to testify before the grand jury called by Independent CounselKenneth Starr only after negotiating the terms under which he would appear. Declaring that “absolutely no one is above the law”, Starr said such a privilege “must give way” and evidence “must be turned over” to prosecutors if it is relevant to an investigation.
The Bush administration invoked executive privilege on six occasions.
President George W. Bush first asserted executive privilege in December 2001 to deny disclosure of details regarding former attorney general Janet Reno,[15] the scandal involving Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) misuse of organized crime informants James J. Bulger and Stephen Flemmi, and Justice Department deliberations about President Bill Clinton’s fundraising tactics.[16]
Bush invoked executive privilege “in substance” in refusing to disclose the details of Vice PresidentDick Cheney‘s meetings with energy executives, which was not appealed by the GAO. In a separate Supreme Court decision in 2004, however, Justice Anthony Kennedy noted “Executive privilege is an extraordinary assertion of power ‘not to be lightly invoked.'” United States v. Reynolds, 345 U.S. 1, 7 (1953).
Further, on June 28, 2007, Bush invoked executive privilege in response to congressional subpoenas requesting documents from former presidential counsel Harriet Miers and former political director Sara Taylor,[17] citing that:
The reason for these distinctions rests upon a bedrock presidential prerogative: for the president to perform his constitutional duties, it is imperative that he receive candid and unfettered advice and that free and open discussions and deliberations occur among his advisors and between those advisors and others within and outside the Executive Branch.
On July 9, 2007, Bush again invoked executive privilege to block a congressional subpoena requiring the testimonies of Taylor and Miers. Furthermore, White House CounselFred F. Fielding refused to comply with a deadline set by the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee to explain its privilege claim, prove that the president personally invoked it, and provide logs of which documents were being withheld. On July 25, 2007, the House Judiciary Committee voted to cite Miers and White House Chief of StaffJoshua Bolten for contempt of Congress.[18][19]
On July 13, less than a week after claiming executive privilege for Miers and Taylor, Fielding effectively claimed the privilege again, this time in relation to documents related to the 2004 death of Army RangerPat Tillman. In a letter to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, Fielding claimed certain papers relating to discussion of the friendly fire shooting “implicate Executive Branch confidentiality interests” and would therefore not be turned over to the committee.[20]
On August 1, 2007, Bush invoked the privilege for the fourth time in little over a month, this time rejecting a subpoena for Karl Rove. The subpoena would have required Rove to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee in a probe over fired federal prosecutors. In a letter to Senate Judiciary chairman Patrick Leahy, Fielding claimed that “Rove, as an immediate presidential advisor, is immune from compelled congressional testimony about matters that arose during his tenure and that relate to his official duties in that capacity.”[21]
Leahy claimed that President Bush was not involved with the decision to terminate the service of U.S. attorneys. Furthermore, he asserted that the president’s executive privilege claims protecting both Bolten and Rove were illegal. The senator demanded that Bolten, Rove, Sara Taylor, and J. Scott Jennings comply “immediately” with their subpoenas. This development paved the way for a Senate panel vote on whether to advance the citations to the full Senate. “It is obvious that the reasons given for these firings were contrived as part of a cover-up and that the stonewalling by the White House is part and parcel of that same effort”, Leahy concluded.[22][23][24][25]
As of 17 July 2008, Rove still claimed executive privilege to avoid a congressional subpoena. Rove’s lawyer wrote that his client is “constitutionally immune from compelled congressional testimony.”[26]
While investigating claims of Russian interference in the 2016 election, the Senate Intelligence Committee subpoenaed former FBI Director James Comey to testify. Comey was fired several weeks before being subpoenaed but had appeared before the committee once before in March while still serving as director. Less than a week before the scheduled hearing, it was reported that President Trump was considering invoking executive privilege to prevent Comey’s testimony.[33][34] According to attorney Page Pate, it seemed unlikely that executive privilege would be applicable, as Trump had publicly spoken about the encounters in question multiple times.[35]
Sarah Huckabee Sanders, a White House spokesman, released a statement on June 5: “The president’s power to assert executive privilege is very well-established. However, in order to facilitate a swift and thorough examination of the facts sought by the Senate Intelligence Committee, President Trump will not assert executive privilege regarding James Comey’s scheduled testimony.”[36]
On May 8, 2019, Trump asserted executive privilege regarding the full Mueller Report at the request of the attorney general. According to The New York Times, this was Trump’s “first use of the secrecy powers as president”.[37]
On June 12, 2019, Trump asserted executive privilege over documents related to the addition of a citizenship question on the 2020 census. This was in response to a subpoena from the House of Representatives leading up to their impending vote over whether to hold Wilbur Ross and Attorney General William Barr in contempt of Congress over the census question.[38]
Rozell, Mark J. (2010). Executive Privilege : Presidential Power, Secrecy, and Accountability (3rd, rev. and updated ed.). Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. ISBN978-0-7006-1712-8.
Part 2 of 2 — Story 1: President Trump Signs Phase One Trade Agreement With Communist China — Will It Be Fully Enforceable? — Time Will Tell — Videos
Trump speaks before signing “Phase One” of China trade deal
Larry Kudlow breaks down the implications of the US-China trade deal
Trump signs phase one of US-China trade deal
Trump signs partial trade deal with China l ABC News
Mnuchin: US won’t lift China tariffs until phase two of trade deal
Jamie Dimon praises Trump economy, China trade deal in exclusive interview
US Trade Rep. Lighthizer on historic ‘phase-one’ China trade deal
Wilbur Ross: China trade deal, USMCA total $2 trillion in trade
Donald Trump signs ‘phase one’ of trade deal with China which ends escalation of his trade war—and complains about the ‘impeachment hoax’ at White House ceremony with Xi Jinping’s deputy looking on
Donald Trump took a victory lap as he signed a trade deal with China at the White House – as his impeachment sped ahead at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue
He touted his economy and launched attack after attack on his enemies at packed East Room ceremony, railing against the ‘impeachment hoax’
Trump has vowed that he would ink a trade deal with China for more than two years and imposed steep tariffs to bring Beijing to the table
Signing is for ‘phase one’ and the White House promises more segments in the future
Xi Jinping didn’t come for the signing but sent a lower-level official, vice-premier Liu He and Trump said he will go back to China soon to ‘reciprocate’
It’s unclear what he’s reciprocating for, since Xi didn’t come
East Room press credentials didn’t have a date printed on them, suggesting the White House wasn’t confident the event would happen on schedule
President urged House members in the audience to leave early if they needed to cast a vote on sending impeachment articles to the Senate
Donald Trump took a victory lap on Wednesday as he signed a trade deal with China at the White House as his impeachment sped towards the Senate on Capitol Hill.
He boasted to an audience of dignitaries that a new trade deal with China will bring ‘a future of fair and reciprocal trade,’ then complained about the ‘impeachment hoax,’ and praised a string of Republican senators who he needs to vote for his acquittal.
The president has long complained about a massive trade deficit between Washington and Beijing. He pledged during the 2016 campaign to come down hard on China.
‘We are righting the wrongs of the past,’ he said Wednesday, observing that ‘our negotiations were tough, honest, open and respectful.’
‘This is the biggest deal anyone’s ever seen,’ he said, because ‘China has 1.5 billion people.’
The president spent nearly a half-hour acknowledging business leaders and lawmakers who crowded into the East Room to watch. And he noted that some House members might have to leave early in order to vote on a motion to send articles of impeachment to the U.S. Senate.
Some of the congressmen may have a vote—it’s on the impeachment hoax—so if you want, you go out and vote. … It’s not going to matter becausae it’s gone very well. But I’d rather have you voting than sitting here listening to me introduce you, okay?’ he said with a grin.
‘They have a hoax going on over there. Let’s take care of it.’
Trump was not accompanied by Chinese President Xi Jinping, who sent Vice Premier Liu He in his place. Xi’s absence left some with the impression that Washington wants the deal more than Beijing does.
Done deal: Donald Trump and Liu He sign the phase one trade deal which calls a halt to escalations in the U.S.-China trade deal and is claimed to mean up to $50 billion in agricultural sales to China
Signed, sealed, delivered: China’s vice-premier Liu He and Donald Trump show their signatures in the completed phase one trade deal
East room ceremony: Donald Trump hosted the Chinese vice-premier Liu He in the East Wing in front of an audience of Republican senators and Congressmen and figures from the American business world – almost all of whom he named
President Donald Trump stood alongside China’s vice premier Liu He, not its president Xi Jinping, when he signed a landmark trade deal on Wednesday
Awkward exchange: Donald Trump moved to shake hands with China’s vice-premier Liu He, who extended his left hand instead
Unusual handshake: After Liu He extended his left hand, Donald Trump grasped two of his fingers in an attempt to shake his hand
The president announced that he will ‘be going back to China in the not-too-distant future to reciprocate,’ but it’s unclear what he would be reciprocating for.
Vice President Mike Pence said the deal would guarantee $40-50 billion in Chinese purchases of American agriculture products.
And Trump said China will stop forcing American companies to share proprietary technologies with Chinese partners. ‘You don’t have to give up anything anymore. Just be strong,’ he said to business leaders in the room.
The White House’s guests included top executives from UPS, Boeing, AIG, JP Morgan Chase, Mastercard, VISA, Citibank, Honeywell, Dow Chemical, eBay and Ford Motor Company; casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, who aims to see markets opened to him in China; television commentator Lou Dobbs; and Trump’s ambassador in Beijing, Terry Branstad.
Second time lucky: After Liu He spoke through a translator, the two succeeded in shaking hands
Trump acknowledged lawmakers and businessmen in the East Room including casino tycoon Sheldon Adelson
Chinese representative: President Xi Jinping sent vice-premier Liu He, who spoke through a translator (left)
Packed: The East Room was fool for the invited audience of business leaders, White House aides and congressional Republicans
Everyone gets a mention: Chuck Grassley, the Iowa senator was asked to stand, while Trump claimed that Grassley had ‘made [James] Comey choke like a dog’
Official delegation:Donald Trump is flanked by as Vice President Mike Pence and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and U.S. trade representative Robert Lighthizer
First daughter: Ivanka Trump was followed into the East Room by Robert O’Brien, the National Security Advisor
Branstad, a longtime Iowa governor before coming to Washington, got the job because of his deep ties to global agriculture.
While Wall Street will carefully examine the fine print, the trade deal will allow businesses around the globe to breathe a sigh of relief.
After a nearly two-year battle, the signing could give Trump an election-year boost as well. Still, tariffs on hundreds of billions of dollars in imports remain in place, leaving many Americans to foot the bill.
Reporters covering the East Room event on Wednesday wore White House credentials with no date printed on them. That unusual feature suggests Trump’s trade negotiators weren’t certain whether the event would happen as scheduled.
Journalists shoot shoulder-to-shoulder, including a contingent of dozens from Chinese media outlets.
The ‘phase one’ agreement—which includes pledges from China to beef up purchases of American crops and other exports—also comes just as Trump faces an impeachment trial in the U.S. Senate, giving him a victory to trumpet at least in the short term.
As he is about the face an impeachment trial, President Donald Trump will be able to tout a trade deal with China
It’s unclear which country will get the better end of the deal, but Trump has trumpeted every development that is favorable to the United States
China-US trade has diminished in both directions since Trump began venting about an imbalance of hundreds of billions of dollars wach year
The easing of US-China trade frictions has boosted stock markets worldwide in recent weeks, as it takes the threat of new tariffs off the table for now.
And Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said Trump’s negotiating stance led to a ‘fully enforceable deal’ which could bring additional tariffs.
If China fails to abide by the agreement, ‘the president has the ability to put on additional tariffs,’ Mnuchin said on CNBC Wednesday as part of a media blitz promoting the new pact.
However, the most difficult issues remain to be dealt with in ‘phase two’ negotiations, including massive subsidies for state industry and forced technology transfer.
But Mnuchin said the deal puts pressure on Beijing to stay at the negotiating table and make further commitments, including on cyber-security and other services to win relief from the tariffs that remain in place.
‘In phase two there will be additional roll backs,’ Mnuchin said. ‘This gives China a big incentive to get back to the table and agree to the additional issues that are still unresolved.’
Still, elements of the deal the administration has touted as achievements effectively take the relationship between the two powers back to where it was before Trump took office.
‘The US-China phase-one deal is essentially a trade truce, with large state-directed purchases attached,’ economist Mary Lovely said in an analysis.
Even so, ‘The truce is good news for the U.S. and the world economy.’
Still, the trade expert with the Peterson Institute for International Economics, cautioned that ‘we will continue to see the impact of this in slower investment and higher business costs.’
U.S. officials have said they will release details of the agreement set to be signed at a White House ceremony at 11:30 a.m. Wednesday.
After announcing the deal December 13, the U.S. canceled a damaging round of new tariffs that were due to kick in two days later and promised to slash in half the 15 percent tariffs on $120 billion imposed September 1 on consumer goods like clothing.
Mnuchin dismissed a Bloomberg report that the initial agreement could include provisions to roll back more tariffs on China after the election.
‘The tariffs will stay in place until there is a phase two. If the president gets phase two quickly, he will consider releasing tariffs. If not, there won’t be any tariff relief,’ Mnuchin said Tuesday on Bloomberg TV.
‘It has nothing to do with the election or anything else.’
Washington said Beijing agreed to import, over two years, $200 billion of U.S. products above the levels in 2017, before Trump launched his offensive.
Trump has repeatedly touted the trade pact as a boon for American farmers, saying China will buy $40 to $50 billion in agricultural goods.
U.S. farmers were hit hard by the tariff war—notably on soybeans which saw exports to China plunge to just $3 billion from more than $12 billion in 2017. The Trump administration paid out $28 billion in aid to farmers in the last two years.
But many economists question whether they have the capacity to meet that demand.
And Lovely raised a question about the wisdom on relying so heavily on the Chinese market.
‘It also means Chinese retaliation could be reinstated, dampening farmers’ willingness to invest to meet the very hard export targets in the deal.’
Trump and Xi Jinping have a cordial working rapport but the Chinese president didn’t travel to Washington—leaving the impression that Trump wants it more than he does
U.S. and Chinese officials say the agreement includes protections for intellectual property and addresses financial services and foreign exchange while including a pr.ovision for dispute resolution, which Mnuchin said will be binding for the first time.
Trump in August formally accused China of manipulating its currency to gain an advantage in trade and offset the impact of the tariffs.
The label, which had no real practical impact, was removed earlier this week.
The deal also restores a twice-yearly dialogue process that previous administrations conducted regularly but that Trump scrapped.
U.S. and China tiptoe around holes in new trade agreement
by Reuters
Thursday, 16 January 2020 00:46 GMT
By Jeff Mason, Andrea Shalal and David Lawder
WASHINGTON, Jan 15 (Reuters) – The United States and China signed an initial trade deal on Wednesday that will roll back some tariffs and boost Chinese purchases of U.S. products, defusing an 18-month row between the world’s two largest economies but leaving a number of sore spots unresolved.
Beijing and Washington touted the “Phase 1” agreement as a step forward after months of start-and-stop talks, and investors greeted the news with relief. Even so, there was skepticism the U.S.-China trade relationship was now firmly on the mend.
The deal fails to address structural economic issues that led to the trade conflict, does not fully eliminate the tariffs that have slowed the global economy, and sets hard-to-achieve purchase targets, analysts and industry leaders said.
While acknowledging the need for further negotiations with China to solve a host of other problems, President Donald Trump hailed the agreement as a win for the U.S. economy and his administration’s trade policies.
“Together, we are righting the wrongs of the past and delivering a future of economic justice and security for American workers, farmers and families,” Trump said in rambling remarks at the White House alongside U.S. and Chinese officials.
Chinese Vice Premier Liu He read a letter from President Xi Jinping in which the Chinese leader praised the deal as a sign the two countries could resolve their differences with dialogue.
The centerpiece of the deal is a pledge by China to purchase at least an additional $200 billion worth of U.S. farm products and other goods and services over two years, above a baseline of $186 billion in purchases in 2017, the White House said.
Commitments include $54 billion in additional energy purchases, $78 billion in additional manufacturing purchases, $32 billion more in farm products, and $38 billion in services, according to a deal document released by the White House.
Liu said Chinese companies would buy $40 billion in U.S. agricultural products annually over the next two years “based on market conditions.” Beijing had balked at committing to buy set amounts of U.S. farm goods earlier, and has inked new soybean contracts with Brazil since the trade war started.
Key world stock market indexes climbed to record highs on hopes the deal would reduce tensions, before closing below those highs, while oil prices slid on doubts the pact will spur world economic growth and boost crude demand.
Soybean futures, which traded 0.4% lower throughout much of the deal signing ceremony, sank even further after Liu’s remarks, a sign that farmers and traders were dubious about the purchase goals.
The deal does not end retaliatory tariffs on American farm exports, makes farmers “increasingly reliant” on Chinese state-controlled purchases, and does not address “big structural changes,” Michelle Erickson-Jones, a wheat farmer and spokeswoman for Farmers for Free Trade, said in a statement.
Trump and his economic advisers had pledged to attack Beijing’s long-standing practice of propping up state-owned companies and flooding international markets with low-priced goods as the trade war heated up.
Although the deal could be a boost to U.S. farmers, automakers and heavy equipment manufacturers, some analysts question https://af.reuters.com/article/commoditiesNews/idAFL4N29J26S China’s ability to divert imports from other trading partners to the United States.
“I find a radical shift in Chinese spending unlikely. I have low expectations for meeting stated goals,” said Jim Paulsen, chief investment strategist at Leuthold Group in Minneapolis. “But I do think the whole negotiation has moved the football forward for both the U.S. and China.”
Trump, who has embraced an “America First” policy aimed at rebalancing global trade in favor of U.S. companies and workers, said China had pledged action to confront the problem of pirated or counterfeited goods and said the deal included strong protection of intellectual property rights.
U.S. Speaker of the House of Representative Nancy Pelosi said Trump’s China strategy had “inflicted deep, long-term damage to American agriculture and rattled our economy in exchange for more of the promises that Beijing has been breaking for years,” in a statement.
Earlier, top White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow told Fox News the agreement would add 0.5 percentage point to U.S. gross domestic product growth in both 2020 and 2021.
Aviation industry sources said Boeing Co was expected to win a major order for wide-body jets from China, including its 787 or 777-9 models, or a mixture of both. Such a deal could ease pressure on the 787 Dreamliner, which has suffered from a broad downturn in demand for large jets, forcing the planemaker to trim production late last year.
CCTV, China’s state-run television outlet, said the deal would satisfy China’s increasingly demanding consumers by supplying products like dairy, poultry, beef, pork, and processed meat from the United States.
TARIFFS TO STAY
The Phase 1 deal, reached in December, canceled planned U.S. tariffs on Chinese-made cellphones, toys and laptop computers and halved the tariff rate to 7.5% on about $120 billion worth of other Chinese goods, including flat-panel televisions, Bluetooth headphones and footwear.
But it will leave in place 25% tariffs on a $250-billion array of Chinese industrial goods and components used by U.S. manufacturers, and China’s retaliatory tariffs on over $100 billion in U.S. goods.
Market turmoil and reduced investment tied to the trade war cut global growth in 2019 to its lowest rate since the 2008-2009 financial crisis, the International Monetary Fund said in October.
Tariffs on Chinese imports have cost U.S. companies $46 billion. Evidence is mounting that tariffs have raised input costs for U.S. manufacturers, eroding their competitiveness.
Diesel engine maker Cummins Inc said on Tuesday the deal will leave it paying $150 million in tariffs for engines and castings that it produces in China. It urged the parties to take steps to eliminate all the tariffs.
Trump, who has been touting the Phase 1 deal as a pillar of his 2020 re-election campaign, said he would agree to remove the remaining tariffs once the two sides had negotiated a “Phase 2” agreement.
“They will all come off as soon as we finish Phase 2,” said Trump, who added that he would visit China in the not-too-distant future.
Trump added that those negotiations would start soon, though in a Fox Business Network interview that aired on Wednesday evening, Vice President Mike Pence said: “We’ve already begun discussions on a Phase 2 deal.”
(Reporting by Jeff Mason, Andrea Shalal and Dave Lawder Additional reporting by Echo Wang, Lisa Lambert, Susan Heavey Lisa Lambert and Doina Chiacu in Washington, Tim Aeppel in New York, Mark Weinraub in Chicago, Se Young Lee and Stella Qui in Beijing and Tim Hepher in Paris; Writing by Heather Timmons; Editing by Paul Simao, Leslie Adler and Richard Chang)
Story 2: President Trump’s United States Mexico Canada Agreement (USMCA) Bill Passes Senate 89 to 10 Vote– On It Way For President Trump’s Signature — Big Win For Trump and American People — Videos —
Senate passes USMCA trade deal
U.S. Senate passes USMCA trade agreement
Donald Trump’s USMCA trade pact finally passes through both houses of Congress as he touts China truce as ‘one of the greatest trade deals ever made’ but Democrats’ impeachment overshadows everything
NAFTA replacement will go to Trump’s Oval Office desk for his signature
President has pushed the plan for months but it languished in Democrat-run House of Representatives
Speaker Nancy Pelosi put it on the agenda a day after her caucus impeached the president
That sent it to the Senate, which will try the impeachment cases beginning next week
Trump inked a major trade deal with China on Wednesday but even that has been overshadowed by impeachment
Donald Trump tried to nudge the news cycle away from impeachment on Thursday as his long-languishing U.S. Mexico Canada Agreement finally passed in the Senate.
The final tally was 89-10. Democrats Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, two of the presidential primary front-runners, took different approaches. Warren voted yes, Sanders no.
The vote was a rare moment of bipartisanship, a blipp on senators’ radar as they prepared for weeks of wrangling during Trump’s impeachment trial.
The president said farmers in America are ‘really happy’ with both the USMCA and a broad trade truce he signed Wednesday with China.
Impeachment politics also overshadowed the House’s vote to green-light the USMCA, which came just one day after Democrats led a vote to charge Trump with two constitutional crimes.
The U.S. Senate passed the U.S> Mexico Canada Agreement on Thursday just before launching full bore into impeachment procedures
President Donald Trump got a double trade victory after his deal with China on Wednesday but all eyes were on the impeachment ceremonies
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (center) had to wait to put the USMCA on the Senate floor for a vote until the House passed it; Democratic Speaker Nancy Pelosi sat on the trade treaty for months
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell described the pact as a ‘major win for the Trump administration, a major win for those of us who are already ready to move past this season of toxic political noise.’
Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa called the USMCA ‘a major achievement for President Trump and a bipartisan deal for the American people.’
Democrats scrambled to take credit for upgrading the USMCA’s environmental and worker-protection clauses. Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden claimed he and his colleagues gave the plan ‘a trade enforcement regime with real teeth.’
He also praised Trump’s chief negotiator Robert Lighthizer as ‘the hardest working man in the trade business.
Trump blamed the current trade pact with Canada and Mexico, the Bill Clinton-era North American Free Trade Agreement, for sending millions of manufacturing jobs to low-wage plants south of the U.S. border. His administration secured changes that aim to have more cars produced where workers earn an average of at least $16 an hour.
Pelosi held onto the USMCA until she could deny Trump a positivev news cycle, letting impeachment overshadow it completely
It also secured changes that require Mexico to change its laws to make it easier for workers to form independent unions, which should improve worker conditions and wages and reduce the incentive for U.S. companies to relocate their plants.
While the administration completed its negotiations with Canada and Mexico more than a year ago, Democrats in the House insisted on changes to the pact that they say make it more likely Mexico will follow through on its commitments.
As part of those negotiations, the administration agreed to drop a provision that offered expensive biologic drugs—made from living cells—10 years of protection from cheaper knockoff competition.
Republicans and the president have complained about how long it took to complete the negotiations, but the talks resulted in a rare mix of support for USMCA. The AFL-CIO, an association of trade unions, endorsed the measure along with scores of business and farm groups.
The biggest holdouts are environmental groups, which continue to oppose the measure because it doesn´t address climate change. Indeed, they contend the agreement would contribute to rising temperatures.
Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., marveled Wednesday at how leaders of organized labor and farm groups in his state appeared together to support the pact.
‘They both agree that this USMCA trade agreement is a step forward, an improvement over the original NAFTA,’ Durbin said. ‘I think we´ve added to this process by making it truly bipartisan.’
Sen. Jim Risch, R-Idaho, checks his watch while waiting for Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., to wrap up a press conference in the Senate Radio/TV studio on Thursday, Jan. 9, 2020. Sen. Risch along with Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo., Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., and Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, were waiting to hold a press conference on USMCA, which passed the Senate Thursday. (Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call)
The Senate approved implementing legislation Thursday for a renegotiated version of the North American Free Trade Agreement, giving President Donald Trump a victory as the Senate moved to swearing in its members as jurors in Trump’s impeachment trial.
The Senate voted 89-10 to clear the bill for Trump’s signature, with several dissenting Democrats citing the absence of climate change provisions as a lost opportunity to address the issue on an international scale since Trump withdrew the U.S. from the Paris climate agreement. U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer, who negotiated the deal, watched the vote from the public gallery.
The vote on the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement occurred after the Senate voted to waive budget restrictions. Sen. Patrick J. Toomey, R-Pa., argued on the floor, as he did in the Budget Committee, that the bill included appropriations that violate budget rules.
The Democrat-controlled House approved the bill on Dec. 19 with a bipartisan vote of 385-41. Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said House Democrats had negotiated several changes to the USMCA to make it acceptable.
Key changes for Democrats included enforcement of labor provisions they believe will make it more difficult and expensive for U.S. manufacturers, particularly auto makers, to shift production to Mexico. The changes won the endorsement of the AFL-CIO, but other unions such as the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers oppose it.
The pact also would give technology companies provisions to address e-commerce, which did not exist when NAFTA was negotiated. A chapter based on Section 230 of a 1996 telecommunications law (PL 104-104) gives companies like Facebook, Google and Twitter immunity from liability for user content posted on their platforms.
Trump is expected to tout the vote in his reelection campaign as a promise kept. In 2016, he vowed either to revamp the 1994 trade agreement or to withdraw the U.S. from the pact. As president, Trump caused anxiety among businesses large and small and his base of farm support with threats to pull out of NAFTA if Canada and Mexico did not make concessions.
Business groups say congressional approval of the USMCA implementing bill makes it less likely Trump will try to upend a trade agreement negotiated and renamed by his administration.
The bill now goes to Trump for signing, but the Canadian Parliament still must ratify the USMCA before the agreement can take effect. Mexico has already approved the new pact.
The implementing legislation provides the framework and mechanisms the Trump administration will use to enforce labor rights and environmental standards with a focus on Mexico. For example, an interagency task force on labor will be established 90 days after the bill takes effect.
The USMCA will replace NAFTA, an agreement credited with building the three nations into a $1.2 trillion-a-year trading bloc and blamed for contributing to the loss of thousands of U.S. manufacturing jobs to low-wage Mexico.
Trump campaigned against NAFTA as the “worst trade deal ever made.”
In committee reviews, floor comments and statements, several senators cited the absence of environmental provisions addressing climate change as one reason for voting against the implementing bill.
Environmental concern
It seemed unlikely the administration would have pursued climate change, not only because of Trump’s skepticism of the science behind it, but also because a trade-negotiating objective Congress approved in 2015 says trade agreements are not to establish obligations for the U.S. regarding greenhouse gas emissions. The language is part of a customs enforcement law that added several negotiating guidelines to the Trade Promotion Authority statute, which sets the ground rules for trade deals sent to Congress for approval.
Democratic presidential candidates Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Michael Bennet of Colorado voted for the pact. Sanders, another candidate, said in a written statement that it should be rewritten because it does not guarantee that companies will stop shifting jobs to Mexico.
The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the USMCA will increase U.S. government revenue by $2.97 billion from fiscal 2020 to 2029 due to higher expected duty revenue on car and truck parts that do not meet stricter rules.
Some vehicles and parts would no longer qualify for duty-free treatment because they don’t meet new requirements that 75 percent of content in cars and auto parts come from North America and that 40 percent of car content and 45 percent of truck content be made by workers earning $16 an hour.
The CBO also estimates that the agreement would reduce the federal deficit by $3 billion over a 10-year period. The agency estimates that appropriations not subject to emergency status would total $833 million in outlays from fiscal 2020 to 2029.
Under the USMCA, U.S. dairy, poultry and egg products would gain greater access to Canadian markets, and Canada will adopt a new quality-grading system for U.S. wheat.
Canada also will end pricing schemes the U.S. dairy industry says keep Canadian skim milk powder prices at artificially lower levels, giving domestic producers an edge in sales to Canadian cheese-makers over U.S. high-protein ultrafiltered milk.
The International Trade Commission, an independent agency, said the trade agreement, “if fully implemented and enforced,” over several years would increase real GDP by $68.2 billion, or 0.35 percent, and would add 176,000 jobs to the U.S. economy.
House Democrats’ negotiations with the Trump administration in 2019 resulted in the removal of provisions that would have given pharmaceutical companies a 10-year pricing monopoly on biologic drugs in Mexico and Canada. The U.S. has 12-year pricing exclusivity for biologics, and Democrats worried that keeping the provisions in the USMCA would prevent future Congresses from reducing the U.S. timeframe to less than 10 years.
Story 3: REDS (Radical Extremist Democrat Socialist) Show Trial In House is Over — An American Fair Trial Begins Next Tuesday in Senate — Acquittal of President Trump Expected In 30 Days or Less As Hoax Exposed — Trump Goes On Offense — Videos
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U.S. Senate: Swearing-in of Chief Justice & Senators
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Trump Impeachment Trial Begins as Senators Are Sworn In
House managers read charges as watchdog faults president’s hold on Ukraine aid and Kyiv probes whether U.S. envoy was tailed
Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts swears in members of the Senate for the impeachment trial against President Trump.PHOTO: SENATE TELEVISION/ASSOCIATED PRESS
By Lindsay Wise
WASHINGTON—The Senate opened the impeachment trial of President Trump on Thursday with Chief Justice John Roberts swearing in the senators, who pledged to deliver impartial justice, and the formal reading of the two charges of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress.
Hours before the senators took their oath, the Government Accountability Office, a watchdog agency, determined that Mr. Trump’s administration violated the law when it withheld aid to Ukraine, an issue at the heart of the impeachment case against the president.
Democrats allege that Mr. Trump, a Republican, improperly withheld the aid to pressure Kyiv to launch investigations that would help him politically in the 2020 election.
Mr. Trump has denied wrongdoing, calling the case against him a “big hoax” on Thursday. He is the third president in U.S. history to be impeached.
The GAO wrote that the White House Office of Management and Budget improperly froze Ukraine funding over the summer for policy reasons. It was later released after pressure from Congress. A spokeswoman for OMB said it disagreed with the GAO finding.
Meanwhile, Ukrainian authorities opened a criminal probe into whether U.S. citizens placed the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine under surveillance, as text messages suggest, before she was removed from her post last year by Mr. Trump. The information came to light after House Democrats released documents Tuesday showing that an associate of Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, was sent text messages about tracking Marie Yovanovitch in Ukraine.
Democratic and GOP lawmakers continued to wrangle on Thursday over whether new witnesses and evidence will be allowed in the trial. Those issues aren’t expected to be decided until well after the trial begins in earnest on Tuesday.
“If any of my colleagues had doubts about the case for witnesses and documents in a Senate trial, the stunning revelations this week should put those to rest,” said Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York, the chamber’s Democratic leader.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) said it wasn’t the Senate’s job to shore up the case the House built in what he called a “slapdash inquiry.” The Senate won’t “redo their homework and rerun the investigation,” he said
Chief Justice Roberts and Senators Sworn In for Impeachment Trial
The impeachment trial of President Trump opened in the U.S. Senate as Chief Justice John Roberts and senators were sworn in. Photo: Associated Press
Mr. McConnell is set to release his plans for a trial framework on Tuesday, but Senate Republicans and White House officials said the contents of the resolution have largely been settled. Republicans briefed on the resolution have said they expect it to include a guaranteed vote on whether to subpoena witnesses and documents, as requested by some moderate Republicans.
GOP leaders believe they can keep Republicans united to block any efforts by Democrats to subpoena witnesses at the outset of the trial, according to people familiar with their plans. A vote on witnesses would be held later, after the House managers and Mr. Trump’s legal team present their cases, a process expected to stretch over two weeks.
A guaranteed vote to dismiss the charges won’t be built into the trial rules, according to these people. The White House and Senate Republicans are discussing holding a vote on a motion to dismiss after Democrats present their case but before Mr. Trump’s team addresses the Senate, according to an administration official.
At least two-thirds of the senators would have to vote to convict Mr. Trump to remove him from office.
By noon on Thursday, the fighting over the scope of the Senate trial took a pause. Every senator was seated at his or her desk, a rare sight during the ordinary legislative business, when it is common to see senators delivering speeches to an empty chamber. Senators typically don’t sit in their assigned seats even during roll call votes, preferring to stroll around and chitchat.
As they waited for the formal “exhibition” of articles, some senators scrolled on their cellphones or talked quietly to each other.
At 12:05 p.m., House managers, who will act as prosecutors during the trial, arrived at the ornate doors of the Senate. They walked in two-by-two, led by Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D., Calif.) and Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler (D., N.Y.). Freshman Rep. Sylvia Garcia (D., Texas) trailed as the seventh. A Democratic aide said the order was chosen according to seniority.
All managers carried large blue folders containing their own copy of the articles of impeachment passed by the House last month and the resolution passed on Wednesday authorizing them as managers.
Silence fell and phones disappeared as the sergeant at arms warned senators to keep quiet “on pain of imprisonment.” Then Mr. Schiff, the lead manager, began reading the articles aloud from the well of the Senate.
“Resolved, that Donald John Trump, president of the United States, is impeached for high crimes and misdemeanors,” he said.
The House managers make their way to the Senate before the reading of the two articles of impeachment, for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress..PHOTO: ALYSSA SCHUKAR FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
The first article of impeachment stems from Mr. Trump pressing Ukraine to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden, a leading candidate for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, including by withholding the almost $400 million in aid to help Kyiv combat Russian aggression. The second article accuses Mr. Trump of impeding Congress’s investigation by preventing witnesses from testifying and defying subpoenas for documentary evidence.
The senators watched, with stony faces, as Mr. Schiff spoke. Sen. Susan Collins (R., Maine) stifled a cough. Next to her, Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R., Alaska) sat motionless with her hands folded in her lap. Sens. Rob Portman (R., Ohio), Amy Klobuchar (D., Minn.), Tammy Baldwin (D., Wis.) and Kirsten Gillibrand (D., N.Y.) scribbled notes.
At 12:22, when Mr. Schiff had finished, the managers departed. They briefly huddled outside the chamber, once again got in order, and marched back toward the House side of the Capitol.
Shortly after 2 p.m., Chief Justice Roberts was escorted into the Senate by Sens. Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.), Roy Blunt (R., Mo.), Dianne Feinstein (D., Calif.) and Patrick Leahy (D., Vt.).
Everyone in the chamber rose. The only sound was the scratching of reporters’ pens.Then Chief Justice Roberts spoke: “Senators, I attend the Senate in conformity with your notice for the purpose of joining with you for the trial of the President of the United States. I am now prepared to take the oath.”
Sen. Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa), the Senate’s president pro tempore, asked him to raise his right hand, place his left hand on the Bible, and swore him in.
Chief Justice Roberts then administered an oath to senators, who will act as the jury. “Do you solemnly swear that in all things appertaining to the trial of the impeachment of Donald John Trump, president of United States, now pending, you will do impartial justice according to the Constitution and laws, so help you God?”
“I do,” the senators said.
Senators were then called in alphabetical order to the Senate clerk’s desk to sign their names in an oath book. As the lawmakers waited to sign, there were flashes of bipartisan bonhomie. Sen. Cory Booker (D., N.J.) warmly shook Mr. Grassley’s hand. Sen. Joe Manchin (D., W.Va.) patted the shoulder of Sen. Ben Sasse (R., Neb.), and the two shared a laugh with Sen. Tim Scott (R., S.C.). Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D., Md.) gave Mr. Portman’s arm a squeeze.
All of the senators were present for the swearing-in except for Sen. Jim Inhofe (R., Okla.), who is at home with a family member facing a medical issue, according to his office. He plans to be sworn in next week, before the trial begins in earnest.
Senate Officially Accepts Articles of Impeachment
Senate Officially Accepts Articles of Impeachment
The Senate accepted the articles of impeachment against President Trump, marking the official start of the trial. Photo: Associated Press
After the swearing-in, the Senate formally notified the White House of the pending trial and summoned Mr. Trump, who will be given until Saturday evening to reply.
Mr. McConnell also said the House has until Saturday at 5 p.m. to file a trial brief with the secretary of the Senate, and Mr. Trump has until noon on Monday to do so. The deadline for the House’s rebuttal is noon on Tuesday. The Senate trial was then adjourned until Tuesday at 1 p.m.
Although historic, Thursday entailed mostly pomp and circumstance. The trial won’t get under way substantively until the Senate reconvenes after the holiday weekend.
All 100 senators agreed on rules for the 1999 Clinton impeachment trial’s initial phase. There is no such bipartisan agreement now, and while Mr. McConnell says all 53 Republicans in his caucus are united on the path forward, he hasn’t released the text of his resolution laying out the procedures agreed upon by GOP senators.
In 1999, a resolution dealing with witnesses passed a few weeks into the trial, along party lines. Three witnesses, including Monica Lewinsky, the former White House intern with whom Mr. Clinton admitted an inappropriate relationship, were deposed privately in the presence of a senator from each party. Excerpts were shown by video during the trial.
There are 15 senators now serving who also voted in the Clinton impeachment trial, including Messrs. McConnell and Schumer.
“I remember the solemnity of this, when you see the chief justice sitting in the chair with his august robes, when you hear your name called and you hear the charges, your hair sort of stands on end,” Mr. Schumer said in a recent interview.
Throughout the trial, all senators will be expected to be present and seated at their assigned desks. They won’t be allowed to talk.
Any deliberations among senators likely will be held in closed session, meaning that no press or cameras will be allowed. The rest of the trial will be open.
“It is a solemn feeling when you’re sitting in the seat, and you’re listening closely to what’s going on,” said Sen. Mike Braun (R., Ind.).
Mr. Braun said he and other senators are worried about the precedent being set. “Many senators have on their minds: Is this the new dynamic? Having two impeachments within 20 years of one another?” he said. “I don’t think anybody likes that feeling.”
NPR’s Rachel Martin speaks with constitutional law scholar Jonathan Turley about his testimony on Wednesday
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi says she is instructing her committee chairs to draft articles of impeachment to remove President Trump from office. She framed her decision as a historic moment.
(SOUNDBITE OF PRESS CONFERENCE)
NANCY PELOSI: The president’s actions have seriously violated the Constitution, especially when he says and acts upon the belief, Article II says I can do whatever I want. No. His wrongdoing strikes at the very heart of our Constitution.
MARTIN: Pelosi says the impeachment process has shown the public how the president has abused his power. Yesterday, four constitutional experts laid out the standards for and against impeachment in front of the House Judiciary Committee. One of them was Jonathan Turley. He’s a law professor at George Washington University. We spoke with him earlier today.
JONATHAN TURLEY: Well, first of all, my testimony, I said, as I did in the Clinton impeachment, that a president could be impeached for a noncriminal act and that President Trump could be impeached for abuse of power. You just have to prove it. He can also be impeached for obstruction of Congress.
The problem with the obstruction of Congress claim, in my view, is that it’s based on a very short period of investigation. This is one of the shortest we’ve had. It depends how you count the days between this and the Johnson impeachment, but it’s a very short period of investigation.
And what Congress is saying is that if the president invokes executive privilege or immunities and goes to court, he can be impeached for that – that he has to just turn over the information to Congress. Now, that’s a position that was maintained during the Nixon impeachment. In fact, it was the basis of the third article of impeachment. I’ve always disagreed with it. It’s not that you can’t impeach a president for withholding documents and witnesses. You can, and President Trump could well be the next one to be impeached on those grounds.
MARTIN: Mmm hmm.
TURLEY: What I was telling Congress is that they’ve burned two months. They should have gone to court over people like John – I’m sorry, subpoenaed and gone to court over people like John Bolton and gotten a court order. That would make it a stronger case.
MARTIN: So let’s talk about what you just laid out here. I mean, you are saying that because the White House has refused to allow certain people to come and testify, refused to hand over certain documents that the committees have requested and is fighting this in court, you’re saying that that process should be allowed to play out, that Congress is making an impeachment argument that is weak because they’re not waiting for the courts to weigh in?
TURLEY: I’m saying that this case could be much stronger. No one has really explained why they have to have a vote by the end of December rather than…
MARTIN: Well, isn’t the case about election interference? I mean, isn’t that the answer, that the central query here is about the interference of U.S. elections and 2020’s coming right up?
TURLEY: Well, 2020 is coming right up. But the problem is that when you look at how fast this has unfolded, the record remains thin. It remains conflicted. You have about 12 witnesses. You have other witnesses with direct evidence. And more importantly, you have a lot of defenses that have not been fully addressed. It’s not a fully developed record.
And all I’m saying is that before you give that record to the Senate, you should deal with some of those conflicts and some of those gaps. And this is an example of one of those, that I think the president could very well be impeached and removed for obstruction based on these acts. But by the way, that record is – conflicts in other respects. We had 12 witnesses. Many of those witnesses correctly appeared before Congress. They did so against the wishes of the president, but they remain in federal employment. They have not been disciplined. And does that…
MARTIN: But you’re saying their testimony is insufficient to prove obstruction or abuse of power.
TURLEY: Well, it’s insufficient because there remain conflicts. You know, part of the problems I have with the arguments made by my esteemed colleagues on the panel is that they kept on using the terms inference and circumstantial evidence. Those actually can be used in an impeachment, but it’s problematic if there’s information out there you can still get. This is not a question of the unknowable. This is using the peripheral. This is using information that could be strengthened. That’s what I’m arguing.
MARTIN: Although they pointed to the Mueller report as evidence of obstruction. Presumably, you don’t believe that the Mueller report conclusions are true then.
TURLEY: Well, I never said I didn’t think they were true, but the obstruction claim was rejected by the Department of Justice – not just Attorney General Bill Barr, but by Rod Rosenstein, who is a respected deputy attorney general. And I agree with their decision on that.
MARTIN: All right. Jonathan Turley, one of the constitutional scholars testifying before the House Judiciary Committee yesterday. Thank you.
Joe Biden’s 2020 Ukrainian nightmare: A closed probe is revived
BY JOHN SOLOMON, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR — 04/01/19 09:37 PM EDT 2,330
THE VIEWS EXPRESSED BY CONTRIBUTORS ARE THEIR OWN AND NOT THE VIEW OF THE HILL
Two years after leaving office, Joe Biden couldn’t resist the temptation last year to brag to an audience of foreign policy specialists about the time as vice president that he strong-armed Ukraine into firing its top prosecutor.
In his own words, with video cameras rolling, Biden described how he threatened Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko in March 2016 that the Obama administration would pull $1 billion in U.S. loan guarantees, sending the former Soviet republic toward insolvency, if it didn’t immediately fire Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin.
Joe Biden Brags about getting Ukranian Prosecutor Fired
“I said, ‘You’re not getting the billion.’ I’m going to be leaving here in, I think it was about six hours. I looked at them and said: ‘I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money,’” Biden recalled telling Poroshenko.
“Well, son of a bitch, he got fired. And they put in place someone who was solid at the time,” Biden told the Council on Foreign Relations event, insisting that President Obama was in on the threat.
Interviews with a half-dozen senior Ukrainian officials confirm Biden’s account, though they claim the pressure was applied over several months in late 2015 and early 2016, not just six hours of one dramatic day. Whatever the case, Poroshenko and Ukraine’s parliament obliged by ending Shokin’s tenure as prosecutor. Shokin was facing steep criticism in Ukraine, and among some U.S. officials, for not bringing enough corruption prosecutions when he was fired.
But Ukrainian officials tell me there was one crucial piece of information that Biden must have known but didn’t mention to his audience: The prosecutor he got fired was leading a wide-ranging corruption probe into the natural gas firm Burisma Holdings that employed Biden’s younger son, Hunter, as a board member.
U.S. banking records show Hunter Biden’s American-based firm, Rosemont Seneca Partners LLC, received regular transfers into one of its accounts — usually more than $166,000 a month — from Burisma from spring 2014 through fall 2015, during a period when Vice President Biden was the main U.S. official dealing with Ukraine and its tense relations with Russia.
The general prosecutor’s official file for the Burisma probe — shared with me by senior Ukrainian officials — shows prosecutors identified Hunter Biden, business partner Devon Archer and their firm, Rosemont Seneca, as potential recipients of money.
Shokin told me in written answers to questions that, before he was fired as general prosecutor, he had made “specific plans” for the investigation that “included interrogations and other crime-investigation procedures into all members of the executive board, including Hunter Biden.”
He added: “I would like to emphasize the fact that presumption of innocence is a principle in Ukraine” and that he couldn’t describe the evidence further.
William Russo, a spokesman for Joe Biden, and Hunter Biden did not respond to email messages Monday seeking comment. The phone number at Rosemont Seneca Partners LLC in Washington was no longer in service on Monday.
Although Biden made no mention of his son in his 2018 speech, U.S. and Ukrainian authorities both told me Biden and his office clearly had to know about the general prosecutor’s probe of Burisma and his son’s role. They noted that:
Hunter Biden’s appointment to the board was widely reported in American media;
The U.S. Embassy in Kiev that coordinated Biden’s work in the country repeatedly and publicly discussed the general prosecutor’s case against Burisma;
Great Britain took very public action against Burisma while Joe Biden was working with that government on Ukraine issues;
Biden’s office was quoted, on the record, acknowledging Hunter Biden’s role in Burisma in a New York Times article about the general prosecutor’s Burisma case that appeared four months before Biden forced the firing of Shokin. The vice president’s office suggested in that article that Hunter Biden was a lawyer free to pursue his own private business deals.
President Obama named Biden the administration’s point man on Ukraine in February 2014, after a popular revolution ousted Russia-friendly President Viktor Yanukovych and as Moscow sent military forces into Ukraine’s Crimea territory.
According to Schweizer’s book, Vice President Biden met with Archer in April 2014 right as Archer was named to the board at Burisma. A month later, Hunter Biden was named to the board, to oversee Burisma’s legal team.
But the Ukrainian investigation and Joe Biden’s effort to fire the prosecutor overseeing it has escaped without much public debate.
Most of the general prosecutor’s investigative work on Burisma focused on three separate cases, and most stopped abruptly once Shokin was fired. The most prominent of the Burisma cases was transferred to a different Ukrainian agency, closely aligned with the U.S. Embassy in Kiev, known as the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU), according to the case file and current General Prosecutor Yuriy Lutsenko.
NABU closed that case, and a second case involving alleged improper money transfers in London was dropped when Ukrainian officials failed to file the necessary documents by the required deadline. The general prosecutor’s office successfully secured a multimillion-dollar judgment in a tax evasion case, Lutsenko said. He did not say who was the actual defendant in that case.
As a result, the Biden family appeared to have escaped the potential for an embarrassing inquiry overseas in the final days of the Obama administration and during an election in which Democrat Hillary Clintonwas running for president in 2016.
But then, as Biden’s 2020 campaign ramped up over the past year, Lutsenko — the Ukrainian prosecutor that Biden once hailed as a “solid” replacement for Shokin — began looking into what happened with the Burisma case that had been shut down.
Lutsenko told me that, while reviewing the Burisma investigative files, he discovered “members of the Board obtained funds as well as another U.S.-based legal entity, Rosemont Seneca Partners LLC, for consulting services.”
Lutsenko said some of the evidence he knows about in the Burisma case may interest U.S. authorities and he’d like to present that information to new U.S. Attorney General William Barr, particularly the vice president’s intervention.
“Unfortunately, Mr. Biden had correlated and connected this aid with some of the HR (personnel) issues and changes in the prosecutor’s office,” Lutsenko said.
Nazar Kholodnytskyi, the lead anti-corruption prosecutor in Lutsenko’s office, confirmed to me in an interview that part of the Burisma investigation was reopened in 2018, after Joe Biden made his remarks. “We were able to start this case again,” Kholodnytskyi said.
But he said the separate Ukrainian police agency that investigates corruption has dragged its feet in gathering evidence. “We don’t see any result from this case one year after the reopening because of some external influence,” he said, declining to be more specific.
Ukraine is in the middle of a hard-fought presidential election, is a frequent target of intelligence operations by neighboring Russia and suffers from rampant political corruption nationwide. Thus, many Americans might take the restart of the Burisma case with a grain of salt, and rightfully so.
But what makes Lutsenko’s account compelling is that federal authorities in America, in an entirely different case, uncovered financial records showing just how much Hunter Biden’s and Archer’s company received from Burisma while Joe Biden acted as Obama’s point man on Ukraine.
Between April 2014 and October 2015, more than $3 million was paid out of Burisma accounts to an account linked to Biden’s and Archer’s Rosemont Seneca firm, according to the financial records placed in a federal court file in Manhattan in an unrelated case against Archer.
The bank records show that, on most months when Burisma money flowed, two wire transfers of $83,333.33 each were sent to the Rosemont Seneca–connected account on the same day. The same Rosemont Seneca–linked account typically then would pay Hunter Biden one or more payments ranging from $5,000 to $25,000 each. Prosecutors reviewed internal company documents and wanted to interview Hunter Biden and Archer about why they had received such payments, according to interviews.
Lutsenko said Ukrainian company board members legally can pay themselves for work they do if it benefits the company’s bottom line, but prosecutors never got to determine the merits of the payments to Rosemont because of the way the investigation was shut down.
As for Joe Biden’s intervention in getting Lutsenko’s predecessor fired in the midst of the Burisma investigation, Lutsenko suggested that was a matter to discuss with Attorney General Barr: “Of course, I would be happy to have a conversation with him about this issue.”
As the now-completed Russia collusion investigation showed us, every American deserves the right to be presumed innocent until evidence is made public or a conviction is secured, especially when some matters of a case involve foreigners. The same presumption should be afforded to Joe Biden, Hunter Biden, Devon Archer and Burisma in the Ukraine case.
Nonetheless, some hard questions should be answered by Biden as he prepares, potentially, to run for president in 2020: Was it appropriate for your son and his firm to cash in on Ukraine while you served as point man for Ukraine policy? What work was performed for the money Hunter Biden’s firm received? Did you know about the Burisma probe? And when it was publicly announced that your son worked for Burisma, should you have recused yourself from leveraging a U.S. policy to pressure the prosecutor who very publicly pursued Burisma?
Solomon: These once-secret memos cast doubt on Joe Biden’s Ukraine story
BY JOHN SOLOMON, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR — 09/26/19 06:00 PM EDT 11,128
THE VIEWS EXPRESSED BY CONTRIBUTORS ARE THEIR OWN AND NOT THE VIEW OF THE HILL
Former Vice President Joe Biden, now a 2020 Democratic presidential contender, has locked into a specific story about the controversy in Ukraine.
He insists that, in spring 2016, he strong-armed Ukraine to fire its chief prosecutor solely because Biden believed that official was corrupt and inept, not because the Ukrainian was investigating a natural gas company, Burisma Holdings, that hired Biden’s son, Hunter, into a lucrative job.
There’s just one problem.
Hundreds of pages of never-released memos and documents — many from inside the American team helping Burisma to stave off its legal troubles — conflict with Biden’s narrative.
And they raise the troubling prospect that U.S. officials may have painted a false picture in Ukraine that helped ease Burisma’s legal troubles and stop prosecutors’ plans to interview Hunter Biden during the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
For instance, Burisma’s American legal representatives met with Ukrainian officials just days after Biden forced the firing of the country’s chief prosecutor and offered “an apology for dissemination of false information by U.S. representatives and public figures” about the Ukrainian prosecutors, according to the Ukrainian government’s official memo of the meeting. The effort to secure that meeting began the same day the prosecutor’s firing was announced.
In addition, Burisma’s American team offered to introduce Ukrainian prosecutors to Obama administration officials to make amends, according to that memo and the American legal team’s internal emails.
The memos raise troubling questions:
1.) If the Ukraine prosecutor’s firing involved only his alleged corruption and ineptitude, why did Burisma’s American legal team refer to those allegations as “false information?”
2.) If the firing had nothing to do with the Burisma case, as Biden has adamantly claimed, why would Burisma’s American lawyers contact the replacement prosecutor within hours of the termination and urgently seek a meeting in Ukraine to discuss the case?
Ukrainian prosecutors say they have tried to get this information to the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) since the summer of 2018, fearing it might be evidence of possible violations of U.S. ethics laws. First, they hired a former federal prosecutor to bring the information to the U.S. attorney in New York, who, they say, showed no interest. Then, the Ukrainians reached out to President Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani.
Ukraine’s new president, Volodymyr Zelensky, told Trump in July that he plans to launch his own wide-ranging investigation into what happened with the Bidens and Burisma.
“I’m knowledgeable about the situation,” Zelensky told Trump, asking the American president to forward any evidence he might know about. “The issue of the investigation of the case is actually the issue of making sure to restore the honesty so we will take care of that and will work on the investigation of the case.”
Biden has faced scrutiny since December 2015, when the New York Times published a story noting that Burisma hired Hunter Biden just weeks after the vice president was asked by President Obama to oversee U.S.-Ukraine relations. That story also alerted Biden’s office that Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin had an active investigation of Burisma and its founder.
Documents I obtained this year detail an effort to change the narrative after the Times story about Hunter Biden, with the help of the Obama State Department.
Hunter Biden’s American business partner in Burisma, Devon Archer, texted a colleague two days after the Times story about a strategy to counter the “new wave of scrutiny” and stated that he and Hunter Biden had just met at the State Department. The text suggested there was about to be a new “USAID project the embassy is announcing with us” and that it was “perfect for us to move forward now with momentum.”
I have sued the State Department for any records related to that meeting. The reason is simple: There is both a public interest and an ethics question to knowing if Hunter Biden and his team sought State’s assistance while his father was vice president.
The controversy ignited anew earlier this year when I disclosed that Joe Biden admitted during a 2018 videotaped speech that, as vice president in March 2016, he threatened to cancel $1 billion in U.S. loan guarantees, to pressure Ukraine’s then-President Petro Poroshenko to fire Shokin.
At the time, Shokin’s office was investigating Burisma. Shokin told me he was making plans to question Hunter Biden about $3 million in fees that Biden and his partner, Archer, collected from Burisma through their American firm. Documents seized by the FBI in an unrelated case confirm the payments, which in many months totaled more than $166,000.
Some media outlets have reported that, at the time Joe Biden forced the firing in March 2016, there were no open investigations. Those reports are wrong. A British-based investigation of Burisma’s owner was closed down in early 2015 on a technicality when a deadline for documents was not met. But the Ukraine Prosecutor General’s office still had two open inquiries in March 2016, according to the official case file provided me. One of those cases involved taxes; the other, allegations of corruption. Burisma announced the cases against it were not closed and settled until January 2017.
Joe Biden has since responded that he forced Shokin’s firing over concerns about corruption and ineptitude, which he claims were widely shared by Western allies, and that it had nothing to do with the Burisma investigation.
Some of the new documents I obtained call that claim into question.
In a newly sworn affidavit prepared for a European court, Shokin testified that when he was fired in March 2016, he was told the reason was that Biden was unhappy about the Burisma investigation. “The truth is that I was forced out because I was leading a wide-ranging corruption probe into Burisma Holdings, a natural gas firm active in Ukraine and Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, was a member of the Board of Directors,” Shokin testified.
“On several occasions President Poroshenko asked me to have a look at the case against Burisma and consider the possibility of winding down the investigative actions in respect of this company but I refused to close this investigation,” Shokin added.
Shokin certainly would have reason to hold a grudge over his firing. But his account is supported by documents from Burisma’s legal team in America, which appeared to be moving into Ukraine with intensity as Biden’s effort to fire Shokin picked up steam.
Burisma’s own accounting records show that it paid tens of thousands of dollars while Hunter Biden served on the board of an American lobbying and public relations firm, Blue Star Strategies, run by Sally Painter and Karen Tramontano, who both served in President Bill Clinton’s administration.
Just days before Biden forced Shokin’s firing, Painter met with the No. 2 official at the Ukrainian embassy in Washington and asked to meet officials in Kiev around the same time that Joe Biden visited there. Ukrainian embassy employee Oksana Shulyar emailed Painter afterward: “With regards to the meetings in Kiev, I suggest that you wait until the next week when there is an expected vote of the government’s reshuffle.”
Ukraine’s Washington embassy confirmed the conversations between Shulyar and Painter but said the reference to a shakeup in Ukrainian government was not specifically referring to Shokin’s firing or anything to do with Burisma.
Painter then asked one of the Ukraine embassy’s workers to open the door for meetings with Ukraine’s prosecutors about the Burisma investigation, the memos show. Eventually, Blue Star would pay that Ukrainian official money for his help with the prosecutor’s office.
At the time, Blue Star worked in concert with an American criminal defense lawyer, John Buretta, who was hired by Burisma to help address the case in Ukraine. The case was settled in January 2017 for a few million dollars in fines for alleged tax issues.
Buretta, Painter, Tramontano, Hunter Biden and Joe Biden’s campaign have not responded to numerous calls and emails seeking comment.
On March 29, 2016, the day Shokin’s firing was announced, Buretta asked to speak with Yuriy Sevruk, the prosecutor named to temporarily replace Shokin, but was turned down, the memos show.
Blue Star, using the Ukrainian embassy worker it had hired, eventually scored a meeting with Sevruk on April 6, 2016, a week after Shokin’s firing. Buretta, Tramontano and Painter attended that meeting in Kiev, according to Blue Star’s memos.
Sevruk memorialized the meeting in a government memo that the general prosecutor’s office provided to me, stating that the three Americans offered an apology for the “false” narrative that had been provided by U.S. officials about Shokin being corrupt and inept.
“They realized that the information disseminated in the U.S. was incorrect and that they would facilitate my visit to the U.S. for the purpose of delivering the true information to the State Department management,” the memo stated.
The memo also quoted the Americans as saying they knew Shokin pursued an aggressive corruption investigation against Burisma’s owner, only to be thwarted by British allies: “These individuals noted that they had been aware that the Prosecutor General’s Office of Ukraine had implemented all required steps for prosecution … and that he was released by the British court due to the underperformance of the British law enforcement agencies.”
The memo provides a vastly different portrayal of Shokin than Biden’s. And its contents are partially backed by subsequent emails from Blue Star and Buretta that confirm the offer to bring Ukrainian authorities to meet the Obama administration in Washington.
For instance, Tramontano wrote the Ukrainian prosecution team on April 16, 2016, saying U.S. Justice Department officials, including top international prosecutor Bruce Swartz, might be willing to meet. “The reforms are not known to the US Justice Department and it would be useful for the Prosecutor General to meet officials in the US and share this information directly,” she wrote.
Buretta sent a similar email to the Ukrainians, writing that “I think you would find it productive to meet with DOJ officials in Washington” and providing contact information for Swartz. “I would be happy to help,” added Buretta, a former senior DOJ official.
Burisma, Buretta and Blue Star continued throughout 2016 to try to resolve the open issues in Ukraine, and memos recount various contacts with the State Department and the U.S. embassy in Kiev seeking help in getting the Burisma case resolved.
Just days before Trump took office, Burisma announced it had resolved all of its legal issues. And Buretta gave an interview in Ukraine about how he helped navigate the issues.
Today, two questions remain.
One is whether it was ethically improper or even illegal for Biden to intervene to fire the prosecutor handling Burisma’s case, given his son’s interests. That is one that requires more investigation and the expertise of lawyers.
The second is whether Biden has given the American people an honest accounting of what happened. The new documents I obtained raise serious doubts about his story’s credibility. And that’s an issue that needs to be resolved by voters.
The House of Representatives is engaged in a formal impeachment inquiry of President Trump. It is focused on his efforts to secure specific investigations in Ukraine that carried political benefits for him — including aides allegedly tying those investigations to official U.S. government concessions.
Below is a timeline of relevant events.
The timeline is sortable. “Trump” refers to events in which Trump himself was involved. “Quid pro quo” is events that involve government concessions being tied to investigations. “Ukraine” tracks what Ukrainian officials were doing, while “Giuliani” does the same for Trump’s personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani, and “Biden” tracks every event in which Joe or Hunter Biden were invoked.
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Key events An in-depth look Everything
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Unrest in Ukraine
2014-2016
February 22, 2014
Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych is ousted from power during a popular uprising in the country. He flees to Russia. After his ouster, Ukrainian officials begin a wide-ranging investigation into corruption in the country.
March 7, 2014
Lev Parnas, eventually an associate of former New York City mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, has his first known interaction with Donald Trump at a golf tournament in Florida.
March 1, 2014
Russia invades the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea, annexing it.
May 13, 2014
KEY EVENTHunter Biden, a son of then-U.S. Vice President Joe Biden, joins the board of the Ukrainian energy company Burisma Holdings. It is owned by oligarch Mykola Zlochevsky, one of several subjects of the Ukrainian corruption probe.
May 25, 2014
Petro Poroshenko is elected president of Ukraine.
February 10, 2015
Viktor Shokinbecomes Ukraine’s prosecutor general.
Early 2015
Top State Department aide George Kent raises concerns about Hunter Biden’s work for Burisma, as he later testifies. Biden’s office turns him away and explains that the vice president does not have the “bandwidth” to deal with the issue at a time when his other son, Beau Biden, is dealing with cancer, according to Kent’s testimony.
September 24, 2015
Then-U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt blasts Shokin in a speech in Odessa, Ukraine. He points to a “glaring problem” that threatens the good work regional leaders are doing: “the failure of the institution of the prosecutor general of Ukraine to successfully fight internal corruption.” He adds: “The United States stands behind those who challenge these bad actors.”
October 8, 2015
Assistant U.S. Secretary of State Victoria Nulandtestifies to the Senate that Shokin’s “office has to be reinvented as an institution that serves the citizens of Ukraine, rather than ripping them off.”
December 8, 2015
KEY EVENTIn Kyiv, Biden tells Ukrainian leaders to fire Shokin or lose more than $1 billion in loan guarantees. Biden joins many Western leaders in urging Shokin’s ouster.
February 10, 2016
The International Monetary Fund threatens to halt a bailout program for Ukraine unless the country addresses its corruption issues.
February 11, 2016
Biden speaks with Poroshenkoby phone and emphasizes the urgency of rooting out corruption.
Paul Manafort is hired as Donald Trump’s presidential campaign chairman, where he is chiefly in charge of securing delegates at the Republican National Convention. Manafort formerly worked for Yanukovych‘s Party of Regions in Ukraine.
March 29, 2016
Shokin is ousted from his position by Ukraine’s parliament.
Yuri Lutsenko becomes Ukraine’s new prosecutor general, replacing Shokin.
May 13, 2016
The White House says it “welcomes” Lutsenko‘s appointment and the addition of an independent counsel in Lutsenko’s office, and declares it will guarantee the $1 billion in loans.
Manafort becomes the head of Trump’s campaign after campaign manager Corey Lewandowski is fired.
August 14, 2016
Ukrainian officials reveal the existence of a handwritten “black ledger” suggesting Manafort had received millions in off-the-books payments from Yanukovych‘s party. These payments will ultimately be part of criminal charges filed against Manafort in the United States.
August 19, 2016
Manafort is forced out of Trump’s campaign.
November 8, 2016
KEY EVENT Trump is elected president, defeating Hillary Clinton.
Seeds of a conspiracy theory
2017-April 2019
January 11, 2017
KEY EVENT Politico reports Ukrainian officials “helped Clinton‘s allies research damaging information on Trump and his advisers” during the campaign. It said they were also trying to make amends after questioning Trump’s fitness for office and disseminating the Manafort documents. The article notes, however, that there is no indication of an effort originating within the leadership of the Ukrainian government itself.
January 12, 2017
Ukraine’s probes of Burisma are finalized and closed, according to the company, though Lutsenko later tells Bloomberg that one sale of an oil storage terminal will still be investigated.
Trump for the first time floats a conspiracy theory that Ukraine might have played a role in falsely fingering Russia for its 2016 election interference. “[The Democrats] get hacked, and the FBI goes to see them, and they won’t let the FBI see their server,” Trump tells AP, adding, “They brought in another company that I hear is Ukrainian-based. That’s what I heard. I heard it’s owned by a very rich Ukrainian.”
Giuliani, who would later become Trump’s personal lawyer, meets with Poroshenko and Lutsenko, according to a later-released House investigation.
June 9, 2017
Lutsenko’s office joins in an existing investigation into the black ledger, which had been under the control of an independent anti-corruption bureau. Critics allege the effort is intended to stifle the investigation.
June 14, 2017
European reports indicate Poroshenko will meet with Trump in the White House.
June 20, 2017
Poroshenko visits the White House to meet with Vice President Pence, but receives only a brief audience with Trump.
July 25, 2017
Trump tweets about “Ukrainian efforts to sabotage Trump campaign” and asks: “So where is the investigation A.G.” — referring to Attorney General Jeff Sessions.
December 20, 2017
The Trump administration approves the sale of lethal arms to Ukraine for the first time.
January 23, 2018
KEY EVENT At an event hosted by the Council on Foreign Relations, Biden describes his pressure campaign in Ukraine. “I said, you’re not getting the billion. I’m going to be leaving here in, I think it was about six hours. I looked at them and said: ‘I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money,’ ” Biden says. “Well, son of a b—-. He got fired. And they put in place someone who was solid at the time.”
Early April
Ukrainian officials close their Manafort probes and have also decide to stop assisting special counsel Robert S. Mueller III‘s Russia investigation out of concern that doing so would harm their relationship with Trump’s administration and jeopardize military assistance, according to the New York Times.
April 19, 2018
KEY EVENT The Washington Post reports Trump has hired Giuliani as his personal lawyer, initially focused on seeing out the Russia investigation.
April 2018
Two Soviet-born business associates of Giuliani, Parnas and Igor Fruman, attend an event for a pro-Trump super PAC at Trump’s Washington hotel. While speaking with Trump, they badmouth U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch, and Trump immediately suggests she be fired, according to Parnas.
April 30, 2018
Poroshenko announces the first shipment of Javelins from the United States have arrived.
Three Democratic senators — Robert Menendez (N.J.), Richard J. Durbin(Ill.) and Patrick J. Leahy (Vt.) — write to Lutsenko, urging him to continue working with Mueller.
May 9, 2018
Parnas posts a photo of him and his business partner David Correiameetingwith Rep. Pete Sessions (R-Tex.) in Sessions’s Capitol Hill office. The two men commit to raise $20,000 for Sessions, according to their later indictments.
May 9, 2018
That same day, Pete Sessions writes to the State Department seeking the dismissal of Yovanovitch. Sessions says he has “received notice of concrete evidence” that she had “spoken privately and repeatedly about her disdain for the current Administration.”
May 17, 2018
Parnas and Frumancontribute $325,000 to the pro-Trump super PAC America First Action through a newly formed business named Global Energy Producers, which is supposedly a liquefied natural gas company. In their later indictments, prosecutors will say the funds actually came from a $1.26 million private lending transaction that occurred two days earlier.
May 21, 2018
Parnasposts a picture on Facebook showing him and Fruman at breakfast with Donald Trump Jr. in Beverly Hills, Calif.
December 5, 2018
Giulianimeets with former Ukrainian prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko, according to a lobbying database. They talk about “security issues, including the escalation of Russia’s war against Ukraine and the US assistance to our country,” according to a Ukrainian report.
Late 2018
Giuliani speaks with Shokin, according to a later-revealed complaint from an anonymous whistleblower.
January
Giuliani and Lutsenkomeet in New York, as Bloomberg News later reports.
Mid-February
Giuliani again meets with Lutsenko, this time in Warsaw, according to the whistleblower.
February 1, 2019
Ukrainian Interior Minister Arsen Avakov tells Yovanovitch that the country is worried about being wrapped up in U.S. political campaigns, according to Yovanovitch’s testimony. He cites the Manafort situation and both the Bidens and Trump’s conspiracy theory involving Ukraine’s role in 2016 election interference.
March 6, 2019
Yovanovitch gives a speech in Ukraine in which she targetsLutsenko. “To ensure the integrity of anticorruption institutions, the Special Anticorruption Prosecutor must be replaced,” she says. “Nobody who has been recorded coaching suspects on how to avoid corruption charges can be trusted to prosecute those very same cases.”
March 20, 2019
In an interview with pro-Trump journalist John Solomon, Lutsenkoalleges that Yovanovitch gave him “a list of people whom we should not prosecute.” The State Department calls the claim an “outright fabrication,” but Trump promotes the story in a tweet. It is later revealed that Parnas facilitated the interview.The whistleblower later notes that Lutsenko was working for the incumbent, Poroshenko, who had been trailing challenger Volodymyr Zelensky in the upcoming March 31 election. Zelensky had pledged to replace Lutsenko. Yovanovitch later speculates, in congressional testimony, that Lutsenko was hoping Trump would endorse Poroshenko.
March 24, 2019
Trump Jr. attacks Yovanovitch on Twitter, saying: “We need more [Germany Ambassador] @RichardGrenell‘s and less of these jokers as ambassadors.”
Giuliani speaks with Pompeo again, according to the State Department emails. The call lasts about four minutes.
March 31, 2019
The first round of Ukraine’s presidential election is held. Poroshenko and Zelensky head to a runoff.
April 1, 2019
After speaking with Lutsenko, Solomon reports that a probe into Joe Biden’s push to fire Lutsenko’s predecessor is underway. Lutsenko tells Solomon that he wants to present his evidence to Attorney General William P. Barr.
Mid-April
Hunter Biden‘s term as a Burisma board member ends.
April 18, 2019
Lutsenkoretracts his claim that Yovanovitch gave him a list of people not to prosecute.
April 18, 2019
Separately, Muellerreleases his report on the Russia investigation. Mueller finds no illegal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia but says he decided not to reach a firm conclusion on potential obstruction of justice by Trump. William Barr later opts not to accuse Trump of obstruction, despite extensive evidence laid out in the Mueller report.
April 21, 2019
KEY EVENTZelensky, a former TV comedian, is elected president of Ukraine with 73 percent of the vote.
Ahead of a Trump phone call with Zelensky, Vindman writes talking points that indicate Trump should bring up “corruption” with the president-elect, according to Vindman’s later testimony, and a White House readout is drafted declaring Trump did so, according to Washington Post reporting. But Trump does not mention corruption on the call, according to a transcript released later by the White House.
April 23, 2019
Giuliani tweets about a Ukrainian investigation into alleged foreign collusion by the Democrats. “Now Ukraine is investigating Hillary campaign and DNC conspiracy with foreign operatives including Ukrainian and others to affect 2016 election,” he says. “And there’s no [former FBI director James B.]Comey to fix the result.”
April 24, 2019
Foreign Service Director General Carol Perez speaks with Yovanovitch at 1 a.m. and urges her to come back to Washington immediately, according to Yovanovitch’s testimony. “I was like, what? What happened?” Yovanovitch would later testify. “And she said, ‘I don’t know, but this is about your security. You need to come home immediately. You need to come home on the next plane.’ ” Once home, she says she meets with Deputy Secretary of State John Sullivan, who informs her that her time as ambassador is being curtailed. “He added that there had been a concerted campaign against me, and that the department had been under pressure from the president to remove me since the Summer of 2018,″ Yovanovitch says in her testimony. “He also said that I had done nothing wrong and that this was not like other situations where he had recalled ambassadors for cause.”
April 25, 2019
In an interview with Fox News, Trump addresses the suggestion that Ukraine interfered in 2016. “I would imagine [William Barr] would want to see this,” he says. “People have been saying this whole — the concept of Ukraine, they have been talking about it actually for a long time.”
KEY EVENT The New York Times publishes a story tying Joe Biden’s pressure campaign in Ukraine to Shokin having investigated Burisma, portraying it as a potential liability in his 2020 campaign.
May 7, 2019
BloombergNewscasts doubt on the Times report, citing Ukrainian officials who say the Burisma investigation had long been dormant when Joe Biden applied pressure on Ukraine’s government.
May 7, 2019
KEY EVENT It is reported that Yovanovitch has been recalled by the State Department, two months before her scheduled departure date. Democrats allege a “political hit job” aimed at creating a pretext to remove her.
May 7, 2019
Zelensky holds a meeting with top advisers that is supposed to be about energy policy. According to AP, though, most of the three-hour meeting winds up being devoted to how to navigate Giuliani‘s efforts and avoid being wrapped up in U.S. politics.
May 9, 2019
KEY EVENTGiuliani tells the New York Times that he will travel to Ukraine to push for investigations related to the Bidens and the 2016 election “because that information will be very, very helpful to my client, and may turn out to be helpful to my government.”
May 11, 2019
Giulianicancels his Ukraine trip, acceding to the pressure.
May 11, 2019
Separately, Lutsenko and Zelensky meet for two hours, according to the whistleblower, with Lutsenko requesting to stay in his position.
Early May
Former Ukrainian prosecutor Kostiantyn H. Kulyk tells the Times that Yovanovitch had thwarted his efforts to deliver damaging information about the Bidens to the FBI by denying his visa request.
May 13, 2019
William Barrannounces a probe into the origins of the Russia investigation, which Trump and his congressional allies had pushed for by alleging a coup attempt. He appoints U.S. attorney John Durham to lead it.
Mid-May
The whistleblower is told that officials, including Special Representative for Ukraine Negotiations Kurt Volker and Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland, had spoken with Giuliani to “contain the damage” he was doing, according to their complaint.
Mid-May
Parnas and Fruman, the Giuliani associates, travel to Ukraine and meet with Sergey Shefir, who later became an aide to Zelensky, and Ivan Bakanov, who is now the head of Ukraine’s secret police. Parnas’s lawyer later claimsParnas told Ukrainian officials that they had to announce the investigations of the Bidens or else Vice President Pence would skip Zelensky’s inauguration and the United States would freeze aid to Ukraine.
Mid-May
Trump tells Pence not to attend Zelensky‘s inauguration, according to the whistleblower. Instead, Energy Secretary Rick Perry attends. The whistleblower says it was “made clear” to them that “the President did not want to meet with Mr. Zelensky until he saw how Zelensky ‘chose to act’ in office.”
May 14, 2019
Giuliani tells a Ukrainian journalist that Yovanovitch was “removed . . . because she was part of the efforts against the president.”
May 16, 2019
Lutsenkosays there is no evidence of any wrongdoing by the Bidens.
May 19, 2019
KEY EVENT In an interview with Fox News, Trump explicitly references Biden’s efforts in Ukraine. “Biden, he calls them and says, ‘Don’t you dare persecute, if you don’t fire this prosecutor’ — The prosecutor was after his son,” Trump says. “Then he said, ‘If you fire the prosecutor, you’ll be okay. And if you don’t fire the prosecutor, ‘We’re not giving you $2 billion in loan guarantees,’ or whatever he was supposed to give. Can you imagine if I did that?” Trump makes the allegation even though there was no evidence the investigation focused on any actions by the Bidens.
May 20, 2019
KEY EVENTZelensky is inaugurated as president of Ukraine. Shortly after his inauguration, Giuliani meets with Lutsenko allies who made the allegations included in Solomon’s reporting.
May 23, 2019
The administration notifies Congress that it intends to release hundreds of millions of dollars worth of aid to Ukraine.
May 23, 2019
At a White House meeting with Trump and acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, Perry, Sondland and Volker—who later dub themselves the “three amigos” — debrief the president on Zelensky’s inauguration and their views of the new Ukrainian leader. Trump is skeptical, telling them that Ukraine is “not serious about reform” and “tried to take him down,” according to later testimony from Sondland. Trump puts them in charge of a back-channel diplomacy effort in Ukraine, according to the later testimony of Kent, instructing them to “talk with Rudy” as they did so.
May 28, 2019
Former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine William B. Taylor Jr. meets with Pompeo, who encourages him to become the top diplomat to Ukraine — also known as a chargé d’affaires. Despite reservations, which he later recounts in his testimony, including about Giuliani, Taylor takes the job, effectively replacing Yovanovitch.
May 29, 2019
Trump sends Zelensky a congratulatory letter inviting him to a White House meeting.
Some time in May
Giuliani meets with a top Ukrainian anti-corruption prosecutor, Nazar Kholodnytsky, in Paris, according to Kholodnytsky. Kholodnytsky, who had clashed with Yovanovitch, has declined to comment on what he and Giuliani discussed, but he said the Burisma investigation should be reopened.
June 13, 2019
KEY EVENT In an interview with ABC News, Trump says he might accept electoral assistance from a foreign government, if offered. “I think you might want to listen, there isn’t anything wrong with listening,” Trump says. “If somebody called from a country, Norway — ‘We have information on your opponent’ — oh, I think I’d want to hear it.” The chairwoman of the Federal Election Commission subsequently points out on Twitter that this would be illegal.
June 18, 2019
The Department of Defense publicly announces $250 million in military aid to Ukraine.
June 19, 2019
Trump begins asking questions about the military aid after seeing news reports, according to the testimony of Office of Management and Budget official Mark Sandy.
June 19, 2019
In an interview with Fox News, Trump again links Ukraine and the effort to hack the Democratic National Committee during the 2016 election — a link that the whistleblower and later reporting show does not exist.
June 21, 2019
Giuliani tweets that Zelensky is “still silent on investigation of Ukrainian interference in 2016 election and alleged Biden bribery of Pres Poroshenko.”
June 27, 2019
Sondland tells Taylor that Zelensky needs to make clear to Trump that he is not impeding “investigations,” as Taylor will later testify.
June 28, 2019
Sondland, Volker, Taylor and Perry participate in a call ahead of a planned call with Zelensky. According to Taylor, before Zelensky is added to the call, Sondland expresses a desire to keep regular interagency officials off the call. Sondland says he does not want anyone monitoring or transcribing the call, according to Taylor. Also on the call, Volker tells the participants that he intends to be explicit with Zelensky during an upcoming meeting in Toronto about what Zelensky needs to do to secure a White House meeting, according to Taylor. But Volker does not say specifically what he will request.
On the call, it is “made clear that some action on a Burisma/Biden investigation was a precondition for an Oval Office meeting,” Taylor tells one of his aides, David Holmes, according to Holmes’s later testimony.
Internal discord and a presidential call
July-August 2019
July 3, 2019
Aid to Ukraine is put on hold, according to three administration officials. Word of the hold is not widely known until later in the month.
July 10, 2019
KEY EVENT Top Ukrainian defense official Oleksandr Danyliuk meets with Sondland, Volker, Perry and White House national security adviser John Bolton in Washington. (Taylor says top Zelensky aide Andriy Yermak was also present.) According to Vindman’s testimony and the testimony of fellow NSC aide Fiona Hill, Bolton cuts the meeting short when Sondland begins requesting specific investigations in exchange for a meeting between Trump and Zelensky. Sondland also states that he coordinated the quid pro quo with Mulvaney, according to Vindman and Hill.
According to Vindman, Sondland in a later meeting emphasizes “the importance that Ukraine deliver the investigations into the 2016 election, the Bidens and Burisma,” and Vindman and Hill both reprimand him for his “inappropriate” requests. Vindman contacts NSC lawyers, according to his testimony, and Hill contacts NSC lawyer John Eisenberg, according to her testimony. According to Taylor, Vindman and Hill tell him later that Bolton said they should have nothing to do with domestic politics and that Hill should “brief the lawyers.” Bolton decries the arrangement as a “drug deal,” according to Hill.
July 10, 2019
Taylor meets in Ukraine with Zelensky’s chief of staff, Andriy Bohdan, and foreign policy adviser Vadym Prystaiko. According to Taylor, they tell him Giuliani had told them a phone call between Trump and Zelensky was unlikely to happen. Taylor relays their disappointment to U.S. officials.
July 12, 2019
Axios reports that Trump and Director of National Intelligence Daniel Coatsare at odds, with Trump telling confidants that he wants to remove Coats from his position.
July 18, 2019
KEY EVENT Trump’s decision to withhold nearly $400 million in aid to Ukraine is communicated to the State and Defense departments. Members of Congress are told that the hold is part of an “interagency delay.” Taylor later says an Office of Management and Budget official did not explain why, but said that the decision was relayed through Mulvaney.
July 19, 2019
Volker texts Sondland about the upcoming Zelensky call with Trump. “Most impt is for Zelensky to say that he will help investigation,” Volker says.
July 19, 2019
VolkertextsGiuliani to connect him with Yermak. Giuliani would later say on Fox News that the State Department had asked for his help. “I didn’t know Mr. Yermak on July 19,” Giuliani said. “You see it right there, 2019 at 4:48 in the afternoon I got a call from Volker. Volker said ‘Would you meet with him? It would be helpful to us. We really want you to do it.’ ” Giuliani added: “They basically knew everything I was doing.”
July 19, 2019
Vindman and Hill inform Taylor that they are not aware of an official change in U.S. policy toward Ukraine, but that Mulvaney is skeptical of the country, according to Taylor’s testimony.
July 20, 2019
Taylor confronts Volker about Hill‘s claim that Volker met with Giuliani, according to Taylor, and Volker does not respond.
July 20, 2019
Sondland tells Taylor that he encouraged Zelensky to tell Trump that he would “leave no stone unturned” when it comes to “investigations,” according to Taylor.
July 20, 2019
Danyliuk tells Taylor that Zelensky does not want to be used as a pawn for a U.S. reelection campaign, also according to Taylor.
July 21, 2019
Taylor relays that concern to Sondlandvia text. “President Zelensky is sensitive about Ukraine being taken seriously,” he writes, “not merely as an instrument in Washington domestic, reelection politics.”
July 22, 2019
Shokinalleges to The Post that he was removed as prosecutor general over the Biden issue. “I will answer that the activities of Burisma, the involvement of his son, Hunter Biden, and the [prosecutor general’s office] investigators on his tail, are the only — I emphasize, the only — motives for organizing my resignation,” he says. Other Ukrainian officials have said this is untrue.
July 22, 2019
Yermak and Giuliani schedule a meeting in early August, according to Giuliani.
July 23, 2019
The OMB reiterates that aid to Ukraine is suspended.
July 24, 2019
Muellertestifies before Congress about his report and its findings.
July 25, 2019
KEY EVENT Before a scheduled call between Trump and Zelensky, Volkertexts with Yermak and again expresses the importance of Zelensky saying he will launch investigations. For the first time on-record, he also ties this to a potential White House meeting for Zelensky. “Heard from White House-assuming President Z convinces trump he will investigate / ‘get to the bottom of what happened’ in 2016, we will nail down date for visit to Washington,” Volker says.
That message followed outreach from Sondland who, about half an hour prior, had left Volker a message. Sondland had spoken with Trump that morning and would later testify that he believed Volker’s text to Yermak was a message that he had “likely” received from Trump on that call.
July 25, 2019
KEY EVENT Trump and Zelensky speak. As we later find out from a rough transcript released by the White House, Trump repeatedly notes how “good” the United States is to Ukraine and then proceeds to ask Zelensky to open two investigations. One investigation involves CrowdStrike, an Internet security company that probed the Democratic National Committee hack in 2016, and the other involves the Bidens and Burisma.
“I would like you to do us a favor though because our country has been through a lot and Ukraine knows a lot about it,” Trump says before floating the CrowdStrike investigation.
He later adds: “The other thing, there’s a lot of talk about Biden’s son, that Biden stopped the prosecution and a lot of people want to find out about that so whatever you can do with the Attorney General would be great. Biden went around bragging that he stopped the prosecution so if you can look into it. . . . It sounds horrible to me.”
Trump repeatedly suggests William Barr will be involved in working with the Ukrainian government on the investigation. Zelensky tells Trump that his yet-to-be-named new prosecutor general “will look into the situation, specifically to the company that you mentioned in this issue” — apparently referring to Burisma.
Trump says Yovanovitch “was bad news, and the people she was dealing with in the Ukraine were bad news so I just want to let you know that.” When Zelensky thanks Trump for previously warning him about Yovanovitch, Trump responds: “Well, she’s going to go through some things.”
The Post would later report that at least four national security officials raised concerns about Trump’s Ukraine efforts with a White House lawyer both before and immediately after the Zelensky call. Eisenberg moves a transcript of the call to a classified server that is generally reserved for sensitive national security information, according to multiple witnesses, though Vindman and Morrison said not for nefarious reasons.
July 25, 2019
After the call, Yermak texts Volker back, saying: “Phone call went well. President Trump proposed to choose any convenient dates. President Zelenskiy chose 20,21,22 September for the White House Visit.”
July 25, 2019
State Department staff circulate emails indicating the Ukrainian embassy is asking about U.S. military assistance and appears to be aware of the “situation” involving the aid, according to later testimony by State Department official Laura Cooper.
July 26, 2019
Volker and Sondland travel to Kyiv and meet with Zelensky and other politicians. There, the whistleblower writes, they “reportedly provided advice to the Ukrainian leadership about how to ‘navigate’ the demands that the President had made of” Zelensky. Zelensky tells Volker and Taylor that he was happy with the call and asks about the Oval Office meeting Trump offered in the May 29 letter, according to Taylor’s later testimony.
July 26, 2019
KEY EVENT Holmes, while in Ukraine with Sondland, overhears a phone call between Trump and Sondland, in which Trump inquires about investigations, according to Taylor’s and Holmes’s later testimonies. Sondland later tells Holmes that Trump doesn’t care about Ukraine as a country and that he just wants the investigations, according to Taylor and Holmes. Sondland later says he doesn’t recall mentioning Biden but otherwise doesn’t contradict their testimony.
Days following July 25
The whistleblowerwrites: “I learned from multiple U.S. officials that senior White House officials had intervened to ‘lock down’ all records of the phone call, especially the official word-for-word transcript of the call that was produced — as is customary — by the White House Situation Room. This set of actions underscored to me that White House officials understood the gravity of what had transpired in the call.”
The whistleblower claims to have been told by White House officials that they were directed by White House lawyers to move the transcript from the normal documentation archive and to “a separate electronic system that is otherwise used to store and handle classified information of an especially sensitive nature” — a move one official called an “act of abuse.”
In an appendix, the whistleblower adds that officials said “this was ‘not the first time’ under this Administration that a Presidential transcript was placed into this codeword-level system solely for the purpose of protecting politically sensitive — rather than national security sensitive — information.”
Trump holds a phone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin. The call is first reported by the Russians; the White House does not confirm it until late in the evening. The Russians, in a much more substantial readout than the United States, claim Trump and Putin spoke about restoring full diplomatic relations one day.
Early August
Mulvaney asks acting OMB director Russell Vought for an update on the legal rationale for withholding the Ukraine aid and how much longer it could be delayed, according to Washington Post reporting.
August 2, 2019
Giuliani travels to Madrid, where he meets with Yermak. Parnas is also in the meeting, according to Yermak. According to the New York Times, the meeting involves Giuliani encouraging Zelensky‘s government to investigate Hunter Biden.
August 3, 2019
Zelenskysays he plans to travel to the United States in September to meet with Trump in Washington.
August 8, 2019
Trump announcesJoseph Maguire will take Coats‘s job as director of national intelligence, in an acting capacity. In doing so, he bypasses Sue Gordon, who had been Coats’s No. 2 at the directorate of national intelligence and who was a career intelligence official with bipartisan support. Gordon would later resign.
August 8, 2019
Giuliani tells Fox News that Durham, the Justice Department official investigating the Russia probe’s origins, is “spending a lot of time in Europe” to investigate what happened in Ukraine.
August 9, 2019
Trump says of Zelensky: “I think he’s going to make a deal with President Putin, and he will be invited to the White House. And we look forward to seeing him. He’s already been invited to the White House, and he wants to come. And I think he will. He’s a very reasonable guy. He wants to see peace in Ukraine. And I think he will be coming very soon, actually.”
August 9, 2019
Volker and Sondland text with one another about a statement Ukraine might be asked to issue about the investigations. Sondland also indicates that Trump “really wants the deliverable.” Volker and Sondland consult Giulianiabout what the statement should say.
August 10, 2019
Yermakemphasizes that Ukraine would like to lock down a date for Zelensky‘s visit before making the statement. “I think it’s possible to make this declaration and mention all these things,” Yermak says. “Which we discussed yesterday. But it will be logic to do after we receive a confirmation of date. We inform about date of visit and about our expectations and our guarantees for future visit.”
August 11, 2019
Sondland emails top State Department aides UlrichBrechbuhl, Lisa Kenna and says, “Kurt & I negotiated a statement from Ze to be delivered for our review in a day or two. The contents will hopefully make the boss happy enough to authorize an invitation. Ze plans to have a big presser on the openness subject (including specifics) next week.” Kenna responds, “I’ll pass to S. Thank you.”
August 12, 2019
KEY EVENTThe whistleblower files a complaint with the inspector general for the intelligence community. Intelligence Community Inspector General Michael Atkinson will later determine the complaint to be credible and a matter of “urgent concern,” which would trigger a legally required disclosure to the House and Senate intelligence committees.
August 13, 2019
Volker and Sondlandtext about what language should be included in Ukraine’s statement.
August 15, 2019
Coats and Gordon officially leave their positions.
August 16, 2019
Volker tells Taylor via text that Yermak asked the U.S. government to submit an official request for the Burisma investigation, according to Taylor’s later testimony. Taylor gives Volker a deputy assistant attorney general to contact regarding whether such a request would be proper.
August 17, 2019
SondlandasksVolker if “we still want Ze[lensky] to give us an unequivocal draft with 2016 and Boresma [sic]?” Volker responds, “That’s the clear message so far …”
August 21, 2019
Taylor asks Brechbuhlwhether there is an official change in U.S. policy toward Ukraine, according to Taylor, and Brechbuhl says there is not.
August 22, 2019
NSC aide Tim Morrison tells Taylor it “remains to be seen” whether U.S. policy toward Ukraine has changed, according to Taylor, and says the “president doesn’t want to provide any assistance at all.”
August 22, 2019
Sondland emails Pompeo and Kenna, saying “Should we block time in Warsaw for a short pull-aside for Potus to meet Zelensky? I would ask Zelensky to look him in the eye and tell him that once Ukraine’s new justice folks are in place ([in] mid-Sept[ember), that Ze should be able to move forward publicly and with confidence on those issues of importance to Potus and to the US. Hopefully, that will break the logjam.” Pompeo replies, “Yes.”
Questions swirl around withheld aid
Early September 2019
August 27, 2019
Bolton meets with Zelensky in Kyiv. According to Taylor, the withheld military aid is not discussed.
August 28, 2019
KEY EVENTPolitico posts a story about the Trump administration withholding $250 million in military aid from Ukraine, the first time it has been reported publicly. (Before this point, it was not clear Ukraine even knew the aid was being withheld.)
August 29, 2019
Yermak texts Volker a link to the story and says: “Need to talk with you.” Volker responds: “Hi Andrey — absolutely. When is good for you?” Yermak also contacts Taylor to express his deep concern, according to Taylor, and Taylor says he is “embarrassed” that he has no explanation.
August 29, 2019
Taylor writes a cable to Pompeo, at Bolton‘s urging, decrying the “folly” of withholding the funds at a time when Russia is breathing down Ukraine’s neck.
Late August
Lawmakers raise concerns about Ukraine aid being withheld, citing its importance to defend the former Soviet republic from Russia.
August 30, 2019
Sondland tells Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) that Trump was withholding the Ukraine military aid to “get to the bottom of what happened in 2016 — if President Trump has that confidence, then he’ll release the military spending,” according to Johnson’s later recollection.
August 31, 2019
Johnson tries to get Trump to release the military aid. He later says Trump explained that part of the reason for the delay was his concern about Ukraine’s role in 2016 election interference. “I didn’t succeed,” Johnson explains later. “But the president was very consistent on why he was considering it. Again, it was corruption, overall, generalized — but yeah, no doubt about it, what happened in 2016 — what happened in 2016, as relates? What was the truth about that?”
September 1, 2019
KEY EVENTSondland tells Yermak at a meeting in Warsaw that the military aid would not arrive until Zelensky promises to pursue the Burisma investigation, as Taylor, Kent, Morrison and Sondland later confirm. Sondland says in clarified testimony that he “presumed” the two issues were connected “in the absence of any [other] credible explanation.” But he emphasizes that Trump did not directly convey it to him and later explicitly denied a quid pro quo.
September 1, 2019
Taylor tells Kent that Sondland had told Yermak that “POTUS wanted nothing less than President Zelensky to go to [a] microphone and say ‘investigations,’ ‘Biden,’ and ‘Clinton,’ ” according to Kent’s later testimony.
September 1, 2019
Zelensky and Pence also meet in Warsaw for a ceremony commemorating World War II. (Trump had originally been slated to attend the ceremony but remained in the United States to monitor Hurricane Dorian.) Taylor informs Danyliuk before the meeting that if the military aid is not released by the end of the month, the funds would expire because that is the end of the fiscal year, according to Taylor.
At the meeting, Pence tells Zelensky he will talk to Trump about the military aid, according to a readout from Morrison that Taylor says he received. Pence also says Trump wants Europe to do more to support Ukraine and that he wants Ukraine to do more to root out corruption, according to Morrison’s readout, as relayed by Taylor.
September 1, 2019
KEY EVENTTaylor texts Sondland, asking: “Are we now saying that security assistance and WH meeting are conditioned on investigations?” Sondland responds, “Call me.” The two speak, according to Taylor, and Sondland explains that Trump wants Zelensky to say publicly that Ukraine will investigate Burisma and the conspiracy theory about Ukraine’s alleged role in the 2016 election interference. Sondland tells Taylor that he regrets not telling Ukrainian officials that “everything” relied on their announcement of the investigations — both a meeting and military aid — according to Taylor.
September 2, 2019
Pence says he did not discuss Biden with Zelensky, but that he did suggest that aid was conditioned on rooting out corruption. “As President Trump had me make clear, we have great concerns about issues of corruption,” Pence said. “The president wants to be assured that those resources are truly making their way to the kind of investments that will contribute to security and stability in Ukraine.”
September 2, 2019
Danyliuk expresses concern to Morrison that U.S. officials are not able to provide answers about the withheld military aid, according to Taylor, and Ukrainian Defense Minister AndriyZagorodnyukraises similar concerns with Taylor.
September 5, 2019
Johnson and Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) meet in Ukraine with Zelensky, with Taylor hosting the meeting. Zelensky’s first question is about the military aid, according to Taylor. Murphy later tells NBC’s Chuck Todd that Zelensky had expressed concerns about Giuliani‘s overtures.
September 5, 2019
KEY EVENT The Post’s editorial board writes that it had been “reliably told” that Trump was “attempting to force Mr. Zelensky to intervene in the 2020 U.S. presidential election by launching an investigation of the leading Democratic candidate, Joe Biden.”
September 7, 2019
Trump tells Sondland that he is not asking for a “quid pro quo” but insists Zelensky make the announcement about the two investigations, according Morrison’s testimony and Taylor’s testimony about his conversations with Morrison. Morrison informs NSC lawyers about the call, according to both of them.
September 8, 2019
Sondland tells Taylor that Trump is adamant that Zelensky “clear things up and do it in public,” according to Taylor. Sondland also tells Taylor that he told Zelensky and Yermak that it wasn’t a quid pro quo, but that if they didn’t “clear things up” publicly, there would be a “stalemate,” according to Taylor.
Sondland also explains to Taylor that Trump is a businessman, and that before a businessman signs a check, he expects someone who owes him something to pay up, according to Taylor. (Taylor said Volker had said something similar.)
September 8, 2019
Taylor texts Volker and Sondland, saying: “The nightmare is they give the interview and don’t get the security assistance. The Russians love it. (And I quit.)”
September 9, 2019
TaylortextsSondland again about the idea that the military aid is being withheld in some kind of quid pro quo. “As I said on the phone, I think it’s crazy to withhold security assistance for help with a political campaign,” Taylor says.
Sondland speaks with Trump via phone and, during which Trump tells him something similar to, “I want nothing. I want nothing. I want no quid pro quo. Tell Zelensky to do the right thing,” according to Sondland’s testimony.
Sondland then responds to Taylor‘s text, “Bill, I believe you are incorrect about President Trump’s intentions. The President has been crystal clear no quid pro quo’s of any kind. The President is trying to evaluate whether Ukraine is truly going to adopt the transparency and reforms that President Zelensky promised during his campaign I suggest we stop the back and forth by text If you still have concerns I recommend you give Lisa Kenna or S a call to discuss them directly. Thanks.” (Sondland will later explain that he was simply relaying Trump’s denial, rather than vouching for it.)
A whistleblower, a transcript and impeachment
Sept. 9-present
September 9, 2019
The Democrat-controlled House Foreign Affairs, Intelligence and Oversight committees announce an investigation into Giuliani’s efforts in Ukraine and the administration’s decision to halt aid.
Atkinson notifies the House and Senate intelligence committees that a whistleblower has filed a complaint, but he does not reveal its contents or substance.
September 10, 2019
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.) writes to Maguire demanding Congress receive the complaint.
September 10, 2019
Trump announces on Twitter that Bolton has resigned. Trump says it came at his request; Bolton quickly counters by saying he offered first.
September 11, 2019
KEY EVENT The Trump administration releases the Ukraine aid it had been withholding. Taylor informs Zelensky and Prystaiko.
September 12, 2019
Taylor becomes worried that Zelensky will announce the investigations in a planned CNN interview he learned about from Sondland, as he later testifies. He tries to confirm with Danyliuk that Zelensky won’t do such an interview, and Danyliuk confirms. Taylor asks the same question of Yermak, whom he later describes as being “uncomfortable” with the question. But Danyliuk again confirms there would be no CNN interview, Taylor later testifies.
September 13, 2019
SchiffsubpoenasMaguire to compel him to disclose the whistleblower complaint. According to Schiff, the DNI’s office, in a letter from counsel, indicates the whistleblower complaint is being withheld because of confidential and potentially privileged communications by people outside the intelligence community. It is assumed that this refers to Trump.
September 17, 2019
Maguiresays he will not testify or hand over the whistleblower complaint. Schiff says Maguire told him he couldn’t “because he is being instructed not to, that this involved a higher authority, someone above.”
September 18, 2019
The Post reports that the complaint involves Trump’s communications with a foreign leader and some kind of “promise” that was made.
September 18, 2019
Pence holds a call with Zelensky, which U.S. officials tell The Post was somewhat perfunctory. During Vindman’s later public testimony, though, Pence’s office says the call is classified and can’t be discussed in an open setting.
Around Sept. 18 or 19
Zelenskycancelsa planned CNN interview, according to the network.
September 19, 2019
Atkinson briefs Congress in a closed-door session, telling them the complaint involved multiple events and not a single communication. The Post reports the complaint involves Ukraine.
September 19, 2019
Giulianiappears on CNN and denies any wrongdoing by Trump. But he also suggests it would be okay if Trump withheld aid in exchange for Ukraine investigating the Bidens. “The reality is the president of the United States has every right to say to another leader of a foreign country, ‘You got to straighten up before we give you a lot of money,’ ” Giuliani says. “It is perfectly appropriate for [Trump] to ask a foreign government to investigate this massive crime that was made by a former vice president.”
September 23, 2019
Trump suggests aid to Ukraine may have been withheld over “corruption” issues — without citing the Bidens. “If you don’t talk about corruption, why would you give money to a country that you think is corrupt?” Trump said. “. . . So it’s very important that, on occasion, you speak to somebody about corruption.”
September 24, 2019
Trump confirms he withheld the funding but suggests it was because other European countries should pay for Ukraine’s military aid. Trump later says he will release a transcript of his phone call with Zelensky.
September 24, 2019
KEY EVENT House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) announces her supportfor a formal impeachment inquiry for the first time, setting that process in motion.
September 25, 2019
KEY EVENT The White House releases a rough transcript of Trump’s July 25 call with Zelensky, including the details described above.
September 25, 2019
Trump meets with Zelensky at the United Nations. Zelensky maintains he didn’t feel “pressure” to pursue investigations and that he didn’t interfere in his country’s law enforcement process. “We have an independent country and independent [prosecutor general],” he says. “I can’t push anyone. That is the answer. I didn’t call somebody or the new [prosecutor general]. I didn’t ask him. I didn’t push him.”
Zelensky also pointedly notes that, despite repeated invitations, Trump has never actually identified a date for a White House visit.
September 26, 2019
KEY EVENT The White House declassifies the whistleblower complaint, and Schiff releases it. The complaint focuses on Trump’s call with Zelensky but also alleges an effort to cover it up and alludes to substantial concern within the administration about Trump’s actions.
At a hearing later that day, Schiff paraphrases the Trump-Zelensky call, prompting criticism from Republicans.
September 26, 2019
Maguire testifies to the House Intelligence Committee that the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel downgraded the inspector general’s determination that the whistleblower complaint was of “urgent concern,” which eliminated the requirement that it be shared with Congress. Democrats allege a conflict of interest, noting that the complaint names William Barr — the head of the Justice Department — as being potentially involved.
More than 300 former U.S. national security and foreign policy officials sign a statement supporting House Democrats’ impeachment inquiry.
September 28, 2019
A top Pompeo aide, Michael McKinley, rallies support for a State Department statement strongly defending Yovanovitch, according to his testimony, but department spokeswoman Morgan Ortagus informs McKinley that Pompeo decides against releasing such a statement — in part to “not draw undue attention to her.”
October 1, 2019
Pompeosends House Democrats a letter declaring that five State Department employees who had been summoned for depositions would not appear. Pompeo calls the inquiry “an attempt to intimidate, bully, and treat improperly, the distinguished professionals of the Department of State.”
October 2, 2019
The New York Times reports — and The Post confirms — that the whistleblowerhad approached a staffer for Schiff‘s committee early in the process, contradicting some of Schiff’s claims.
October 2, 2019
State Department Inspector General Steve Linickshares with Congress documents that had been sent to the State Department that include conspiracy theories about the Bidens. Giuliani indicates he was responsible for some of the materials, which were apparently sent to State from the White House.
“Mr. President, what exactly did you hope Zelensky would do about the Bidens after your phone call?” Trump is asked by a reporter.
“Well,” he replies, “I would think that, if they were honest about it, they’d start a major investigation into the Bidens. It’s a very simple answer.”
He tells reporters that he also thinks China should launch an investigation involving the Bidens. “And by the way, likewise, China should start an investigation into the Bidens because what happened in China is just about as bad as what happened with Ukraine,” Trump says.
October 3, 2019
Kent confronts State officials about the claims in Pompeo‘s letter, calling them inaccurate, according to his later testimony. He tells one official whose name is redacted: “I said, well, you say that the career foreign services are being intimidated. . . . And I asked him, about whom are you speaking? And he said, you’re asking me to reveal confidential information. And I said, no, I’m not. There are only two career Foreign Service officers who subject to this process. I’m one of them. I’m the only one working at the Department of State, and the other one is Ambassador Yovanovitch, who is teaching at Georgetown.”
October 3, 2019
The State Department informs Congress that it has approved the sale of 150 Javelin antitank missiles to Ukraine — a type of weaponry Zelensky mentioned on the July 25 call with Trump — at a cost of $39.2 million.
October 6, 2019
Lawyers for the whistleblower indicate they are representing a second whistleblower — this one with firsthand knowledge of some of the key events. They say the second whistleblower has spoken with Atkinson.
October 8, 2019
After blocking Sondland‘s testimony, White House counsel Pat Cipolloneinforms Congress that the White House will not cooperate with any facet of its impeachment inquiry, making curious arguments about the lack of “due process.”
October 10, 2019
Giuliani‘s two Soviet-born business associates, Parnas and Fruman, are arrested shortly before they are set to leave the country. They are indicted on campaign finance charges, with the Southern District of New York accusing them of funneling foreign money into U.S. politics to influence U.S.-Ukraine relations.
October 10, 2019
McKinleyresigns over Pompeo‘s alleged failure to support State Department officials ensnared in the Ukraine controversy.
October 11, 2019
Yovanovitchtestifies to Congress, alleging a politicized effort to remove her as ambassador to Ukraine.
October 12, 2019
The Post reportsSondland will tell Congress that his Sept. 9 text message stating there was no quid pro quo between Trump and Ukraine was based on assurances from Trump and that he is not certain Trump’s denial was accurate. Trump and his allies had hailed Sondland’s text as proof there was no quid pro quo.
McKinleytestifies and explains his resignation. “I was disturbed by the implication that foreign governments were being approached to procure negative information on political opponents,” McKinley says. “I was convinced that this would also have a serious impact on Foreign Service morale and the integrity of our work overseas.”
October 17, 2019
Sondland testifies, saying any pressure he applied on Ukraine to investigate Burisma came before he knew the case involved the Bidens. (He claims this despite Giuliani‘s efforts and the Bidens’ proximity to them being in the news by early May.) Sondland says he is making that distinction “because I believe I testified that it would be improper” to push for such political investigations. Asked whether it would be illegal, Sondland says: “I’m not a lawyer, but I assume so.”
October 17, 2019
Trump announces Perry will resign by the end of the year.
October 17, 2019
KEY EVENTMulvaney in a news conference momentarily confirms a quid pro quo with Ukraine. “[Did Trump] also mention to me, in the past, that the corruption related to the DNC server?” Mulvaney said. “Absolutely, no question about that. But that’s it. And that’s why we held up the money. . . . The look back to what happened in 2016 certainly was part of the thing that he was worried about in corruption with that nation. And that is absolutely appropriate.” Mulvaney later issues a statement trying to reverse course, saying there actually was no connection.
Cooper testifies, but not before the proceedings are delayed for five hours as House Republicans storm the secure room where the depositions are being held. The Republicans expressed concern about the secrecy of the process.
State Department officials Catherine Croft and Christopher Andersontestify separately, describing the dim view of Ukraine taken by Trump and those around him.
October 30, 2019
In his confirmation hearing to become ambassador to Russia, Sullivan says he was aware of a“smear” campaign against Yovanovitch and that he believed Giuliani was a part of it. He also says it was appropriate to remove Yovanovitch, though, because Trump had lost confidence in her.
October 31, 2019
Morrisontestifies, corroborating Taylor‘s testimony that Sondlandcommunicated a quid pro quo to Ukraine. Morrison says he raised concerns about Trump’s July 25 call with Zelensky, but that he did not think it contained anything illegal.
October 31, 2019
The House votes to formalize its impeachment inquiry and open up its hearings, amid GOP criticism that the process was too secretive. No House Republicans vote in favor of the inquiry, and two Democrats vote against it.
Sondland clarifies his testimony to acknowledge he communicated the quid pro quo to Ukraine on July 10, but that he was acting on what he presumed to be the case rather than a direct order from Trump.
Bolton‘s lawyer tells Congress in a letter that his client was “part of many relevant meetings and conversations” pertaining to the impeachment inquiry that aren’t yet public, but reinforces that Bolton will appear only if ordered to by a judge.
November 10, 2019
Parnas‘s lawyer discloses the quid pro quo he allegedly communicated to Ukrainian officials in May.
November 13, 2019
Taylor and Kent testify in an open hearing.
November 15, 2019
Yovanovitchtestifies in an open hearing, during which Trump tweets an attack on her. “Everywhere Marie Yovanovitch went turned bad,” he said. “She started off in Somalia, how did that go? Then fast forward to Ukraine, where the new Ukrainian President spoke unfavorably about her in my second phone call with him. It is a U.S. President’s absolute right to appoint ambassadors.” Democrats accuse Trump of witness intimidation.
Vindman, Williams, Volker and Morrisontestify in two consecutive open hearings.
November 20, 2019
Sondlandtestifies in an open hearing, in which he says top administration officials including Pence and Pompeo were aware of the quid pro quo and that it was clear Giuliani was acting on Trump’s wishes when he pushed for it. Sondland’s testimony is followed by Hale and Cooper in their own hearing.
November 21, 2019
Hill and Holmes round out the public impeachment hearings. Hill criticizes efforts by Republicans to draw an equivalence between Russia’s interference in 2016 and the actions of Ukrainians during the campaign. Holmes notes that the pressure felt by Ukraine during its interactions with Trump since Zelensky’s inauguration is on-going, given that Ukraine still seeks to demonstrate that it maintains the U.S.’ support.
The Moscow Trials were a series of show trials held in the Soviet Union at the instigation of Joseph Stalin between 1936 and 1938 against Trotskyists and members of Right Opposition of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. There were three Moscow Trials: the Case of the Trotskyite-Zinovievite Terrorist Center (Zinoviev–Kamenev Trial, aka “Trial of the Sixteen,” 1936), the Case of the Anti-Soviet Trotskyist Center (Pyatakov–Radek Trial, 1937), and the Case of the Anti-Soviet “Bloc of Rights and Trotskyites” (Bukharin–Rykov Trial, aka “Trial of the Twenty-One,” 1938). The defendants of these were Old Bolshevik party leaders and top officials of the Soviet secret police. Most defendants were charged under Article 58 of the RSFSR Penal Code with conspiring with the Western powers to assassinate Stalin and other Soviet leaders, dismember the Soviet Union, and restore capitalism.
The Moscow Trials led to the execution of many of the defendants. They are generally seen as part of Stalin’s Great Purge, an attempt to rid the party of current or prior oppositionists, especially but not exclusively Trotskyists, and any leading Bolshevik cadre from the time of the Russian Revolution or earlier, who might even potentially become a figurehead for the growing discontent in the Soviet populace resulting from Stalin’s mismanagement of the economy.[1] Stalin’s hasty industrialization during the period of the First Five Year Plan and the brutality of the forced agricultural collectivization had led to an acute economic and political crisis in 1928-33, a part of the global problem known as the Great Depression, and to enormous suffering on the part of the Soviet workers and peasants. Stalin was acutely conscious of this fact and took steps to prevent it taking the form of an opposition inside the Communist Party of the Soviet Union to his increasingly totalitarian rule.[1]
Contents
Background
Grigory Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev, and Joseph Stalin formed a ruling triumvirate in early 1923[2] after Vladimir Lenin had become incapacitated from a stroke. In the context of the series of defeats of communist revolutions abroad (crucially the German revolutions of 1919 but also later the Chinese Revolution of 1927) which left the Russian Revolution increasingly isolated in a backward country, the triumvirate was able to effect the marginalization of Leon Trotsky in an internal party political conflict over the issue of Stalin’s theory of Socialism in One Country. It was Trotsky who most clearly represented the wing of the CPSU leadership which claimed that the survival of the revolution depended on the spread of communism to the advanced European economies especially Germany. This was expressed in his theory of permanent revolution.[3]
A few years later, Zinoviev and Kamenev joined the United Front in an alliance with Trotsky which favored Trotskyism and opposed Stalin specifically.[4] Consequently, Stalin allied with Nikolai Bukharin and defeated Trotsky in a power struggle. Trotsky was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1929 and Kamenev and Zinoviev temporarily lost their membership in the Communist Party. Zinoviev and Kamenev, in 1932, were found to be complicit in the Ryutin Affair and again were temporarily expelled from the Communist Party. In December 1934, Sergei Kirov was assassinated and, subsequently 15 defendants were found guilty of direct, or indirect, involvement in the crime and were executed.[5] Zinoviev and Kamenev were found to be morally complicit in Kirov’s murder and were sentenced to prison terms of ten and five years, respectively.[6]
Both Kamenev and Zinoviev had been secretly tried in 1935 but it appears that Stalin decided that, with suitable confessions, their fate could be used for propaganda purposes. Genrikh Yagoda oversaw the interrogation proceedings.
Anti-Soviet Trotskyist Center
Conspiracy and investigation
In December 1935, the original case surrounding Zinoviev began to widen into what was called the Trotsky-Zinoviev Center.[7] Stalin allegedly received reports that correspondences from Trotsky were found among the possessions of one of those arrested in the widened probe.[8] Consequently, Stalin stressed the importance of the investigation and ordered Nikolai Yezhov to take over the case and ascertain if Trotsky was involved.[8] The central office of NKVD that was headed by Genrikh Yagoda was shocked when it was known that Yezhov (at that time a mere party functionary)[a][9] has discovered the conspiracy,[9] due to the fact that they (NKVD) had no relations to the case.[9] This would have led to inevitable conclusion about unprofessionalism of the NKVD leaders who completely missed the existence of the conspiratorial Trotskyist center.[9] In June 1936, Yagoda reiterated his belief to Stalin that there was no link between Trotsky and Zinoviev, but Stalin promptly rebuked him.[10] Bewilderment was strengthened by the fact that both Zinoviev and Kamenev for a long time were under constant operational surveillance and after the murder of Kirov were held in custody.[9] A key role in investigating played a chief of the Secret-political department of the NKVD Main Directory of State Security (a predecessor of KGB), State Security Commissar of the 2nd Class Georgiy Molchanov.[9]
The basis of the scenario was laid in confession testimonies of three arrested: NKVD agent Valentin Olberg (ru:Ольберг, Валентин Павлович) who was teaching at the Gorky Pedagogic Institute and two former participants of the internal party opposition and Soviet statesmen Isaak Rejngold and Richard Pikel.[9] Wherein Rejngold firmly believed that participating in the case fabrication about mythical conspiracy he executes the party’s task.[9] In relation to their composition, the testimonies looked standard conspiratorial activity, murder of Kirov, preparation to assassination attempts against the leaders of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, seizure of power in the Soviet Union with the aim of “restoration of capitalism”.[9]
In July 1936, Zinoviev and Kamenev were brought to Moscow from an unspecified prison.[10] They were interrogated and denied being part of any Trotsky-led conspiracy.[11] Yezhov appealed to Zinoviev’s and Kamenev’s devotion to the Soviet Union as old Bolsheviks and advised them that Trotsky was fomenting anti-Soviet sentiment amongst the proletariat in the world. Throughout spring and summer of 1936 the investigators were requesting from the arrested “to lay down arms in front the party” exerting a continuous pressure on them.[9] Furthermore, this loss of support, in the event of a war with Germany or Japan, could have disastrous ramifications for the Soviet Union.[12] To Kamenev specifically, Yezhov showed him evidence that his son was subject to an investigation that could result in his son’s execution.[13] According to one witness, at the beginning of the summer the central heating was turned on in Zinoviev’s and Kamenev’s cells. This was very unpleasant for both prisoners but particularly Zinoviev who was asthmatic and couldn’t tolerate the artificially increased temperatures.[9] Finally the exhausted prisoners agreed to a deal with Stalin who promised them, on the behalf of Politburo, their lives in exchange for participation in the anti-Trotskyist spectacle.[9] Kamenev and Zinoviev agreed to confess on condition that they receive a direct guarantee from the entire Politburo that their lives and those of their families and followers would be spared. When they were taken to the supposed Politburo meeting, they were met by only Stalin and Kliment Voroshilov.[13] Stalin explained that they were the “commission” authorized by the Politburo, and Stalin agreed to their conditions in order to gain their desired confessions.[14] After that the future defendants were given some medical treatment and food.[9]
The trial was held from August 19 to August 24, 1936 in the small October Hall of the House of the Unions (chosen instead of the larger Hall of Columns, used for earlier trials)[15] and there were 16 defendants.[16]
Defendant Ivan Nikitich Smirnov was blamed by his co-defendants for being the leader of the Center which planned Kirov’s assassination. He, however, had been in prison since January 1933 and refused to confess.[18]
Another defendant, the Old Bolshevik Eduard Holtzman, was accused at the Trial of the 16 of conspiring with Trotsky in Copenhagen at the Hotel Bristol in 1932, where Trotsky was giving a public lecture. A week after the trial it was revealed by a Danish Social Democratic newspaper that the hotel had been demolished in 1917.[19]
All the defendants were sentenced to death and were subsequently shot in the cellars of Lubyanka Prison in Moscow.[citation needed]
The second trial occurred between January 23 and January 30, 1937.[20]
This second trial involved 17 lesser figures including Karl Radek, Yuri Pyatakov and Grigory Sokolnikov. Alexander Beloborodov was also arrested and intended to be tried along with Radek, but did not make the confession required of him, and so he was not produced in court. Thirteen of the defendants were eventually executed by shooting. The rest received sentences in labour camps.[21][22] Radek was spared as he implicated others, including Nikolai Bukharin, Alexei Rykov, and Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky, setting the stage for the Trial of Military and Trial of the Twenty One.
Radek provided the pretext for the purge on a massive scale with his testimony that there was a “third organization separate from the cadres which had passed through [Trotsky’s] school”[23] as well as “semi-Trotskyites, quarter-Trotskyites, one-eighth-Trotskyites, people who helped us, not knowing of the terrorist organization but sympathizing with us, people who from liberalism, from a Fronde against the Party, gave us this help.”[24]
By the third organization, he meant the last remaining former opposition group called Rightists led by Bukharin, whom he implicated by saying: “I feel guilty of one thing more: even after admitting my guilt and exposing the organisation, I stubbornly refused to give evidence about Bukharin. I knew that Bukharin’s situation was just as hopeless as my own, because our guilt, if not juridically, then in essence, was the same. But we are close friends, and intellectual friendship is stronger than other friendships. I knew that Bukharin was in the same state of upheaval as myself. That is why I did not want to deliver him bound hand and foot to the People’s Commissariat of Home Affairs. Just as in relation to our other cadres, I wanted Bukharin himself to lay down his arms.”[23]
At the time, many Western observers who attended the trials said that they were fair and that the guilt of the accused had been established. They based this assessment on the confessions of the accused, which were freely given in open court, without any apparent evidence that they had been extracted by torture or drugging. Joseph E. Davies, the U.S. ambassador, wrote in Mission to Moscow:
In view of the character of the accused, their long terms of service, their recognized distinction in their profession, their long-continued loyalty to the Communist cause, it is scarcely credible that their brother officers … should have acquiesced in their execution, unless they were convinced that these men had been guilty of some offense.[*] It is generally accepted by members of the Diplomatic Corps that the accused must have been guilty of an offense which in the Soviet Union would merit the death penalty.
* The Bukharin trial six months later developed evidence which, if true, more than justified this action. Undoubtedly those facts were all full known to the military court at this time.[25]
The third show trial, in March 1938, known as The Trial of the Twenty-One, tied together all the loose threads from earlier trials. It included 21 defendants alleged to belong to the so-called “Bloc of Rightists and Trotskyites”:
The fact that Yagoda was one of the accused showed the speed at which the purges were consuming its own. Meant to be the culmination of previous trials, it now alleged that Bukharin and others had conspired to assassinate Lenin and Stalin numerous times after 1918 and had murdered Soviet writer Maxim Gorky by poison in 1936. The group also stood accused of espionage. Bukharin and others were claimed to have plotted the overthrow and territorial partition of the Soviet Union in collusion with agents of the German and Japanese governments, among other preposterous charges.
Even sympathetic observers who had stomached the earlier trials found it hard to swallow the new charges as they became ever more absurd, and the purge had now expanded to include virtually every living Old Bolshevik leader except Stalin.
The preparation for this trial was delayed in its early stages due to the reluctance of some party members to denounce their comrades. It was at this time that Stalin personally intervened to speed up the process and replaced Yagoda with Yezhov. Stalin also observed some of the trial in person from a hidden chamber in the courtroom. On the first day of the trial, Krestinsky caused a sensation when he repudiated his written confession and pleaded not guilty to all the charges. However, he changed his plea the next day after “special measures”, which dislocated his left shoulder among other things.[26]
Anastas Mikoyan and Vyacheslav Molotov later claimed that Bukharin was never tortured, but it is now known that his interrogators were given the order, “beating permitted,” and were under great pressure to extract confessions out of the “star” defendant. Bukharin held out for three months, but threats to his young wife and infant son, combined with “methods of physical influence” wore him down. But when he read his confession, amended and corrected personally by Stalin, he withdrew his whole confession. The examination started all over again, with a double team of interrogators.[27]
Bukharin’s confession in particular became the subject of much debate among Western observers, inspiring Koestler’s novel Darkness at Noon and a philosophical essay by Maurice Merleau-Ponty in Humanism and Terror among others. His confessions were somewhat different from others in that, while he pleaded guilty to general charges, he denied knowledge of any specific crimes. Some astute observers noted that he would allow only what was in his written confession and refused to go any further. The fact that he was allowed to write in prison (he wrote four book-length manuscripts including an autobiographical novel, How It All Began, a philosophical treatise, and a collection of poems – all of which were found in Stalin’s archive and published in the 1990s) suggests that some kind of deal was reached as a condition for his confession. He also wrote a series of emotional letters to Stalin, protesting his innocence and professing his love for Stalin, which contrasts with his critical opinion of Stalin and his policies as expressed to others and with his conduct in the trial.
There are several possible interpretations of Bukharin’s motivation (besides coercion) in the trial. Koestler and others viewed it as a true believer’s last service to the Party (while preserving a modicum of personal honor), whereas Bukharin’s biographers Stephen Cohen and Robert Tucker saw traces of Aesopian language, with which Bukharin sought to turn the tables and conduct a trial of Stalinism (while still keeping his part of the bargain to save his family). Bukharin himself speaks of his “peculiar duality of mind” in his last plea, which led to “semi-paralysis of the will” and Hegelian “unhappy consciousness“.
The result was a curious mix of fulsome confessions and subtle criticisms of the trial. After disproving several charges against him (one observer noted that he proceeded to demolish, or rather showed he could very easily demolish, the whole case[28]), Bukharin said that “the confession of the accused is not essential. The confession of the accused is a medieval principle of jurisprudence”, his point being that the trial was solely based on coerced confessions. He finished his last plea with “the monstrousness of my crime is immeasurable, especially in the new stage of the struggle of the U.S.S.R. May this trial be the last severe lesson, and may the great might of the U.S.S.R. become clear to all.”[29]
Romain Rolland and others wrote to Stalin seeking clemency for Bukharin, but all the leading defendants were executed except Rakovsky and two others (they were killed in prison in 1941). Despite the promise to spare his family, Bukharin’s wife, Anna Larina, was sent to a labor camp, but she survived.
Aftermath
Communist Party leaders in most Western countries denounced criticism of the trials as capitalist attempts to subvert Communism.[30]
A number of American communists and progressive “fellow travellers” outside of the Soviet Union signed a Statement of American Progressives on the Moscow Trials. These included Langston Hughes[31] and Stuart Davis,[32] who would later express regrets.
Some contemporary observers who thought the trials were inherently fair cite the statements of Molotov, who while conceding that some of the confessions contain unlikely statements, said there may have been several reasons or motives for this – one being that the handful who made doubtful confessions were trying to undermine the Soviet Union and its government by making dubious statements in their confessions to cast doubts on their trial. Molotov postulated that a defendant might invent a story that he collaborated with foreign agents and party members to undermine the government so that those members would falsely come under suspicion, while the false foreign collaboration charge would be believed as well. Thus, the Soviet government was in his view the victim of false confessions. Nonetheless, he said the evidence of mostly out-of-power Communist officials conspiring to make a power grab during a moment of weakness in the upcoming war truly existed.[citation needed] This defense collapsed after the release of Khrushchev’s Secret Speech to the Twentieth Congress.
In Britain, the lawyer and Labour MP Denis Nowell Pritt, for example, wrote: “Once again the more faint-hearted socialists are beset with doubts and anxieties,” but “once again we can feel confident that when the smoke has rolled away from the battlefield of controversy it will be realized that the charge was true, the confessions correct and the prosecution fairly conducted”, while socialist thinker Beatrice Webb “was pleased that Stalin had ‘cut out the dead wood'”.[33] Communist Party leader Harry Pollitt, in the Daily Worker of March 12, 1936, told the world that “the trials in Moscow represent a new triumph in the history of progress”. The article was ironically illustrated by a photograph of Stalin with Yezhov, himself shortly to vanish and his photographs airbrushed from history by NKVD archivists.[34]
In the United States, left-wing advocates such as Corliss Lamont and Lillian Hellman also denounced criticism of the Moscow trials, signing An Open Letter To American Liberals in support of the trials for the March 1937 issue of Soviet Russia Today.[35] In the political atmosphere of the 1930s, the accusation that there was a conspiracy to destroy the Soviet Union was not incredible, and few outside observers were aware of the events inside the Communist Party that had led to the purge and the trials.
However, the Moscow trials were generally viewed negatively by most Western observers including many liberals. The New York Times noted the absurdity in an editorial on March 1, 1938: “It is as if twenty years after Yorktown somebody in power at Washington found it necessary for the safety of the State to send to the scaffold Thomas Jefferson, Madison, John Adams, Hamilton, Jay and most of their associates. The charge against them would be that they conspired to hand over the United States to George III.”[36]
For Bertram Wolfe, the outcome of the Bukharin trial marked his break with Stalinism.[37]
In May 1937, the Commission of Inquiry into the Charges Made against Leon Trotsky in the Moscow Trials, commonly known as the Dewey Commission, was set up in the United States by supporters of Trotsky, to establish the truth about the trials. The commission was headed by the noted American philosopher and educator John Dewey, who led a delegation to Mexico, where Trotsky lived, to interview him and hold hearings from April 10 to April 17, 1937. The hearings were conducted to investigate the allegations against Trotsky who publicly stated in advance of them that if the commission found him guilty as charged he would hand himself over to the Soviet authorities. They brought to light evidence which established that some of the specific charges made at the trials could not be true.
The Dewey Commission published its findings in the form of a 422-page book titled Not Guilty. Its conclusions asserted the innocence of all those condemned in the Moscow Trials. In its summary the commission wrote: “Independent of extrinsic evidence, the Commission finds:
That the conduct of the Moscow Trials was such as to convince any unprejudiced person that no attempt was made to ascertain the truth.
That while confessions are necessarily entitled to the most serious consideration, the confessions themselves contain such inherent improbabilities as to convince the Commission that they do not represent the truth, irrespective of any means used to obtain them.”
That Trotsky never instructed any of the accused or witnesses in the Moscow trials to enter into agreements with foreign powers against the Soviet Union [and] that Trotsky never recommended, plotted, or attempted the restoration of capitalism in the USSR.
The commission concluded: “We therefore find the Moscow Trials to be frame-ups.”
For example, in Moscow, Pyatakov had testified that he had flown to Oslo in December 1935 to “receive terrorist instructions” from Trotsky. The Dewey Commission established that no such flight had taken place.
In Britain, the trials were also subject to criticism. A group called the British Provisional Committee for the Defence of Leon Trotsky was set up. In 1936, the Committee published an open letter in the Manchester Guardian calling for an international inquiry into the Trials. The letter was signed by several notable figures, including H. N. Brailsford, Harry Wicks, Conrad Noel, Frank Horrabin and Eleanor Rathbone.[38][39] The Committee also supported the Dewey Commission. Emrys Hughes, the British MP, also attacked the Moscow Trials as unjust in his newspaper Forward.[38]
Legacy
All of the surviving members of the Lenin-era party leadership except Stalin and Trotsky, were tried. By the end of the final trial Stalin had arrested and executed almost every important living Bolshevik from the Revolution. Of 1,966 delegates to the party congress in 1934, 1,108 were arrested. Of 139 members of the Central Committee, 98 were arrested. Three out of five Soviet marshals (Alexander Ilyich Yegorov, Vasily Blyukher, Tukhachevsky) and several thousands of the Red Army officers were arrested or shot. The key defendant, Leon Trotsky, was living in exile abroad, but he still did not survive Stalin’s desire to have him dead and was assassinated by a Soviet agent in Mexico in 1940.
While Khrushchev’s Secret Speech denounced Stalin’s personality cult and purges as early as 1956, rehabilitation of Old Bolsheviks proceeded at a slow pace. Nikolai Bukharin and 19 other co-defendants were officially completely rehabilitated in February 1988. Yagoda, who was deeply involved in the great purge as the head of NKVD, was not included. In May 1988, rehabilitation of Zinoviev, Kamenev, Radek, and co-defendants was announced.
After the death of Stalin, Nikita Khrushchev repudiated the trials in a speech to the Twentieth Congress of the Russian Communist Party:
The commission has become acquainted with a large quantity of materials in the NKVD archives and with other documents and has established many facts pertaining to the fabrication of cases against Communists, to glaring abuses of Socialist legality which resulted in the death of innocent people. It became apparent that many party, Government and economic activists who were branded in 1937–38 as ‘enemies,’ were actually never enemies, spies, wreckers, etc., but were always honest Communists … They were only so stigmatized and often, no longer able to bear barbaric tortures, they charged themselves (at the order of the investigative judges – falsifiers) with all kinds of grave and unlikely crimes.[40]
It is now known that the confessions were given only after great psychological pressure and torture had been applied to the defendants. From the accounts of former GPU officer Alexander Orlov and others the methods used to extract the confessions are known: repeated beatings, torture, making prisoners stand or go without sleep for days on end, and threats to arrest and execute the prisoners’ families. For example, Kamenev’s teenage son was arrested and charged with terrorism. After months of such interrogation, the defendants were driven to despair and exhaustion.[41]
In January 1989, the official newspaper Pravda reported that 25,000 persons had been posthumously rehabilitated.
Report of Court Proceedings in the Case of the Anti-Soviet Trotskyite Centre. Heard before the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the U.S.S.R., Moscow, January 23-30, 1937. Moscow 1937.
Report of Court Proceedings in the Case of the Anti-Soviet “Bloc of Rights and Trotskyites”. Heard before the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the U. S. S. R, Moscow, March 2- 13, 1938. Moscow 1938.
Leno, Matthew L. (2010). The Kirov Murder and Soviet History. New Haven: Yale University Press ISBN978-0-300-11236-8.
Orlov, Alexander (1953). The Secret History of Stalin’s Crimes. Random House, Inc.
Redman, Joseph, The British Stalinists and the Moscow Trials. Labour Review Vol. 3 No. 2, March–April 1958
Rogovin, Vadim Z. (1998). 1937: Stalin’s Year of Terror. Oak Park, MI: Mehring Books, Inc. ISBN0-929087-77-1.
Snyder, Timothy (2010). Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin. New York: Basic Books. ISBN978-0-465-00239-9.
Tucker, Robert C. (1973). Stalin as Revolutionary, 1879–1929: A Study in History and Personality. New York: Norton. ISBN0-393-05487-X.
Wolfe, Bertram David (1990). Breaking with Communism: The Intellectual Odyssey of Bertram D. Wolfe. Stanford: Hoover Institution Press. ISBN0-8179-8881-5.
Further reading
Getty, J. Arch and Naumov, Oleg V. (2010). The Road to Terror: Stalin and the Self-destruction of the Bolsheviks, 1932–1939. New Haven: Yale University Press. ISBN978-0-300-10407-3.
Goldman, Wendy Z. (2011). Inventing the Enemy: Denunciation and Terror in Stalin’s Russia. New York: Cambridge University Press. ISBN978-0-521-19196-8.
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Dow Jones plunges 400 points as Donald Trump says ‘I have no deadline’ for a trade deal with China and that he could for 2020 election to strike one
Global stocks took a tumble amid pessimism over a standoff between the U.S. and China when it comes to resolving their trade war
On Wall Street, the Dow Jones index fell more than 400 points and the Nasdaq was down by more than 90 points
President Trump appeared to downplay the chances for a deal to end soon
‘In some ways I like the idea of waiting until after the election,’ he said
U.S. stocks also took a tumble when the market opened
Wall Street shares tumbled Tuesday after Donald Trump said he could wait until after next year’s presidential election to strike a trade deal with China.
Trump appeared to downplay the chances for a deal to end the U.S.-China trade war before the end of the year and even said it could wait until after the 2020 presidential election.
Speaking in London where he is attending a NATO summit, Trump said that the only limiting factor to reaching an agreement with China is whether he wants to make a deal.
Asked about his previous goal of reaching an agreement by years’ end, Trump told reporters, ‘I have no deadline, no.’
‘In some ways I like the idea of waiting until after the election,’ he added. He has previously suggested that China wanted to wait until after the election to negotiate a deal.
‘I’m doing very well in a deal with China, if I want to make it. If I want to make. It’s not if they want to make it,’ the president said at a breakfast meeting with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg. ‘It’s if I want to make it. We’ll see what happens. But I’m doing a well if I want to make a deal. I don’t know if I want to make it.’
His intervention caused a Wall Street sell-off with the Dow Jones index losing a maximum of 411 points, and thew Nasdq falling by as much as 97 points,
Technology companies, which do a lot of business with China, stocks led the declines. Apple sank 2.5%.
Investors were also disappointed that the U.S. proposed tariffs on French goods, a day after announcing taxes on steel and aluminum imports from Chile and Argentina.
Surprise: ‘I’m doing very well in a deal with China, if I want to make it. If I want to make. It’s not if they want to make it, Donald Trump said – sending markets tumbling
President Donald Trump – at a meeting with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg – downplayed chances for an to the U.S.-China trade war soon
Around the world, Trump caused a sell off. France’s CAC 40 fell 0.3% to 5,770, while Britain’s FTSE 100 tumbled nearly 1% 7,216. Germany’s DAX gained 0.6% to 13,045.
Tensions between the two nations flared anew last week after Trump signed legislation expressing U.S. support for pro-democracy demonstrators in Hong Kong.
Investors have been hoping that the world´s two biggest economies can make progress toward at least staving off new tariffs scheduled for Dec. 15 on $160 billion worth of Chinese products, including smartphones and laptops.
The Trump administration has also proposed tariffs on $2.4 billion in goods in retaliation for a French tax on global tech giants including Google, Amazon and Facebook.
France´s finance minister threatened a ‘strong European riposte’ if the U.S. follows through on a proposal to hit French cheese, Champagne, handbags and other products with tariffs of up to 100%.
The move is likely to increase tensions between the U.S. and Europe – and set the stage for a likely tense meeting Tuesday between President Donald Trump and French President Emmanuel Macron.
In Asia, tensions had already flared after China retaliated for U.S. support of protesters in Hong Kong, putting investors in a selling mood. Asian regional markets are generally hurt by declines in trade and the slowdown in the Chinese economy that might cause.
Japan’s benchmark Nikkei 225 lost 0.6% to finish at 23,379.81. Australia´s S&P/ASX 200 slid 2.2% to 6,712.30. South Korea´s Kospi declined 0.4% to 2,084.07. Hong Kong’s Hang Seng fell 0.2% to 26,391.30, while the Shanghai Composite recovered earlier losses to inch up 0.3% to 2,884.70.
Last week, Trump said ‘We´re in the final throes of a very important deal.’
And China’s Commerce Ministry reported that its negotiator, Vice Premier Liu He, had spoken by phone with his U.S. counterparts, U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin. The official Xinhua News Agency said the men had discussed their ‘core concerns’ and ‘agreed to maintain communication on remaining issues in consultations on the Phase 1 deal.’
Earlier, China had made goodwill gestures, issuing improved guidelines for protection of patents, copyrights and other intellectual property and lifting a five-year ban on American poultry.
Then Trump’s comments Tuesday seemed to suggest that a breakthrough might not come anytime soon.
It’s been a year and a half since Trump declared that ‘trade wars are good, and easy to win.’
But his war with China has dragged on and on, with each side imposing – and raising – import taxes on hundreds of billions of dollars of each other’s goods. Those taxes are paid by companies that import those goods.
These importers must either absorb those higher costs or pass them on to customers in the form of price increases.
Negotiators have met 13 times. Truces have come and gone. Predictions of peace have proved premature.
For now, at least, the reality remains: The United States is taxing more than $360 billion worth of Chinese imports, and Beijing is retaliating with tariffs on $120 billion of American products. Not since the 1930s has the world seen such intense trade warfare.
The two sides are fighting over allegations that China has deployed predatory tactics in its drive to achieve global dominance in such advanced technologies as quantum computing and electric cars. The administration asserts, and many China analysts agree, that these tactics include stealing sensitive technology, unfairly subsidizing their own firms and forcing foreign companies to hand over trade secrets as the price of admission to China’s market.
6
Trump said a deal could wait until after the 2020 election
U.S. stocks also took a tumble when the market opened
On Oct. 11, Trump had announced what he cast as a breakthrough: Beijing had agreed to buy far more U.S. farm products – as much as $50 billion worth annually, the administration said – and to better protect intellectual property. In return, the United States suspended plans to raise tariffs on $112 billion in Chinese goods.
Even though this so-called Phase 1 deal left the thorniest issues for future negotiations, the two sides still haven’t managed to finalize it.
‘It now looks likely that a Phase 1 deal will be rather limited in scope, hardly resolving the broader trade-related uncertainty that continues to cloud business sentiment in both countries,’ said Eswar Prasad, a Cornell University economist who formerly led the China division at the International Monetary Fund.
Beijing has been reluctant to make the kind of substantive policy reforms that would satisfy the Trump administration. Doing so would likely require scaling back China’s aspirations for technological supremacy, which it sees as crucial to its prosperity.
The prolonged trade war has been inflicting economic damage. Factories have cut purchases and investments because they don’t know whether or when Trump will lift his tariffs or which countries he might target next.
The president’s sudden move Monday to take action against Argentina and Brazil underscored how unpredictable his policies are. Last year, he had agreed to exempt the two countries from tariffs on steel and aluminum. But he reversed that decision in a tweet Monday morning, accusing Argentina and Brazil of manipulating their currencies lower to give their exporters a price advantage. In fact, their currencies are plunging because their economies are in crisis.
On Tuesday, the Trump administration ratcheted up tensions with Europe by announcing plans to impose tariffs of up to 100% on cheese, Champagne and lipstick and other imports from France to protest a French digital services tax.
The administration is also readying taxes on $7.5 billion worth of European Union imports in a dispute over illegal EU subsidies to aircraft manufacturer Airbus.
The tariffs and the uncertainty they generate have hurt the U.S. manufacturing sector, which many economists say is already in recession. On Monday, a private survey found that American factory output had fallen for the fourth straight month.
Alphabet CEO Larry Page will step down from the role and Google CEO Sundar Pichai will take over, adding to his current responsibilities. Co-founder Sergey Brin will also step down as president of Alphabet and the role will be eliminated.
Page and Brin said in a blog post that “it’s the natural time to simplify our management structure.”
Page became CEO of Alphabet after Google restructured to form the parent company in 2015. He had previously been CEO of Google.
Sundar Pichai to replace Larry Page as Alphabet CEO
Alphabet CEO Larry Page announced Tuesday that he will step down from the position. Google CEO Sundar Pichai will take over as CEO of the parent company in addition to his current role. Co-founder Sergey Brin will also step down as president of Alphabet and the role will be eliminated.
Alphabet’s stock was up as much as 0.8% after hours.
“With Alphabet now well-established, and Google and the Other Bets operating effectively as independent companies, it’s the natural time to simplify our management structure,” Page and Brin wrote in a blog post announcing the change. “We’ve never been ones to hold on to management roles when we think there’s a better way to run the company. And Alphabet and Google no longer need two CEOs and a President.”
Page became CEO of Alphabet in 2015 when Google reorganized to form the new parent company to oversee its “Other Bets” outside of its main search and digital ads businesses. Page had previously served as CEO of Google. Under the new structure, Pichai became CEO of Google after effectively runningmuch of the business as Page had taken a step back to focus on big picture endeavors. Pichai had previously led Android and Chrome at the company.
Both Page and Brin will remain “actively involved” as members of Alphabet’s board, according to the letter. The co-founders still have controlling voting shares of the company. Page holds about 5.8% of Alphabet shares, Brin controls about 5.6% and Pichai holds about 0.1%, ensuring the new CEO may still be challenged by the company’s founders. Google said its voting structure is not changing in light of the announcement.
Alphabet may need to lean more heavily on its other bets, which include companies like Waymo and Verily, as its core digital advertising business run by Google shows signs of slowing down. Google showed slowing ad revenue in its first quarter of 2019 and lower profit compared to the previous year during the third quarter. The company has still struggled to generate significant revenue in hardware, although its cloud business is growing.
Page and Pichai have overseen the company during a tumultuous few years as Google employees have voiced their discontent with company policies. Thousands of Google employees walked out of offices around the world last year to protest a $90 million exit package Google reportedly paid to former Android leader Andy Rubin despite finding sexual misconduct claims against him to be credible, a New York Times investigation revealed. Alphabet’s board has opened an investigation into how executives have handled claims of sexual misconduct, CNBC reported last month.
Google has been forced to back off of certain projects have pushback from employees. In 2018, Google’s cloud chief at the time said the company would not renew its contract with the Department of Defense after it was set to expire in March 2019. The decision followed a petition signed by thousands of employees urging Pichai to keep Google out of the “business of war.” Google employees have also urged the company to back off its plans to build a censored search engine for China after The Intercept reported on the plans cryptically called Project Dragonfly.
More recently, a group of former Google employees known as the “Thanksgiving Four” have claimed their pre-holiday dismissal amounted to retaliation for their attempts to organize workers. The former employees have promised to file charges with the National Labor Relations Board, claiming unfair labor practices. Google denies any retaliation and has insisted the workers were let go for sharing confidential documents and breaching security.
“Google is not a conventional company. We do not intend to become one. Throughout Google’s evolution as a privately held company, we have managed Google differently. We have also emphasized an atmosphere of creativity and challenge, which has helped us provide unbiased, accurate and free access to information for those who rely on us around the world.”
We believe those central tenets are still true today. The company is not conventional and continues to make ambitious bets on new technology, especially with our Alphabet structure. Creativity and challenge remain as ever-present as before, if not more so, and are increasingly applied to a variety of fields such as machine learning, energy efficiency and transportation. Nonetheless, Google’s core service—providing unbiased, accurate, and free access to information—remains at the heart of the company.
However, since we wrote our first founders’ letter, the company has evolved and matured. Within Google, there are all the popular consumer services that followed Search, such as Maps, Photos, and YouTube; a global ecosystem of devices powered by our Android and Chrome platforms, including our own Made by Google devices; Google Cloud, including GCP and G Suite; and of course a base of fundamental technologies around machine learning, cloud computing, and software engineering. It’s an honor that billions of people have chosen to make these products central to their lives—this is a trust and responsibility that Google will always work to live up to.
And structurally, the company evolved into Alphabet in 2015. As we said in the Alphabet founding letter in 2015:
“Alphabet is about businesses prospering through strong leaders and independence.”
Since we wrote that, hundreds of Phoenix residents are now being driven around in Waymo cars—many without drivers! Wing became the first drone company to make commercial deliveries to consumers in the U.S. And Verily and Calico are doing important work, through a number of great partnerships with other healthcare companies. Some of our “Other Bets” have their own boards with independent members, and outside investors.
Those are just a few examples of technology companies that we have formed within Alphabet, in addition to investment subsidiaries GV and Capital G, which have supported hundreds more. Together with all of Google’s services, this forms a colorful tapestry of bets in technology across a range of industries—all with the goal of helping people and tackling major challenges.
“Google was born in 1998. If it were a person, it would have started elementary school late last summer (around August 19), and today it would have just about finished the first grade.”
Today, in 2019, if the company was a person, it would be a young adult of 21 and it would be time to leave the roost. While it has been a tremendous privilege to be deeply involved in the day-to-day management of the company for so long, we believe it’s time to assume the role of proud parents—offering advice and love, but not daily nagging!
With Alphabet now well-established, and Google and the Other Bets operating effectively as independent companies, it’s the natural time to simplify our management structure. We’ve never been ones to hold on to management roles when we think there’s a better way to run the company. And Alphabet and Google no longer need two CEOs and a President. Going forward, Sundar will be the CEO of both Google and Alphabet. He will be the executive responsible and accountable for leading Google, and managing Alphabet’s investment in our portfolio of Other Bets. We are deeply committed to Google and Alphabet for the long term, and will remain actively involved as Board members, shareholders and co-founders. In addition, we plan to continue talking with Sundar regularly, especially on topics we’re passionate about!
Sundar brings humility and a deep passion for technology to our users, partners and our employees every day. He’s worked closely with us for 15 years, through the formation of Alphabet, as CEO of Google, and a member of the Alphabet Board of Directors. He shares our confidence in the value of the Alphabet structure, and the ability it provides us to tackle big challenges through technology. There is no one that we have relied on more since Alphabet was founded, and no better person to lead Google and Alphabet into the future.
We are deeply humbled to have seen a small research project develop into a source of knowledge and empowerment for billions—a bet we made as two Stanford students that led to a multitude of other technology bets. We could not have imagined, back in 1998 when we moved our servers from a dorm room to a garage, the journey that would follow.
Page was the chief executive officer of Alphabet Inc. (Google’s parent company) until stepping down on December 3, 2019. After stepping aside as Google CEO in August 2001, in favor of Eric Schmidt, he re-assumed the role in April 2011. He announced his intention to step aside a second time in July 2015, to become CEO of Alphabet, under which Google’s assets would be reorganized. Under Page, Alphabet is seeking to deliver major advancements in a variety of industries.[6]
As of October 2019, Page is the 9th-richest person in the world, with a net worth of $55.8 billion.[7]Forbes placed him 10th in the list “Billionaires 2019”.[8]
During an interview, Page recalled his childhood, noting that his house “was usually a mess, with computers, science, and technology magazines and Popular Science magazines all over the place”, an environment in which he immersed himself.[26] Page was an avid reader during his youth, writing in his 2013 Google founders letter: “I remember spending a huge amount of time pouring [sic] over books and magazines”.[27] According to writer Nicholas Carlson, the combined influence of Page’s home atmosphere and his attentive parents “fostered creativity and invention”. Page also played flute and studied music composition while growing up. He attended the renowned music summer camp – Interlochen Arts Camp at Interlochen, Michigan. Page has mentioned that his musical education inspired his impatience and obsession with speed in computing. “In some sense, I feel like music training led to the high-speed legacy of Google for me”. In an interview Page said that “In music, you’re very cognizant of time. Time is like the primary thing” and that “If you think about it from a music point of view, if you’re a percussionist, you hit something, it’s got to happen in milliseconds, fractions of a second”.[9][28]
Page was first attracted to computers when he was six years old, as he was able to “play with the stuff lying around”—first-generation personal computers—that had been left by his mother and father.[24] He became the “first kid in his elementary school to turn in an assignment from a word processor“.[29] His older brother also taught him to take things apart and before long he was taking “everything in his house apart to see how it worked”. He said that “from a very early age, I also realized I wanted to invent things. So I became really interested in technology and business. Probably from when I was 12, I knew I was going to start a company eventually.”[29]
Page focused on the problem of finding out which web pages linked to a given page, considering the number and nature of such backlinks as valuable information for that page. The role of citations in academic publishing would also become pertinent for the research.[37]Sergey Brin, a fellow Stanford PhD student, would soon join Page’s research project, nicknamed “BackRub.”[37] Together, the pair authored a research paper titled “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine”, which became one of the most downloaded scientific documents in the history of the Internet at the time.[24][35]
John Battelle, co-founder of Wired magazine, wrote that Page had reasoned that the:
… entire Web was loosely based on the premise of citation—after all, what is a link but a citation? If he could devise a method to count and qualify each backlink on the Web, as Page puts it “the Web would become a more valuable place.”[37]
Battelle further described how Page and Brin began working together on the project:
At the time Page conceived of BackRub, the Web comprised an estimated 10 million documents, with an untold number of links between them. The computing resources required to crawl such a beast were well beyond the usual bounds of a student project. Unaware of exactly what he was getting into, Page began building out his crawler. The idea’s complexity and scale lured Brin to the job. A polymath who had jumped from project to project without settling on a thesis topic, he found the premise behind BackRub fascinating. “I talked to lots of research groups” around the school, Brin recalls, “and this was the most exciting project, both because it tackled the Web, which represents human knowledge, and because I liked Larry.”[37]
Search engine development
To convert the backlink data gathered by BackRub’s web crawler into a measure of importance for a given web page, Brin and Page developed the PageRank algorithm, and realized that it could be used to build a search engine far superior to existing ones.[37] The algorithm relied on a new technology that analyzed the relevance of the backlinks that connected one web page to another.[38]
Combining their ideas, the pair began utilizing Page’s dormitory room as a machine laboratory, and extracted spare parts from inexpensive computers to create a device that they used to connect the not nascent search engine with Stanford’s broadband campus network.[37] After filling Page’s room with equipment, they then converted Brin’s dorm room into an office and programming center, where they tested their new search engine designs on the Web. The rapid growth of their project caused Stanford’s computing infrastructure to experience problems.[39]
Page and Brin used the former’s basic HTML programming skills to set up a simple search page for users, as they did not have a web page developer to create anything visually elaborate. They also began using any computer part they could find to assemble the necessary computing power to handle searches by multiple users. As their search engine grew in popularity among Stanford users, it required additional servers to process the queries. In August 1996, the initial version of Google, still on the Stanford University website, was made available to Internet users.[37]
The mathematical website interlinking that the PageRankalgorithm facilitates, illustrated by size-percentage correlation of the circles. The algorithm was named after Page himself.
By early 1997, the BackRub page described the state as follows:
Some Rough Statistics (from August 29, 1996)
Total indexable HTML URLs: 75.2306 Million
Total content downloaded: 207.022 gigabytes
…
BackRub is written in Java and Python and runs on several Sun Ultras and Intel Pentiums running Linux. The primary database is kept on a Sun Ultra series II with 28GB of disk. Scott Hassan and Alan Steremberg have provided a great deal of very talented implementation help. Sergey Brin has also been very involved and deserves many thanks.
BackRub already exhibited the rudimentary functions and characteristics of a search engine: a query input was entered and it provided a list of backlinks ranked by importance. Page recalled: “We realized that we had a querying tool. It gave you a good overall ranking of pages and ordering of follow-up pages.”[41] Page said that in mid-1998 they finally realized the further potential of their project: “Pretty soon, we had 10,000 searches a day. And we figured, maybe this is really real.”[39]
Some compared Page and Brin’s vision to the impact of Johannes Gutenberg, the inventor of modern printing:
In 1440, Johannes Gutenberg introduced Europe to the mechanical printing press, printing Bibles for mass consumption. The technology allowed for books and manuscripts – originally replicated by hand – to be printed at a much faster rate, thus spreading knowledge and helping to usher in the European Renaissance … Google has done a similar job.[42]
The comparison was also noted by the authors of The Google Story: “Not since Gutenberg … has any new invention empowered individuals, and transformed access to information, as profoundly as Google.”[43] Also, not long after the two “cooked up their new engine for web searches, they began thinking about information that was at the time beyond the web,” such as digitizing books and expanding health information.[39]
Soliciting funds from faculty members, family and friends, Brin and Page scraped together enough to buy some servers and rent that famous garage in Menlo Park. … [soon after], Sun Microsystems co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim wrote a $100,000 check to “Google, Inc.” The only problem was, “Google, Inc.” did not yet exist—the company hadn’t yet been incorporated. For two weeks, as they handled the paperwork, the young men had nowhere to deposit the money.[44]
In 1998,[45] Brin and Page incorporated Google, Inc.[46] with the initial domain name of “Googol,” derived from a number that consists of one followed by one hundred zeros—representing the vast amount of data that the search engine was intended to explore. Following inception, Page appointed himself as CEO, while Brin, named Google’s co-founder, served as Google’s president.[9] Writer Nicholas Carlson wrote in 2014:
While Google is often thought of as the invention of two young computer whizzes—Sergey and Larry, Larry and Sergey—the truth is that Google is a creation of Larry Page, helped along by Sergey Brin.[9]
The pair’s mission was “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”[47] With a US$1-million loan from friends and family, the inaugural team moved into a Mountain View office by the start of 2000. In 1999, Page experimented with smaller servers so Google could fit more into each square meter of the third-party warehouses the company rented for their servers. This eventually led to a search engine that ran much faster than Google’s competitors at the time.[9]
By June 2000, Google had indexed one billion Internet URLs (Uniform Resource Locators), making it the most comprehensive search engine on the Web at the time. The company cited NEC Research Institute data in its June 26 press release, stating that “there are more than 1 billion web pages online today,” with Google “providing access to 560 million full-text indexed web pages and 500 million partially indexed URLs.”[48]
Early management style
During his first tenure as CEO, Page embarked on an attempt to fire all of Google’s project managers in 2001. Page’s plan involved all of Google’s engineers reporting to a VP of engineering, who would then report directly to him—Page explained that he didn’t like non-engineers supervising engineers due to their limited technical knowledge.[9] Page even documented his management tenets for his team to use as a reference:
Don’t delegate: Do everything you can yourself to make things go faster.
Don’t get in the way if you’re not adding value. Let the people actually doing the work talk to each other while you go do something else.
Ideas are more important than age. Just because someone is junior doesn’t mean they don’t deserve respect and cooperation.
The worst thing you can do is stop someone from doing something by saying, “No. Period.” If you say no, you have to help them find a better way to get it done.[9]
Even though Page’s new model was unsustainable and led to disgruntlement among the affected employees, his issue with engineers being managed by non-engineering staff gained traction more broadly. Eventually, the practice of only instating engineers into the management roles of engineering teams was established as a standard across Silicon Valley.[49]
Page also believed that the faster Google’s search engine returned answers, the more it would be used. He fretted over milliseconds and pushed his engineers—from those who developed algorithms to those who built data centers—to think about lag times. He also pushed for keeping Google’s home page famously sparse in its design because it would help the search results load faster.[28]
2001–2011
Changes in management and expansion
Before Silicon Valley’s two most prominent investors, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Sequoia Capital, agreed to invest a combined total of $50 million in Google, they applied pressure on Page to step down as CEO so that a more experienced leader could build a “world-class management team.” Page eventually became amenable to the idea after meeting with other technology CEOs, including Steve Jobs and Intel’s Andrew Grove. Eric Schmidt, who had been hired as Chairman of Google in March 2001, left his full-time position as the CEO of Novell to take the same role at Google in August of the same year, and Page moved aside to assume the President of Products role.[9]
Under Schmidt’s leadership, Google underwent a period of major growth and expansion, which included its initial public offering (IPO) on August 20, 2004. He always acted in consultation with Page and Brin when he embarked on initiatives such as the hiring of an executive team and the creation of a sales force management system. Page remained the boss at Google in the eyes of the employees, as he gave final approval on all new hires, and it was Page who provided the signature for the IPO, the latter making him a billionaire at the age of 30.[9]
Page led the acquisition of Android for $50 million in 2005 to fulfill his ambition to place handheld computers in the possession of consumers so that they could access Google anywhere. The purchase was made without Schmidt’s knowledge, but the CEO was not perturbed by the relatively small acquisition. Page became passionate about Android, and spent large amounts of time with Android CEO and cofounder Andy Rubin. By September 2008, T-Mobile launched the G1, the first phone using Android software and, by 2010, 17.2% of the handset market consisted of Android sales, overtaking Apple for the first time. Android became the world’s most popular mobile operating system shortly afterward.[9]
Assumption of CEO position at Google
Following a January 2011 announcement,[50] Page officially became the chief executive of Google on April 4, 2011, while Schmidt stepped down to become executive chairman.[51] By this time, Google had over $180 billion market capitalization and more than 24,000 employees.[52]
After Schmidt announced the end of his tenure as CEO on January 20, 2011, he jokingly tweeted on Twitter: “Adult-supervision no longer needed.” Quartz organizational management reporter, Max Nisen, described the decade prior to Page’s second appointment as Google’s CEO as his “lost decade.” While Page continued to exert a significant influence at Google during this time, overseeing product development and other operations, he became increasingly disconnected and less responsive over time.[9][49]
2011–2013
As Google’s new CEO, Page’s two key goals were the development of greater autonomy for the executives overseeing the most important divisions, and higher levels of collaboration, communication and unity among the teams. Page also formed what the media called the “L-Team,” a group of senior vice-presidents who reported directly to him and worked in close proximity to his office for a portion of the working week.[53] Additionally, he reorganized the company’s senior management, placing a CEO-like manager at the top of Google’s most important product divisions, including YouTube, AdWords, and Google Search.[9]
In accordance with a more cohesive team environment, Page declared a new “zero tolerance for fighting” policy that contrasted with his approach during the early days of Google, when he would use his harsh and intense arguments with Brin as an exemplar for senior management. Page had changed his thinking during his time away from the CEO role, as he eventually arrived at the conclusion that his greatly ambitious goals required a harmonious team dynamic. As part of Page’s collaborative rejuvenation process, Google’s products and applications were consolidated and underwent an aesthetic overhaul.[49][54]
Changes and consolidation process
At least 70 of Google’s products, features and services were eventually shut down by March 2013, while the appearance and nature of the remaining ones were unified.[55][56] Jon Wiley, lead designer of Google Search at the time, codenamed Page’s redesign overhaul, which officially commenced on April 4, 2011, “Project Kennedy,” based on Page’s use of the term “moonshots” to describe ambitious projects in a January 2013 Wired interview.[54][57] An initiative named “Kanna” previously attempted to create a uniform design aesthetic for Google’s range of products, but it was too difficult at that point in the company’s history for one team to drive such change. Matias Duarte, senior director of the Android user experience at the time that “Kennedy” started, explained in 2013 that “Google passionately cares about design.” Page proceeded to consult with the Google Creative Lab design team, based in New York City, to find an answer to his question of what a “cohesive vision” of Google might look like.[54]
The eventual results of “Kennedy,” which were progressively rolled out from June 2011 until January 2013, were described by The Verge technology publication as focused upon “refinement, white space, cleanliness, elasticity, usefulness, and most of all simplicity.” The final products were aligned with Page’s aim for a consistent suite of products that can “move fast,” and “Kennedy” was called a “design revolution” by Duarte. Page’s “UXA” (user/graphics interface) design team then emerged from the “Kennedy” project, tasked with “designing and developing a true UI framework that transforms Google’s application software into a beautiful, mature, accessible and consistent platform for its users.” Unspoken of in public, the small UXA unit was designed to ensure that “Kennedy” became an “institution.”[54]
Acquisition strategy and new products
When acquiring products and companies for Google, Page asked whether the business acquisition passed the toothbrush test as an initial qualifier, asking the question “Is it something you will use once or twice a day, and does it make your life better?”. This approach looked for usefulness above profitability, and long-term potential over near-term financial gain, which has been noted as rare in business acquiring processes.[58][59][60]
With Facebook’s influence rapidly expanding during the start of Page’s second tenure, he finally responded to the intensive competition with Google’s own social network, Google+, in mid-2011. After several delays, the social network was released through a very limited field test and was led by Vic Gundotra, Google’s then senior vice president of social.[61]
In August 2011, Page announced that Google would spend $12.5 billion to acquire Motorola Mobility.[62] The purchase was primarily motivated by Google’s need to secure patents to protect Android from lawsuits by companies including Apple Inc.[9] Page wrote on Google’s official blog on August 15, 2011 that “companies including Microsoft and Apple are banding together in anti-competitive patent attacks on Android. The United States Department of Justice had to intervene in the results of one recent patent auction to “protect competition and innovation in the open source software community”… Our acquisition of Motorola will increase competition by strengthening Google’s patent portfolio, which will enable us to better protect Android from anti-competitive threats from Microsoft, Apple and other companies”.[63][64] In 2014, Page sold Motorola Mobility for $2.9 billion to Personal Computer maker, Lenovo which represented a loss in value of $9.5 billion over two years.[65]
Page also ventured into hardware and Google unveiled the Chromebook in May 2012. The hardware product was a laptop that ran on a Google operating system, Chrome OS.[66]
2013–2015
In January 2013, Page participated in a rare interview with Wired, in which writer Steven Levy discussed Page’s “10X” mentality—Google employees are expected to create products and services that are at least 10 times better than those of its competitors—in the introductory blurb. Astro Teller, the head of Google X, explained to Levy that 10X is “just core to who he [Page] is,” while Page’s “focus is on where the next 10X will come from.”[57] In his interview with Levy, Page referred to the success of YouTube and Android as examples of “crazy” ideas that investors were not initially interested in, saying: “If you’re not doing some things that are crazy, then you’re doing the wrong things.”[57] Page also stated that he was “very happy” with the status of Google+, and discussed concerns over the Internet in relation to the SOPA bill and an International Telecommunication Union proposal that had been recently introduced:
… I do think the Internet’s under much greater attack than it has been in the past. Governments are now afraid of the Internet because of the Middle East stuff, and so they’re a little more willing to listen to what I see as a lot of commercial interests that just want to make money by restricting people’s freedoms. But they’ve also seen a tremendous user reaction, like the backlash against SOPA. I think that governments fight users’ freedoms at their own peril.[57]
At the May 2013 I/O developers conference in San Francisco, Page delivered a keynote address and said that “We’re at maybe 1% of what is possible. Despite the faster change, we’re still moving slow relative to the opportunities we have. I think a lot of that is because of the negativity … Every story I read is Google vs someone else. That’s boring. We should be focusing on building the things that don’t exist” and that he was “sad the Web isn’t advancing as fast as it should be” citing a perceived focus on negativity and zero sum games among some in the technology sector as a cause for that.[67] In response to an audience question, Page noted an issue that Google had been experiencing with Microsoft, whereby the latter made its Outlook program interoperable with Google, but did not allow for backward compatibility—he referred to Microsoft’s practice as “milking off.” During the question-and-answer section of his keynote, Page expressed interest in Burning Man, which Brin had previously praised—it was a motivating factor for the latter during Schmidt’s hiring process, as Brin liked that Schmidt had attended the week-long annual event.[9][68][69]
In September 2013, Page launched the independent Calico initiative, a R&D project in the field of biotechnology. Google announced that Calico seeks to innovate and make improvements in the field of human health, and appointed Art Levinson, chairman of Apple’s board and former CEO of Genentech, to be the new division’s CEO. Page’s official statement read: “Illness and aging affect all our families. With some longer term, moonshot thinking around healthcare and biotechnology, I believe we can improve millions of lives.”[70]
Page participated in a March 2014 TedX conference that was held in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. The presentation was scripted by Page’s chief PR executive Rachel Whetstone, and Google’s CMO Lorraine Twohill, and a demonstration of an artificially intelligent computer program was displayed on a large screen.[9] Page responded to a question about corporations, noting that corporations largely get a “bad rap”, which he stated was because they were probably doing the same incremental things they were doing “50 or 20 years ago”. He went on to juxtapose that kind of incremental approach to his vision of Google counteracting calcification through driving technology innovation at a high rate. Page mentioned Elon Musk and SpaceX:
He [Musk] wants to go to Mars to back up humanity. That’s a worthy goal. We have a lot of employees at Google who’ve become pretty wealthy. You’re working because you want to change the world and make it better … I’d like for us to help out more than we are.[71]
Page also mentioned Nikola Tesla with regard to invention and commercialization:
Invention is not enough. [Nikola] Tesla invented the electric power we use, but he struggled to get it out to people. [You have to] combine both things … invention and innovation focus, plus … a company that can really commercialize things and get them to people.[72]
Page announced a major management restructure in October 2014 so that he would no longer need to be responsible for day-to-day product-related decision making. In a memo, Page said that Google’s core businesses would be able to progress in a typical manner, while he could focus on the next generation of ambitious projects, including Google X initiatives; access and energy, including Google Fiber; smart-home automation through Nest Labs; and biotechnology innovations under Calico.[73] Page maintained that he would continue as the unofficial “chief product officer.”[56] Subsequent to the announcement, the executives in charge of Google’s core products reported to then Google Senior Vice President Sundar Pichai, who reported directly to Page.[73][74][75][76]
In a November 2014 interview, Page stated that he prioritized the maintenance of his “deep knowledge” of Google’s products and breadth of projects, as it had been a key motivating factor for team members. In relation to his then role as the company’s CEO, Page said: “I think my job as CEO—I feel like it’s always to be pushing people ahead.”[56]
On August 10, 2015, Page announced on Google’s official blog that Google had restructured into a number of subsidiaries of a new holding company known as Alphabet Inc with Page becoming CEO of Alphabet Inc and Sundar Pichai assuming the position of CEO of Google Inc. In his announcement, Page described the planned holding company as follows:[77]
Alphabet is mostly a collection of companies. The largest of which, of course, is Google. This newer Google is a bit slimmed down, with the companies that are pretty far afield of our main Internet products contained in Alphabet instead. … Fundamentally, we believe this allows us more management scale, as we can run things independently that aren’t very related.
As well as explaining the origin of the company’s name:
We liked the name Alphabet because it means a collection of letters that represent language, one of humanity’s most important innovations, and is the core of how we index with Google search! We also like that it means alpha‑bet (Alpha is investment return above benchmark), which we strive for!
Page wrote that the motivation behind the reorganization is to make Google “cleaner and more accountable.” He also wrote that there was a desire to improve “the transparency and oversight of what we’re doing,” and to allow greater control of unrelated companies previously within the Google ecosystem.[77][78][79]
Page has not been on any press conferences since 2015 and has not presented at product launches or earnings calls since 2013. The Bloomberg Businessweek termed the reorganization into Alphabet as a clever retirement plan allowing Page to retain control over Google, at the same time relinquishing all responsibilities over it. Executives at Alphabet describe Page as a “futurist”, highly detached from day-to-day business dealings and more focused on moon-shot projects. While some managers of Alphabet companies speak of Page as intensely involved, others say that his rare office check-ins are “akin to a royal visit”.[80]
2019
On December 3, 2019 Larry Page announced that he will step down from the position of Alphabet CEO and would be replaced by Google CEO Sundar Pichai. Pichai will also continue as Google CEO. Page and Google co-founder and Alphabet president Sergey Bryn announced the change in a joint blog post, “With Alphabet now well-established, and Google and the Other Bets operating effectively as independent companies, it’s the natural time to simplify our management structure. We’ve never been ones to hold on to management roles when we think there’s a better way to run the company. And Alphabet and Google no longer need two CEOs and a President.”[81]
Other interests
Page is an investor in Tesla Motors.[82] He has invested in renewable energy technology, and with the help of Google.org, Google’s philanthropic arm, promotes the adoption of plug-in hybrid electric cars[83][84][85][86] and other alternative energy investments.[87] He is also a strategic backer in the Opener startup which is developing aerial vehicles for consumer travel.[88]
Page is also interested in the socio-economic effects of advanced intelligent systems and how advanced digital technologies can be used to create abundance (as described in Peter Diamandis’ book), provide for people’s needs, shorten the workweek, and mitigate the potential detrimental effects of technological unemployment.[89][90]
Page also helped to set up Singularity University, a transhumanist think-tank.[91] Google is one of the institution’s corporate founders[92] and still funds scholarships at Singularity University.[93]
Personal life
In 2007, Page married Lucinda Southworth on Necker Island, the Caribbean island owned by Richard Branson.[94] Southworth is a research scientist and the sister of actress and model Carrie Southworth.[95] Page and Southworth have two children, born in 2009 and 2011.[96][97]
In 2009 Page began purchasing properties and tearing down homes adjacent to his home in Palo Alto to make room for a large ecohouse. The existing buildings were “deconstructed” and the materials donated for reuse. The ecohouse was designed to “minimize the impact on the environment.” Page worked with an arborist to replace some trees that were in poor health with others that used less water to maintain. Page also applied for Green Point Certification, with points given for use of recycled and low or no-VOC (volatile organic compound) materials and for a roof garden with solar panels. The house’s exterior features zinccladding and plenty of windows, including a wall of sliding-glass doors in the rear. It includes eco-friendly elements such as permeable paving in the parking court and a pervious path through the trees on the property. The 6,000-square-foot (560m²) house also observes other green home design features such as organic architecture building materials and low volatile organic compound paint.[104][105][106][107]
In 2011, Page bought the $45-million 193-foot (59m) superyacht ‘Senses’, which is equipped with a helipad, gym, multi-level sun decks, ten luxury suites, a crew of 14 and interior design by French designer Philippe Starck.[108]‘Senses’ has extensive ocean exploration capabilities, the superyacht was created to explore the world’s oceans in comfort and it carries a comprehensive inventory of equipment for that purpose.[109] ‘Senses’ was built by Fr. Schweers Shipyard in (Germany) at their Berneshipyard. ‘Senses’ features a displacement steel hull and a steel/aluminium superstructure, with teak decks. ‘Senses’ is equipped with an ultra-modern stabilization system which reduces the free surface effect and results in a smoother cruising experience underway.[110]
Page announced on his Google+ profile in May 2013 that his right vocal cord is paralyzed from a cold that he contracted the previous summer, while his left cord was paralyzed in 1999.[111] Page explained that he has been suffering from a vocal cord issue for 14 years, and, as of his May 2013 post, doctors were unable to identify the exact cause. The Google+ post also revealed that Page had donated a considerable sum of money to a vocal-cord nerve-function research program at the Voice Health Institute in Boston, US. The program, at Massachusetts General Hospital, is led by Steven Zeitels, the Eugene B. Casey Professor of Laryngeal Surgery. An anonymous source stated that the donation exceeded $20 million.[112]
In October 2013, Business Insider reported that Page’s paralyzed vocal cords are caused by an autoimmune disease called Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, and prevented him from undertaking Google quarterly earnings conference calls for an indefinite period.[113]
In November 2014, Page’s family foundation, the Carl Victor Page Memorial Fund, reportedly holding assets in excess of a billion dollars at the end of 2013, gave $15 million to aid the effort against the Ebola virus epidemic in West Africa. Page wrote on his Google+ page that “My wife and I just donated $15 million … Our hearts go out to everyone affected.”[114][115][116][117]
Awards and accolades
1998–2009
PC Magazine has praised Google as among the Top 100 Web Sites and Search Engines (1998) and awarded Google the Technical Excellence Award for Innovation in Web Application Development in 1999. In 2000, Google earned a Webby Award, a People’s Voice Award for technical achievement, and in 2001, was awarded Outstanding Search Service, Best Image Search Engine, Best Design, Most Webmaster Friendly Search Engine, and Best Search Feature at the Search Engine Watch Awards.”[118]
In 2003, both Page and Brin received a MBA from IE Business School, in an honorary capacity, “for embodying the entrepreneurial spirit and lending momentum to the creation of new businesses.”[120]
In 2004, they received the Marconi Foundation‘s prize and were elected Fellows of the Marconi Foundation at Columbia University. In announcing their selection, John Jay Iselin, the Foundation’s president, congratulated the two men for “their invention that has fundamentally changed the way information is retrieved today.”.[121]
Page and Brin were also Award Recipients and National Finalists for the EY Entrepreneur of the Year Award in 2003.[122]
Also in 2004, X PRIZE chose Page as a trustee of their board[123] and he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering.[citation needed]
In 2009, Page received an honorary doctorate from the University of Michigan during a graduation commencement ceremony.[126] In 2011, he was ranked 24th on the Forbes list of billionaires, and as the 11th richest person in the U.S.[1]
In 2015, Page’s “Powerful People” profile on the Forbes site states that Google is “the most influential company of the digital era”.[127]
As of July 2014, the Bloomberg Billionaires Index lists Page as the 17th richest man in the world, with an estimated net worth of $32.7 billion.[128]
At the completion of 2014, Fortune magazine named Page its “Businessperson of the Year,” declaring him “the world’s most daring CEO”.[129]
In October 2015, Page was named number one in Forbes‘ “America’s Most Popular Chief Executives”, as voted by Google’s employees.[130]
In August 2017, Page was awarded honorary citizenship of Agrigento, Italy.[131]
Hi, reader in the U.S., it’s a little awkward to ask, but this Tuesday we need your help. Time is running out in 2019 to help us. The internet isn’t what it used to be. But we haven’t changed. We’re still a non-profit. We depend on donations averaging $16.36, and fewer than 2% of readers give. If you donate just $2.75, the price of your Tuesdaycoffee, Wikipedia could keep thriving. Thank you.
Pichai was born in Madurai, Tamil Nadu, India.[13][14] His mother Lakshmi was a stenographer and his father, Regunatha Pichai was an electrical engineer at GEC, the British conglomerate. His father also had a manufacturing plant that produced electrical components.[15][16] Pichai grew up in a two-room apartment in Ashok Nagar, Chennai.[15]
Pichai worked in engineering and product management at Applied Materials and in management consulting at McKinsey & Company.[23] Pichai joined Google in 2004, where he led the product management and innovation efforts for a suite of Google’s client software products, including Google Chrome[24] and Chrome OS, as well as being largely responsible for Google Drive. He went on to oversee the development of other applications such as Gmail and Google Maps.[25][26] On November 19, 2009, Pichai gave a demonstration of Chrome OS; the Chromebook was released for trial and testing in 2011, and released to the public in 2012.[27] On May 20, 2010, he announced the open-sourcing of the new video codec VP8 by Google and introduced the new video format, WebM.[28]
On March 13, 2013, Pichai added Android to the list of Google products that he oversees. Android was formerly managed by Andy Rubin.[29] He was a director of Jive Software from April 2011 to July 30, 2013.[30][31][32] Pichai was selected to become the next CEO of Google on August 10, 2015[10] after previously being appointed Product Chief by CEO, Larry Page. On October 24, 2015 he stepped into the new position at the completion of the formation of Alphabet Inc., the new holding company for the Google company family.[11][32][33]
Pichai had been suggested as a contender for Microsoft‘s CEO in 2014, a position that was eventually given to Satya Nadella.[34][35]
In August 2017, Pichai drew publicity for firing a Google employee who wrote a ten-page manifesto criticizing the company’s diversity policies and arguing that “distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes and … these differences may explain why we don’t see equal representation of women in tech and leadership”.[36][37][38][39] While noting that the manifesto raised a number of issues that are open to debate, Pichai said in a memo to Google employees that “to suggest a group of our colleagues have traits that make them less biologically suited to that work is offensive and not OK”.[40]
In December 2017, Pichai was a speaker at the World Internet Conference in China, where he stated that “a lot of work Google does is to help Chinese companies. There are many small and medium-sized businesses in China who take advantage of Google to get their products to many other countries outside of China.”[41][42]
U.S. Congress testimony
On December 11, 2018, Pichai testified before the U.S. House Judiciary Committee on a wide range of Google-related issues such as the alleged, potential political bias on Google’s platforms, the company’s plans for a censored search app in China, and its privacy practices.[43] Pichai, in response, stated that Google employees cannot influence search results. He also stated that Google users can opt out of having gheir data collected and that “there are no current plans for a censored search engine” in China.[44]Wired‘s Issie Lapowsky characterized Pichai’s appearance before the committee as one “major missed opportunity,” since, as he wrote, its members “staked out opposite sides of a partisan battle,” and presented to the public “a foreboding reminder of Congress’s continued technological ignorance.”[45]
Personal life
Pichai is married to Anjali Pichai and has two children.[8] Pichai’s interests include football and cricket.[46][47]
Harris told aides of her intentions in an all-staff call on Tuesday, and a person familiar with the conversation said she sounded distraught. While Harris had qualified for the December debate in her home state later this month, she was running dangerously low on cash — lacking the resources to air TV ads in Iowa — and her staff was gripped by long-running internal turmoil.
“I’ve taken stock and looked at this from every angle, and over the last few days have come to one of the hardest decisions of my life. My campaign for president simply doesn’t have the financial resources we need to continue .”
Harris, who spent Thanksgiving in Iowa with family, took a deep look at the campaign’s resources over the holiday and decided she did not have a path to the nomination. A Harris campaign aide said the expected impeachment trial in January further complicated the situation.
She made the decision Monday after discussions with her family and senior aides. Harris will travel to the early states this week to thank staff and supporters for their dedication to the campaign.
The senator did not bow out without taking a parting shot at her billionaire and self-funding rivals who made late entrances into the race this summer and fall.
“I’m not a billionaire. I can’t fund my own campaign,” Harris said in a video explaining her decision to drop out. “And as the campaign has gone on, it has become harder and harder to raise the money we need to compete. In good faith, I can’t tell you, my supporters and volunteers, that I have a path forward if I don’t believe I do.”
Once dubbed the “female Obama” by former Today Show anchor Matt Lauer, Harris’ campaign began on a promising note: Her kickoff rally in her hometown of Oakland drew more than 20,000 supporters who cheered wildly as she cast herself as the kind of fighter fit to take on a president like Trump.
Her candidacy got one of its first major breaks in the first Democratic debate in June, when Harris pulled off a blistering ambush of former Vice President Joe Biden over his previous stance on busing, which prompted another review of his record on race issues. Harris’ performance sent her soaring in the polls, and the campaign raised $2 million in the 24 hours following the debate.
But the attack ultimately blew back on Harris when her own stance on busing came under scrutiny in the days after. Her sharp rise in the polls did not last long, with Harris skidding into fifth place and registering in the single digits by September. When she dropped out Tuesday, her RealClearPolitics national polling average was hovering just above 3 percent.
Throughout the campaign, Harris had never been steady on health care, many voters’ stated key issue. Harris spent months backtracking following an ill-fated moment in a CNN town hall in which she said, “let’s eliminate all that,” when asked whether she supported a health care plan that got rid of private insurance.
Her stumbles on the issue continued into the fall, as Harris waffled on whether she backed the kind of single-payer, “Medicare for All” plan championed by Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, or more incremental change, an opening her opponents seized on.
In addition to health care, voters complained that they were unable to pin Harris down on a host of other issues. And Harris shied away some from what could have been one of her greatest strengths — her time spent as a prosecutor and attorney general in California — as her prosecutorial record became a liability with a Democratic base that has turned sharply left on issues of criminal justice.
Hawaii Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, a low-polling Democratic wildcard, weaponized Harris’ prosecutorial record against her in a later debate, lambasting Harris with a set of somewhat misleading and out-of-context accusations. But Harris did not mount a full-throated defense in the moment, only reiterating that she was proud of her time as a prosecutor.
The campaign also struggled to bring in small-dollar donations, creating a greater reliance on the kind of big-money fundraisers some of Harris’ rivals have sworn off, and resulting in less-than-savory headlines about small controversies like her initial plan to skip a climate change town hall in favor of a fundraiser. (Harris later said she was unaware of the scheduling conflict, and attended the town hall.)
Harris further struggled with the question of electability — concerns that have also gripped other competitors in the historically diverse field — as she addressed voters afraid the country might not be ready for a female president of color. From the earliest days of the campaign, Harris was subject to conspiracy theories that ricocheted around social media, even giving way to a reprisal of the same birtherism smears that plagued former President Barack Obama.
In the spring, prior to Harris’ debate stage spat with Biden, she was forced to deftly maneuver suggestions from fellow members of the Congressional Black Caucus that her becoming Biden’s running mate would make for a “dream ticket.” After the debate, Harris allies ripped the Biden campaign for suggesting that she let her ambition get the best of her in leveling the busing broadside.
Still, she was unable to make significant inroads with black voters, a key Democratic voting bloc, in the same way that Biden has, despite running neck and neck with the former vice president in endorsements from members of the CBC.
Recent weeks have carried numerous warning signs of a derailed campaign, with Harris abruptly shuttering much of the campaign’s New Hampshire operation as the senator focused squarely on Iowa. She laid off staff rather than recalibrating her resources and hoped a top-three finish in Iowa could propel her to a win in South Carolina.
Harris’ financial struggles likely would have been compounded by the possibility of an impeachment trial in the beginning of the year, which will keep her and her fellow rivals in the Senate in Washington and off the campaign trail in the crucial weeks leading up to the Iowa caucuses and potentially even the New Hampshire primary.
But in her video message Tuesday, Harris pledged to stay in the fight against Trump.
“I want to be clear,” she said. “Although I am no longer running for president, I will do everything in my power to defeat Donald Trump and fight for the future of our country and the best of who we are. I know you will too. So let’s do that together.”
Story 1: The Day of Reckoning Is Approaching And Not A Word Is Spoken — National Debt More Than $23 Trillion — Plus Unfunded Obligations Estimates Over $100 Trillion to Over $200 Trillion — Videos —
Deficits and debt | AP Macroeconomics | Khan Academy
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Ingraham: An animated series of failures
How the Fed creates free money for big banks, CEOs and billionaires
Trillion-dollar deficits as far as the eye can see, and hardly a voice of caution to be heard
BY ALBERT HUNT, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR — 12/01/19 11:30 AM EST 2,649
THE VIEWS EXPRESSED BY CONTRIBUTORS ARE THEIR OWN AND NOT THE VIEW OF THE HILL
In the old days, a decade or so ago, Democrats would have assailed Donald Trump‘s failure on federal deficits; instead of eliminating it, as promised, the deficit has doubled to a trillion dollars as far as the eye can see.
Republicans would be in full fury over the spending schemes of Democratic presidential candidates; even the mainstream moderates propose huge increases for health care, education and the social safety net for the disadvantaged.
Yet deficits, as a political issue, are dead.
The political impact always was exaggerated, but out-of-control deficits were a staple of opposition rhetoric. There invariably was some budget-balancing blue-ribbon group, the most famous being the Simpson-Bowles Commission.
For Democrats, the pressing urgency of unmet needs in health care, education, infrastructure and the social safety net far outweigh any rising debt. They favor tax hikes, mainly on the rich, to reverse the huge 2017 Republican tax cuts, but there’s less premium on the green eyeshade test of paying for all spending initiatives.
Most Republicans strongly want to keep those tax cuts — the only significant achievement of three years of party rule — and have little interest in tackling politically popular entitlements. In the years the Republican Party controlled both houses of Congress and the White House, it focused only on gutting the Affordable Care Act.
This has become the Trump Party, which overshadows the old Republican battle lines between budget balancers and tax cutters. This Republican executive is a tax cutter and budget buster.
As well as the politics, Democrats have a strong policy basis for their position. Early this year, the two most prominent Democratic economists — former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers and Jason Furman, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, both under Barack Obama — wrote an influential article citing structural declines in interest rates. This means that “policymakers should reconsider the traditional fiscal approach that has often wrong-headedly limited worthwhile investments in such areas as education, health care and infrastructure,” they said.
“Politicians and policymakers should focus on urgent social programs, not deficits,” they advised.
They don’t go as far as the Modern Monetary Theorists who basically argue the sky is the limit on debt unless inflation takes off. Instead, Summers and Furman claim a key is that the federal debt — as a percentage of the economy — stays at a relatively stable 3 percent to 4 percent, where it has been for the past five years.
The Republican deficits hawks, most recently former House Speaker Paul Ryan, have been rendered obsolete, as least as long it’s the party of Trump.
Even back in the 1970s, however, some Republicans embraced what supply-side propagandist Jude Wanniski called the “Two-Santa Theory” — namely, to counter Democrats’ support for popular spending programs, Republicans should favor huge tax cuts without concern for the deficit. (Ronald Reagan once joked he didn’t worry about the deficit, as it was “big enough to take care of itself.”)
Moreover, the Republican cries about the evils of big deficits have been more rhetorical than real, although the general perception of Democrats as more fiscally profligate is a canard.
The deficit also soared under George W. Bush, especially at the end of his term, with the economic crisis.
Obama inherited a massive $1.4 trillion shortfall and in eight years cut it by 60 percent.
The shortfall has doubled under Trump.
As a percentage of the economy, however, it has risen from 3 percent in the final Obama year to a bit more than 4 percent now.
Even Washington’s most stalwart and consistent fiscal hawk, Maya MacGuineas, president of the bipartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, acknowledges the budget deficit isn’t a top policy concern right now “as low interest rates buy us some time.”
However, she cautions that the fiscal situation “is the worst it has been since just after World War II,” adding, “No one knows when the tipping point is or what it looks like, but those are questions we shouldn’t want to find the answers to.”
Albert R. Hunt is the former executive editor of Bloomberg News. He previously served as reporter, bureau chief and Washington editor for the Wall Street Journal. For almost a quarter-century he wrote a column on politics for The Wall Street Journal, then the International New York Times and Bloomberg View. Follow him on Twitter @alhuntdc.
Story 3: Federal Reserve Intervenes and Adds More Liquidity or Money Into Economy — Overnight and 42-Day Term Repos Madness Bubble — Return of Quantitative Easing? –Videos —
Fed is in a ‘lose, lose, lose situation,’ says Mohamed A. El-Erian
Repo Madness: Up to $300 Billion Per Day As First 42 Day Term Repo Kicks In Going Into 2020!
Repo: How Roughly $1 Trillion Moves Overnight | WSJ
How the Fed creates free money for big banks, CEOs and billionaires
The ‘repo’ market explained
The Central Banks’ Monetary Policy Is Backfiring (w/ Simon White)
New York Fed Adds Liquidity Amid Heavy Demand for Year-End Funding
Interventions ensure markets have enough liquidity and short-term borrowing rates remain well-behaved
The Federal Reserve Bank of New York intervened in financial markets again Monday. PHOTO: EDUARDO MUNOZ/REUTERS
By
Michael S. Derby
The Federal Reserve Bank of New York again saw very strong demand for liquidity aimed at helping financial markets navigate the turn of the year.
The demand once again arrived as the Fed added temporary liquidity to financial markets Monday. All together the central bank pumped in $97.9 billion in two parts. One was via overnight repurchase agreements, or repos, that totaled $72.9 billion. The other was via 42-day repos.
While the Fed took all the securities that dealers offered it for the overnight repo, the longer-term operation saw eligible banks offer $42.55 billion in securities versus the $25 billion the Fed took. That level of interest was a replay from the last 42-day repo operation held Nov. 25, when eligible banks submitted $49.05 billion in securities against the $25 billion the central bank accepted.
The robust demand for year-end liquidity could alter the path of future longer-term Fed interventions and induce the central bank to increase their size. Central banks want to ensure that markets remain well behaved over year end, and they have signaled they will be flexible in achieving that. The Fed has already increased the size of other temporary operations, making it possible future term operations could be bigger as well.
The Repo Market, Explained
The repo market shook the financial world in September when an unexpected rate spike choked short-term lending, spurring the Federal Reserve to intervene. WSJ explains how this critical, but murky part of the financial system works, and why some banks say the crunch could have been prevented. Illustration: Jacob Reynolds for The Wall Street Journal
Fed repo interventions take in Treasury and mortgage securities from eligible banks in what is effectively a short-term loan of central-bank cash, collateralized by the securities.
The Fed’s interventions are aimed at ensuring that the financial system has enough liquidity and that short-term borrowing rates remain well-behaved, with the central bank’s federal-funds rate staying within the 1.5%-to-1.75% target range. The effective fed-funds rate stood at 1.56% on Friday. The broad general collateral rate for repo trading stood at 1.62%, also for Tuesday.
The Fed has been intervening in markets in the current fashion since mid-September, when short-term rates unexpectedly shot up on a confluence of factors, although it has used similar operations for decades to manage short-term rates.
Since the large interventions started, money-market rates have been well-behaved. The Fed is using temporary operations to tamp down any possible volatility, while purchasing Treasury bills to build up reserves in the banking system. It hopes that by buying Treasury bills it will be able to cut back on repo interventions at the start of next year.
The Fed currently expects to buy Treasury bills through the middle of next year.
Story 4: Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz Report Will Be Released on December 9 and Horowitz Will Testify Before Senate Judiciary Committee December 11, 2019 — Videos —
‘They Tried to Overthrow the Presidency’: Trump Says Results of IG’s Report Could be ‘Historic’
FBI official allegedly altered document in Russia probe: Report
DOJ Inspector General to testify on alleged 2016 campaign spying
IG Horowitz to testify on Russia probe, FISA abuse
TRUMP PROBE REPORT AND HEARING – DECEMBER 9/11, 2019
DiGenova: Comey, Clapper and Brennan will have to pay the ‘Barr bill’
Jason Chaffetz: FBI deep state clear – will FISA report finally lead to action?
Jason Chaffetz By Jason Chaffetz | Fox News
PROGRAMMING ALERT: Watch Jason Chaffetz discuss this op-ed and much more on “Mornings with Maria” on Monday, December 2.
Following a series of four damning inspector general reports over the last two years, there is little doubt the senior leadership of the Obama-era FBI was weaponized in the service of the Democratic Party. But as America awaits what many expect to be the most damning investigation of all, it’s fair to ask what has been done to rein in our rogue FBI.
The report on FISA abuse set for release on Dec. 9 is expected to show how the FBI used the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) to spy on American citizens affiliated with the Trump campaign in 2016. As damning as such a conclusion would be, it will only be the latest in a series of explosive revelations from the Department of Justice Inspector General (IG) Michael Horowitz, some of which got muted coverage from the mainstream press. Advance leaks suggest the upcoming report will, at a minimum, show an FBI lawyer illegally altered documents to justify a FISA application.
Even before next week’s anticipated release, we already have IG reports implicating the FBI director, assistant director, deputy assistant director, and chief of the counterintelligence section. Though none of them remain at the bureau, we have seen little reassurance from current FBI Director Christopher Wray that the culture they created has changed.
Thus far, no one has been prosecuted, despite a long string of damaging reports and referrals. An IG can make a recommendation but it is up to the DOJ to prosecute, even if it is one of their own.
A 63-page report released last month found “numerous issues” with the FBI’s use of confidential sources during a period that included the 2016 election. That report revealed that the FBI lacked appropriate procedures to vet and maintain oversight of sources like the ones used against the Trump campaign. This created a security risk for the United States. Yet no prosecutions have been announced.
Last August, an even more serious finding was released when the IG determined that the FBI director himself had violated FBI policy and the terms of his own employment agreement in disseminating classified information for release to the media. Though the DOJ could have prosecuted based on the report’s findings, it declined to do so.
A May 2019 IG report implicated the FBI deputy assistant director for unauthorized contacts with the media, illegally disclosing sealed court documents and other sensitive information to the media, and accepting gifts from the media. The DOJ declined to prosecute. But why? The IG recommended prosecution.
The IG’s June 2018 probe into the Hillary Clinton email investigation implicated the FBI’s head of counterintelligence, Peter Strzok, of repeatedly articulating a strong political bias even as he headed up the investigation of Clinton’s exposure of classified information. The 500-page report, which reviewed 1.2 million documents and included interviews with more than 100 witnesses, documented numerous questionable decisions that benefited Clinton or damaged Trump, though the IG acknowledged the parties denied their political bias impacted their decisions.
The FBI is in shambles and there has been little to no public acknowledgment of the crisis by the current director. No work by him to stem this tide of political bias is evident to the public.
The report also highlighted an interoffice affair between Strzok and FBI lawyer Lisa Page, both of whom worked on the Clinton and Trump investigations. Next week’s IG report is also expected to document an affair between two other FBI lawyers who worked together on the FISA applications.
What is going on at the FBI and why no consequences for such blatant violations of internal policy and the law? And why did these vulnerabilities exist for so long without detection? No doubt adversarial intelligence agencies could have figured this out quite easily, making our intelligence operations vulnerable to exploitation.
Finally, an April 2018 report implicated FBI Assistant Director Andrew McCabe of inappropriately authorizing the disclosure of sensitive information to a reporter and repeatedly lying to investigators about it. The report found McCabe lied four times, three under oath, and that it was done “in a manner designed to advance his personal interests at the expense of Department leadership.” Though McCabe was fired, he wasn’t prosecuted.
What message does it send when the Justice Department protects its own?
The FBI is in shambles and there has been little to no public acknowledgment of the crisis by Director Wray. No work by him to stem this tide of political bias is evident to the public.
With the release of next week’s FISA report, we must demand action by Wray. Given the well-documented wrongdoing by the previous FBI director, deputy director, deputy assistant director, the chief of counterintelligence, and evidently DOJ counsel, the American people are right to question the legitimacy of America’s federal law enforcement apparatus.
If the American people are going to regain confidence in the senior leadership of the FBI, the Justice Department will need to prosecute wrongdoing as they would if it weren’t one of their own. Until then, questions of imbalance, favoritism and bias in one direction will persist. Certainly, we deserve better.
Story 4: Lisa Page Role in Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Court Warrant Application Process? — Videos
Lisa Page Breaks Silence On Trump’s DISGUSTING Behavior
Trump viciously mocks Strzok, Page at Minneapolis rally
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Lisa Page Speaks: ‘There’s No Fathomable Way I Have Committed Any Crime at All’
STRIKING BACK
The former FBI lawyer and ongoing Trump target breaks two years of silence in this exclusive interview. And she has quite a lot to say.
Molly Jong-Fast
It’s not often that you interview a subject who has no interest in being famous. But recently, I did just that when I sat down with Lisa Page the week before Thanksgiving in my hotel room in Washington, D.C. Page, of course, is the former FBI lawyer whose text-message exchanges with agent Peter Strzok that belittled Donald Trump and expressed fear at his possible victory became international news. They were hijacked by Trump to fuel his “deep state” conspiracy.
For the nearly two years since her name first made the papers, she’s been publicly silent (she did have a closed-door interview with House members in July 2018). I asked her why she was willing to talk now. “Honestly, his demeaning fake orgasm was really the straw that broke the camel’s back,” she says. The president called out her name as he acted out an orgasm in front of thousands of people at a Minneapolis rally on Oct. 11.
That was the moment Page decided she had to speak up. “I had stayed quiet for years hoping it would fade away, but instead it got worse,” she says. “It had been so hard not to defend myself, to let people who hate me control the narrative. I decided to take my power back.”
She is also about to be back in the news cycle in a big way. On Dec. 9, the Justice Department inspector general report into Trump’s charges that the FBI spied on his 2016 campaign will come out. Leaked press accounts indicate the report will exonerate Page of the allegation that she acted unprofessionally or showed bias against Trump.
How does it feel after all this time to finally have the IG apparently affirm what she’s been saying all along? She said she wouldn’t discuss the findings until they were officially public, but she did note: “While it would be nice to have the IG confirm publicly that my personal opinions had absolutely no bearing on the course of the Russia investigations, I don’t kid myself that the fact will matter very much for a lot of people. The president has a very loud megaphone.”
Page, 39, is thin and athletic. She speaks in an exceedingly confident, clear, and lawyerly way. But having been through the MAGA meat grinder has clearly worn her down, not unlike the other women I’ve met who’ve been subjected to the president’s abuse. She is just slightly crumbly around the edges the way the president’s other victims are.
My heart drops to my stomach when I realize he has tweeted about me again.
“It’s almost impossible to describe” what it’s like, she told me. “It’s like being punched in the gut. My heart drops to my stomach when I realize he has tweeted about me again. The president of the United States is calling me names to the entire world. He’s demeaning me and my career. It’s sickening.”
“But it’s also very intimidating because he’s still the president of the United States. And when the president accuses you of treason by name, despite the fact that I know there’s no fathomable way that I have committed any crime at all, let alone treason, he’s still somebody in a position to actually do something about that. To try to further destroy my life. It never goes away or stops, even when he’s not publicly attacking me.”
Does it affect you in your normal day-to-day life?
“I wish it didn’t,” she said. “I’m someone who’s always in my head anyway—so now otherwise normal interactions take on a different meaning. Like, when somebody makes eye contact with me on the Metro, I kind of wince, wondering if it’s because they recognize me, or are they just scanning the train like people do? It’s immediately a question of friend or foe? Or if I’m walking down the street or shopping and there’s somebody wearing Trump gear or a MAGA hat, I’ll walk the other way or try to put some distance between us because I’m not looking for conflict. Really, what I wanted most in this world is my life back.”
Rising Through the Ranks
Lisa Page did not aspire to fame or fortune. She was, she says, “one of those nerdy kids who from very early on knew I wanted work for the government and make the world a better place.” Born in the San Fernando Valley, she and her family moved to Ohio in her teens. She went to American University in Washington, D.C., and then moved back home to central Ohio to attend law school, living with her parents so she could save money.
After graduating from law school, she was one of an elite group selected for admission in the Department of Justice Honors Program in 2006—and the only woman in her class of five entering the Criminal Division. She worked as a federal prosecutor for six years before moving across the street to the FBI’s office of general counsel. Soon after her arrival, the deputy general counsel over national-security law hired her for a new special-counsel-type position in 2013.
Once there, her path begins to be set.
“I start [in the role] in early 2013, and there are two big events that kind of set the trajectory for the rest of my career at the FBI: the Boston bombing in April 2013, and Edward Snowden’s leaks in June of the same year,” she told me. “And those are both significant in their own ways, because the Boston bombing introduces me to Andy McCabe, who at the time was the head of the counterterrorism division at the FBI. Two months later, the Snowden leaks hit, which became a transformative moment for the intelligence community, setting off a series of reforms by the Obama administration with respect to the legal authorities that we rely on to collect intelligence.”
Eventually, she was asked to lead that effort, “which gives me a lot of exposure to senior FBI executives, as well as leaders through the IC, DOJ, and White House.”
Page continued to rise through the ranks of the FBI and was assigned to more significant and substantive work. She became close with McCabe. Eventually she became McCabe’s special counsel.
Story 1: Coup Cover-up Campaign Continues — Big Lie Media Continues Peddling Progressive Propaganda Lies — Both Phony Whistle Blower and Trump Dirt Digger Must Testify — Democrat Operative Activist and CIA Analyst Eric A. Ciaramella Is The Whistleblower — Democrat National Committee (DNC) Ukraine Trump Dirt Digger –Alexandra Chalupa — Both Must Testify In Public or Impeachment Fails — Videos —
House Impeachment Inquiry Hearing – Vindman & Williams Testimony
Impeachment Inquiry Hearing with Lt. Col. Vindman and Vice President Pence Aide Jennifer Williams. Hearing begins with gavel at 31:40. https://cs.pn/377wOPm
Rep. Devin Nunes Opening Statement
WATCH: Rep. Nunes’ full opening statement in Volker and Morrison hearing
WATCH: Rep. Elise Stefanik’s full questioning of Vindman and Williams | Trump impeachment hearings
WATCH: Rep. Michael Turner’s full questioning of Vindman and Williams | Trump impeachment hearings
WATCH: Rep. Jordan criticizes Vindman for discussing Trump Ukraine call | Trump impeachment inquiry
WATCH: Rep. Jim Jordan’s full questioning of Vindman and Williams | Trump impeachment hearings
WATCH: Schiff’s full questioning of Vindman and Williams | Trump impeachment hearings
WATCH: Democratic counsel’s full questioning of Vindman and Williams | Trump impeachment hearings
WATCH: Rep. Nunes’ full opening statement in Volker and Morrison hearing
Rep. Devin Nunes, the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, said there has been in a “disconnect” between what’s been seen and heard in the public impeachment hearings so far, and what’s been reported by media. Repeating a GOP argument in the hearings, Nunes raised questions about Democrats’ “prior coordination” with the whistleblower. Rep. Adam Schiff, the chair of the House Intelligence Committee, has previously said he doesn’t know the identity of the whistleblower or communicated with them. Nunes spoke ahead of testimony from Jennifer Williams, an aide to Vice President, and Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, an Army officer who works for the National Security Council, on Nov. 19, in a public hearing as part of the impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump. The impeachment inquiry has focused on a July 25 phone call in which Trump asked the president of Ukraine to investigate former vice president and 2020 presidential candidate Joe Biden and his son, Hunter. For more on who’s who in the Trump impeachment inquiry, read: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics…
Day 3, Part 13: Devin Nunes and Steve Castor question Kurt Volker and Tim Morrison
WATCH: Rep. Jim Jordan’s full questioning of Volker and Morrison | Trump impeachment hearings
WATCH: Republican counsel’s full questioning of Volker and Morrison | Trump impeachment hearings
WATCH: Rep. Michael Turner’s full questioning of Volker and Morrison | Trump impeachment hearings
WATCH: Democratic counsel’s full questioning of Volker and Morrison | Trump impeachment hearings
House Impeachment Inquiry Hearing – Vindman & Williams Testimony
George Soros, Marie Yovanovitch, Democrats & Ukraine: How the DEEP STATE Takes Control
Glenn breaks down the several steps our shadow government, or deep state, uses to take control of both domestic and foreign policy, allowing them to gain power and shape the world into their socialistic viewpoint. Several sources claim former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, instructed Ukraine officials to keep their hands off investigating the NGO in Ukraine founded by George Soros. Why? George Soros is working with the State Department on the two final steps to take power there: training activists to go into action when cued, and actively supporting that opposition.
Debunking some of the Ukraine scandal myths about Biden and election interference
There is a long way to go in the impeachment process, and there are some very important issues still to be resolved. But as the process marches on, a growing number of myths and falsehoods are being spread by partisans and their allies in the news media.
The early pattern of misinformation about Ukraine, Joe Biden and election interference mirrors closely the tactics used in late 2016 and early 2017 to build the false and now-debunked narrative that Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin colluded to hijack the 2016 election.
Facts do matter. And they prove to be stubborn evidence, even in the midst of a political firestorm. So here are the facts (complete with links to the original materials) debunking some of the bigger fables in the Ukraine scandal.
Myth: There is no evidence the Democratic National Committee sought Ukraine’s assistance during the 2016 election.
The Facts: The Ukrainian embassy in Washington confirmed to me this past April that a Democratic National Committee contractor named Alexandra Chalupa did, in fact, solicit dirt on Donald Trump and Paul Manafort during the spring of 2016 in hopes of spurring a pre-election congressional hearing into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia. The embassy also stated Chalupa tried to get Ukraine’s president at the time, Petro Poroshenko, to do an interview on Manafort with an American investigative reporter working on the issue. The embassy said it turned down both requests.
You can read the Ukraine embassy’s statement here. The statement essentially confirmed a January 2017 investigative article in Politico that first raised concerns about Chalupa’s contacts with the embassy.
Chalupa’s activities involving Ukraine were further detailed in a May 2016 email published by WikiLeaks in which she reported to DNC officials on her efforts to dig up dirt on Manafort and Trump. You can read that email here. Myth: There is no evidence that Ukrainian government officials tried to influence the American presidential election in 2016.
The Facts: There are two documented episodes involving Ukrainian government officials’ efforts to influence the 2016 American presidential election. The first occurred in Ukraine, where a court last December ruled that a Parliamentary member and a senior Ukrainian law enforcement official improperly tried to influence the U.S. election by releasing financial records in spring and summer 2016 from an investigation into Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort’s lobbying activities. The publicity from the release of the so-called Black Ledger documents forced Manafort to resign. You can read that ruling here. While that court ruling since has been set aside on a jurisdiction technicality, the facts of the released information are not in dispute.
The second episode occurred on U.S. soil back in August 2016 when Ukraine’s then-ambassador to Washington, Valeriy Chaly, took the extraordinary step of writing an OpEd in The Hill criticizing GOP nominee Donald Trump and his views on Russia just three months before Election Day. You can read that OpEd here.
Chaly later told me through his spokeswoman that he wasn’t writing the OpEd for political purposes but rather to address his country’s geopolitical interests. But his article, nonetheless, was viewed by many in career diplomatic circles as running contrary to the Geneva Convention’s rules barring diplomats from becoming embroiled in the host country’s political affairs. And it clearly adds to the public perception that Ukraine’s government at the time preferred Hillary Clinton over Trump in the 2016 election.
Myth: The allegation that Joe Biden tried to fire the Ukrainian prosecutor investigating his son Hunter Biden’s Ukrainian gas firm employer has been debunked, and there is no evidence the ex-vice president did anything improper.
The Facts: Joe Biden is captured on videotape bragging about his effort to strong-arm Ukraine’s president into firing Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin. Biden told a foreign policy group in early 2018 that he used the threat of withholding $1 billion in U.S. aid to Kiev to successfully force Shokin’s firing. You can watch Biden’s statement here.
It also is not in dispute that at the time he forced the firing, the vice president’s office knew Shokin was investigating Burisma Holdings, the company where Hunter Biden worked as a board member and consultant. Team Biden was alerted to the investigation in a December 2015 New York Times article. You can read that article here.
The unresolved question is what motivated Joe Biden to seek Shokin’s ouster. Biden says he took the action solely because the U.S. and Western allies believed Shokin was ineffective in fighting corruption. Shokin told me, ABC News and others that he was fired because Joe Biden was unhappy that the Burisma investigation was not shut down. He made similar statements in an affidavit prepared to be filed in an European court. You can read that affidavit here.
In the end, though, whether Joe Biden had good or bad intentions in getting Shokin fired is somewhat irrelevant to the question of the vice president’s ethical obligation.
U.S. ethics rules require all government officials to avoid even the appearance of a conflict of interest in taking official actions. Ethics experts I talked with say Biden should have recused himself from the Shokin matter once he learned about the Burisma investigation to avoid the appearance issue.
And a senior U.S. diplomat was quoted in testimony reported by The Washington Post earlier this month that he tried to raise warnings with Biden’s VP office in 2015 that Hunter Biden’s role at the Ukrainian firm raised the potential issue of conflicts of interest.
Myth: Ukraine’s investigation into Burisma Holdings was no longer active when Joe Biden forced Shokin’s firing in March 2016.
The Facts: This is one of the most egregiously false statements spread by the media. Ukraine’s official case file for Burisma Holdings, provided to me by prosecutors, shows there were two active investigations into the gas firm and its founder Mykola Zlochevsky in early 2016, one involving corruption allegations and the other involving unpaid taxes.
In fact, Shokin told me in an interview he was making plans to interview Burisma board members, including Hunter Biden, at the time he was fired. And it was publicly reported that in February 2016, a month before Shokin was fired, that Ukrainian prosecutors raided one of Zlochevsky’s homes and seized expensive items like a luxury car as part of the corruption probe. You can read a contemporaneous news report about the seizure here.
Burisma’s own legal activities also clearly show the investigations were active at the time Shokin was fired. Internal emails I obtained from the American legal team representing Burisma show that on March 29, 2016 – the very day Shokin was fired – Burisma lawyer John Buretta was seeking a meeting with Shokin’s temporary replacement in hopes of settling the open cases.
In May 2016 when new Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko was appointed, Buretta then sent a letter to the new prosecutor seeking to resolve the investigations of Burisma and Zlochevsky. You can read that letter here.
Buretta eventually gave a February 2017 interview to the Kiev Post in which he divulged that the corruption probe was resolved in fall 2016 and the tax case by early January 2017. You can read Buretta’s interview here.
In another words, the Burisma investigations were active at the time Vice President Biden forced Shokin’s firing, and any suggestion to the contrary is pure misinformation.
Myth: There is no evidence Vice President Joe Biden did anything to encourage Burisma’s hiring of his son Hunter.
The Facts: This is another area where the public facts cry out for more investigation and raise a question in some minds about another appearance of a conflict of interest.
Hunter Biden’s business partner, Devon Archer, was appointed to Burisma’s board in mid-April 2014 and the firm Rosemont Seneca Bohai — jointly owned by Hunter Biden and Devon Archer — received its first payments from the Ukrainian gas company on April 15, 2014, according to the company’s ledgers. That very same day as the first Burisma payment, Devon Archer met with Joe Biden at the White House, according to White House visitor logs. It is not known what the two discussed.
A week later, Joe Biden traveled to Ukraine and met with then-Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk. During that meeting, the American vice president urged Ukraine to ramp up energy production to free itself from its Russian natural gas dependence. Biden even boasted that “an American team is currently in the region working with Ukraine and its neighbors to increase Ukraine’s short-term energy supply.” Yatsenyuk welcomed the help from American “investors” in modernizing natural gas supply lines in Ukraine. You can read the Biden-Yatsenyuk transcript here.
Less than three weeks later, Burisma added Hunter Biden to its board to join Archer. To some, the sequence of events creates the appearance that Joe Biden’s pressure to increase Ukrainian gas supply and to urge Kiev to rely on Americans might have led Burisma to hire his son. More investigation needs to be done to determine exactly what happened. And until that occurs, the appearance issue will likely linger over this episode.
Myth: Hunter Biden’s firm only received $50,000 a month for his work as a board member and consultant for Burisma Holdings.
The Facts: This figure frequently cited by Biden defenders and the media significantly understates what Burisma was paying Hunter Biden’s Rosemont Seneca Bohai firm for his and Devon Archer’s services. Bank records obtained by the FBI in an unrelated case show that between May 2014 and the end of 2015, Hunter Biden’s and Archer’s firm received monthly consulting payments totaling $166,666, or three times the amount cited by the media. In some months, there was even more money than that paid. You can review those bank records here.
The monthly payments figures are confirmed by the accounting ledger that Burisma turned over to Ukrainian prosecutors. That ledger, which you can read here, also shows that in spring and summer of 2014 Burisma paid more than $283,000 to the American law firm of Boies Schiller, where Hunter Biden also worked as an attorney.
Myth: President Trump was trying to force Ukraine to reopen a probe into Burisma Holdings and its founder Mykola Zlochevsky when he talked to Ukraine’s new president, Volodymyr Zelensky, in July of this year.
The Facts: Trump could not have forced the Ukrainians into opening a new Burisma investigation in July because the Ukrainian Prosecutor General’s office had already done so on March 28, 2019, or three months before the call.
The prosecutors filed this notice of suspicion in Ukraine announcing the re-opening of the investigation. The revival of the case was even widely reported in the Ukrainian press, something U.S. intelligence and diplomats who are now testifying to Congress behind closed doors should have known. Here’s an example of one such Ukrainian media report at the time.
Myth: Former Ukrainian Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko retracted or recanted his claim that U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch in 2016 identified people and entities she did not what to see prosecuted in Ukraine.
The Facts: In a March interview with me at Hill.TV captured on videotape, Lutsenko stated that during his first meeting with Yovanovitch in summer 2016, the American diplomat rattled off a list of names of Ukrainian individuals and entities she did not want to see investigated or prosecuted. Lutsenko called it a “do not prosecute” list. You can watch that video here. The State Department disputed his characterization as a fabrication, which Hill.TV reported in its original report.
A few weeks later, a Ukrainian news outlet claimed it interviewed Lutsenko and he backed off his assertion about the list. Several American outlets have since picked up that same language.
There is just one problem. I re-interviewed Lutsenko after the Ukrainian report suggesting he recanted. He adamantly denied recanting, retracting or changing his story, and said the Ukrainian newspaper simply misunderstood that the list of names were conveyed orally during the meeting and not in writing, just like he said in the original Hill.TV interview.
Here is Lutsenko’s full explanation to me back last spring: “At no time since our interview have I ever retracted the statement I made about the U.S. ambassador providing me a list of names of people and organizations she did not want my office to prosecute. Shortly after my televised interview with your news organization I was asked by a Ukraine reporter if I had a copy of the letter that Ambassador Yovanovitch provided me with the names of those she did not want prosecuted. The reporter misunderstood how the names were transmitted to me. I explained to the reporter that the Ambassador did not hand me a written list but rather provided the list of names orally over the course of a meeting.” Lutsenko reaffirmed he stood by his statements again in September.
It is important to note Lutsenko’s story was also backed up by State Department officials and contemporaneous memos before his interview was ever aired. For instance, a senior U.S. official I interviewed for the Lutsenko story reviewed the list of names that Lutsenko recalled being on the so-called do-not-prosecute list.
That official stated during the interview: ““I can confirm to you that at least some of those names are names that U.S. embassy Kiev raised with the Prosecutor General’s office because we were concerned about retribution and unfair treatment of Ukrainians viewed as favorable to the United States.”
Separately, both U.S. and Ukrainian official confirmed to me a letter written by then-U.S. embassy official George Kent in April 2016 in which U.S. officials pointedly (and in writing) demanded that Ukrainian prosecutors stand down an investigation into several Ukrainian nonprofit groups suspected of misspending U.S. foreign aid. The letter even named one of the groups, the AntiCorruption Action Centre, a nonprofit funded jointly by the State Department and liberal megadonor George Soros.
“We are gravely concerned about this investigation, for which we see no basis,” Kent wrote the Ukrainian prosecutor’s office in April 2016. You can read the letter here.
So even without Lutsenko’s claim, there is substantial evidence that the U.S. embassy in Kiev applied pressure on Ukrainian prosecutors not to pursue certain investigations in 2016.
Myth: The narratives about Biden, the U.S. embassy and Ukrainian election interference are conspiracy theories invented by Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, former Mayor Rudy Giuliani, to impact the 2020 election.
The Facts: Giuliani began investigating matters in Ukraine in late fall 2018 as a personal lawyer to the president. But months before his quest began, Ukrainian prosecutors believed they possessed evidence about Burisma, the Bidens and 2016 election interference that might interest the U.S. Justice Department. It is the same evidence that came to light this spring and summer and that is now a focus of the impeachment proceedings.
Originally, one of Ukraine’s senior prosecutors tried to secure a visa to come to the United States to deliver that evidence. But when the U.S. embassy in Kiev did not fulfill his travel request, the group of Ukrainian prosecutors used an intermediary to hire a former U.S. attorney in America to reach out to the U.S. attorney office in New York and try to arrange a transfer of the evidence. The Ukrainian prosecutors’ story about making the overture to the DOJ was independently verified by the American lawyer they hired.
So the activities and allegation now at the heart of impeachment actually pre-date Giuliani starting work on Ukraine. You can read the prosecutors’ account of their 2018 effort to get this information to Americans here.
Solomon speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, D.C.
John F. Solomon is an American media executive, and a conservative political commentator. He was an editorialist and executive vice president of digital video for The Hill[1] and as of October 2019, is a contributor to Fox News.[2] He was formerly employed as an executive and as editor-in-chief at The Washington Times.[3]
While he won a number of prestigious awards for his investigative journalism in the 1990s and 2000s,[4][5] he has also been accused of magnifying small scandals and creating fake controversy.[6][7][8] During Donald Trump’s presidency, he has been known for advancing Trump-friendly stories. He played a role in advancing conspiracy theories about wrongdoing involving Joe Biden, his son Hunter Biden and Ukraine; Solomon’s stories about the Bidens influenced President Trump to request that the Ukrainian president launch an investigation into 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, which led to an impeachment inquiry into President Trump.[2]
Contents
Career
Solomon graduated from Marquette University with a bachelor’s degree in journalism and sociology.[9]
From May 1987 to December 2006, Solomon worked at the Associated Press, where he became the assistant bureau chief in Washington, helping to develop some of the organization’s first digital products, such as its online elections offering.
In February 2008, Solomon became editor-in-chief of The Washington Times.[10] During this time, Solomon made a mission to make the paper’s coverage more objective while expanding its reach. Under Solomon, the Times changed some of its style guide to conform to more mainstream media usage. The Times announced that it would no longer use words like “illegal aliens” and “homosexual,” and instead opt for “more neutral terminology” such as “illegal immigrants” and “gay,” respectively. The paper also decided to stop using “Hillary” when referring to Senator Hillary Clinton, and to stop putting the word “marriage” in the expression “gay marriage” in quotes.[11] He also oversaw the redesign of the paper’s website and the launch of the paper’s national weekly edition. A new television studio was built in the paper’s Washington DC headquarters, and the paper also launched a syndicated three-hour morning-drive radio news program.[8]
Solomon left the paper in November 2009 after internal shakeups and financial uncertainty among the paper’s ownership.[12]
Return
After a three-and-a-half-year hiatus, most of which was spent at Circa News, Solomon returned to the paper in July 2013 to oversee the newspaper’s content, digital and business strategies.[13] He helped to craft digital strategies to expand online traffic, created new products and partnerships, and led a reorganization of the company’s advertising and sales team. He also helped launch a new subscription-only national edition targeted for tablets, cellphones and other mobile devices, and helped push a redesign of the paper’s website.
Solomon left the paper in December 2015 to serve as chief creative officer of the mobile news application Circa, which was relaunching at that time.[3]
Packard Media Group
Solomon was president of Packard Media Group from November 2009 to December 2015.[14] Solomon also served as journalist in residence at the Center for Public Integrity, a non-profit organization that specializes in investigative journalism, from March 2010 to June 2011.[8] He was also named executive editor of the Center for Public Integrity in November 2010 and helped oversee the launch of iWatch News, but resigned quickly after to join Newsweek/The Daily Beast in May 2011.[15][16][8]
Washington Guardian
In 2012, Solomon and former Associated Press executives Jim Williams and Brad Kalbfeld created the Washington Guardian, an online investigative news portal. It was acquired by The Washington Times when Solomon returned to the paper in July 2013.[3]
Circa
After leaving The Washington Times, Solomon became chief creative officer for Circa News. Circa is a mobile news application founded in 2011 that streams updates on big news events to users. In June 2015, it shut down, but its relaunch was announced after its acquisition by Sinclair Broadcast Group.[3]
Upon leaving Circa, Solomon became executive vice president of digital video for The Hill.[1][19] Until May 2018, he worked on news and investigative pieces for The Hill.[19] According to the New York Times, Solomon tended to push narratives about alleged misdeeds by Trump’s political enemies.[20]
In October 2017, Solomon published an article in The Hill about the Uranium One controversy where he insinuated that Russia made payments to the Clinton Foundation at the time when the Obama administration approved the sale of Uranium One to Rosatom.[21] Solomon’s story also focused on the alleged failures of the Department of Justice to investigate and report on the controversy, suggesting a cover-up.[21] Subsequent to Solomon’s reporting, the story “took off like wildfire in the right-wing media ecosystem,” according to a 2018 study by scholars at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, Harvard University.[21] No evidence of any quid pro quo or other wrongdoing has surfaced.[21]
In January 2018, it was reported that newsroom staffers at The Hill had complained about Solomon’s reporting for the publication.[22][23][24] The staffers reportedly criticized Solomon’s reporting as having a conservative bias and missing important context, and that this undermined The Hill‘s reputation.[22][23] They also expressed concerns over Solomon’s close relationship with Sean Hannity, whose TV show he appeared on more than a dozen times over a span of three months.[22] In May 2018, the editor-in-chief of The Hill announced that Solomon would become an “opinion contributor” at The Hill while remaining executive vice president of digital video.[19] He frequently appeared on Fox News, which continued to describe him as an investigative reporter, even after he became an opinion contributor for the Hill.[24]
Pro-Donald Trump opinion pieces
Solomon published a story alleging that women who had accused Trump of sexual assault had sought payments from partisan donors and tabloids.[24]
On June 19, 2019, The Hill published an opinion piece written by Solomon alleging that the FBI and Robert Mueller disregarded warnings that evidence used against Paul Manafort may have been faked.[25] His source was Nazar Kholodnytsky, a disgraced Ukrainian prosecutor, and Konstantin Kilimnik, who has been linked to Russian intelligence and who happens to be Paul Manafort’s former business partner.[26]
In April 2019, The Hill published two opinion pieces by Solomon regarding allegations by Ukrainian officials that “American Democrats” and particularly former Vice-President Joe Biden of collaborating with “their allies in Kiev” in “wrongdoing…ranging from 2016 election interference to obstructing criminal probes.”[27][28] Solomon’s stories attracted attention in conservative media.[23] Fox News frequently covered Solomon’s claims;[29] Solomon also promoted these allegations on Sean Heannity’s Fox News show.[23] According to The Washington Post Solomon’s pieces “played an important role in advancing a flawed, Trump-friendly tale of corruption in Ukraine, particularly involving Biden and his son Hunter”, and inspired “the alleged effort by Trump and his allies to pressure Ukraine’s government into digging up dirt on Trump’s Democratic rivals.”[23] On the same day that The Washington Post published its article, The Hill published another opinion piece by Solomon in which Solomon states that there are “(h)undreds of pages of never-released memos and documents…(that) conflict with Biden’s narrative.”[30]
Solomon’s stories had significant flaws.[23][20] Not only had the State Department dismissed the allegations presented by Solomon as “an outright fabrication”, but the Ukrainian prosecutor who Solomon claimed made the allegations to him is not supporting Solomon’s claim.[23][20]Foreign Policy noted that anti-corrupton activists in Ukraine had characterized the source behind Solomon’s claims as an unreliable narrator who had hindered anti-corruption efforts in Ukraine.[31] Solomon pushed allegations that Biden wanted to remove a Ukrainian prosecutor in order to prevent an investigation of a Ukrainian company that his son, Hunter Biden, served on; however, Western governments and anti-corruption activist wanted the prosecutor removed because he was reluctant to pursue corruption investigations.[20] By September 2019, Solomon said he still stood 100% by his stories.[23] There is no evidence of wrong-doing by Joe Biden and Hunter Biden, and no evidence that Hunter Biden was ever under investigation by Ukrainian authorities.[32] WNYC characterized Solomon’s Ukraine stories as laundering of foreign propaganda.[33]
Prior to the publication of a story where Solomon alleged that the Obama administration had pressured the Ukrainian government to stop investigating a group funded by George Soros, Solomon sent the full text of his report to Ukrainian-American businessman Lev Parnas and the two pro-Trump lawyers and conspiracy theorists Joseph diGenova and Victoria Toensing.[34] Solomon said he did so for fact-checking, but Parnas, DiGenova and Toensing were not mentioned in the text, nor did Solomon send individual items of the draft for vetting (but rather the whole draft).[34]
During October 2019 hearings for the impeachment inquiry against Donald Trump, two government officials experienced in Ukraine matters — Alexander Vindman and George Kent — testified that Ukraine-related articles Solomon had written and that were featured in conservative media circles contained a “false narrative” and in some cases were “entirely made up in full cloth.”[35][36]
Solomon worked closely with Lev Parnas, an associate of Rudy Giuliani – the personal attorney of President Trump – who was indicted for funneling foreign money into American political campaigns, to promote stories that Democrats colluded with a foreign power in the 2016 election (the U.S. intelligence community’s assessment is that Russia interfered in the 2016 election to aid Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump). Parnas worked with Solomon on interviews and translation. Solomon defended his work with Parnas, “No one knew there was anything wrong with Lev Parnas at the time. Everybody who approaches me has an angle.” Parnas helped to set Solomon up with the Ukrainian prosecutor who accused the Bidens of wrong-doing (before later retracting the claim).[2]
Advertising controversy
Solomon was accused of breaking the traditional ethical “wall” that separated news stories from advertising at The Hill. In October 2017, Solomon negotiated a $160,000 deal with a conservative group called Job Creators Network to target ads in The Hill to business owners in Maine. He then had a quote from the group’s director inserted into a news story about a Maine senator’s key role in an upcoming vote on the Trump administration’s tax bill. Solomon “pops by the advertising bullpen almost daily to discuss big deals he’s about to close,” Johanna Derlega, then The Hill’s publisher, wrote in an internal memo at the time, according to Pro Publica. “If a media reporter gets ahold of this story, it could destroy us.”[2]
Departure
In September 2019, the Washington Examiner reported that Solomon would leave The Hill at the end of the month to start his own media firm.[37] In October 2019, it was reported he was joining Fox News as an opinion contributor.[38]
Reception
Paul McCleary, writing for the Columbia Journalism Review in 2007, wrote that Solomon had earned a reputation for hyping stories without solid foundation.[7] In 2012, Mariah Blake, writing for the Columbia Journalism Review, wrote that Solomon “has a history of bending the truth to his storyline,” and that he “was notorious for massaging facts to conjure phantom scandals.”[8][23] During the 2004 presidential election between George W. Bush and John Kerry, Thomas Lang wrote for the Columbia Journalism Review that a Solomon story for the Associated Press covered criticism of John Kerry’s record on national security appeared to mirror a research report released by the Republican National Committee. Lang wrote that Solomon’s story was “a clear demonstration of the influence opposition research is already having on coverage of the [presidential] campaign.”[39][40]
The Washington Post wrote in September 2019 that Solomon’s “recent work has been trailed by claims that it is biased and lacks rigor.”[23]The Post noted that Solomon had done award-winning investigative work during his early career, but that his work had taken a pronounced conservative bent from the late 2000s and onwards.[23] According to Foreign Policy magazine, Solomon had “grown into a prominent conservative political commentator with a somewhat controversial track record.”[31]
In 2007, Deborah Howell, then-ombudsman at The Washington Post criticized a story that Solomon wrote for The Post which had suggested impropriety by Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards in a real estate purchase; Solomon’s reporting omitted context which would have made clear that there was no impropriety.[6]Progressive news outlets ThinkProgress, Media Matters for America and Crooked Media have argued that Solomon’s reporting has a conservative bias and that there are multiple instances of inaccuracies.[41][42][43] According to The Intercept, Just Security and The Daily Beast, Solomon helps to advance right-wing and pro-Trump conspiracy theories.[26][24][44] The New Republic described Solomon’s columns for the Hill as “right-wing fever dreams.”[45] Independent journalist Marcy Wheeler accused Solomon of manufacturing fake scandals which suggested wrongdoing by those conducting probes into Russian interference in the 2016 election.[46] Reporters who worked under Solomon as an editor have said that he encouraged them to bend the truth to fit a pre-existing narrative.[8]
In January 2018, Solomon published a report for The Hill suggesting that Peter Strzok and Lisa Page had foreknowledge of a Wall Street Journal article and that they themselves had leaked to the Wall Street Journal.[47] According to the Huffington Post, Solomon’s reporting omitted that the Wall Street Journal article Strzok and Page were discussing was critical of Hillary Clinton and the FBI, Strzok and Page expressed dismay at the fallout from the article, and Strzok and Page criticized unauthorized leaks from the FBI. According to the Huffington Post, “Solomon told HuffPost he was not authorized to speak and does not comment on his reporting. He may simply have been unaware of these three facts when he published his story. But they provide crucial context to an incomplete narrative that has been bouncing around the right-wing echo chamber all week.”[47]
Story 2: Illegal Alien Invasion Continues and Democrats Continue To Support Open Borders and Citizenship For All 30-60 Million Illegal Aliens Now In The United States — Democrats More Concerned With Illegal Aliens Than Welfare of American People — The Great Betrayal of The American People By The Political Elitist Establishment of Both Big Government Parties — Videos
Former ICE Director Has to Explain to Democrat That Crossing the Border Illegally is a Crime
Homan slams Dems, says Americans need to hear the truth about border
Former ICE acting director Thomas Homan discusses speaking in front of a House subcommittee on the border crisis and says he won’t stand for Congressmembers speaking ill about ICE workers
Story 1: Understanding The November Jobs Report With Increased U-3 Unemployment Rate of 3.6% and Labor Participation Rate of 63.3% With Estimated 128,000 New Jobs Created — Videos
Watch Wall Street five experts react to the October jobs report
Pay attention to the manufacturing data in the jobs report, says NationsShares’ Scott Nations
October Jobs Report: 128,000 Jobs Added, Unemployment At 3.6 Percent | Morning Joe | MSNBC
Nightly Business Report – November 1, 2019
Alternate Unemployment Charts
The seasonally-adjusted SGS Alternate Unemployment Rate reflects current unemployment reporting methodology adjusted for SGS-estimated long-term discouraged workers, who were defined out of official existence in 1994. That estimate is added to the BLS estimate of U-6 unemployment, which includes short-term discouraged workers.
The U-3 unemployment rate is the monthly headline number. The U-6 unemployment rate is the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ (BLS) broadest unemployment measure, including short-term discouraged and other marginally-attached workers as well as those forced to work part-time because they cannot find full-time employment.
Series Id: LNS11000000
Seasonally Adjusted
Series title: (Seas) Civilian Labor Force Level
Labor force status: Civilian labor force
Type of data: Number in thousands
Age: 16 years and over
Download:
Year
Jan
Feb
Mar
Apr
May
Jun
Jul
Aug
Sep
Oct
Nov
Dec
2000
142267(1)
142456
142434
142751
142388
142591
142278
142514
142518
142622
142962
143248
2001
143800
143701
143924
143569
143318
143357
143654
143284
143989
144086
144240
144305
2002
143883
144653
144481
144725
144938
144808
144803
145009
145552
145314
145041
145066
2003
145937(1)
146100
146022
146474
146500
147056
146485
146445
146530
146716
147000
146729
2004
146842(1)
146709
146944
146850
147065
147460
147692
147564
147415
147793
148162
148059
2005
148029(1)
148364
148391
148926
149261
149238
149432
149779
149954
150001
150065
150030
2006
150214(1)
150641
150813
150881
151069
151354
151377
151716
151662
152041
152406
152732
2007
153144(1)
152983
153051
152435
152670
153041
153054
152749
153414
153183
153835
153918
2008
154063(1)
153653
153908
153769
154303
154313
154469
154641
154570
154876
154639
154655
2009
154210(1)
154538
154133
154509
154747
154716
154502
154307
153827
153784
153878
153111
2010
153484(1)
153694
153954
154622
154091
153616
153691
154086
153975
153635
154125
153650
2011
153263(1)
153214
153376
153543
153479
153346
153288
153760
154131
153961
154128
153995
2012
154381(1)
154671
154749
154545
154866
155083
154948
154763
155160
155554
155338
155628
2013
155763(1)
155312
155005
155394
155536
155749
155599
155605
155687
154673
155265
155182
2014
155352(1)
155483
156028
155369
155684
155707
156007
156130
156040
156417
156494
156332
2015
157053(1)
156663
156626
157017
157616
157014
157008
157165
156745
157188
157502
158080
2016
158371(1)
158705
159079
158891
158700
158899
159150
159582
159810
159768
159629
159779
2017
159693(1)
159854
160036
160169
159910
160124
160383
160706
161190
160436
160626
160636
2018
161123(1)
161900
161646
161551
161667
162129
162209
161802
162055
162694
162821
163240
2019
163229(1)
163184
162960
162470
162646
162981
163351
163922
164039
164364
1 : Data affected by changes in population controls.
Labor Force Participation Rate
63.3%
Series Id: LNS11300000
Seasonally Adjusted
Series title: (Seas) Labor Force Participation Rate
Labor force status: Civilian labor force participation rate
Type of data: Percent or rate
Age: 16 years and over
Download:
Year
Jan
Feb
Mar
Apr
May
Jun
Jul
Aug
Sep
Oct
Nov
Dec
2000
67.3
67.3
67.3
67.3
67.1
67.1
66.9
66.9
66.9
66.8
66.9
67.0
2001
67.2
67.1
67.2
66.9
66.7
66.7
66.8
66.5
66.8
66.7
66.7
66.7
2002
66.5
66.8
66.6
66.7
66.7
66.6
66.5
66.6
66.7
66.6
66.4
66.3
2003
66.4
66.4
66.3
66.4
66.4
66.5
66.2
66.1
66.1
66.1
66.1
65.9
2004
66.1
66.0
66.0
65.9
66.0
66.1
66.1
66.0
65.8
65.9
66.0
65.9
2005
65.8
65.9
65.9
66.1
66.1
66.1
66.1
66.2
66.1
66.1
66.0
66.0
2006
66.0
66.1
66.2
66.1
66.1
66.2
66.1
66.2
66.1
66.2
66.3
66.4
2007
66.4
66.3
66.2
65.9
66.0
66.0
66.0
65.8
66.0
65.8
66.0
66.0
2008
66.2
66.0
66.1
65.9
66.1
66.1
66.1
66.1
66.0
66.0
65.9
65.8
2009
65.7
65.8
65.6
65.7
65.7
65.7
65.5
65.4
65.1
65.0
65.0
64.6
2010
64.8
64.9
64.9
65.2
64.9
64.6
64.6
64.7
64.6
64.4
64.6
64.3
2011
64.2
64.1
64.2
64.2
64.1
64.0
64.0
64.1
64.2
64.1
64.1
64.0
2012
63.7
63.8
63.8
63.7
63.7
63.8
63.7
63.5
63.6
63.8
63.6
63.7
2013
63.7
63.4
63.3
63.4
63.4
63.4
63.3
63.3
63.2
62.8
63.0
62.9
2014
62.9
62.9
63.1
62.8
62.9
62.8
62.9
62.9
62.8
62.9
62.9
62.8
2015
62.9
62.7
62.6
62.7
62.9
62.6
62.6
62.6
62.4
62.5
62.6
62.7
2016
62.7
62.8
62.9
62.8
62.7
62.7
62.8
62.9
62.9
62.8
62.7
62.7
2017
62.9
62.9
62.9
62.9
62.8
62.8
62.9
62.9
63.1
62.7
62.8
62.7
2018
62.7
63.0
62.9
62.8
62.8
62.9
62.9
62.7
62.7
62.9
62.9
63.1
2019
63.2
63.2
63.0
62.8
62.8
62.9
63.0
63.2
63.2
63.3
Employment Level
158,510,000
Series Id: LNS12000000
Seasonally Adjusted
Series title: (Seas) Employment Level
Labor force status: Employed
Type of data: Number in thousands
Age: 16 years and over
Download:
Year
Jan
Feb
Mar
Apr
May
Jun
Jul
Aug
Sep
Oct
Nov
Dec
2000
136559(1)
136598
136701
137270
136630
136940
136531
136662
136893
137088
137322
137614
2001
137778
137612
137783
137299
137092
136873
137071
136241
136846
136392
136238
136047
2002
135701
136438
136177
136126
136539
136415
136413
136705
137302
137008
136521
136426
2003
137417(1)
137482
137434
137633
137544
137790
137474
137549
137609
137984
138424
138411
2004
138472(1)
138542
138453
138680
138852
139174
139556
139573
139487
139732
140231
140125
2005
140245(1)
140385
140654
141254
141609
141714
142026
142434
142401
142548
142499
142752
2006
143150(1)
143457
143741
143761
144089
144353
144202
144625
144815
145314
145534
145970
2007
146028(1)
146057
146320
145586
145903
146063
145905
145682
146244
145946
146595
146273
2008
146378(1)
146156
146086
146132
145908
145737
145532
145203
145076
144802
144100
143369
2009
142152(1)
141640
140707
140656
140248
140009
139901
139492
138818
138432
138659
138013
2010
138438(1)
138581
138751
139297
139241
139141
139179
139438
139396
139119
139044
139301
2011
139250(1)
139394
139639
139586
139624
139384
139524
139942
140183
140368
140826
140902
2012
141584(1)
141858
142036
141899
142206
142391
142292
142291
143044
143431
143333
143330
2013
143292(1)
143362
143316
143635
143882
143999
144264
144326
144418
143537
144479
144778
2014
145150(1)
145134
145648
145667
145825
146247
146399
146530
146778
147427
147404
147615
2015
148150(1)
148053
148122
148491
148802
148765
148815
149175
148853
149270
149506
150164
2016
150622(1)
150934
151146
150963
151074
151104
151450
151766
151877
151949
152150
152276
2017
152128(1)
152417
152958
153150
152920
153176
153456
153591
154399
153847
153945
154065
2018
154482(1)
155213
155160
155216
155539
155592
155964
155604
156069
156582
156803
156945
2019
156694(1)
156949
156748
156645
156758
157005
157288
157878
158269
158510
1 : Data affected by changes in population controls.
Unemployment Level
5,855,000
Series Id: LNS13000000
Seasonally Adjusted
Series title: (Seas) Unemployment Level
Labor force status: Unemployed
Type of data: Number in thousands
Age: 16 years and over
Download:
Year
Jan
Feb
Mar
Apr
May
Jun
Jul
Aug
Sep
Oct
Nov
Dec
2000
5708
5858
5733
5481
5758
5651
5747
5853
5625
5534
5639
5634
2001
6023
6089
6141
6271
6226
6484
6583
7042
7142
7694
8003
8258
2002
8182
8215
8304
8599
8399
8393
8390
8304
8251
8307
8520
8640
2003
8520
8618
8588
8842
8957
9266
9011
8896
8921
8732
8576
8317
2004
8370
8167
8491
8170
8212
8286
8136
7990
7927
8061
7932
7934
2005
7784
7980
7737
7672
7651
7524
7406
7345
7553
7453
7566
7279
2006
7064
7184
7072
7120
6980
7001
7175
7091
6847
6727
6872
6762
2007
7116
6927
6731
6850
6766
6979
7149
7067
7170
7237
7240
7645
2008
7685
7497
7822
7637
8395
8575
8937
9438
9494
10074
10538
11286
2009
12058
12898
13426
13853
14499
14707
14601
14814
15009
15352
15219
15098
2010
15046
15113
15202
15325
14849
14474
14512
14648
14579
14516
15081
14348
2011
14013
13820
13737
13957
13855
13962
13763
13818
13948
13594
13302
13093
2012
12797
12813
12713
12646
12660
12692
12656
12471
12115
12124
12005
12298
2013
12471
11950
11689
11760
11654
11751
11335
11279
11270
11136
10787
10404
2014
10202
10349
10380
9702
9859
9460
9608
9599
9262
8990
9090
8717
2015
8903
8610
8504
8526
8814
8249
8194
7990
7892
7918
7995
7916
2016
7749
7771
7932
7928
7626
7795
7700
7817
7933
7819
7480
7503
2017
7565
7437
7078
7019
6991
6948
6927
7115
6791
6588
6682
6572
2018
6641
6687
6486
6335
6128
6537
6245
6197
5986
6112
6018
6294
2019
6535
6235
6211
5824
5888
5975
6063
6044
5769
5855
Unemployment Rate
3.6%
Series Id: LNS14000000
Seasonally Adjusted
Series title: (Seas) Unemployment Rate
Labor force status: Unemployment rate
Type of data: Percent or rate
Age: 16 years and over
Year
Jan
Feb
Mar
Apr
May
Jun
Jul
Aug
Sep
Oct
Nov
Dec
2000
4.0
4.1
4.0
3.8
4.0
4.0
4.0
4.1
3.9
3.9
3.9
3.9
2001
4.2
4.2
4.3
4.4
4.3
4.5
4.6
4.9
5.0
5.3
5.5
5.7
2002
5.7
5.7
5.7
5.9
5.8
5.8
5.8
5.7
5.7
5.7
5.9
6.0
2003
5.8
5.9
5.9
6.0
6.1
6.3
6.2
6.1
6.1
6.0
5.8
5.7
2004
5.7
5.6
5.8
5.6
5.6
5.6
5.5
5.4
5.4
5.5
5.4
5.4
2005
5.3
5.4
5.2
5.2
5.1
5.0
5.0
4.9
5.0
5.0
5.0
4.9
2006
4.7
4.8
4.7
4.7
4.6
4.6
4.7
4.7
4.5
4.4
4.5
4.4
2007
4.6
4.5
4.4
4.5
4.4
4.6
4.7
4.6
4.7
4.7
4.7
5.0
2008
5.0
4.9
5.1
5.0
5.4
5.6
5.8
6.1
6.1
6.5
6.8
7.3
2009
7.8
8.3
8.7
9.0
9.4
9.5
9.5
9.6
9.8
10.0
9.9
9.9
2010
9.8
9.8
9.9
9.9
9.6
9.4
9.4
9.5
9.5
9.4
9.8
9.3
2011
9.1
9.0
9.0
9.1
9.0
9.1
9.0
9.0
9.0
8.8
8.6
8.5
2012
8.3
8.3
8.2
8.2
8.2
8.2
8.2
8.1
7.8
7.8
7.7
7.9
2013
8.0
7.7
7.5
7.6
7.5
7.5
7.3
7.2
7.2
7.2
6.9
6.7
2014
6.6
6.7
6.7
6.2
6.3
6.1
6.2
6.1
5.9
5.7
5.8
5.6
2015
5.7
5.5
5.4
5.4
5.6
5.3
5.2
5.1
5.0
5.0
5.1
5.0
2016
4.9
4.9
5.0
5.0
4.8
4.9
4.8
4.9
5.0
4.9
4.7
4.7
2017
4.7
4.7
4.4
4.4
4.4
4.3
4.3
4.4
4.2
4.1
4.2
4.1
2018
4.1
4.1
4.0
3.9
3.8
4.0
3.9
3.8
3.7
3.8
3.7
3.9
2019
4.0
3.8
3.8
3.6
3.6
3.7
3.7
3.7
3.5
3.6
Not in Labor Force
95,481,000
Series Id: LNS15000000
Seasonally Adjusted
Series title: (Seas) Not in Labor Force
Labor force status: Not in labor force
Type of data: Number in thousands
Age: 16 years and over
Download:
Year
Jan
Feb
Mar
Apr
May
Jun
Jul
Aug
Sep
Oct
Nov
Dec
2000
69142
69120
69338
69267
69853
69876
70398
70401
70645
70782
70579
70488
2001
70088
70409
70381
70956
71414
71592
71526
72136
71676
71817
71876
72010
2002
72623
72010
72343
72281
72260
72600
72827
72856
72554
73026
73508
73675
2003
73960
74015
74295
74066
74268
73958
74767
75062
75249
75324
75280
75780
2004
75319
75648
75606
75907
75903
75735
75730
76113
76526
76399
76259
76581
2005
76808
76677
76846
76514
76409
76673
76721
76642
76739
76958
77138
77394
2006
77339
77122
77161
77318
77359
77317
77535
77451
77757
77634
77499
77376
2007
77506
77851
77982
78818
78810
78671
78904
79461
79047
79532
79105
79238
2008
78554
79156
79087
79429
79102
79314
79395
79466
79790
79736
80189
80380
2009
80529
80374
80953
80762
80705
80938
81367
81780
82495
82766
82865
83813
2010
83349
83304
83206
82707
83409
84075
84199
84014
84347
84895
84590
85240
2011
85441
85637
85623
85603
85834
86144
86383
86111
85940
86308
86312
86589
2012
87888
87765
87855
88239
88100
88073
88405
88803
88613
88429
88836
88722
2013
88900
89516
89990
89780
89827
89803
90156
90355
90481
91708
91302
91563
2014
91563
91603
91230
92070
91938
92107
92016
92099
92406
92240
92350
92695
2015
92671
93237
93454
93249
92839
93649
93868
93931
94580
94353
94245
93856
2016
94026
93872
93689
94077
94475
94498
94470
94272
94281
94553
94911
94963
2017
94389
94392
94378
94419
94857
94833
94769
94651
94372
95330
95323
95473
2018
95657
95033
95451
95721
95787
95513
95633
96264
96235
95821
95886
95649
2019
95010
95208
95577
96223
96215
96057
95874
95510
95599
95481
U-6 Unemployment Rate
7.0%
Series Id: LNS13327709
Seasonally Adjusted
Series title: (seas) Total unemployed, plus all marginally attached workers plus total employed part time for economic reasons, as a percent of all civilian labor force plus all marginally attached workers
Labor force status: Aggregated totals unemployed
Type of data: Percent or rate
Age: 16 years and over
Percent/rates: Unemployed and mrg attached and pt for econ reas as percent of labor force plus marg attached
Year
Jan
Feb
Mar
Apr
May
Jun
Jul
Aug
Sep
Oct
Nov
Dec
2000
7.1
7.2
7.1
6.9
7.1
7.0
7.0
7.1
7.0
6.8
7.1
6.9
2001
7.3
7.4
7.3
7.4
7.5
7.9
7.8
8.1
8.7
9.3
9.4
9.6
2002
9.5
9.5
9.4
9.7
9.5
9.5
9.6
9.6
9.6
9.6
9.7
9.8
2003
10.0
10.2
10.0
10.2
10.1
10.3
10.3
10.1
10.4
10.2
10.0
9.8
2004
9.9
9.7
10.0
9.6
9.6
9.5
9.5
9.4
9.4
9.7
9.4
9.2
2005
9.3
9.3
9.1
8.9
8.9
9.0
8.8
8.9
9.0
8.7
8.7
8.6
2006
8.4
8.4
8.2
8.1
8.2
8.4
8.5
8.4
8.0
8.2
8.1
7.9
2007
8.4
8.2
8.0
8.2
8.2
8.3
8.4
8.4
8.4
8.4
8.4
8.8
2008
9.2
9.0
9.1
9.2
9.7
10.1
10.5
10.8
11.0
11.8
12.6
13.6
2009
14.2
15.2
15.8
15.9
16.5
16.5
16.4
16.7
16.7
17.1
17.1
17.1
2010
16.7
17.0
17.1
17.1
16.6
16.4
16.4
16.5
16.8
16.6
16.9
16.6
2011
16.2
16.0
15.9
16.1
15.8
16.1
15.9
16.1
16.4
15.8
15.5
15.2
2012
15.2
15.0
14.5
14.6
14.7
14.8
14.8
14.6
14.8
14.4
14.4
14.4
2013
14.6
14.4
13.8
14.0
13.8
14.2
13.8
13.6
13.5
13.6
13.1
13.1
2014
12.7
12.6
12.6
12.3
12.2
12.0
12.1
12.0
11.7
11.5
11.4
11.2
2015
11.3
11.0
10.8
10.8
10.9
10.4
10.3
10.2
10.0
9.8
10.0
9.9
2016
9.8
9.7
9.8
9.7
9.9
9.5
9.7
9.6
9.7
9.6
9.4
9.2
2017
9.3
9.1
8.7
8.6
8.5
8.5
8.5
8.6
8.3
8.0
8.0
8.1
2018
8.2
8.2
7.9
7.8
7.7
7.8
7.5
7.4
7.5
7.5
7.6
7.6
2019
8.1
7.3
7.3
7.3
7.1
7.2
7.0
7.2
6.9
7.0
October job creation comes in at 128,000, easily topping estimates even with GM auto strike
Nonfarm payrolls rose by 128,000 in October, exceeding the estimate of 75,000 from economists surveyed by Dow Jones.
There were big revisions of past numbers as well. August’s initial 168,000 payrolls addition was revised up to 219,000, while September’s jumped from 136,000 to 180,000.
The unemployment rate ticked slightly higher to 3.6% from 3.5%, still near the lowest in 50 years.
The pace of average hourly earnings picked up a bit, rising 0.1% to a year-over-year 3% gain.
Nonfarm payrolls rose by 128,000 in October as the U.S. economy overcame the weight of the GM autoworkers’ strike and created jobs at a pace well above expectations.
Even with a decline of 42,000 in the motor vehicles and parts industry, the pace of new jobs well exceeded the estimate of 75,000 from economists surveyed by Dow Jones. The loss of jobs came due to the General Motors strike that has since been settled. That 42,000 job loss itself was less than the 50,000 or more that many economists had been anticipating.
The unemployment rate ticked higher to 3.6%, in line with estimates, but remains around the lowest in 50 years. A more encompassing measure that includes discouraged workers and those holding part-time positions for economic reasons also edged up to 7%.
The unemployment rate for African Americans nudged down to a record low 5.4%. Also, the total employment level as measured in the household survey jumped to 158.5 million, also a new high.
The pace of average hourly earnings picked up a bit, rising 0.1% to a year-over-year 3% gain, also in line with estimates. The average work week was unchanged at 34.4 hours.
“This report is yet another sign that the economy is still strong right now and adds to a list of indicators that are looking optimistic of late,” said Steve Rick, chief economist at CUNA Mutual Group. “The vigor of this labor market, along with a more positive housing market and solid Q3 GDP, should offer some welcome reassurance.”
Big revisions upward
Along with the better-than-expected performance in October, previous months’ counts were revised considerably higher. August’s initial 168,000 estimate came all the way up to 219,000 while September’s jumped from 136,000 to 180,000.
Together, the new estimates added 95,000 positions for the two-month period, bringing the three-month average to 176,000, which is well above the pace needed to keep the unemployment rate around its current level.
For the year, monthly job creation now averages 167,000 compared with 223,000 in 2018.
The report helps further quell worries that the U.S. economy is teetering toward recession and helps affirm the assessment from most Federal Reserve officials.
Central bank leaders have largely praised the state of the U.S. economy, particularly compared with its global peers. The Fed earlier this week lowered its benchmark interest rate a quarter point, the third such move this year, but Chairman Jerome Powell clearly indicated that this likely will be the last cut for some time unless conditions change significantly.
“The October jobs report is unambiguously positive for the US economic outlook,” said Citigroup economist Andrew Hollenhorst. “Above-consensus hiring in October, together with upward revisions to prior months, is consistent with our view that job growth, while clearly slower in 2019 than in 2018, will maintain a pace of 130-150K per month. Wage growth remaining at 3.0% should further support incomes and consumption-led growth.”
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How the unemployment rate is calculated
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At the industry level, the biggest job creation came in food services and drinking establishments, which added 48,000.While those positions are generally associated with lower wages, they also can reflect consumer demand and the willingness to spend discretionary money. The industry has seen a surge in job creation as of late, with the past three months averaging 38,000 compared with 16,000 in the first seven months of this year.
Professional and business services added 22,000 and health care rose 15,000, part of a gain of 402,000 for that industry over the past year.
Social assistance increased by 20,000 while financial activities rose by 16,000, bringing to 108,000 the total Wall Street jobs added over the past year.
Job losses came in manufacturing (-36,000) as part of the GM strike, and the federal government, which subtracted 17,000 because 20,000 workers hired for Census duties finished their work.
The total employment level in the household survey reached another record high, swelling by 241,000 to 158.5 million.
The labor force expanded by 325,000 to 164.4 million and the labor force participation rate edged higher to 63.3%. Those counted as not in the labor force declined by 118,000 to nearly 95.5 million.
After previously sitting at a record low, the unemployment rate for Asians jumped 0.4 percentage points to 2.9%.
private-sector production and nonsupervisory employees rose by 4 cents to $23.70.
(See tables B-3 and B-8.)
The average workweek for all employees on private nonfarm payrolls was unchanged
at 34.4 hours in October. In manufacturing, the average workweek decreased by
0.2 hour to 40.3 hours, while overtime was unchanged at 3.2 hours. The average
workweek of private-sector production and nonsupervisory employees held at 33.6
hours. (See tables B-2 and B-7.)
The change in total nonfarm payroll employment for August was revised up by 51,000
from +168,000 to +219,000, and the change for September was revised up by 44,000
from +136,000 to +180,000. With these revisions, employment gains in August and
September combined were 95,000 more than previously reported. (Monthly revisions
result from additional reports received from businesses and government agencies
since the last published estimates and from the recalculation of seasonal factors.)
After revisions, job gains have averaged 176,000 over the last 3 months.
_____________
The Employment Situation for November is scheduled to be released on
Friday, December 6, 2019, at 8:30 a.m. (EST).
Employment Situation Summary Table A. Household data, seasonally adjusted
HOUSEHOLD DATA
Summary table A. Household data, seasonally adjusted[Numbers in thousands]
Category
Oct.
2018
Aug.
2019
Sept.
2019
Oct.
2019
Change from:
Sept.
2019-
Oct.
2019
Employment status
Civilian noninstitutional population
258,514
259,432
259,638
259,845
207
Civilian labor force
162,694
163,922
164,039
164,364
325
Participation rate
62.9
63.2
63.2
63.3
0.1
Employed
156,582
157,878
158,269
158,510
241
Employment-population ratio
60.6
60.9
61.0
61.0
0.0
Unemployed
6,112
6,044
5,769
5,855
86
Unemployment rate
3.8
3.7
3.5
3.6
0.1
Not in labor force
95,821
95,510
95,599
95,481
-118
Unemployment rates
Total, 16 years and over
3.8
3.7
3.5
3.6
0.1
Adult men (20 years and over)
3.5
3.4
3.2
3.2
0.0
Adult women (20 years and over)
3.4
3.3
3.1
3.2
0.1
Teenagers (16 to 19 years)
12.0
12.6
12.5
12.3
-0.2
White
3.3
3.4
3.2
3.2
0.0
Black or African American
6.2
5.5
5.5
5.4
-0.1
Asian
3.1
2.8
2.5
2.9
0.4
Hispanic or Latino ethnicity
4.4
4.2
3.9
4.1
0.2
Total, 25 years and over
3.1
2.9
2.8
2.9
0.1
Less than a high school diploma
5.9
5.4
4.8
5.6
0.8
High school graduates, no college
4.0
3.6
3.6
3.7
0.1
Some college or associate degree
3.0
3.1
2.9
2.9
0.0
Bachelor’s degree and higher
2.0
2.1
2.0
2.1
0.1
Reason for unemployment
Job losers and persons who completed temporary jobs
2,858
2,876
2,572
2,674
102
Job leavers
731
781
840
849
9
Reentrants
1,914
1,801
1,669
1,703
34
New entrants
605
574
677
627
-50
Duration of unemployment
Less than 5 weeks
2,062
2,207
1,868
1,968
100
5 to 14 weeks
1,845
1,757
1,781
1,749
-32
15 to 26 weeks
859
835
819
899
80
27 weeks and over
1,370
1,243
1,314
1,264
-50
Employed persons at work part time
Part time for economic reasons
4,630
4,381
4,350
4,438
88
Slack work or business conditions
2,837
2,678
2,588
2,754
166
Could only find part-time work
1,461
1,351
1,322
1,287
-35
Part time for noneconomic reasons
21,448
21,697
21,573
21,549
-24
Persons not in the labor force (not seasonally adjusted)
Marginally attached to the labor force
1,491
1,564
1,299
1,229
–
Discouraged workers
506
467
321
341
–
– Over-the-month changes are not displayed for not seasonally adjusted data.
NOTE: Persons whose ethnicity is identified as Hispanic or Latino may be of any race. Detail for the seasonally adjusted data shown in this table will not necessarily add to totals because of the independent seasonal adjustment of the various series. Updated population controls are introduced annually with the release of January data.
Footnotes
(1) Includes other industries, not shown separately.
(2) Data relate to production employees in mining and logging and manufacturing, construction employees in construction, and nonsupervisory employees in the service-providing industries.
(3) The indexes of aggregate weekly hours are calculated by dividing the current month’s estimates of aggregate hours by the corresponding annual average aggregate hours.
(4) The indexes of aggregate weekly payrolls are calculated by dividing the current month’s estimates of aggregate weekly payrolls by the corresponding annual average aggregate weekly payrolls.
(5) Figures are the percent of industries with employment increasing plus one-half of the industries with unchanged employment, where 50 percent indicates an equal balance between industries with increasing and decreasing employment.
(P) Preliminary
NOTE: Data have been revised to reflect March 2018 benchmark levels and updated seasonal adjustment factors.
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In this episode of the Keiser Report, Max and Stacy discuss the fact that the massive daily NY Fed interventions in the repo market are getting worse and worse. What was meant to be small and temporary seems now to be huge and permanent. Investors are asking, “What is the Fed hiding?” They also look at the 23% decline in the U.S. Monetary Base since 2016 and ask whether or not it signifies anything. In the second half, Max talks to David Morgan of The Morgan Report about what he sees in the turmoil in the repo markets. They also discuss China’s gold purchases and whether or not he agrees with Alasdair MacLeod’s belief that China could announce they have more than 10,000 tons of gold.
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Opinion: The Federal Reserve is in stealth intervention mode
Published: Oct 26, 2019 4:23 p.m. ET
What the central bank passes off as ‘funding issues’ could more accurately be described as liquidity injections to keep interest rates low
Getty Images
Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell
By SVENHENRICH
The Federal Reserve has gone into full intervention mode.
Actually, accelerated intervention mode. Not just a “mid-cycle adjustment,” as Fed Chairman Jerome Powell said in July, but interventions to the tune of tens of billions of dollars every day.
What’s the crisis, you ask? After all, we live in an age of trillion-dollar market-cap companies and unemployment at 50-year lows. Yet the Fed is acting like the doomsday clock has melted as a result of a nuclear attack.
Think I’m in hyperbole mode? Far from it.
Unless you think the biggest repurchase (repo) efforts ever — surpassing the 2008 financial-crisis actions — are hyperbole:
Sven Henrich
✔@NorthmanTrader
What is the Fed not telling us?
I’m asking for a friend.
Something’s off. See, it all started as a temporary fix in September when, suddenly, the overnight target rate jumped sky high and the Fed had to intervene to keep the wheels from coming off. Short-term liquidity issues, the Fed said. Those have become rather permanent:
And liquidity injections are massive and accelerating. On Tuesday, the Fed injected $99.9 billion in temporary liquidity into the financial system and $7.5 billion in permanent reserves as part of a program to buy $60 billion a month in Treasury bills. The $99.9 billion comes from $64.9 billion in overnight repurchase agreements and $35 billion in repo operations.
But market demand for overnight repo operations has far exceeded even the $75 billion the Fed has allocated, suggesting a lot more liquidity demand. Hence, on Wednesday the Fed suddenly announced a $45 billion increase on top of the $75 billion repo facility for a daily total of $120 billion. Here’s the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the branch involved in such actions:
“Consistent with the most recent FOMC [Federal Open Market Committee] directive, to ensure that the supply of reserves remains ample even during periods of sharp increases in non-reserve liabilities, and to mitigate the risk of money market pressures that could adversely affect policy implementation, the amount offered in overnight repo operations will increase to at least $120 billion starting Thursday, Oct. 24, 2019.”
These actions are surprising. What stable financial system requires over $100 billion in overnight liquidity injections? The Fed did not see the need for these actions coming. It is reacting to a market that suddenly requires it.
“Funding issues,” Chairman Powell called it in October. The Fed was totally caught off guard when the overnight financing rate suddenly jumped to over 5%, and it’s been reacting ever since.
What started as a slow walk in policy reversion from last year’s rate-hike cycle and balance-sheet roll-off (aka quantitative tightening, or QT) on autopilot has now turned into ongoing interest-rate cuts and balance-sheet expansion:
To be clear: This is not a temporary rise in the balance sheet; this is the beginning of something big. The Fed’s balance sheet looks like it will expand to record highs once again.
I keep questioning the efficacy of all this, and I have to question the honesty of the Fed. After all, the central bank keeps chasing events, and its policy actions are turning ever more aggressive while it insists that everything is fine. The bank’s actions are saying things are not fine. Far from it. Otherwise, the Fed wouldn’t be forced into all these policy actions. But would the Fed cop to things not being fine? To do so would be to sap confidence — can’t have that.
What would markets look like without these policy interventions? One can only wonder. For one, we know the overnight financing rate would be much higher. That is, after all, why the Fed is forced to intervene: To keep the target rate low.
Many analysts now suggest there will be a year-end stock market rally, primarily driven by the Fed as earnings growth remains weak. If they print, you must buy.
It may well be that our financial markets have permanently devolved into a Fed-subsidized, wealth-inequality-generating machine benefitting the few that own stocks. But one has to wonder why the rate cutting and liquidity injections haven’t been able to produce sustained market highs.
Consider the evolution of the Fed’s “put” in 2019:
First came the hints in January. “Flexible on the balance sheet,” Powell suddenly was uttering following the fourth-quarter 2018 stock market massacre, producing a 3.5% rally in one day on that pronouncement. Then we got treated to a multi-month jawboning of Fed speakers increasingly sending dovish messages, and markets gladly jumping from Fed speech to Fed speech. Powell again rescued the market in early June after May’s market rout. “Ready to act” was the rallying cry then — and the market rallied dutifully into the July rate cut.
But then the dynamics changed. Rate cut No. 1 in July was sold. Rate cut No. 2 in September was sold. Then came the repo operations, also in September. And now, in October, the Fed launched the $60 billion-a-month Treasury-bill-buying program.
Did you note the accelerated pace of Fed actions here? The Fed went from pausing rate increases to ending the balance sheet roll-off to multiple rate cuts and, finally, aggressive daily repos and balance-sheet expansion. All of this since July. And guess what? Another rate cut is coming next week.
Why? Because markets want it. And what markets want, markets shall receive. That’s the only data point that matters, it appears.
And markets really want that third rate cut next week:
There’s a 94.6% probability of a rate cut. Think that a Fed that is intervening in markets daily by the tens of billions of dollars will chance to disappoint markets by not cutting rates? Please.
Investors have been chasing the Fed into corporate multiple expansion all year. But now that the Fed is forced to intervene ever more aggressively, it has to prove something: Efficacy.
Are we seeing an improvement in growth? No. Are we seeing an improvement in earnings? No. From the looks of it, the Fed is barely keeping it together and is forced to do ever more to prevent markets from falling as the principal bull rationale for buying stocks is the Fed.
And so one has to ponder a larger question:
Sven Henrich
✔@NorthmanTrader
I’ll go out on a limb here, but a financial system that requires over $100B of liquidity injections every day, temporary, permanent or otherwise, has major issues.
But, to be fair, so far the Fed has succeeded in compressing volatility as price discovery has degraded to overnight action over any intraday price discovery. Markets are back to tight intra-ranges void of any actions and elevating indices near record highs.
Whether the Fed can prompt a move to sustained new highs remains to be seen. All eyes will be on the Fed next week to see whether policy makers can achieve it.
If they can, investors can look for another run at the upper trend line on the S&P 500 SPX, -0.12% chart:
If they can’t, things may turn out quite differently, such as this speculative scenario:
You don’t think the Fed is all about markets? Where have you been? After all, the Fed’s stated policy objective now is to extend the business cycle by any means necessary. And policy makers can’t do that with falling stock prices.
And so they are in accelerated daily intervention mode. Because that is what it takes. The questions that investors have to ask themselves is: What if it’s not enough? And what is it policy makers aren’t telling us? Why are they are forced into these historic, unexpected measures? What happens if they lose control? We may know more next week.
Statement Regarding Repurchase and Reverse Repurchase Agreements Small Value Exercise
November 4, 2019
The New York Fed undertakes certain small value open market transactions from time to time for the purpose of testing operational readiness to implement existing and potential policy directives from the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC). The FOMC authorizes the New York Fed’s Open Market Trading Desk (the Desk) to conduct these exercises to test its operational readiness in the Authorization for Domestic Open Market Operations and Authorization for Foreign Currency Operations.
In connection with these authorizations, the Desk intends to conduct one small value forward-settling repo and one small value reverse repo operation during the month of November. Each operation will begin around 9:45 AM ET and end at 10:00 AM ET. The operations will be open to Primary Dealers and/or Reverse Repo Counterparties. All counterparties will be limited to one $1 million proposition per tranche during each operation. The planned schedule, including operation details, follows below:
Repurchase Agreement Operation:
OPERATION TENOR/TYPE
ELIGIBLE COUNTERPARTIES
OPERATION DATE
SETTLEMENT DATE
MATURITY DATE
COLLATERAL TYPE
MAXIMUM VALUE OF OPERATION
Term Repo
Primary Dealers
Tues, Nov 5, 2019
Wed, Nov 6, 2019
Fri, Nov 8, 2019
Multi-tranche: Treasury, Agency, Agency MBS
$75 million
Reverse Repurchase Agreement Operation:
OPERATION TENOR/TYPE
ELIGIBLE COUNTERPARTIES
OPERATION DATE
SETTLEMENT DATE
MATURITY DATE
COLLATERAL TYPE
OFFERING RATE
MAXIMUM VALUE OF OPERATION
Term Reverse Repo
Primary Dealers and Reverse Repo Counterparties
Tues, Nov 19, 2019
Tues, Nov 19, 2019
Thu, Nov 21, 2019
Single-tranche: Agency MBS -only
ON RRP Offering Rate on Nov 19
$175 million
Announcements and results will be posted on the New York Fed’s website at the start and following the completion of each operation.
A monetary base is the total amount of a currency that is either in general circulation in the hands of the public or in the commercial bank deposits held in the central bank’s reserves. This measure of the money supply typically only includes the most liquid currencies; it is also known as the “money base.”
Breaking Down Monetary Base
The monetary base is a component of a nation’s money supply. It refers strictly to highly liquid funds including notes, coinage and current bank deposits. When the Federal Reserve creates new funds to purchase bonds from commercial banks, the banks see an increase in their holdings, which causes the monetary base to expand.
For example, country Z has 600 million currency units circulating in the public and its central bank has 10 billion currency units in reserve as part of deposits from many commercial banks. In this case, the monetary base for country Z is 10.6 billion currency units.
As of June 2016, the U.S. had a monetary base of almost $3.9 trillion.
Monetary Base and the Money Supply
The money supply expands beyond the monetary base to include other assets that may be less liquid in form. It is most commonly divided into levels, listed as M0 through M3 or M4 depending on the system, with each representing a different facet of a nation’s assets. The monetary base’s funds are generally held within the lower levels of the money supply, such as M1 or M2, which encompasses cash in circulation and specific liquid assets including, but not limited to, savings and checking accounts.
To qualify, the funds must be considered a final settlement of a transaction. For example, if a person uses cash to pay a debt, that transaction is final. Additionally, writing a check against money in a checking account, or using a debit card, can also be considered final since the transaction is backed by actual cash deposits once they have cleared.
In contrast, the use of credit to pay a debt does not qualify as part of the monetary base, as this is not the final step to the transaction. This is due to the fact the use of credit just transfers a debt owed from one party, the person or business receiving the credit-based payment and the credit issuer.
Managing Monetary Bases
Most monetary bases are controlled by one national institution, usually a country’s central bank. They can usually change the monetary base (either expanding or contracting) through open market operations or monetary policies.
For many countries, the government can maintain a measure of control over the monetary base by buying and selling government bonds in the open market.
Smaller Scale Monetary Bases and Money Supplies
At the household level, the monetary base consists of all notes and coins in the possession of the household, as well as any funds in deposit accounts. The money supply of a household may be extended to include any available credit open on credit cards, unused portions of lines of credit and other accessible funds that translate into a debt that must be repaid.
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The Democratic-controlled House has called for a formal impeachment inquiry against President Donald Trump. The inquiry comes on the heels of a whistleblower complaint about a phone call exchange between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. In response, on September 25th, the White House released a memo it says summarizes the phone call in question.
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Ukraine Court Rules Manafort Disclosure Caused ‘Meddling’ in U.S. Election
Paul Manafort, center, arriving for his arraignment hearing at the federal courthouse in Alexandria, Va., in March.Credit…Al Drago for The New York Times
MOSCOW — A court in Ukraine has ruled that officials in the country violated the law by revealing, during the 2016 presidential election in the United States, details of suspected illegal payments to Paul Manafort.
In 2016, while Mr. Manafort was chairman of the Trump campaign, anti-corruption prosecutors in Ukraine disclosed that a pro-Russian political party had earmarked payments for Mr. Manafort from an illegal slush fund. Mr. Manafort resigned from the campaign a week later.
The court’s ruling that what the prosecutors did was illegal comes as the Ukrainian government, which is deeply reliant on the United States for financial and military aid, has sought to distance itself from matters related to the special counsel’s investigation of Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential race.
Some of the investigation by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, has dealt with Mr. Manafort’s decade of work in Ukraine advising the country’s Russia-aligned former president, Viktor F. Yanukovych, his party and the oligarchs behind it.
After President Trump’s victory, some politicians in Ukraine criticized the public release by prosecutors of the slush fund records, saying the move would complicate Ukraine’s relations with the Trump administration.
In Ukraine, investigations into the payments marked for Mr. Manafort were halted for a time and never led to indictments. Mr. Manafort’s conviction in the United States on financial fraud charges related to his work in Ukraine was not based on any known legal assistance from Ukraine.
Two Ukrainian members of Parliament had pressed for investigations into whether the prosecutors’ revelation of the payment records, which were first published in The New York Times, had violated Ukrainian laws that, in some cases, prohibit prosecutors from revealing evidence before a trial.
Both lawmakers asserted that if the release of the slush fund information broke the law, then it should be viewed as an illegal effort to influence the United States presidential election in favor of Hillary Clinton by damaging the Trump campaign.
Artem Sytnik, the head of the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine, said he had revealed the information about Paul Manafort “in accordance with the law in effect at the time.”Credit…Oleksandr Stashevskyi/Associated Press
The Kiev District Administrative Court, in a statement issued Wednesday, said that Artem Sytnik, the head of the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine, the agency that had released information about the payments, had violated the law. The court’s statement said this violation “resulted in meddling in the electoral process of the United States in 2016 and damaged the national interests of Ukraine.”
A spokeswoman for the anti-corruption bureau said she could not comment before the court released a full text of the ruling. In an interview last June, Mr. Sytnik said he had revealed the information “in accordance with the law in effect at the time.”
The court also faulted a member of Ukraine’s Parliament, Serhiy A. Leshchenko, who had commented on Mr. Manafort’s case and publicized at a news conference materials that the anti-corruption bureau had already posted on its website.
Mr. Leshchenko said he would appeal the ruling, and that the court was not independent and was doing the bidding of the Ukrainian government as it sought to curry favor with the Trump administration.
“This decision of the court is for Poroshenko to find a way to Trump’s heart,” he said, referring to President Petro O. Poroshenko. “At the next meeting with Trump, he will say, ‘You know, an independent Ukrainian court decided investigators made an inappropriate move.’ He will find the loyalty of the Trump administration.”
Mr. Leshchenko said the prosecutors’ revelations about Mr. Manafort were legal because they were “public interest information,” even if they were also potential evidence in a criminal investigation.
Mr. Manafort has not been charged with a crime in Ukraine, and earlier this year, Ukrainian officials froze several investigations into Mr. Manafort’s payments at a time when the government was negotiating with the Trump administration to purchase sophisticated anti-tank missiles, called Javelins.
Ukraine’s prosecutor general said the delay on Mr. Manafort’s cases was unrelated to the missile negotiations. In total, the United States provides about $600 million in bilateral aid to Ukraine annually.
Earlier this month, the special counsel accused Mr. Manafort of violating a cooperation agreement by lying. Two of the five alleged lies, according to the filing, related to meetings or conversations with Konstantin V. Kilimnik, Mr. Manafort’s former office manager in Kiev, whom the special counsel’s office has identified as tied to Russian intelligence and as a key figure in the investigation into possible coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia.
Ukrainian law enforcement officials last year allowed Mr. Kilimnik to leave for Russia, putting him out of reach for questioning.
Let’s get real: Democrats were first to enlist Ukraine in US elections
BY JOHN SOLOMON, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR — 09/23/19 06:30 PM EDT 2,915
THE VIEWS EXPRESSED BY CONTRIBUTORS ARE THEIR OWN AND NOT THE VIEW OF THE HILL
Earlier this month, during a bipartisan meeting in Kiev, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) delivered a pointed message to Ukraine’s new president, Volodymyr Zelensky.
While choosing his words carefully, Murphy made clear — by his own account — that Ukraine currently enjoyed bipartisan support for its U.S. aid but that could be jeopardized if the new president acquiesced to requests by President Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani to investigate past corruption allegations involving Americans, including former Vice President Joe Biden’s family.
Murphy boasted after the meeting that he told the new Ukrainian leader that U.S. aid was his country’s “most important asset” and it would be viewed as election meddling and “disastrous for long-term U.S.-Ukraine relations” to bend to the wishes of Trump and Giuliani.
“I told Zelensky that he should not insert himself or his government into American politics. I cautioned him that complying with the demands of the President’s campaign representatives to investigate a political rival of the President would gravely damage the U.S.-Ukraine relationship. There are few things that Republicans and Democrats agree on in Washington these days, and support for Ukraine is one of them,” Murphy told me today, confirming what he told Ukraine’s leader.
The implied message did not require an interpreter for Zelensky to understand: Investigate the Ukraine dealings of Joe Biden and his son Hunter, and you jeopardize Democrats’ support for future U.S. aid to Kiev.
The Murphy anecdote is a powerful reminder that, since at least 2016, Democrats repeatedly have exerted pressure on Ukraine, a key U.S. ally for buffering Russia, to meddle in U.S. politics and elections.
And that activity long preceded Giuliani’s discussions with Ukrainian officials and Trump’s phone call to Zelensky in July, seeking to have Ukraine formally investigate whether then-Vice President Joe Biden used a threat of canceling foreign aid to shut down an investigation into $3 million routed to the U.S. firm run by Biden’s son.
As I have reported, the pressure began at least as early as January 2016, when the Obama White House unexpectedly invited Ukraine’s top prosecutors to Washington to discuss fighting corruption in the country.
The meeting, promised as training, turned out to be more of a pretext for the Obama administration to pressure Ukraine’s prosecutors to drop an investigation into the Burisma Holdings gas company that employed Hunter Biden and to look for new evidence in a then-dormant criminal case against eventual Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, a GOP lobbyist.
U.S. officials “kept talking about how important it was that all of our anti-corruption efforts be united,” said Andrii Telizhenko, the former political officer in the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington who organized and attended the meetings.
Nazar Kholodnytsky, Ukraine’s chief anti-corruption prosecutor, told me that, soon after he returned from the Washington meeting, he saw evidence in Ukraine of political meddling in the U.S. election. That’s when two top Ukrainian officials released secret evidence to the American media, smearing Manafort.
The release of the evidence forced Manafort to step down as Trump’s top campaign adviser. A Ukrainian court concluded last December that the release of the evidence amounted to an unlawful intervention in the U.S. election by Kiev’s government, although that ruling has since been overturned on a technicality.
Shortly after the Ukrainian prosecutors returned from their Washington meeting, a new round of Democratic pressure was exerted on Ukraine — this time via its embassy in Washington.
Valeriy Chaly, the Ukrainian ambassador to the United States at the time, confirmed to me in a statement issued by his office that, in March 2016, a contractor for the Democratic National Committee (DNC) pressed his embassy to try to find any Russian dirt on Trump and Manafort that might reside in Ukraine’s intelligence files.
The DNC contractor also asked Chaly’s team to try to persuade Ukraine’s president at the time, Petro Poroshenko, to make a statement disparaging Manafort when the Ukrainian leader visited the United States during the 2016 election.
Chaly said his embassy rebuffed both requests because it recognized they were improper efforts to get a foreign government to try to influence the election against Trump and for Hillary Clinton.
The political pressure continued. Biden threatened to withhold $1 billion in crucial U.S. aid to Kiev if Poroshenko did not fire the country’s chief prosecutor. Ukraine would have been bankrupted without the aid, so Poroshenko obliged on March 29, 2016, and fired Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin.
What wasn’t known at the time, Shokin told me recently, was that Ukrainian prosecutors were preparing a request to interview Hunter Biden about his activities and the monies he was receiving from Ukraine. If such an interview became public during the middle of the 2016 election, it could have had enormous negative implications for Democrats.
Democrats continued to tap Ukraine for Trump dirt throughout the 2016 election, my reporting shows.
Nellie Ohr, the wife of senior U.S. Justice Department official Bruce Ohr, worked in 2016 as a contractor for Fusion GPS, the same Hillary Clinton–funded opposition research firm that hired Christopher Steele, the British spy who wrote the now-debunked dossier linking Trump to Russia collusion.
Nellie Ohr testified to Congress that some of the dirt she found on Trump during her 2016 election opposition research came from a Ukrainian parliament member. She also said that she eventually took the information to the FBI through her husband — another way Ukraine got inserted into the 2016 election.
Politics. Pressure. Opposition research. All were part of the Democrats’ playbook on Ukraine long before Trump ever called Zelensky this summer. And as Sen. Murphy’s foray earlier this month shows, it hasn’t stopped.
The evidence is so expansive as to strain the credulity of the Democrats’ current outrage at Trump’s behavior with Ukraine.
Which raises a question: Could it be the Ukraine tale currently being weaved by Democrats and their allies in the media is nothing more than a smoke screen designed to distract us from the forthcoming Justice Department inspector general report into abuses during the Democratic-inspired Russia collusion probe?
It’s a question worth asking.
John Solomon is an award-winning investigative journalist whose work over the years has exposed U.S. and FBI intelligence failures before the Sept. 11 attacks, federal scientists’ misuse of foster children and veterans in drug experiments, and numerous cases of political corruption. He serves as an investigative columnist and executive vice president for video at The Hill. Follow him on Twitter @jsolomonReports.
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Top GOP lawmakers speak after House passes impeachment inquiry resolution
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Nancy Pelosi sets up ultra-partisan televised impeachment probe by jamming new rules through House without Republican backing – and two of her own side vote AGAINST new stage in investigating Donald Trump
House Democrats approved an impeachment inquiry into the president in a vote almost entirely along party lines
‘What is at stake is our democracy. What are we fighting for? Defending our democracy for the people,’ Speaker Pelosi said
The vote was 232 in favor with 196 voting no; two Democrats rebelled and voted with Republicans
‘The Greatest Witch Hunt In American History!,’ Trump tweeted afterward
Trump spent morning tweeting and retweeting words from his supporters
He called on Republicans to stand together and back him
The resolution outlines how the impeachment investigation will proceed and what rights the president will have during it
Republicans complained about the lack of ‘due process’ for Trump and charged Democrats with trying to overturn the 2016 election
White House counselor Kellyanne Conway said the administration is considering bringing aboard additional staff to combat the impeachment inquiry
The vote comes as Tim Morrison, who was Trump’s top adviser for Russian and European affairs, testifies behind closed doors in the impeachment inquiry
PUBLISHED: 08:57 EDT, 31 October 2019 | UPDATED: 11:21 EDT, 1 November 2019
A divided House of Representatives voted on Thursday to begin the next stage of the impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump, taking the investigation from behind closed doors to Americans’ television screens with a series of public hearings.
Republican and Democratic lawmakers took to the House floor to engage in a bitter debate over the impeachment process before voting almost entirely along along party lines on the resolution.
Thursday’s vote was 232 in favor with 196 lawmakers voting no. There were two Democratic defections – Congressmen Jeff Van Drew of New Jersey and Collin Peterson of Minnesota.
Both hold swing districts that Trump carried in the 2016 election. Trump carried Peterson’s district by over 30 points. Republicans had hoped more Democrats in vulnerable seats would vote against.
Rep. Justin Amash, a Republican who became an Independent, voted in favor of the resolution.
Nancy Pelosi was left with no fig leaf of bipartisanship when no Republican backed her case; the Republicans got two Democrats voting with them but not the up to a dozen they had hoped would rebel against the Speaker.
Steve Scalise, the Republican whip boasted afterwards about keeping his side united.
The contentious debate is likely a preview of the public hearings to come.
Democrats focused on their constitutional duty; they talked about following the law and protecting national security interests.
Republicans railed against the process, echoing a White House argument there is no due process for the president and no Republican in-put into the proceedings, and accused their colleagues across the aisle of trying to overturn the 2016 election.
The Greatest Witch Hunt In American History!,’ Trump tweeted after the vote was finished, using his favorite phrase to describe any investigation into him.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi presided over the vote and gaveled it to a close, announcing the final total.
She kept her words on the matter short: ‘On this vote the yeas are 232, the nays are 196. The resolution is adopted without objection.’
Four lawmakers did not vote. Three Republicans – Jody Hice of Georgia, John Rose of Tennessee, and William Timmons of South Carolina – and one Democrat: Donald McEachin of Virginia.
Rep. Hice tweeted he missed the vote because his father died but he would have voted no on the resolution if he had been present.
Democrats launched the formal impeachment inquiry in September after a whistleblower revealed concerns that President Trump asked the Ukrainian president to investigate Joe and Hunter Bidens, his political enemies, during a July 25 phone call.
Trump has denied any wrongdoing and called the call ‘perfect.’
The weeks-long inquiry accumulated into Thursday’s five-minute vote. The House chamber was crowded with lawmakers as it took place. They chatted with each other on their respective sides of aisle.
After it was over, Democrats moved on to the next vote on the schedule while Republicans yelled in protest. ‘Order, order,’ they yelled, ‘we have rules.’
But Democrats, who control the chamber, moved on.
White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham, as soon as the vote was over, charged House Democrats with an ‘obsession’ with impeaching the president.
‘The President has done nothing wrong, and the Democrats know it. Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats’ unhinged obsession with this illegitimate impeachment proceeding does not hurt President Trump; it hurts the American people,’ she said in a statement.
President Trump spent the morning before the House votes on an impeachment resolution into him tweeting and retweeting words from his supporters
Trump spent Thursday morning tweeting and retweeting words from his supporters, calling on Republicans to stand by him in the upcoming vote.
‘The Impeachment Hoax is hurting our Stock Market. The Do Nothing Democrats don’t care!,’ he wrote shortly before the House started voting on the resolution against him.
Earlier he called on Republicans to stand by him during the proceedings.
‘Now is the time for Republicans to stand together and defend the leader of their party against these smears,’ Trump tweeted, quoting conservative talk host Laura Ingraham.
Pelosi, meanwhile, gaveled the House into order on Thursday morning as lawmakers took to the floor to debate the resolution.
Democrats talked about following the law and protecting national security interests. Republicans railed against the process, echoing a White House argument there is no due process for the president and no Republican in-put into the proceedings.
‘It’s not a fair process. It’s not a transparent process. It’s not an open process. But instead it’s limited and a closed process with a pre-ordained outcome,’ argued Republican Rep. Tom Cole said on the House floor Thursday morning.
Rep. Devin Nunes, the ranking Republican on the Intelligence panel, compared Democrats pursuing impeachment to a ‘cult,’ and their inquiry to a ‘show trial.’
‘They have always intended to transform the Intelligence committee into the impeachment committee,’ said Nunes, a California Republican who was himself accused of politicizing the Intelligence panel during the Mueller investigation.
‘Every one of their actions from the staff they hired to the Trump conspiracy theories they investigate … indicates this has been their plan from day one,’ he said on the House floor.
He accused Democrats of harboring a ‘bizarre obsession with overturning the results of the last presidential election.’
‘What we’re seeing among Democrats on the Intelligence Committees, down in the [secure Capitol facility] right now, is like a cult. These are a group of people loyally following their leader as he bounces from one outlandish conspiracy theory to another. And the media are the cult followers, permanently stationed outside the committee spaces, pretending to take everything seriously, because they too support the goal of removing the president from office,’ Nunes said.
Pelosi, like many of her colleagues, delivered floor remarks in front of a poster of an American flag where lawmakers often place visual aids.
The Speaker, who only occasionally speaks on legislation or procedures on the floor of the House, began her remarks by reading the preamble to the Constitution.
‘What is at stake is our democracy. What are we fighting for? Defending our democracy for the people,’ she said.
‘The genius of the Constitution, a separation of powers. Three coequal branches of government to be a check and balance on each other,’ Pelosi told colleagues.
‘Sadly this is not any cause for any glee or comfort. This is something that is very solemn that is something prayerful.’ Addressing arguments that the House was authorizing something that has already begun, she said: ‘We had to gather so much information to take us to this next step.’
‘I doubt anybody in this place … comes to Congress to take the oath of office … to impeach the president of the United States, unless his actions are jeopardizing our honoring our oath of office,’ said Pelosi, who earlier this month walked out of a meeting with President Trump after it grew heated.
‘Let us honor our oath of office. Let us defend our democracy. Let us have a good vote today and have clarity, clarity as to how we proceed,’ she said.
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Speaker Nancy Pelosi spoke on the House floor with a poster of a flag
Rep. Steve Scalise, the Number Two Republican in the House, called the proceedings ‘Soviet-style’
‘At the end of the day, this resolution isn’t about Donald Trump. It isn’t about any of us. It’s about our Constitution. It’s about our country. And so I urge my colleagues to not just think about the political pressures of the moment. These will pass. Please consider the heavy responsibility you have today, to this institution, the Constitution, and our country,’ said Rules Committee Chairman Rep. Jim McGovern on the House floor Thursday morning.
”I never wanted our country to reach this point. I do not take any pleasure in the need for this resolution. We are not here in some partisan exercise. We are here because the facts compel us to be here. There is serious evidence that President Trump may have violated the Constitution. This is about protecting our national security and safeguarding our elections,’ he added.
‘I support this resolution because it lays the groundwork for open hearings. The House and the American public must see all of the evidence for themselves,’ said Judiciary Chair Jerry Nadler in his floor speech.
Nadler’s committee will hold some of those public hearings.
‘I support this resolution because I know we must overcome this difficult moment for the Nation. This resolution is necessary to ensure that our constitutional order remains intact for future generations,’ he added. ‘I support this resolution because we simply have no choice.’
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler spoke in support of the resolution; his committee will hold some of the public hearings
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House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy charged Democrats with trying to overturn the 2016 election
Republicans complained Democrats were trying to overturn the 2016 election.
House minority whip Rep. Steve Scalise of Louisiana tried to turn the table on Democrats, who have spent years focusing on Russian election interference and Trump campaign contacts with Russians.
He spoke next to a blow-up posture of the Kremlin, and accused the Democrats of conducting a Soviet-style inquiry.
‘If the chair chooses, at his whim, they can literally kick out the president’s legal counsel. This is unprecedented. It’s not only unprecedented, this is Soviet-style rules. Maybe in the Soviet Union, you’d do things like this, where only you make the rules, where you reject the ability of the person you are accusing to even be in the room to question what’s going on, for anybody else to call witnesses,’ said Scalise.
House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy blasted Democrats for ‘not working for the American people.’
‘This Congress has more subpoenas than laws,’ he said in his floor speech.
‘Democrats are trying to impeach the president because they are scared they cannot beat him at the ballot,’ McCarthy complained. ‘This impeachment is not only an attempt to undo the last election. It is an attempt to undo the last one as well.’
For both sides the vote will become a political weapon in 2020 with Republicans targeting Democrats who represent House districts that Trump won in 2016 and Democrats using it as a rallying cry for their base.
Tim Morrison, who was Trump’s top adviser for Russian and European affairs, arrives on Capitol Hill Thursday to testify
White House counselor Kellyanne Conway said Thursday morning the administration is considering bringing aboard additional staff to combat the impeachment inquiry.
‘Possibly and if we do it’s because our portfolios are already over flowing,’ she told reporters in the White House drive way. ‘So possibly. Stephanie Grisham is the press secretary and communications director the president and to the first lady. She’s got a pretty busy portfolio already.’
She added that any additions would be temporary and single-focused on the impeach issue, comparing it to how the administration brought on small teams of extra staff to handle other key issues, such as Supreme Court nominations.
‘So if it’s something intense, but single focused albeit temporary, there’s an argument for bringing a few extra hands and minds on to the team. So I would analogize it to Kavanaugh Part II for example,’ she said. ‘You have a short window and somebody who is single-focused on just that which is, frankly, something the rest of us can’t do.’
She was quick to add: ‘It’s not a war room. The president has made it pretty clear he doesn’t need a war room.’
The vote comes as Tim Morrison, who was Trump’s top adviser for Russian and European affairs, arrived on Capitol Hill Thursday morning to testify in the inquiry.
Morrison recently left his White House post and Democrats will seek details from him on an allegation that president linked nearly $400 million in U.S. military aid to the Ukraine to officials there undertaking an investigation into Joe and Hunter Biden, along with probing an unproven theory that it was the Ukrainians who hacked the Democratic National Committee’s email server and blamed the Russians.
Trump has maintained he’s done nothing wrong.
The House resolution includes a package of rules for how the Intelligence Committee – now leading the investigation closed-door testimony from witness – would transition to public hearings.
It also details how Intelligence panel Chair Adam Schiff will have most of the power in the process – deciding who will testify in front of the cameras and for how long – before issuing a public report and handing the matter over to the House Judiciary Committee, which will compose any formal articles of impeachment against the president.
Republicans and the White House are objecting to how that process is laid out.
Under the resolution, GOP lawmakers can only issue subpoenas for witnesses if the entire panel approved them – in effect giving Democrats veto power over their requests. Democrats argue this was the same procedure Republicans used when they had the majority during Bill Clinton’s impeachment process in the 1990s.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi will bring a resolution to a vote that outlines how the investigation will proceed and what rights the president will have during it
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House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff will play a lead role in the public hearing phase of the investigation
Additionally, there is no role for President Trump’s lawyers when the Intelligence panel holds its public hearings – a time when the cable news networks will run wall-to-wall coverage and viewership is expected to be high.
Trump’s lawyers aren’t allowed into the process into the Judiciary committee phase but what rights they will have – such as the ability to question witnesses – are not outlined in the resolution.
The White House blasted the rules as ‘an illegitimate sham’ that lacks ‘any due process’ for President Trump.
‘The White House is barred from participating at all, until after Chairman Schiff conducts two rounds of one-sided hearings to generate a biased report for the Judiciary Committee. Even then, the White House’s rights remain undefined, unclear, and uncertain – because those rules still haven’t been written,’ White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham argued in a statement earlier this week on the resolution.
By the time the president gets to participate, most of the drama will have played out on television screens across the country.
Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell blasted the procedure as denying the president his ‘basic due process rights.’
‘It does not confer on President Trump the most basic rights of due process,’ McConnell complained in a speech on the Senate floor on Wednesday.
Meanwhile, Bill Taylor, the top U.S. diplomat in the Ukraine whose closed-door testimony in the impeachment inquiry against Trump shocked Democrats with its details, is willing to testify in public when the hearings move to that stage.
No request has been made for his public testimony, CNN reports, but he is likely to be on the Democrats’ list when the time comes.
Republican Leader Mitch McConnell blasted House Democrats’ impeachment resolution on the Senate floor on Wednesday
Bill Taylor, the top U.S. diplomat in the Ukraine, is wiling to testify in public
Taylor testified last week that he was told that American military aid to the Ukraine was contingent on Kiev putting out a statement they were investigating the Bidens and the 2016 election.
Democrats believe he could be a star witness.
He’s rock solid, detailed notetaker and unimpeachable,’ Rep. Jackie Speier, a Democratic member of the House Intelligence Committee, told CNN. ‘Fifty years given to his country — it doesn’t get much more ‘Top Gun’ than that.’
Taylor testified behind closed doors last week that Trump refused to release U.S. security aid or meet with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky until Zelensky agreed to investigate the president’s political rivals.
Trump wanted a public commitment from the Ukraine they would investigate Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian gas company with Hunter Biden on its board, Taylor – a Vietnam veteran and career State Department official – told Congress, and said the president wanted Ukraine ‘put in a box.’
Trump and his allies have pushed an unproven theory Joe Biden, as vice president, demanded the Ukraine remove a prosecutor to the benefit of the company.
The president also pushed an unproven conspiracy theory that an email server belonging to the Democratic National Committee was hacked by Ukrainians during the 2016 election and they made it look as it were the Russians – a story, that if true, would indicate he won the 2016 contest without Russian interference.
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Bolton was in meetings with EU Ambassador Gordon Sondland on Ukraine policy
Taylor said he was told that Trump had made clear that military aid to help keep Ukraine safe from Russia would only be made available if Zelensky went public to order ‘investigations,’ otherwise there was a ‘stalemate.’
And Taylor testified that Sondland told another diplomat: ‘President Trump did insist that President Zelensky go to a microphone and say that he is opening investigations of Biden and 2016 election interference, and that President Zelensky should want to do this himself.’
The bombshell testimony rocked Washington D.C. and left the White House reeling – after Trump had started the day by calling impeachment ‘a lynching.’
As Democratic lawmakers trickled out of the hearing, they called they evidence ‘damning,’ while Republicans had little to say.
Taylor called the involvement of Rudy Giuliani in a ‘parallel’ foreign policy ‘highly irregular’; confirmed that John Bolton had called linking military aid to Ukraine to a Biden probe a ‘drug deal’; implicated Mike Pence, Mike Pompeo and Mick Mulvaney in the scheme; and painted EU Ambassador Gordon Sondland as part of Giuliani’s scheme as well as an error-prone official lax on security and an unreliable witness – who one Republican conceded is likely to be recalled to the probe.
He recalled a phone call with Sondland, whom the president put in charge of Ukrainian affairs despite that country not being an EU member.
‘During that phone call, Amb. Sondland told me that President Trump had told him that he wants President Zelensky to state publicly that Ukraine will investigate Burisma and alleged Ukrainian interference in the 2016 election,’ Taylor said in his statement.
He added Sondland told him ‘everything’ – meaning U.S. military aid and a White House meeting – was contingent on the Ukraine publicly agreeing to the probe.
‘Amb. Sondland also told me that he now recognized that he had made a mistake by earlier telling the Ukrainian officials to whom he spoke that a White House meeting with President Zelensky was dependent on a public announcement of investigations — in fact, Amb. Sondland said, ‘everything’ was dependent on such an announcement, including security assistance,’ Taylor said.
‘He said that President Trump wanted President Zelensky ‘in a public box’ by making a public statement about ordering such investigations,” he noted.
Taylor is considered the biggest threat to Trump to come before lawmakers.
He left his retirement to take up the top U.S. post in the Ukraine after Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch was fired by Trump. He has no ties to the administration and no diplomatic career to worry about given his senior statesman status. He has worked in administrations for both political parties.
White House blasts impeachment resolution as ‘illegitimate sham’ without ‘any due process’ for Donald Trump after Democrats release proposal that omits details about president’s rights when public hearings are televised
White House blasted the Democrats’ impeachment resolution
It’s ‘an illegitimate sham … without any due process for the President,’ White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham said in a statement
House Democrats released their impeachment resolution on Tuesday that outlines the next stage of the investigation into Donald Trump
It includes public hearings and gives Republicans limited power to call witnesses
Power is concentrated in hands on Intel Committee Chair Adam Schiff
He will get to approve Republican witnesses and their requests for subpoena
After Intel finishes its investigation, it will write a public report
Matter then goes to Judiciary panel which writes articles of impeachment
Trump and his lawyer cannot participate in process until that final stage
House votes on resolution on Thursday, which is Halloween
PUBLISHED: 15:37 EDT, 29 October 2019 | UPDATED: 19:34 EDT, 29 October 2019
Under the resolution, power is concentrated in the hands of House Intelligence committee Chair Adam Schiff, who can authorize longer periods to question witnesses and who can approve Republican requests for witnesses to appear.
The Intelligence panel will take the lead in the next, immediate steps. Those include public hearings where Republican lawmakers and staff can question witnesses.
But there is no role for the president’s lawyer in the that stage – which is the White House’s chief complaint.
After its public hearings conclude, the Intelligence panel will submit its findings to the House Judiciary Committee, which will have the responsibility for drafting any articles of impeachment that would charge the president.
STEPHANIE GRISHAM STATEMENT ON RESOLUTION
The resolution put forward by Speaker Pelosi confirms that House Democrats’ impeachment has been an illegitimate sham from the start as it lacked any proper authorization by a House vote.
It continues this scam by allowing Chairman Schiff, who repeatedly lies to the American people, to hold a new round of hearings, still without any due process for the President.
The White House is barred from participating at all, until after Chairman Schiff conducts two rounds of one-sided hearings to generate a biased report for the Judiciary Committee. Even then, the White House’s rights remain undefined, unclear, and uncertain – because those rules still haven’t been written.
This resolution does nothing to change the fundamental fact that House Democrats refuse to provide basic due process rights to the Administration.
It’s in that stage that President Trump’s lawyers will get to be involved but what rights they will have – such as the ability to question witnesses – are not outlined in the resolution.
‘The White House is barred from participating at all, until after Chairman Schiff conducts two rounds of one-sided hearings to generate a biased report for the Judiciary Committee. Even then, the White House’s rights remain undefined, unclear, and uncertain – because those rules still haven’t been written,’ Grisham argued in her statement on the resolution.
By the time the president gets to participate, most of the drama will have played out on television screens across the country.
Republicans, meanwhile, have called foul on the restrictions Democrats have placed on them when it comes to presenting Trump’s case when the hearings move the public stage.
Rep. Devin Nunes, the top Republican on the intelligence panel, can request witnesses, documents and any subpoenas the GOP want but Schiff must sign off on those requests and the full committee, which has a majority of Democrats, must approve them by vote.
Democrats point out that it is the same practice Republicans used for the minority power during the impeachment proceedings into President Bill Clinton into 1998.
The resolution puts the power in the impeachment inquiry into House Intelligence panel Chair Adam Schiff
The resolution is slated for a vote on Thursday in the full House. Republican leadership is telling its members to vote no on what they call a ‘Soviet-style’ resolution.
Under the Democratic-written measure, the House committees are directed ‘to continue their ongoing investigations as part of the existing House of Representatives inquiry into whether sufficient grounds exist for the House of Representatives to exercise its Constitutional power to impeach Donald John Trump, President of the United States of America, and for other purposes.’
Besides setting out the procedure for public hearings, the House intelligence panel is directed to write a public report – with classified information redacted – and ultimately transfer its findings to the House Judiciary Committee, which will take the lead in the final stage of the impeachment inquiry.
That panel, led by Chairman Jerry Nadler, will draw up any articles of impeachment that will end up before the full House for a vote.
The Judiciary panel can also hold public hearings as it works on drafting the articles.
For both committees, in the public hearings, each side could engage in extended questioning of witnesses in rounds of up to 90 minutes before beginning the traditional five-minute rounds extended to lawmakers on those panels under existing rules.
Both lawmakers and staff would have the ability to ask questions.
The resolution also allows for Trump to make his case before lawmakers in the Judiciary Committee stage.
‘The House authorizes the Committee on the Judiciary to conduct proceedings relating to the impeachment inquiry referenced in the first section of this resolution pursuant to the procedures submitted for printing in the Congressional Record by the chair of the Committee on Rules, including such procedures as to allow for the participation of the President and his counsel,’ it reads.
A fact sheet put out by Democrats says that the president’s lawyers can will have an opportunity to present their case, attend hearings, respond to evidence, and raise an objection to testimony given.
B
President Trump and Republicans have cried foul on impeachment process
Republicans and President Trump have assailed the impeachment process.
By offering a resolution on the next steps, Democrats could undercut that argument if Republicans bring it up during the public hearings.
Additionally, by putting the Intelligence and Judiciary panels in charge of the next steps, it would appear to cut out the House Oversight and Foreign Affairs committees, which have played a role in the closed-door hearings.
That result could see some of Trump’s most ardent defenders – Republican lawmakers Jim Jordan and Mark Meadows among them – not part of the panels that will question witnesses in the public hearings, which are sure to play out on the 24-hour cable news channels.
GOP lawmakers immediately attacked the resolution for giving Schiff approval over the witnesses they want to call.
‘Socialist Dem impeachment resolution lets Repubs call witnesses … IF Adam Schiff okays. Duh! Will Adam Schiff allow exculpatory witnesses that embarrass Socialist Dems and help public discern truth? Schiff past partisan dishonesty suggests UNLIKELY!,’ Republican Congressman Mo Brooks tweeted.
But Democrats argued the resolution outlines the path forward.
‘The House impeachment inquiry has collected extensive evidence and testimony, and soon the American people will hear from witnesses in an open setting. The resolution introduced today in the House Rules Committee will provide that pathway forward,’ Schiff and his fellow committee chairs Eliot Engel, Carolyn Maloney and Jerry Nadler said in a statement.
‘The resolution provides rules for the format of open hearings in the House Intelligence Committee, including staff-led questioning of witnesses, and it authorizes the public release of deposition transcripts.
‘The resolution also establishes procedures for the transfer of evidence to the Judiciary Committee as it considers potential articles of impeachment, and it sets forth due process rights for the President and his Counsel in the Judiciary Committee proceedings,’ they said.
Impeachment in the United States is the process by which a legislature (usually in the form of the lower house) brings charges against a civil officer of government for crimes alleged to have been committed, analogous to the bringing of an indictment by a grand jury. At the federal level, this is at the discretion of the House of Representatives. Most impeachments have concerned alleged crimes committed while in office, though there have been a few cases in which officials have been impeached and subsequently convicted for crimes committed prior to taking office.[1] The impeached official remains in office until a trial is held. That trial, and their removal from office if convicted, is separate from the act of impeachment itself. Analogous to a trial before a judge and jury, these proceedings are (where the legislature is bicameral) conducted by the upper house of the legislature, which at the federal level is the Senate.
The Senate shall have the sole Power to try all Impeachments. When sitting for that Purpose, they shall be on Oath or Affirmation. When the President of the United States is tried, the Chief Justice shall preside: And no Person shall be convicted without the Concurrence of two-thirds of the Members present.
Judgment in Cases of Impeachment shall not extend further than to removal from Office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any Office of honor, Trust or Profit under the United States; but the Party convicted shall nevertheless be liable and subject to Indictment, Trial, Judgment and Punishment, according to Law.
The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.
The Constitution limits grounds of impeachment to “Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors”.[2] The precise meaning of the phrase “high Crimes and Misdemeanors” is not defined in the Constitution itself.
The notion that only criminal conduct can constitute sufficient grounds for impeachment does not comport with either the views of the founders or with historical practice.[1]Alexander Hamilton, in Federalist 65, described impeachable offenses as arising from “the misconduct of public men, or in other words from the abuse or violation of some public trust.”[3] Such offenses were “political, as they relate chiefly to injuries done immediately to the society itself.”[3] According to this reasoning, impeachable conduct could include behavior that violates an official’s duty to the country, even if such conduct is not necessarily a prosecutable offense. Indeed, in the past both houses of Congress have given the phrase “high Crimes and Misdemeanors” a broad reading, finding that impeachable offenses need not be limited to criminal conduct.[4][1]
The purposes underlying the impeachment process also indicate that non-criminal activity may constitute sufficient grounds for impeachment.[1][5] The purpose of impeachment is not to inflict personal punishment for criminal activity. Instead, impeachment is a “remedial” tool; it serves to effectively “maintain constitutional government” by removing individuals unfit for office.[6][1] Grounds for impeachment include abuse of the particular powers of government office or a violation of the “public trust”—conduct that is unlikely to be barred via statute.[6][4][1]
In drawing up articles of impeachment, the House has placed little emphasis on criminal conduct.[1] Less than one-third of the articles that the House have adopted have explicitly charged the violation of a criminal statute or used the word “criminal” or “crime” to describe the conduct alleged.[1] Officials have been impeached and removed for drunkenness, biased decision-making, or inducing parties to enter financial transactions, none of which is specifically criminal.[1] Two of the articles against President Andrew Johnson were based on rude speech that reflected badly on the office: President Johnson had made “harangues” criticizing the Congress and questioning its legislative authority, refusing to follow laws, and diverting funds allocated in an army appropriations act, each of which brought the presidency “into contempt, ridicule, and disgrace”.[7] A number of individuals have been impeached for behavior incompatible with the nature of the office they hold.[1] Some impeachments have addressed, at least in part, conduct before the individuals assumed their positions: for example, Article IV against Judge Porteous related to false statements to the FBI and Senate in connection with his nomination and confirmation to the court.[1]
On the other hand, the Constitutional Convention rejected language that would have permitted impeachment for “maladministration,” with Madison arguing that “[s]o vague a term will be equivalent to a tenure during pleasure of the Senate.”[8]
Congressional materials have cautioned that the grounds for impeachment “do not all fit neatly and logically into categories” because the remedy of impeachment is intended to “reach a broad variety of conduct by officers that is both serious and incompatible with the duties of the office”.[6][1] Congress has identified three general types of conduct that constitute grounds for impeachment, although these categories should not be understood as exhaustive:
(1) improperly exceeding or abusing the powers of the office;
(2) behavior incompatible with the function and purpose of the office; and
(3) misusing the office for an improper purpose or for personal gain.[6][1]
Conversely, not all criminal conduct is impeachable: in 1974, the Judiciary Committee rejected an article of impeachment against President Nixon alleging that he committed tax fraud, primarily because that “related to the President’s private conduct, not to an abuse of his authority as President.”[1]
Several commentators have suggested that Congress alone may decide for itself what constitutes a “high Crime or Misdemeanor”, especially since the Supreme Court decided in Nixon v. United States that it did not have the authority to determine whether the Senate properly “tried” a defendant.[9] In 1970, then-House Minority LeaderGerald R. Ford defined the criterion as he saw it: “An impeachable offense is whatever a majority of the House of Representatives considers it to be at a given moment in history.”[10]
Of the 17 impeachments voted by the House:
No official has been charged with treason. (In 1797, Senator Blount was impeached for assisting Britain in capturing Spanish territory. In 1862, Judge Humphries was impeached and convicted for siding with the Confederacy and taking a position as a Confederate judge during the Civil War.)
Three officials have been charged with bribery. Of those, two proceeded to trial and were removed (Judge Archibald and Judge Hastings); the other resigned prior to trial (Secretary Belknap).
The remaining charges against all the other officials fall under the category of “high Crimes and Misdemeanors”.
The standard of proof required for impeachment and conviction is also left to the discretion of individual Representatives and Senators, respectively. Defendants have argued that impeachment trials are in the nature of criminal proceedings, with convictions carrying grave consequences for the accused, and that therefore proof beyond a reasonable doubt should be the applicable standard. House Managers have argued that a lower standard would be appropriate to better serve the purpose of defending the community against abuse of power, since the defendant does not risk forfeiture of life, liberty, or property, for which the reasonable doubt standard was set.[11]
Officers subject to impeachment: “civil officers of the United States”
The Constitution gives Congress the authority to impeach and remove “The President, Vice President, and all civil officers of the United States” upon a determination that such officers have engaged in treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors. The Constitution does not articulate who qualifies as a “civil officer of the United States”.[12]
Federal judges are subject to impeachment. In fact, 15 of 19 officers impeached, and all eight officers removed after Senate trial, have been judges. The most recent impeachment effort against a Supreme Court justice that resulted in a House of Representatives investigation was against Justice William O. Douglas. In 1970, Representative Gerald Ford, who was then House minority leader, called for the House to impeach Douglas. However, a House investigation led by Congressman Emanuel Celler (D-NY) determined that Ford’s allegations were baseless. According to Professor Joshua E. Kastenberg at the University of New Mexico, School of Law, Ford and Nixon sought to force Douglas off the Court in order to cement the “Southern Strategy” as well as to provide cover for the invasion of Cambodia. When their efforts failed, Douglas remained on the Court.[13]
Within the executive branch, any Presidentially appointed “principal officer,” including a head of an agency such as a Secretary, Administrator, or Commissioner, is a “civil officer of the United States” subject to impeachment.[1] At the opposite end of the spectrum, lesser functionaries, such as federal civil service employees, do not exercise “significant authority”, and are not appointed by the President or an agency head. These employees do not appear to be subject to impeachment, though that may be a matter of allocation of House floor debate time by the Speaker, rather than a matter of law.
The Senate has concluded that members of Congress (Representatives and Senators) are not “civil officers” for purposes of impeachment.[14] As a practical matter, expulsion is effected by the simpler procedures of Article I, Section 5, which provides “Each House shall be the Judge of the Elections, Returns and Qualifications of its own Members… Each House may determine the Rules of its Proceedings, punish its Members for disorderly Behaviour, and, with the Concurrence of two thirds, expel a Member.” (see List of United States senators expelled or censured and List of United States Representatives expelled, censured, or reprimanded). This allows each House to expel its own members without involving the other chamber. In 1797, the House of Representatives impeached Senator William Blount of Tennessee,[15] The Senate expelled Senator Blount under Article I, Section 5, on the same day. However, the impeachment proceeding remained pending (expulsion only removes the individual from office, but conviction after impeachment may also bar the individual from holding future office, so the question of further punishment remained to be decided). After four days of debate, the Senate concluded that a Senator is not a “civil officer of the United States” for purposes of the Impeachment clause, and dismissed for lack of jurisdiction.[14][16] The House has not impeached a Member of Congress since Blount.
Procedure
At the federal level, the impeachment process is a three-step procedure.
First, the Congress investigates. This investigation typically begins in the House Judiciary Committee, but may begin elsewhere. For example, the Nixon impeachment inquiry began in the Senate Judiciary Committee. The facts that led to impeachment of Bill Clintonwere first discovered in the course of an investigation by Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr.
Second, the House of Representatives must pass, by a simple majority of those present and voting, articles of impeachment, which constitute the formal allegation or allegations. Upon passage, the defendant has been “impeached”.
Third, the Senate tries the accused. In the case of the impeachment of a president, the Chief Justice of the United States presides over the proceedings. For the impeachment of any other official, the Constitution is silent on who shall preside, suggesting that this role falls to the Senate’s usual presiding officer, the President of the Senate who is also the Vice President of the United States. Conviction in the Senate requires a two-thirds supermajority vote of those present. The result of conviction is removal from office.
Rules
A number of rules have been adopted by the House and Senate, and are honored by tradition.
Jefferson’s Manual, which is integral to the Rules of the House of Representatives,[17] states that impeachment is set in motion by charges made on the floor, charges proffered by a memorial, a member’s resolution referred to a committee, a message from the president, or from facts developed and reported by an investigating committee of the House. It further states that a proposition to impeach is a question of high privilege in the House and at once supersedes business otherwise in order under the rules governing the order of business.
The House Practice: A Guide to the Rules, Precedents and Procedures of the House[18] is a reference source for information on the rules and selected precedents governing the House procedure, prepared by the House Parliamentarian. The manual has a chapter on the House’s rules, procedures, and precedent for impeachment.
In 1974, as part of the preliminary investigation in the Nixon impeachment inquiry, the staff of the Impeachment Inquiry of the House Judiciary Committee prepared a report, Constitutional Grounds for Presidential Impeachment.[6] The primary focus of the Report is the definition of the term “high Crimes and Misdemeanors” and the relationship to criminality, which the Report traces through history from English roots, through the debates at the 1787 Constitutional Convention, and the history of the impeachments before 1974.
The 1974 report has been expanded and revised on several occasions by the Congressional Research Service, and the current version Impeachment and Removal dates from October 2015.[1] While this document is only staff recommendation, as a practical matter, today it is probably the single most influential definition of “high Crimes and Misdemeanors.”
The Senate has formal Rules and Procedures of Practice in the Senate When Sitting on Impeachment Trials.[19]
Calls for impeachment, and Congressional power to investigate
While the actual impeachment of a federal public official is a rare event, demands for impeachment, especially of presidents, are common,[20] going back to the administration of George Washington in the mid-1790s.
While almost all of them were for the most part frivolous and were buried as soon as they were introduced, several did have their intended effect. Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon[21] and Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas both resigned in response to the threat of impeachment hearings, and, most famously, President Richard Nixon resigned from office after the House Judiciary Committee had already reported articles of impeachment to the floor.
In advance of the formal resolution by the full House to authorize proceedings, committee chairmen have the same power for impeachment as for any other issue within the jurisdiction of the committee: to investigate, subpoena witnesses, and prepare a preliminary report of findings. For example:
In 1970, House minority leader Gerald R. Ford attempted to initiate impeachment proceedings against Associate Justice William O. Douglas; the attempt included a 90-minute speech on the House floor.[22] The House did not vote to initiate proceedings.
In 1973, the Senate Watergate hearings (with testimony from John Dean, and the revelation of the White House tapes by Alexander Butterfield) were held in May and June 1973, and the House Judiciary Committee authorized Chairman Rodino to commence an investigation, with subpoena power, on October 30, 1973. The full House voted to initiate impeachment proceedings on February 6, 1974, that is, after nine months of formal investigations by various Congressional committees.
Targets of congressional investigations have challenged the power of Congress to investigate before a formal resolution commences impeachment proceedings. For example, President Buchanan wrote to the committee investigating his administration:
I do, therefore,… solemnly protest against these proceedings of the House of Representatives, because they are in violation of the rights of the coordinate executive branch of the Government, and subversive of its constitutional independence; because they are calculated to foster a band of interested parasites and informers, ever ready, for their own advantage, to swear before ex parte committees to pretended private conversations between the President and themselves, incapable, from their nature, of being disproved; thus furnishing material for harassing him, degrading him in the eyes of the country…[23]
He maintained that the House of Representatives possessed no general powers to investigate him, except when sitting as an impeaching body.
When the Supreme Court has considered similar issues, it held that the power to secure “needed information… has long been treated as an attribute of the power to legislate.… [The power to investigate is deeply rooted in the nation’s history:] It was so regarded in the British Parliament and in the colonial Legislatures before the American Revolution, and a like view has prevailed and been carried into effect in both houses of Congress and in most of the state Legislatures.”[24] The Supreme Court also held, “There can be no doubt as to the power of Congress, by itself or through its committees, to investigate matters and conditions relating to contemplated legislation.”[25]
The Supreme Court considered the power of the Congress to investigate, and to subpoena executive branch officials, in a pair of cases arising out of alleged corruption in the administration of President Warren G. Harding. In the first, McGrain v. Daugherty, the Court considered a subpoena issued to the brother of Attorney General Harry Daugherty for bank records relevant to the Senate’s investigation into the Department of Justice. Concluding that the subpoena was valid, the Court explained that Congress’s “power of inquiry… is an essential and appropriate auxiliary to the legislative function,” as “[a] legislative body cannot legislate wisely or effectively in the absence of information respecting the conditions which the legislation is intended to affect or change.” The Supreme Court held that it was irrelevant that the Senate’s authorizing resolution lacked an “avow[al] that legislative action was had in view” because, said the Court, “the subject to be investigated was… [p]lainly [a] subject… on which legislation could be had” and such legislation “would be materially aided by the information which the investigation was calculated to elicit.” Although “[a]n express avowal” of the Senate’s legislative objective “would have been better,” the Court admonished that “the presumption should be indulged that [legislation] was the real object.”[24]
Two years later, in Sinclair v. United States,[26] the Court considered investigation of private parties involved with officials under potential investigation for public corruption. In Sinclair, Harry Sinclair, the president of an oil company, appealed his conviction for refusing to answer a Senate committee’s questions regarding his company’s allegedly fraudulent lease on federal oil reserves at Teapot Dome in Wyoming. The Court, acknowledging individuals’ “right to be exempt from all unauthorized, arbitrary or unreasonable inquiries and disclosures in respect of their personal and private affairs,” nonetheless explained that because “[i]t was a matter of concern to the United States,” “the transaction purporting to lease to [Sinclair’s company] the lands within the reserve cannot be said to be merely or principally… personal.” The Court also dismissed the suggestion that the Senate was impermissibly conducting a criminal investigation. “It may be conceded that Congress is without authority to compel disclosures for the purpose of aiding the prosecution of pending suits,” explained the Court, “but the authority of that body, directly or through its committees, to require pertinent disclosures in aid of its own constitutional power is not abridged because the information sought to be elicited may also be of use in such suits.”
The Supreme Court reached similar conclusions in a number of other cases. In Barenblatt v. United States,[27] the Court permitted Congress to punish contempt, when a person refused to answer questions while testifying under subpoena by the House Committee on Un-American Activities. The Court explained that although “Congress may not constitutionally require an individual to disclose his … private affairs except in relation to” “a valid legislative purpose,” such a purpose was present. Congress’s “wide power to legislate in the field of Communist activity… and to conduct appropriate investigations in aid thereof[] is hardly debatable,” said the Court, and “[s]o long as Congress acts in pursuance of its constitutional power, the Judiciary lacks authority to intervene on the basis of the motives which spurred the exercise of that power.”
Presidents have often been the subjects of Congress’s legislative investigations. For example, in 1832, the House vested a select committee with subpoena power “to inquire whether an attempt was made by the late Secretary of War… [to] fraudulently [award]… a contract for supplying rations” to Native Americans and to “further… inquire whether the President… had any knowledge of such attempted fraud, and whether he disapproved or approved of the same.” In the 1990s, first the House and Senate Banking Committees and then a Senate special committee investigated President and Mrs. Clinton’s involvement in the Whitewater land deal and related matters. The Senate had an enabling resolution; the House did not.
The Supreme Court has also explained that Congress has not only the power, but the duty, to investigate so it can inform the public of the operations of government:
It is the proper duty of a representative body to look diligently into every affair of government and to talk much about what it sees. It is meant to be the eyes and the voice, and to embody the wisdom and will of its constituents. Unless Congress have and use every means of acquainting itself with the acts and the disposition of the administrative agents of the government, the country must be helpless to learn how it is being served; and unless Congress both scrutinize these things and sift them by every form of discussion, the country must remain in embarrassing, crippling ignorance of the very affairs which it is most important that it should understand and direct. The informing function of Congress should be preferred even to its legislative function.[28]
House of Representatives: Impeachment
“House Manager” redirects here. For theater operations, see House management.
Impeachment proceedings may be requested by a member of the House of Representatives on his or her own initiative, either by presenting a list of the charges under oath or by asking for referral to the appropriate committee. The impeachment process may be requested by non-members. For example, when the Judicial Conference of the United States suggests a federal judge be impeached, a charge of actions constituting grounds for impeachment may come from a special prosecutor, the President, or state or territorial legislature, grand jury, or by petition. An impeachment proceeding formally begins with a resolution adopted by the full House of Representatives, which typically includes a referral to a House committee.
The type of impeachment resolution determines the committee to which it is referred. A resolution impeaching a particular individual is typically referred to the House Committee on the Judiciary. A resolution to authorize an investigation regarding impeachable conduct is referred to the House Committee on Rules, and then to the Judiciary Committee. The House Committee on the Judiciary, by majority vote, will determine whether grounds for impeachment exist (this vote is not law and is not required, US Constitution and US law). If the Committee finds grounds for impeachment, it will set forth specific allegations of misconduct in one or more articles of impeachment. The Impeachment Resolution, or Articles of Impeachment, are then reported to the full House with the committee’s recommendations.
The House debates the resolution and may at the conclusion consider the resolution as a whole or vote on each article of impeachment individually. A simple majority of those present and voting is required for each article for the resolution as a whole to pass. If the House votes to impeach, managers (typically referred to as “House managers”, with a “lead House manager”) are selected to present the case to the Senate. Recently, managers have been selected by resolution, while historically the House would occasionally elect the managers or pass a resolution allowing the appointment of managers at the discretion of the Speaker of the United States House of Representatives. These managers are roughly the equivalent of the prosecution or district attorney in a standard criminal trial. Also, the House will adopt a resolution in order to notify the Senate of its action. After receiving the notice, the Senate will adopt an order notifying the House that it is ready to receive the managers. The House managers then appear before the bar of the Senate and exhibit the articles of impeachment. After the reading of the charges, the managers return and make a verbal report to the House.
The proceedings unfold in the form of a trial, with each side having the right to call witnesses and perform cross-examinations. The House members, who are given the collective title of managers during the course of the trial, present the prosecution case, and the impeached official has the right to mount a defense with his or her own attorneys as well. Senators must also take an oath or affirmation that they will perform their duties honestly and with due diligence. After hearing the charges, the Senate usually deliberates in private. The Constitution requires a two-thirds super majority to convict a person being impeached.[29] The Senate enters judgment on its decision, whether that be to convict or acquit, and a copy of the judgment is filed with the Secretary of State.[19] Upon conviction in the Senate, the official is automatically removed from office and may also be barred from holding future office. The trial is not an actual criminal proceeding and more closely resembles a civil service termination appeal in terms of the contemplated deprivation. Therefore, the removed official may still be liable to criminal prosecution under a subsequent criminal proceeding. The President may not grant a pardon in the impeachment case, but may in any resulting Federal criminal case.[30]
Beginning in the 1980s with Harry E. Claiborne, the Senate began using “Impeachment Trial Committees” pursuant to Senate Rule XI.[19] These committees presided over the evidentiary phase of the trials, hearing the evidence and supervising the examination and cross-examination of witnesses. The committees would then compile the evidentiary record and present it to the Senate; all senators would then have the opportunity to review the evidence before the chamber voted to convict or acquit. The purpose of the committees was to streamline impeachment trials, which otherwise would have taken up a great deal of the chamber’s time. Defendants challenged the use of these committees, claiming them to be a violation of their fair trial rights as this did not meet the constitutional requirement for their cases to be “tried by the Senate”. Several impeached judges, including District Court JudgeWalter Nixon, sought court intervention in their impeachment proceedings on these grounds. In Nixon v. United States (1993),[9] the Supreme Court determined that the federal judiciary could not review such proceedings, as matters related to impeachment trials are political questions and could not be resolved in the courts.[31]
To convict an accused, “the concurrence of two thirds of the [Senators] present” for at least one article is required. If there is no single charge commanding a “guilty” vote of two-thirds majority of the senators present, the defendant is acquitted and no punishment is imposed.
Result of conviction: removal, and with an additional Senate vote, disqualification
Conviction immediately removes the defendant from office. Following conviction, the Senate may vote to further punish the individual by barring him or her from holding future federal office, elected or appointed. As the threshold for disqualification is not explicitly mentioned in the Constitution, the Senate has taken the position that disqualification votes only require a simple majority rather than a two-thirds majority. The Senate has used disqualification sparingly, as only three individuals have been disqualified from holding future office.[32]
Conviction does not extend to further punishment, for example, loss of pension. After conviction by the Senate, “the Party convicted shall nevertheless be liable and subject to Indictment, Trial, Judgment and Punishment, according to Law” in the regular federal or state courts.
History of federal constitutional impeachment
In the United Kingdom, impeachment was a procedure whereby a member of the House of Commons could accuse someone of a crime. If the Commons voted for the impeachment, a trial would then be held in the House of Lords. Unlike a bill of attainder, a law declaring a person guilty of a crime, impeachments did not require royal assent, so they could be used to remove troublesome officers of the Crown even if the monarch was trying to protect them.
The monarch, however, was above the law and could not be impeached, or indeed judged guilty of any crime. When King Charles I was tried before the Rump Parliament of the New Model Army in 1649 he denied that they had any right to legally indict him, their king, whose power was given by God and the laws of the country, saying: “no earthly power can justly call me (who is your King) in question as a delinquent… no learned lawyer will affirm that an impeachment can lie against the King.” While the House of Commons pronounced him guilty and ordered his execution anyway, the jurisdictional issue tainted the proceedings.
With this example in mind, the delegates to the 1787 Constitutional Convention chose to include an impeachment procedure in Article II, Section4 of the Constitution which could be applied to any government official; they explicitly mentioned the President to ensure there would be no ambiguity. Opinions differed, however, as to the reasons Congress should be able to initiate an impeachment. Initial drafts listed only treason and bribery, but George Mason favored impeachment for “maladministration” (incompetence). James Madisonargued that impeachment should only be for criminal behavior, arguing that a maladministration standard would effectively mean that the President would serve at the pleasure of the Senate.[33] Thus the delegates adopted a compromise version allowing impeachment for “treason, bribery and other high crimes and misdemeanors”.
Formal federal impeachment investigations and results
The House of Representatives has initiated impeachment proceedings 62 times since 1789.[citation needed]
The House has impeached 19 federal officers. Of these:
Of the 19 impeachments by the House, two cases did not come to trial because the individuals had left office, seven were acquitted, and eight officials were convicted, all of whom were judges.[35][36] One, former judge Alcee Hastings, was elected as a member of the United States House of Representatives after being removed from office.
Additionally, an impeachment process against Richard Nixon was commenced, but not completed, as he resigned from office before the full House voted on the articles of impeachment.[31] To date, no president has been removed from office by impeachment and conviction.
The following table lists federal officials for whom impeachment proceedings were instituted and referred to a committee of the House of Representatives. Numbered lines of the table reflect officials impeached by a majority vote of the House. Unnumbered lines are those officials for whom an impeachment proceeding was formally instituted, but ended when (a) the Committee did not vote to recommend impeachment, (b) the Committee recommended impeachment but the vote in the full House failed, or (c) the official resigned or died before the full House vote.
Conspiring to assist Britain in capturing Spanish territory
Senate refused to accept impeachment of a Senator by the House of Representatives, instead expelling him from the Senate on their own authority[37][Note 2][38]
The Covode committee was established March 5, 1860, and submitted its final report on June 16, 1860. The committee found that Buchanan had not done anything to warrant impeachment, but that his was the most corrupt administration since the adoption of the US Constitution in 1789.[42][43]
Violating the Tenure of Office Act. The Supreme Court would later state in dicta that the (by then repealed) Tenure of Office Act had been unconstitutional.[44]
Acquitted on May 26, 1868, 35–19 in favor of conviction, falling one vote short of two-thirds.[37][38]
Failure to recuse on obscenity cases while at the same time having articles published in Evergreen Review and Avant-Garde magazines; conflict of paid board positions with two non-profits
Referred to a special subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee (Apr. 21, 1970); subcommittee voted to end the investigation (Dec. 3, 1970).
proceedings aborted before impeachment vote, January to August 1974
House Judiciary Committee begins investigating and issuing subpoenas (Oct. 30, 1973); House Judiciary Report on committee investigation (Feb. 1, 1974);[47] House resolution 93-803 authorizes Judiciary Committee investigation (Feb. 6, 1974);[48] House Judiciary Committee votes three articles of impeachment to House floor (July 27–30, 1974);[49] proceedings terminated by resignation of President Nixon (August 8, 1974).
One notable impeachment attempt that never reached the point of House resolution was an attempt to impeach Associate Justice William O. Douglas by then-House Minority Leader Gerald R. Ford. The Legislative Reference Service of the Library of Congress prepared a report as part of Ford’s vetting for confirmation as Vice President in 1973.[22]
President Bill Clinton, a Democrat, was impeached on December 19, 1998, by the House of Representatives on articles charging perjury (specifically, lying to a federal grand jury) by a 228–206 vote and obstruction of justice by a 221–212 vote. The House rejected other articles: one was a count of perjury in a civil deposition in Paula Jones‘ sexual harassment lawsuit against Clinton (by a 205–229 vote); the second accused Clinton of abuse of power (by a 148–285 vote). President Clinton was acquitted by the Senate. The votes in the Senate to remove him from office did not even reach a majority, let alone two-thirds: 45–55 on obstruction of justice and 50–50 on perjury.
Impeachment in the states
State legislatures can impeach state officials, including governors, in every State except Oregon. The court for the trial of impeachments may differ somewhat from the federal model—in New York, for instance, the Assembly (lower house) impeaches, and the State Senate tries the case, but the members of the seven-judge New York State Court of Appeals (the state’s highest, constitutional court) sit with the senators as jurors as well.[57] Impeachment and removal of governors has happened occasionally throughout the history of the United States, usually for corruption charges. A total of at least eleven U.S. state governors have faced an impeachment trial; a twelfth, GovernorLee Cruce of Oklahoma, escaped impeachment conviction by a single vote in 1912. Several others, most recently Missouri‘s Eric Greitens, have resigned rather than face impeachment, when events seemed to make it inevitable.[58] The most recent impeachment of a state governor occurred on January 14, 2009, when the Illinois House of Representatives voted 117–1 to impeach Rod Blagojevichon corruption charges;[59] he was subsequently removed from office and barred from holding future office by the Illinois Senate on January 29. He was the eighth U.S. state governor to be removed from office.
The procedure for impeachment, or removal, of local officials varies widely. For instance, in New York a mayor is removed directly by the governor “upon being heard” on charges—the law makes no further specification of what charges are necessary or what the governor must find in order to remove a mayor.
Retired on August 13, 2018.[93] Despite her retirement, the West Virginia Senate refused to dismiss the articles of impeachment and scheduled trial for October 29, 2018 although the trial is currently delayed by court order.[94]
Resigned on July 24, 2019; with effect August 2, 2019, immediately stopping impeachment proceedings
State governors
At least four state governors have been impeached and removed from office:
James E. Ferguson, Democratic Governor of Texas, was impeached for misapplication of public funds and embezzlement. In July 1917, Ferguson was convicted and removed from office.
Jack C. Walton, DemocraticGovernor of Oklahoma, was impeached for a variety of crimes including illegal collection of campaign funds, padding the public payroll, suspension of habeas corpus, excessive use of the pardon power, and general incompetence. In November 1923, Walton was convicted and removed from office.[101]
Stephen B. Presser, Essays on Article I: ImpeachmentPresser, Stephen B. “Essays on Article I: Impeachment”. The Heritage Guide to the Constitution. Heritage Foundation. Retrieved June 14, 2018.
^“Removed and disqualified” indicates that following conviction the Senate voted to disqualify the individual from holding further federal office pursuant to Article I, Section3 of the United States Constitution, which provides, in pertinent part, that “[j]udgment in cases of impeachment shall not extend further than to removal from office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any office of honor, trust or profit under the United States.”
^During the impeachment trial of Senator Blount, it was argued that the House of Representatives did not have the power to impeach members of either House of Congress; though the Senate never explicitly ruled on this argument, the House has never again impeached a member of Congress. The Constitution allows either House to expel one of its members by a two-thirds vote, which the Senate had done to Blount on the same day the House impeached him (but before the Senate heard the case).
^Judge Nixon later challenged the validity of his removal from office on procedural grounds; the challenge was ultimately rejected as nonjusticiable by the Supreme Court in Nixon v. United States.
Story 2: Big Lie Media Spinning and Lying About Tim Morrison Testimony About Trump Phone Call With Ukraine — Nothing Illegal Was Discussed and No Quid Pro Quo — Videos —
Tim Morrison, a former National Security Council official under Trump, told Rep. Adam Schiff in testimony today that he was never concerned that Trump discussed anything illegal in his July 25 phone call with the Ukrainain president.
A top National Security Council (NSC) official who listened to President Donald Trump’s July 25 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymr Zelensky testified to Congress today that he did not believe Trump had discussed anything illegal during the conversation.
“I want to be clear, I was not concerned that anything illegal was discussed,” former NSC Senior Director for European Affairs Tim Morrison testified today, according to a record of his remarks obtained by The Federalist.
Morrison testified that Ukrainian officials were not even aware that certain military funding had been delayed by the Trump administration until late August 2019, more than a month after the Trump-Zelensky call, casting doubt on allegations that Trump somehow conveyed an illegal quid pro quo demand during the July 25 call.
“I have no reason to believe the Ukrainians had any knowledge of the [military funding] review until August 28, 2019,” Morrison said. That is the same day that Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., the chief anti-Trump inquisitor in the U.S. House of Representatives, disclosed on Twitter that funding had been held up. Politico also published a story that day, sourced to anonymous leaks, that military funding had been temporarily held up.
Although Schiff claimed that neither he nor his staff ever spoke to the anti-Trump whistleblower, The New York Times reported that the complainant, whom RealClearInvestigations identified as Eric Ciaramella, coordinated with Schiff’s office before filing his complaint with the intelligence community inspector general on August 12. While Schiff initially demanded that the anti-Trump complainant be allowed to publicly testify, he quickly changed course following the reports that he and his staff had secretly colluded with the whistleblower and then lied about the interactions.
Morrison also pointed out key factual inaccuracies in testimony provided by William Taylor, a State Department official who works in the U.S. embassy in Kiev, Ukraine. Morrison said that, contrary to Taylor’s claims, Morrison never met with the Ukrainian National Security advisor in his private hotel room.
Morrison also said Taylor falsely claimed that Ambassador Gordon Sondland demanded a public statement from the Ukrainian president committing to investigate Burisma, a controversial Ukrainain energy company that paid Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden’s son Hunter millions of dollars to sit on its board.
“My recollection is that Ambassador Sondland’s proposal to [Ukrainian National Security Advisor Andriy] Yermak was that it could be sufficient if the new Ukrainian prosecutor general — not President Zelensky — would commit to pursue the Burisma investigation,” Morrison testified.
Morrison testified that the transcript of the phone call that was declassified and released by Trump in late September “accurately and completely reflects the substance of the call,” and that he was concerned that the substance of the call would be leaked to the media. Morrison said he immediately informed a NSC lawyer about his concerns that the phone call would be leaked. Democrats have alleged that security measures taken to prevent leaks of the top secret call transcript prove that Trump should be removed from office.
He also told lawmakers that the national security process worked as designed in the case of the military funding that Congress appropriated for Ukraine.
“I am pleased our process gave the president the confidence he needed to approve the release of the security sector assistance,” he said. “I am proud of what I have been able, in some small way, to help the Trump administration accomplish.”
Democrats on Thursday morning voted to rubber-stamp Schiff’s efforts to impeach Trump with secret hearings and lopsided rules that prevent Republicans from subpoenaing witnesses or evidence without first obtaining Schiff’s permisison. A bipartisan coalition of Democrats and Republicans opposed the measure.
Tim Morrison, the former White House national security adviser who engaged in multiple crucial conversations with Ambassador William B. Taylor Jr. about the quid pro quo that withheld military aid to try to leverage Ukraine into doing President Trump’s political bidding, has been testifying in the impeachment inquiry.
In preparation for my appearance today, I reviewed the statement Ambassador Taylor provided this inquiry on October 22, 2019. I can confirm that the substance of his statement, as it relates to conversations he and I had, is accurate.
My recollections differ on two of the details, however. I have a slightly different recollection of my September 1, 2019 conversation with Ambassador [Gordon] Sondland. On page 10 of Ambassador Taylor’s statement, he recounts a conversation I relayed to him regarding Ambassador Sondland’s conversation with Ukrainian Presidential Advisor [Andriy] Yermak. Ambassador Taylor wrote: “Ambassador Sondland told Mr. Yermak that security assistance money would not come until President [Volodymyr] Zelensky committed to pursue the Burisma investigation.”
My recollection is that Ambassador Sondland’s proposal to Mr. Yermak was that it could be sufficient if the new Ukrainian prosecutor general — not President Zelensky — would commit to pursue the Burisma investigation.
I also would like to clarify that I did not meet with the Ukrainian National Security Advisor in his hotel room, as Ambassador Taylor indicated on page 11 of his statement. Instead, an NSC aide and I met with Mr. [Oleksandr] Danyliuk in the hotel’s business center.
Pro-Trump Twitter is trying to spin the minor discrepancies between the two accounts into something big, but that’s just absurd. In one case, the difference is over where Morrison met with a Ukrainian official. In the other, the difference is over who would announce the investigation into Burisma, the company on whose board Joe Biden’s son Hunter sat, as part of the quid pro quo.
But what is not in dispute is that the quid pro quo was articulated plainly and clearly. Let me isolate out the part of Morrison’s testimony where he says this explicitly:
AD
Ambassador Taylor wrote: “Ambassador Sondland told Mr. Yermak that security assistance money would not come until President Zelensky committed to pursue the Burisma investigation.”
My recollection is that Ambassador Sondland’s proposal to Mr. Yermak was that it could be sufficient if the new Ukrainian prosecutor general — not President Zelensky — would commit to pursue the Burisma investigation.
Thus, Morrison is saying that Sondland — the ambassador to the European Union who was a leading agent in this whole plot — did indeed tell him that the military aid was conditional on the Ukrainians committing to the Burisma investigation.
Sondland simply proposed a version of this that might be more amenable to the Ukrainians, since it wouldn’t require Zelensky himself to announce it. Thus it is that Morrison says the “substance” of Taylor’s testimony about their conversations was “accurate.”
Importantly, this account comes from someone who discussed these matters directly with Sondland.
Morrison confirms the quid pro quo elsewhere as well:
I had no reason to believe that the release of the security sector assistance might be conditioned on a public statement reopening the Burisma investigation until my September 1, 2019 conversation with Ambassador Sondland. Even then I hoped that Ambassador Sondland’s strategy was exclusively his own and would not be considered by leaders in the Administration and Congress.
After talking to Sondland, Morrison understood that the money was conditioned just that way. And in this context, it’s important to note that Morrison’s hope that this didn’t represent the views of the administration was in vain: You will recall that Sondland was taking his direction straight from the president.
AD
Some have pointed out that Morrison claims he didn’t see anything illegal on Trump’s July 25 call with the Ukrainian president. But so what? That’s not his decision, and the question of the conduct’s legality is not even necessarily relevant to an impeachment context. What’s more, the list of people who actually were deeply alarmed by the conduct is already very long.
They really wanted a public statement
One other point: It’s important to underscore that Trump and his lawyer Rudolph Giuliani didn’t just want an investigation of Biden. They wanted a public announcement of it, to get news organizations to start treating the allegations seriously and help them create an aura of vague corruption around Biden.
This is Trumpworld’s M.O. As Stephen K. Bannon revealed to journalist Joshua Green, the key to this is to vault such charges, no matter how spurious, out of the conservative media, in order to get them merely covered in the mainstream press, to “weaponize” them, as Bannon put it. This helps create what Green described as the “whiff of corruption.”
AD
As those texts show, there were extensive negotiations with the Ukrainians over what that public statement might look like, precisely because Giuliani, acting as Trump’s consigliere, cared about it so much. Thus it might be expected that Sondland and the Ukrainians would haggle over who made the statement, as Sondland tried (but ultimately failed) to get them to do it.
In this sense, Morrison has helped underscore another important part of the story here.
White House Aide Confirms He Saw Signs of a Quid Pro Quo on Ukraine
Timothy Morrison, a National Security Council aide, said a top diplomat close to President Trump suggested a military aid package for Ukraine was conditioned on investigations into his political rivals.
Timothy Morrison, a top Russia and Europe expert on the National Security Council, arriving Thursday on Capitol Hill.Credit…Anna Moneymaker/The New York Times
WASHINGTON — A senior National Security Council aide on Thursday confirmed a key episode at the center of the impeachment inquiry, testifying that a top diplomat working with President Trump told him that a package of military assistance for Ukraine would not be released until the country committed to investigations the president sought.
In a closed-door deposition, the aide, Timothy Morrison, also said he had been told of a September call between Mr. Trump and the diplomat, Gordon D. Sondland. In that conversation, the president said he was not looking for a quid pro quo with Ukraine, but then went on to “insist” that the country’s president publicly announce investigations into Joseph R. Biden Jr. and his son and other Democrats.
William B. Taylor Jr., the top American diplomat in Ukraine, spoke of his alarm about the conversations during his private testimony last week, saying that he had been briefed about them by Mr. Morrison, the senior director for Europe and Russia for the National Security Council. Mr. Sondland, the ambassador to the European Union, has also given investigators a more limited account of his call with Mr. Trump.
Mr. Morrison’s confirmation of the conversations could be important for House Democrats as they seek to build their impeachment case against Mr. Trump. A publicly available, reconstructed transcript already shows that Mr. Trump pressed President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine during a July 25 phone call to undertake the investigations of Democrats. Investigators are trying to establish whether Mr. Trump used $391 million in security aid and a coveted White House meeting with Mr. Zelensky as leverage in a pressure campaign to secure the inquiries.
But Mr. Morrison, a Trump political appointee and a former longtime Republican congressional aide, resisted making the kind of sweeping, often damaging judgments about what was taking place that Democrats have heard from other witnesses, and Republicans emerged calling him the most favorable witness they had heard from so far.
In his opening remarks, obtained by The New York Times, he did not draw conclusions about Mr. Trump’s involvement in the pressure tactics, pointing back repeatedly to Mr. Sondland, whose involvement in Ukraine policy he said he “did not understand.” In subsequent testimony, he said he did not view the July phone call between Mr. Trump and Mr. Zelensky as illegal or improper, but he found it striking enough to ask the National Security Council’s chief lawyer, John Eisenberg, to review it, in part out of a concern that a summary might leak out.
He did so, Mr. Morrison testified, because he worried about how disclosure of what was said in the call “would play out in Washington’s polarized environment,” how it could affect bipartisan backing for Ukraine in Congress, and “how it would affect the Ukrainian perceptions of the U.S.-Ukraine relationship.”
Rather than ascribe a political motive to the pressure campaign against Ukraine, as some witnesses have, Mr. Morrison characterized the behavior he saw as bad foreign policy of the sort that could potentially squander a “once-in-a-generation opportunity” afforded by the election of Mr. Zelensky, who campaigned as a reformer who would crack down on rampant corruption.
“Ambassador Taylor and I had no reason to believe that the public release of the security sector assistance might be conditioned on a public statement reopening the Burisma investigation until my Sept. 1, 2019, conversation with Ambassador Sondland,” Mr. Morrison said. “Even then I hoped that Ambassador Sondland’s strategy was exclusively his own and would not be considered by the leaders of the administration and Congress, who understood the strategic importance of Ukraine to our national security.”
Mr. Morrison’s testimony came as Democrats were moving to wrap up their closed portion of their inquiry in the coming week or so. As he met with investigators, they muscled through a resolution on the floor of the House endorsing the inquiry and laying out a path to move their work into the open and begin a debate over impeachment articles in the coming weeks. Republicans uniformly opposed the measure, which they said fell short of redeeming an illegitimate, politically motivated crusade by Democrats to undo the 2016 election.
What’s New in the Impeachment Case
Updated Oct. 31, 2019
The House voted 232-196 to endorse the Democratic-led impeachment inquiry into President Trump. The resolution sets out rules for the investigation, which will soon go public with hearings and the publication of documents.
Only two Democrats broke with their party to vote against the measure, a sign of how unified the caucus is on impeachment — and how much confidence it has in the evidence of Mr. Trump’s dealings with Ukraine. “This is not any cause for any glee or comfort,” Speaker Nancy Pelosi said. “What is at stake in all of this is nothing less than our democracy.”
Republicans, who for weeks had called for a vote, unanimously opposed the resolution, accusing it of attempting to undo the 2016 election. “Democrats are trying to impeach the president because they are scared they cannot defeat him at the ballot box,” Representative Kevin McCarthy, the House minority leader, said. “Why do you not trust the people?”
In closed-door testimony today, a National Security Council aide corroborated a key fact when he confirmed that Gordon Sondland, the ambassador to the European Union, said that a package of military assistance for Ukraine would not be released until the country committed to investigating the Bidens.
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Mr. Morrison appeared under subpoena despite a White House directive not to, according to an official involved in the inquiry who was not authorized to discuss it publicly. He told colleagues Wednesday on the eve of his appearance before impeachment investigators that he would leave his post.
Mr. Morrison has been weighing leaving the council for some time. He told investigators that he did “not want anyone to think there is a connection between my testimony today and my impending departure.”
He was the second White House official to testify before the inquiry this week, following Lt. Col. Alexander S. Vindman, a Ukraine expert at the National Security Council.
Mr. Taylor testified last week that Mr. Morrison had informed him in early September of a meeting in Warsaw between Mr. Sondland and a top aide to Mr. Zelensky. Mr. Sondland told the Ukrainian aide that the United States would provide the security assistance package only if Mr. Zelensky committed to investigate allegations related to Mr. Biden and his son Hunter, who sat on the board of Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company.
Mr. Sondland claimed in testimony that he failed to appreciate that Burisma was directly tied to Hunter Biden.
Mr. Morrison did depart in one respect from that account, telling investigators that he remembered Mr. Sondland’s remarks slightly differently. He thought Mr. Sondland said Ukraine’s prosecutor general, not Mr. Zelensky, needed to open the inquiry.
Mr. Taylor also testified that, a few days later, Mr. Morrison told him that he had learned of a conversation between Mr. Sondland and Mr. Trump that Mr. Morrison had said gave him a “sinking feeling.” In it, Mr. Trump had told Mr. Sondland that he was not asking for a “quid pro quo” from Ukraine, but then went on to “insist” that Mr. Zelensky publicly announce an investigation into both the Bidens and an unproven theory that Democrats had colluded with Ukraine in the 2016 elections.
Subpoenas and Requests for Evidence in the Trump Impeachment Inquiry
The status of the documents and witness testimony being collected by congressional investigators.
Mr. Morrison told investigators that he first learned that Mr. Trump and people around him might have motives beyond official United States policy when he took over as senior director for Europe and Russia on the National Security Council from his predecessor, Fiona Hill.
“Dr. Hill told me that Ambassador Sondland and President Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, were trying to get President Zelensky to reopen Ukrainian investigations into Burisma,” he said. “At the time, I did not know what Burisma was or what the investigation entailed.”
He said he later worked to persuade Mr. Trump to release the security aid. Mr. Trump froze the aid in July and kept it that way until September, despite the objections of officials at the Defense and State Departments who viewed it as a crucial resource to help Ukraine in its military conflict with Russia.
“Ambassador Taylor and I were concerned that the longer the money was withheld, the more questions the Zelensky administration would ask about the U.S. commitment to Ukraine,” Mr. Morrison said.
Mr. Morrison said he did not have reason to believe Ukraine’s leaders knew the aid had been suspended until it was publicly reported at the end of August.
There’s no doubt Democrats in Washington are hell-bent on impeaching President Trump over the Ukraine matter. But after weeks of polling, it is still unclear precisely what Americans outside the Beltway think.
Much depends on how pollsters ask their questions. Some are straightforward, while others are a bit more complicated. But in the last few weeks, many have asked a variation of: “Do you support or oppose impeaching President Trump?” A new poll, however, done by Suffolk University for USA Today, gets at some of the nuance behind public opinion on the president and Ukraine.
The Suffolk pollsters gave 1,000 registered voters an opportunity to choose among three options regarding impeachment. Which did respondents personally prefer?
“A. The House of Representatives should vote to impeach President Trump.
“B. The House should continue investigating Trump, but not vote to impeach him.
“C. Congress should drop its investigations into President Trump and administration.”
Thirty-six percent of those polled said the House should vote to impeach; 22 percent said the House should continue investigation but not impeach; and 37 percent said the House should drop its investigations. The last 5 percent did not have an answer or refused to give one.
Looking inside the results, there are some major differences based on party, gender, race and more.
Seventy percent of Democrats said the House should vote to impeach, while just 8 percent of Republicans and 22 percent of independents favored an impeachment vote.
Twenty-one percent of Democrats favored more investigation but not impeachment, while 15 percent of Republicans and 34 percent of independents agreed.
And just 8 percent of Democrats favored dropping the House investigations altogether, while 71 percent of Republicans and 36 percent of independents favored the no-more-investigations option.
Forty-one percent of women supported a House vote to impeach, while just 31 percent of men did. Forty-two percent of men wanted to see the investigation dropped entirely, versus 32 percent of women.
Thirty percent of the white voters and 38 percent of Hispanic voters polled wanted a House impeachment vote, versus 73 percent of black voters. Forty-five percent of white voters wanted the matter dropped, along with 28 percent of Hispanic voters, while just 7 percent of black voters favored that result.
The overall message of the poll is that there is a range of opinions among voters that is more complex than much of the yes-impeach-no-don’t-impeach commentary in the media today. But the Suffolk questions do leave at least one issue unclear.
The opinions of those who want a House impeachment vote, as well as those who want the House to drop its investigations altogether, are pretty clear. But what about those who say the House should “continue investigating Trump, but not vote to impeach him”?
Fortunately, another question in the poll sheds some light on that. It is about the infamous phone conversation between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky:
“The White House has released a transcript summary of a July 25th phone call in which President Trump encouraged the Ukrainian president to pursue investigations involving Democratic rival Joe Biden, and hacking allegations in the 2016 election. Which comes closest to your view? A. The phone conversation is an impeachable offense. B. The phone conversation was wrong, but doesn’t rise to an impeachable offense. C. There was nothing wrong with the phone conversation.”
Thirty-eight percent said the conversation is an impeachable offense. Twenty-one percent said the conversation was wrong, but not impeachable. And 31 percent said there was nothing wrong with the conversation. Ten percent were undecided.
That means, at the moment, according to Suffolk, there is a bare majority that does not believe Trump should be impeached for the phone call — which, of course, is the heart of the Democrats’ impeachment effort. The number that believes the call is an impeachable offense, 38 percent, is well below what could be called a groundswell. The 10 percent who haven’t decided are important.
The Suffolk numbers suggest many Americans hold complex views of the Trump impeachment. Some are fine with continued investigation, although large numbers don’t believe they have yet seen an impeachable offense. The numbers of people who are ready to impeach Trump now, or who believe the whole thing should be called off, are not big enough to win the day.
Just as they did after the release of the Mueller report, Democrats now hope televised hearings will convince Americans Trump must be impeached. It didn’t work out before. Now, the Suffolk poll suggests Democrats should be cautious as they try again.
York is chief political correspondent for The Washington Examiner.
A letter released Monday raises questions beyond the Bidens.
By James Freeman
Former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton at Georgetown University on Friday. PHOTO: WIN MCNAMEE/GETTY IMAGES
The Biden clan still needs to explain why a vice president’s son was enjoying a $50,000-per-month gig for which his principal qualification appears to have been his last name. But Joe Biden isn’t the only pillar of the Democratic establishment who won’t enjoy the new spotlight on American relations with Ukraine. And President Donald Trump isn’t the only one who wants a fuller accounting of that country’s role in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
In a letter released on Monday morning, Republican senators Chuck Grassley of Iowa and Ron Johnson of Wisconsin ask U.S. Attorney General William Barr if he’s trying to answer the lingering questions:
We write to follow up on Senator Grassley’s July 20, 2017 letter, which highlighted brazen efforts by the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton campaign to use the government of Ukraine for the express purpose of finding negative information on then candidate Trump in order to undermine his campaign. That letter also highlighted news reports that, during the 2016 presidential election, “Ukrainian government officials tried to help Hillary Clinton and undermine Trump” and did so by “disseminat[ing] documents implicating a top Trump aide in corruption and suggest[ing] they were investigating the matter[.]” Ukrainian officials also reportedly “helped Clinton’s allies research damaging information on Trump and his advisers.”
The senators aren’t relying on reports from conservative bloggers. The quotations come from a 2017 story in Politico, hardly a pro-Trump outfit. “Ukrainian efforts to sabotage Trump backfire,” read the headline on the article by Kenneth P. Vogel and David Stern. “Kiev officials are scrambling to make amends with the president-elect after quietly working to boost Clinton,” said the subhead of the article, which was published shortly before Mr. Trump’s inauguration.
The authors reported that Ukrainian government officials “helped Clinton’s allies research damaging information on Trump and his advisers” with the goal of “advancing the narrative that Trump’s campaign was deeply connected to Ukraine’s foe to the east, Russia.”
With the benefit of hindsight and the results of the Mueller investigation, it’s now clear that there was no evidence of Trump campaign collusion with Russia. What is not clear and what demands further investigation is how this baseless claim managed to consume the first two years of an American presidency.
Among the questions to resolve: the Politico story featured what appear to be contradictory statements about the level of help provided to Democrats by people who worked at the Ukrainian embassy in Washington in 2016. “Politico’s investigation found evidence of Ukrainian government involvement in the race that appears to strain diplomatic protocol dictating that governments refrain from engaging in one another’s elections,” according to the report.
The reporting certainly appears solid but one should not simply accept all the particulars of the Politico story as proven fact, just as—to take an extreme example—a reasonable person would not authorize the wiretap of an opposition political campaign based on a dispatch from Yahoo News. But the Politico piece may be helpful in figuring out exactly how the surveillance tools of America’s national security apparatus were turned against the party out of power in 2016.
Story 3: Long Term China Deal Not Likely Any Time Soon With Chinese Communist Party — Short Term Deal Only — Maximum Pressure Required — Trust But Verify — Enforcement of Any Agreement Is Essential and Chinese Will Never Comply With Any Enforcement Language — Escalloping Trade War Between United States and Chinese Communist Party Leading to Total Embargo of Trade With Communist China — All Talk and More Talk — Time To Walk Out — Videos
China is more relieved than happy on US-China trade deal: Michael Pillsbury
Why these experts say a long-term China trade deal may not happen soon
It will be difficult for US and China to reach an agreement, says analyst
Are the US and China Decoupling? What are the Consequences for the Global Order?
New location for signing of partial US-China trade deal to be announced soon, says Trump
China is more relieved than happy on US-China trade deal: Michael Pillsbury
Here’s how Beijing is reacting to the ‘phase one’ US-China trade deal
President Trump holds press conference on US-China trade deal phase 1
Trump: China will probably try to delay trade deal until US election
How to Win the US China Trade War & Communist China’s Broader Stealth War On America-Robert Spalding
WE WILL NOT HAVE A TRADE DEAL WITH CHINA: ROBERT SPALDING
Is the US-China Trade War a Cold War? (w/ Kyle Bass and Gen. Robert Spalding)
Communist Party of China could ‘start by improving their human rights’
Private survey of China factory activity contradicts official data
How China’s tech sector is challenging the world – Part 1
How China’s tech sector is challenging the world – Part 2
China sees Trump as a weak president: Michael Pillsbury
China May Not Be As Strong As You Think
Deal to end bitter trade war between Washington and Beijing might not be ready in time for President Trump and China’s Xi to sign it next month as planned, US official warns
Washington and Beijing are producing a text to sign at APEC summit next month
‘If it’s not signed in Chile, that doesn’t mean that it falls apart,’ official said today
The deal hopes to bring to an end a nearly 16-month trade war with China
US stocks slumped after potential stall to negotiations was reported by Reuters
PUBLISHED: 09:05 EDT, 30 October 2019 | UPDATED: 12:22 EDT, 30 October 2019
A trade agreement between the US and China might not be completed in time for its planned signing next month at a summit in Chile, a US official warned today.
Negotiators in Washington and Beijing are working to finalize agreements for President Donald Trump and China’s Xi Jinping to sign at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit on the weekend of November 16.
Trump, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and other top US officials have all said good progress is being made on the deal after a nearly 16-month trade war, while also noting that it would be fine if it was not completed by the APEC summit.
‘If it’s not signed in Chile, that doesn’t mean that it falls apart. It just means that it’s not ready,’ the administration official said. ‘Our goal is to sign it in Chile. But sometimes texts aren’t ready. But good progress is being made and we expect to sign the agreement in Chile.’
President Donald Trump smiles at Chinese President Xi Jinping as he shakes his hand during a meeting on the sidelines of the G20 summit in Osaka in June
Deal to end US-China trade war may not be ready for leaders’ signing
White House spokesman Judd Deere said both sides were still working to complete the interim deal.
‘As the president said several weeks ago, we have reached a phase-one agreement with the Chinese, and both sides are working to finalize the text for a signing in Chile,’ he said.
In Beijing, foreign ministry spokesman Geng Shuang said the two nations’ lead trade negotiators would hold another telephone call shortly while working-level consultations continued at a fast pace.
‘It is China’s hope that the two sides can find a way to resolve the economic and trade issues on the basis of mutual respect, equality and mutual benefit,’ he told a daily briefing on Wednesday.
US stocks turned negative after Reuters reported the administration official’s comments, as investors bet the closely watched trade talks were further away from resolution.
The interim trade agreement announced by Trump on October 11 had buoyed markets, promising relief for companies rocked by nearly 16 months of tit-for-tat tariffs that have slowed global growth to its slowest since the 2008-2009 financial crisis.
Stocks rally, White House calls China trade talks ‘productive’
The South China Morning Post, citing a person briefed on the arrangements, said on Tuesday the leaders of the world’s two largest economies were tentatively set to sign the interim trade deal on November 17 ‘if everything goes smoothly.’
A U.S.-based source confirmed that was the target date for a meeting, but the administration official cautioned that the text might not be completed in time.
White House adviser Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, told an investment panel in Riyadh that U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer and Mnuchin ‘have made a fabulous deal’ with Beijing.
‘I think people understand the president, that he’s firm. They know that he’s going to make the decisions that he thinks are right, and I think ultimately that we’ve come to an understanding with China now on where we want to head.’
Lighthizer said on Friday Washington and Beijing are ‘close to finalizing’ some sections of a trade pact after a phone call between top negotiators.
President Trump and China’s Xi are joined by their respective aides at a meeting at the G20 summit in Osaka earlier this year
U.S. officials have said the deal is to cover Chinese purchases of U.S. agricultural goods, intellectual property protections, currency practices and increased access for U.S. companies to China’s financial services market.
Jude Blanchette, a fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said the phase one deal was restoring the status quo to before the trade war began in 2017, calling into question how much progress had actually been made.
Tougher issues, such as China’s industrial policy, subsidies for state-owned enterprises and forced technology transfers had been deferred, he said.
‘The can has been kicked down to a phase two or phase three, but we’re really just wondering if we’re going to get through phase one,’ he said.
Air Force general behind 5G memo leaves White House
Air Force Brig. Gen. Robert Spalding
U.S. AIR FORCE
The author of a memo arguing for a government takeover of development of the nation’s 5G mobile network has been removed from the National Security Council staff. The memo’s unauthorized release this week caused uproar in the telecom community and created embarrassment for the White House.
A senior administration official confirmed that Air Force Brig. Gen. Robert Spalding is no longer serving as NSC senior director for strategic planning. Spalding was not fired, according to the official, who said his detail had ended and was not renewed. His last day as a White House staffer was Jan. 31. Spalding was not implicated in the leak of the memo, but officials said his advocacy for the plan had gone beyond his role, contributing to the NSC leadership’s decision to send him back to the Air Force.
Spalding was informed that his White House tenure was ending last week, the senior administration official said, before his memo and PowerPoint proposal were leaked. The Jan. 28 Axios story sparked alarm, drawing opposition from major telecom companies and catching the White House off guard.
Part of Spalding’s job had been to canvas private industry and outside groups about the plan, but in recent weeks, senior officials became concerned that he had become too aggressive in pushing the idea, getting out ahead of the administration’s still-nascent deliberations. He has not been disciplined formally and is free to seek a new job in the Defense Department.
Another senior administration official said there was considerable upheaval inside the White House this week after the 5G memo story broke. Although it is unclear whether Spalding leaked the memo, because he had shared it so widely, some officials judged him responsible.
White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders told reporters Jan. 29 that consideration of the plan was at its “earliest stages” and the administration was nowhere near a decision. FCC Chairman Ajit Pai said spending federal dollars to build a 5G network would be a “costly and counterproductive distraction” from the competitive, market-driven approach that was needed.
“There is nothing that would slam the brakes more quickly on our hard-won momentum to be the leader in the global race for 5G network deployment,” Jonathan Spalter, chief executive of the industry trade group USTelecom, said in a statement.
Spalding was known both inside and outside the administration as a China hawk. From 2014 to 2016 he led the China division at the Joint Chiefs of Staff and before joining the Trump White House he was the U.S. defense attaché at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing. One key argument for Spalding’s 5G plan was that only the government can properly defend technological infrastructure from Chinese interference.
There are no plans to replace Spalding, officials said. Spalding declined to comment.
Story 1: Army Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman Testifies on Trump Call To Ukraine on July 25 — Wanted Edits That Do Not Change Substance of Conversation — Big Nothing — Commander in Chief Trump — Stay Out of Politics Vandman The President Did Nothing Wrong — No Evidence of Any Wrongdoing — Videos —
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Army official claims several edits left out of Trump-Ukraine call transcript
The national security official who testified Tuesday before House lawmakers in the Trump impeachment probe revealed how key words and phrases were omitted from the transcript of the July phone call between President Trump and Ukraine’s president, a report said.
Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, the top Ukraine expert on the National Security Council, also told lawmakers that his bid to completely restore the omissions failed, three people familiar with his testimony told the New York Times.
But some of the decorated Army officer’s edits were in fact amended, he said Tuesday.
It’s unclear why the two edits were never made and Vindman didn’t testify about a motive, but the Times notes the omissions don’t alter lawmakers’ interpretation of the call.
The two exclusions regarded Trump’s contention of the presence of a tape with former Vice President Joe Biden discussing Ukraine corruption — and a mention by Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky of the company whose board Hunter Biden sat on, Burisma Holdings.
The Biden video reference is reflected in a third ellipsis present in the call’s transcript when the president is speaking, Vindman told investigators.
The president, the Times reports, was likely referring to Biden’s January 2018 remarks about his effort to get Ukraine to oust its prosecutor general, Viktor Shokin.
It’s possible Vindman’s two transcript edits weren’t made since the document was placed into a secure server, preventing further corrections, the report said.
The transcript wasn’t derived from a recording, but instead from note-takers listening in and voice recognition software.
During hours of questioning Tuesday, Vindman also said he “did not think it was proper”for Trump to ask Zelensky to investigate his Democratic political foe.
Colonel testifies he raised concerns about Ukraine, Trump
By LISA MASCARO, MARY CLARE JALONICK and COLLEEN LONG
Defying White House orders, an Army officer serving with President Donald Trump’s National Security Council testified to impeachment investigators Tuesday that he twice raised concerns over the administration’s push to have Ukraine investigate Democrats and Joe Biden.
Alexander Vindman, a lieutenant colonel who served in Iraq and later as a diplomat, is the first official to testify who acwith new Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy. He reported his concerns to the NSC’s lead counsel, he said in his prepared remarks.
His arrival in military blue, with medals , created a striking image at the Capitol as the impeachment inquiry reached deeper into the White House.
“I was concerned by the call,” Vindman said, according to his testimony obtained by The Associated Press. “I did not think it was proper to demand that a foreign government investigate a U.S. citizen, and I was worried about the implications for the U.S. government’s support of Ukraine.”
Vindman, a 20-year military officer, added to the mounting evidence from other witnesses — diplomats, defense and former administration officials — who are corroborating the initial whistleblower’s complaint against Trump and providing new details ahead of a House vote in the impeachment inquiry.
“Every person has put it in higher resolution,” said Rep. Denny Heck, D-Wash., during a break in the daylong session.
“That’s the story: There’s not like a new headline out of all of these,” said Rep. Tom Malinowski, D-N.J. “Every single witness, from their own advantage point, has corroborated the central facts of the story we’ve heard.”
The inquiry is looking into Trump’s call, in which he asked Zelenskiy for a “favor” — to investigate Democrats — that the Democrats say was a quid pro quo for military aid and could be an impeachable offense.
With the administration directing staff not to appear, Vindman was the first current White House official to testify before the impeachment panels. He was issued a subpoena to appear.
Trump took to Twitter Tuesday to denounce the probe as a “sham,” adding: “Why are people that I never even heard of testifying about the call. Just READ THE CALL TRANSCRIPT AND THE IMPEACHMENT HOAX IS OVER!”
Vindman, who arrived in the United States as a 3-year-old from the former Soviet Union, said that it was his “sacred duty” to defend the United States.
Some Trump allies, looking for ways to discredit Vindman, questioned the colonel’s loyalties because he was born in the region. But the line of attack was rejected by some Republicans, including Rep. Liz Cheney, who said it was “shameful” to criticize his patriotism.
Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah called the slams on Vindman “absurd, disgusting and way off the mark. This is a decorated American soldier and he should be given the respect that his service to our country demands.”
The testimony came the day after Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced the House would vote on a resolution to set rules for public hearings and a possible vote on articles of impeachment.
Thursday’s vote would be the first on the impeachment inquiry and aims to nullify complaints from Trump and his allies that the process is illegitimate and unfair.
White House Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham said the resolution merely “confirms that House Democrats’ impeachment has been an illegitimate sham from the start as it lacked any proper authorization by a House vote,”
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said he and other GOP lawmakers will review the resolution to see if it passes a “smell test” of fairness to Trump.
The session Tuesday grew contentious at times as House Republicans continued trying to unmask the still-anonymous whistleblower and call him or her to testify. Vindman said he is not the whistleblower and does not know who it is.
GOP Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio acknowledged Republicans were trying to get Vindman to provide the names of others he spoke to after the July 25 phone call, in an effort to decide whom to call to testify. “He wouldn’t,” Jordan said.
In his prepared remarks, Vindman testified that in spring of this year he became aware of “outside influencers” promoting a “false narrative of Ukraine” that undermined U.S. efforts, a reference in particular to Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani.
He first reported his concerns after a July 10 meeting in which U.S. Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland stressed the importance of having Ukraine investigate the 2016 election as well as Burisma, a company linked to the family of Biden, a 2020 Democratic presidential candidate.
Vindman says he told Sondland that “his statements were inappropriate, that the request to investigate Biden and his son had nothing to do with national security, and that such investigations were not something the NSC was going to get involved in or push.”
That differs from the account of Sondland, a wealthy businessman who donated $1 million to Trump inauguration and testified before the impeachment investigators that no one from the NSC “ever expressed any concerns.” Sondland also testified that he did not realize any connection between Biden and Burisma.
For the call between Trump and Zelenskiy, Vindman said he listened in the Situation Room with colleagues from the NSC and Vice President Mike Pence’s office. He said he again reported his concerns to the NSC’s lead counsel.
He wrote, “I realized that if Ukraine pursued an investigation into the Bidens and Burisma, it would likely be interpreted as a partisan play which would undoubtedly result in Ukraine losing the bipartisan support it has thus far maintained. This would all undermine U.S. national security.”
He told investigators that Ukraine, in trying to become a vibrant democracy integrated with the West, is a bulwark against overt Russian aggression.
Vindman attended Zelenskiy’s inauguration with a delegation led by Energy Secretary Rick Perry, and he and Hill were both part of a Ukraine briefing with Sondland that others have testified irritated Bolton at the White House.
“I am a patriot, and it is my sacred duty and honor to advance and defend OUR country, irrespective of party or politics,” wrote Vindman, who was wounded in Iraq and awarded a Purple Heart.
“For over twenty years as an active duty United States military officer and diplomat, I have served this country in a nonpartisan manner, and have done so with the utmost respect and professionalism for both Republican and Democratic administrations,” he wrote.
‘Our mother died so we came here’: How Ken Burns doc filmed 10-year-old Alexander Vindman six years after he arrived from the Soviet Union in 1985 – as his allegiance to America is questioned
A 1985 documentary featuring Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman as a 10-year-old boy from the former Soviet Union has been unearthed by the Washington Post
A clip from acclaimed filmmaker Ken Burn’s documentary The Statue of Liberty shows Vindman and his twin brother shortly after arriving to the U.S.
‘Our mother died, so we went to Italy,’ one of the Vindman boys says, ‘And then we came here’
Vindman testified the White House omitted key words and phrases from the transcript of Trump’s call with President Zelensky of Ukraine
Vindman, who is a Purple Heart holder and National Security Council official, has been questioned on his allegiance to the U.S. by pro-Trump pundits
Director Ken Burns tweeted Tuesday, ‘I remember the Vindman boys fondly. Theirs is the story of America at its best’
PUBLISHED: 09:57 EDT, 30 October 2019 | UPDATED: 13:30 EDT, 30 October 2019
Decades before the National Security Council’s top Ukraine expert, Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman testified about what he heard in Trump’s controversial phone call with the Ukrainian president, he appeared as a 10-year-old boy in a documentary about immigrants in America.
A clip from acclaimed filmmaker Ken Burns’ Academy-Award nominated 1985 documentary The Statue of Liberty has been unearthed by the Washington Post and features a 10-year-old Vindman with his twin brother, Yevgeny.
The boys are seen sitting on a bench in Brighton Beach, New York, when one tells the camera they’re from Russia and the other says they’re from Kyiv, now the capital of Ukraine.
‘Our mother died, so we went to Italy,’ one of the Vindman boys says, ‘And then we came here.’
This comes as Vindman – a Purple Heart veteran and White House official – is being questioned over his allegiance to the U.S. in the wake of his testimony about the call.
UNUMKenBurns@UNUMKenBurns
As @pbump of @washingtonpost unearthed today, Army Lt. Col. Vindman, who is testifying before Congress today, was featured as a young boy in the @KenBurns Academy Award-nominated doc “The Statue of Liberty” in 1985.
A clip from acclaimed filmmaker Ken Burns’ documentary The Statue of Liberty shows Vindman and his twin brother shortly after arriving to the U.S.
Vindman testified the White House omitted key words and phrases from the transcript of Trump’s call with President Zelensky of Ukraine
Director Ken Burns tweeted Tuesday the Vindmans’ story is ‘America at its best’
Director Ken Burns tweeted Tuesday, ‘I remember the Vindman boys fondly. Theirs is the story of America at its best.’
The Vindmans were three years old when they arrived from the former Soviet Union to the U.S. and have since dedicated their lives to serving America, with Vindman declaring in his opening statement Tuesday that it is his ‘sacred duty’ to defend the United States.
‘Our mother died, so we went to Italy,’ one of the Vindman boys says in the documentary, ‘And then we came here’
According to the Washington Post, both Alexander and Yevgeny Vindman ended up working for the White House under President Trump, served in the U.S. Army, and now work for the National Security Council.
But that hasn’t stopped right wing political pundits from questioning Vindman’s loyalty to the U.S. as he now appears to be a new threat to President Trump.
Fox News host Laura Ingraham attacked Vindman on her show Tuesday night, suggesting he is un-American.
‘Here we have a U.S. national security official who is advising Ukraine while working inside the White House, apparently against the president’s interests, and usually they spoke in English,’ Ingraham said. ‘Isn’t that kind of an interesting angle on the story?’
Her guest John Yo, who worked in the George W. Bush administration went as far as to call it ‘astounding’ and ‘espionage’.
President Trump took to Twitter on Tuesday to denounce the probe as a ‘sham,’ adding: ‘Why are people that I never even heard of testifying about the call. Just READ THE CALL TRANSCRIPT AND THE IMPEACHMENT HOAX IS OVER!’
Fox and Friends’ host Brian Kilmeade painted Vindman as a Ukraine sympathizer. ‘We also know he was born in the Soviet Union, immigrated with his family, young. He tends to feel simpatico with the Ukraine,’ he said.
CNN commentator Sean Duffy suggested Vindman has an ‘affinity’ for Ukraine, saying: ‘He speaks Ukrainian. He came from the country and he wants to make sure they’re safe and free.’
President Trump took to Twitter on Tuesday to denounce the probe as a ‘sham,’ adding: ‘Why are people that I never even heard of testifying about the call’
Fox News host Laura Ingraham attacked Vindman on her show Tuesday night, labeling him un-American
Vindman insists Zelensky specifically mentioned Burisma Holdings, telling investigators he tried to have the White House’s transcript changed to include the missing reference
Vindman was the first current White House official to testify before the impeachment panels, after being issued a subpoena.
He said in his opening statement: ‘My family fled the Soviet Union when I was three and a half years old. Upon arriving in New York City in 1979, my father worked multiple jobs to support us, all the while learning English at night.
‘He stressed to us the importance of fully integrating into our adopted country. For many years, life was quite difficult. In spite of our challenging beginnings, my family worked to build its own American Dream.
‘I have a deep appreciation for American values and ideals and the power of freedom. I am a patriot, and it is my sacred duty and honor to advance and defend OUR country, irrespective of party or politics.’
He went on to tell House impeachment investigators that the White House transcript of the July call between Trump and Ukraine’s president omitted crucial words or phrases that he tried, but failed, to restore.
Dressed in his dark blue Army uniform with military medals displayed proudly across his chest, Vindman didn’t suggest a motive behind the editing process during his more than 10-hour testimony Tuesday, though his claims will likely prompt investigators to further scrutinize how officials handed the call
Such omissions, Vindman said, included Trump’s proclamation that there were recordings of former Vice President Joe Biden discussing Ukrainian corruption, and the country’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, directly mentioning the energy company who employed Hunter Biden to its board, Burisma Holdings
The omissions, Vindman said, included Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky mentioning by name the energy company that once employed Hunter Biden to its board, Burisma Holdings.
‘He or she will look into the situation, specifically to the company that you mentioned in this issue,’ the White House’s transcript quotes Zelensky saying.
However, Vindman insists Zelensky specifically mentioned Burisma, telling investigators he tried to have the White House’s transcript changed to include the missing reference but the amendment was never made.
The rough transcript also contains ellipses in three instances where Trump is talking, which again Vindman says he tried to amend. He told investigators the third set of ellipses relates to Trump speaking about alleged recordings of former Vice President Joe Biden boasting about illegal Ukraine funding.
Vindman, who was listening in on the call from the White House Situation Room along with other members of Vice President Pence’s staff, said he was so ‘concerned by the call’ — and the idea the president’s request could be seen as ‘a partisan play’ that could ‘undermine U.S. national security’ — that he reported it to the NSC’s lead counsel.
‘I was concerned by the call,’ Vindman said. ‘I did not think it was proper to demand that a foreign government investigate a U.S. citizen, and I was worried about the implications for the U.S. government’s support of Ukraine.’
REFUGEE WITH A BRILLIANT MILITARY CAREER: LT. COL VINDMAN’S COMBAT SERVICE
Army Lt. Col Alexander Vindman has a long military career as an infantry officer who has seen combat and diplomatic service.
Born in Ukraine, his mother died before he was three and his father took his older brother, his twin Eugene and his grandmother to the U.S. to escape persecution of Jews in the Soviet Union. They settled in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, New York, an area known as Little Odessa.
He and his twin featured in the Ken Burns documentary, America, in a picture emblematic of the immigrant dream.
Alexander Vindman joined the Army in 1998, after graduating from the State University of New York, and was commissioned the next year from Cornell University.
After basic training at Fort Benning in Georgia, he was deployed first to South Korea as a junior infantry and anti-armor officer.
He saw combat in 2003 and was wounded, gaining the purple star. Other foreign deployments include to Germany and he has a series of medals for his service.
Fluent in Ukrainian and Russian, he has a degree from Harvard in Eastern European Studies and since 2008 has held diplomatic posts for the Army.
Here is what his Army Service Uniform shows about what he has achieved.
On the left of his uniform he wears awards given to him as an individual:
Top: Combat Infantryman Badge – shows that Lt. Col Vindman has seen action as an infantry officer, which he did in Iraq.
Top row of ribbons: Purple Heart, awarded in 2003 after being wounded in an IED attack in Iraq.
Defense Meritorious Service Medal with oak leaf. For distinguishing himself in non-combat operations; awarded twice.
Second row: Meritorious Service Medal – given to officers ranked major and above for outstanding service; can be awarded for combat but unknown if Vindland’s was.
Army Commendation Medal with three oak leaves – for sustained acts of heroism or meritorious service; Vindland has been awarded it four times.
Army Achievement Medal with oak leaf – for meritorious service as a junior officer. Awarded twice.
Third row: National Defense Service Medal – for honorable service since September 11, 2001.
Global War On Terror Expeditionary Medal – given for being deployed to Iraq.
Global War On Terror Service Medal – given for support duty to combat operations in Iraq or Afghanistan, or both.
Fourth row: Korean Defense Service Medal – for serving in Korea as an infantry officer in 2000. Army Service Ribbon – for completing training as an officer. Army Overseas Service Ribbon – for having served abroad.
Below (left): Ranger tab – meaning he completed the tough 61-day Ranger School course in small-unit infantry fighting.
Below (right): Parachutist wings: Is qualified to go into action in airborne operations.
Badge of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Vindman works for the Joint Chiefs in the National Security Council.
On the right of his uniform, Vindman wears decorations awarded to units he has served in:
Top: 2nd Cavalry Regiment. Was deployed to Iraq in 2003, suggesting that Vindman was serving with them when he was wounded. The unit includes infantry elements.
First row of ribbons: Joint Meritorious Unit Award. Equivalent to the Defense Superior Service Medal for an individual.
Second row of ribbons (from left): Valorous Unit Award. Equivalent to the Silver Star for an individual.
Navy Unit Commendation – suggests that he was attached to a Navy unit during his career.
Unknown.
Left: White House Service Badge, for being on active duty in the National Security Council. Right: 25th Infantry Division.
Few constitutional issues have been so consistently and heatedly debated by legal scholars and politicians in recent years as the distribution of war powers between Congress and the President. As a matter of history and policy, it is generally accepted that the executive takes the lead in the actual conduct of war. After all, a single, energetic actor is better able to prosecute war successfully than a committee; the enemy will not wait for deliberation and consensus. At the same time, the Founders plainly intended to establish congressional checks on the executive’s war power. Between these guideposts is a question of considerable importance: Does the Constitution require the President to obtain specific authorization from Congress before initiating hostilities?
Article II, Section 1, Clause 1, vests the entirety of the “executive Power” in a single person, the President of the United States. By contrast, under Article I Congress enjoys only those legislative powers “herein granted.” Scholars generally agree that this vesting of executive power confers upon the President broad authority to engage in foreign relations, including war, except in those areas in which the Constitution places authority in Congress. The debate, then, is over the extent of Congress’s constitutional authority to check the President in matters of war.
Article II, Section 2, expressly designates the President as “Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States.” Presidential power advocates argue that this provision confers substantive constitutional power upon the executive branch to engage military forces in hostilities. The executives throughout British history as well as in the colonial governments and several of the states prior to the Constitution generally enjoyed such power. In contrast, the Articles of Confederation did not provide for a separate executive branch and thus gave “the sole and exclusive right and power of determining on peace and war” to Congress.
The presumption of presidential initiative in war established by these two provisions of Article II appears to be bolstered by other constitutional provisions. Article I, Section 10, Clause 3, expressly prohibits states from “engag[ing] in War, unless actually invaded, or in such imminent Danger as will not admit of delay” unless they have obtained the “Consent of Congress.” By contrast, no such limitation on engagement in war by the President can be found in Article II. Although Article II expressly authorizes the President to engage in other foreign relations powers (such as the making of treaties and the appointment of ambassadors) only with the consent of Congress, it imposes no such check with respect to the use of military force.
The lack of an express consent requirement for executive initiation of hostilities is particularly meaningful in light of preconstitutional American practice. America’s earliest years were haunted by fear of executive tyranny, following the recent experience of living under British rule, and that fear was reflected in several of the legal charters preceding the United States Constitution. Under the Articles of Confederation, the United States could not “engage in any war” absent the consent of nine states. The constitution of South Carolina expressly provided that the state’s executive could neither “commence war” nor “conclude peace” without legislative approval. Other states limited executive war power differently through a variety of structural limitations, such as frequent election, term limits, and selection of the executive by the legislature. In one extreme example, Pennsylvania replaced its single governor with a twelve-person executive council. Problems arising out of weak executive authority soon brought about a reversal in the trend, however. New York established a strong executive, vested with the authority of commander in chief and free of term limits or consent requirements, and Massachusetts and New Hampshire soon followed suit. The text of the Constitution suggests a continuation of, rather than a departure from, this newer trend of enhancing executive authority.
Any power to initiate hostilities would be useless, of course, without the resources necessary to engage in hostilities. Under our Constitution, the power to provide those resources is unequivocally vested with Congress. Under Article I, it is Congress, not the President, that has the power to “lay and collect Taxes” and to “borrow Money,” to make “Appropriations” and “provide for the common Defence,” to “raise and support Armies” and “provide and maintain a Navy,” and to “call[] forth the Militia.” Thus the President may be Commander in Chief, but he has nothing to command except what Congress may provide. As a result of Congress’s authority over the purse, the President is unable as a practical (if not constitutional) matter to engage in hostilities without Congress.
Based on these provisions of the Constitution, some originalist scholars have concluded that Congress’s war power is limited to its control over funding and its power to impeach executive officers. They contend that the President is constitutionally empowered to engage in hostilities with whatever resources Congress has made available to the executive.
Advocates of stronger congressional war power, by contrast, contend that Congress not only has the power to deprive the executive of military resources, but also to control the President’s authority to initiate hostilities. They typically locate the textual hook for their argument in Article I, Section 8, which vests the powers to “declare War” and to “grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal” in Congress, not the President. Congressionalists argue that these two powers exhaust the entire range of possible hostilities and that their vesting in Congress must mean that the President cannot initiate hostilities without prior congressional authorization.
Presidentialists contend that the power to “declare War” is only a power to alter international legal relationships. In their view, placing the power to declare war in Congress does not affect the President’s domestic constitutional authority to engage in hostilities. Notably, Article I provides that states may not, “without the Consent of Congress,…engage in War,” and Article III defines treason as “levyingWar” against the United States—suggesting that the power to “declare War” is a lesser power that does not include the ability to control the actual initiation and conduct of war. Presidentialists also argue that the Marque and Reprisal Clause vests Congress only with the power to authorize private citizens to engage in hostilities for private, commercial gain.
A final textual clue should be noted. Congressionalists generally contend that, although the President may not initiate hostilities, the Declaration of War Clause leaves the President with the authority as Commander in Chief to repel invasions without prior congressional approval. According to his own notes of the Constitutional Convention, James Madison successfully moved to replace the phrase “make” war with “declare” war, “leaving to the Executive the power to repel sudden attacks.” Congressionalists read this power to repel attacks as exhaustive, rather than merely illustrative, of presidential authority. On the other hand, Article I expressly provides that states generally may not engage in war without congressional consent “unless actually invaded, or in such imminent Danger as will not admit of delay”; there is no such language, by contrast, governing the President. In addition, Article I vests authority with Congress to “call[] forth the Militia to…suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions.”
In summary, the argument for executive initiative rests on the background understanding that the vesting of “executive Power” and the “Commander in Chief” designation together constitute a substantive grant of authority to the President to conduct military operations. The argument also rests on the absence of explicit provision for congressional incursion into that power, other than through its express powers over funding and impeachment. Under this view, the contrary position—that congressional consent is required before the initiation of hostilities—suffers from a lack of strong textual support.
Accordingly, congressionalist scholars frequently turn to other authorities. First, they cite statements from various Founders, both before and after the Framing period, in support of broader congressional power. For example, they frequently quote James Wilson, who had urged limits on presidential power during the Constitutional Convention, and who argued during the Pennsylvania ratifying convention that “[t]his system will not hurry us into war; it is calculated against it. It will not be in the power of a single man, or a single body of men, to involve us in such distress; for the important power of declaring war is vested in the legislature at large: this declaration must be made with the concurrence of the House of Representatives: from this circumstance we may draw a certain conclusion that nothing but our national interest can draw us into a war.”
Presidentialists respond that Wilson’s statement must be placed in context. They claim that Wilson was simply responding to concerns that exercise of the treaty power alone could start a war. They further note that nowhere in Wilson’s reference to declarations of war did he ever deny the President’s authority to initiate hostilities without a declaration.
Presidentialists also focus attention on the ratification debates in the battleground state of Virginia, where Anti-Federalists launched a feverish campaign against, among other things, excessive executive power to wage war. Notably, the Federalist effort to ease concerns rested largely on congressional control of the purse—not the Declaration of War Clause. Presidentialists also cite James Madison’s statement that “the sword is in the hands of the British King. The purse in the hands of the Parliament. It is so in America, as far as any analogy can exist.”
Congressionalists and presidentialists also disagree about the proper interpretation of numerous post-ratification statements by Founders and later prominent American figures, as well as early American practice under the Constitution. For example, congressionalists cite the limited, defensive-oriented approach taken by President Thomas Jefferson during the Tripolitan War (1801–1805) and by others in the nation’s earliest hostilities. Presidentialists respond by noting Alexander Hamilton’s sharp criticisms of Jefferson as well as the broader theory of presidential power urged by Jefferson himself when he was Secretary of State. More generally, presidentialists note that, out of only five declarations of war in our nation’s history, the first did not take place until the War of 1812. Presidentialists also contend that early Congresses exerted significant control over hostilities not by refusing to exercise its powers under the Declaration of War Clause, but by denying the President a large, peacetime, standing military force through its control of the purse. In their view, early references to presidential subservience to Congress merely reflected Congress’s ability to deny funding to presidential initiatives, and little else. Finally, presidentialists generally criticize the usefulness of post-ratification statements as little more than the self-interested assertions of politicians caught in the heat of partisan conflict, and not as good faith endeavors to ascertain original meaning.
The modern debate over the allocation of war powers between Congress and the President was triggered largely by the establishment of a large United States peacetime military force in the wake of World War II.
United States intervention in Korea in 1950 began with congressional support but without a formal declaration of war. When the war stalemated, executive power was challenged. President Harry S. Truman responded by claiming independent constitutional authority to commit troops without congressional authorization. Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard M. Nixon undertook military operations of breathtaking breadth in Vietnam, armed with only the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. Congressional criticism of that protracted campaign led not only to funding restrictions, but also to the 1973 enactment of the War Powers Resolution, over President Nixon’s veto. The Resolution substantially limits the President’s ability to engage U.S. forces in hostilities for more than sixty days, absent a declaration of war or specific congressional authorization, and requires the President to consult with Congress about military deployments.
The War Powers Resolution has proven largely impotent in practice. President James Earl Carter did not consult with Congress before attempting to rescue Iranian hostages. President Ronald Reagan refused formal compliance (instead claiming “consistency”) with the terms of the Resolution when he deployed American military forces in Lebanon, Grenada, Libya, and the Persian Gulf. Before Desert Storm, President George H.W. Bush publicly declared that he had constitutional power to initiate war unilaterally. Congress responded by authorizing him to use force. President William Jefferson Clinton followed these precedents in Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, the Middle East, and Kosovo.
Members of Congress have periodically filed suit to enforce the War Powers Resolution and the congressionalist interpretation of the Declaration of War Clause, but courts have generally avoided ruling on the merits by dismissing such cases on a variety of procedural grounds. In Campbell v. Clinton (2000), for example, the D.C. Circuit unanimously dismissed a congressional challenge to President Clinton’s airstrikes campaign in the former Yugoslavia, albeit under a panoply of competing theories arising out of the legislative standing, mootness, and political question doctrines. In O’Connor v. United States (2003), the court dismissed a challenge to President George W. Bush’s intention behind the war in Iraq because it posed a nonjusticiable political question and “there are no judicially discoverable standards that would permit a court to determine whether the intentions of the President in prosecuting a war are proper.”
Executive Order 12333 was signed by President Ronald Reagan on December 4, 1981.
Executive Order 12333, signed on December 4, 1981 by U.S. President Ronald Reagan, was an Executive Order intended to extend powers and responsibilities of U.S. intelligence agencies and direct the leaders of U.S. federal agencies to co-operate fully with CIA requests for information.[1] This executive order was titled United States Intelligence Activities.
“Goals, Direction, Duties and Responsibilities with Respect to the National Intelligence Effort” lays out roles for various intelligence agencies, including the Departments of Defense, Energy, State, and Treasury.
Part 2.3 permits collection, retention and dissemination of the following types of information along with several others.
(c) Information obtained in the course of a lawful foreign intelligence, counterintelligence, international narcotics or international terrorism investigation
. . .
(i) Incidentally obtained information that may indicate involvement in activities that may violate federal, state, local or foreign laws[1]
Part 2.11 of this executive order reiterates a proscription on US intelligence agencies sponsoring or carrying out an assassination. It reads:[5]
No person employed by or acting on behalf of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, assassination.
Previously, EO 11905 (Gerald Ford) had banned political assassinations and EO 12036 (Jimmy Carter) had further banned indirect U.S. involvement in assassinations.[6] As early as 1998, this proscription against assassination was reinterpreted, and relaxed, for targets who are classified by the United States as connected to terrorism.[7][8]
Executive Order 12333 has been regarded by the American intelligence community as a fundamental document authorizing the expansion of data collection activities.[9] The document has been employed by the National Security Agency as legal authorization for its collection of unencrypted information flowing through the data centers of internet communications giants Google and Yahoo!.[9]
In July 2014 chairman David Medine and two other members of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, a government oversight agency, indicated a desire to review Executive Order 12333 in the near future, according to a report by journalist Spencer Ackerman of The Guardian.[9]
In July 2014, former State Department official John Tye published an editorial in The Washington Post, citing his prior access to classified material on intelligence-gathering activities under Executive Order 12333, and arguing that the order represented a significant threat to Americans’ privacy and civil liberties.[10]
In the movie Get Smart, Agent 23 tells Maxwell Smart,”assassinations are prohibited by Executive Order 1-2-333.”
Story 2: Democrat New Procedures Resolution on Impeachment Inquiry of Trump — Losing American People — Videos
Rep. Doug Collins calls upcoming Trump impeachment vote a ‘sham’
Rep. Jim Jordan: House impeachment vote won’t change anything
Democrats unveil procedures for Trump’s impeachment inquiry, rebutting GOP attacks
Mike DeBonis
House Democrats unveiled new procedures for the impeachment inquiry of President Trump on Tuesday, responding to Republican demands for due process by setting out rules for future public hearings delving into whether Trump should be removed from office.
The resolution backed by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) hands the lead role to the House Intelligence Committee and its chairman, Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.), who would have broad latitude to organize extended questioning of potential public witnesses. Two other committees that have so far participated in the closed-door investigation into Trump’s dealings with Ukraine — Foreign Affairs and Oversight and Reform — would not be permitted to directly participate in the open proceedings under the legislation.
It also sets out for the first time the ability of House Republicans to make their own requests for testimony and documents, though those requests will be subject to a vote of the Democratic-majority committee — a practice that matches the minority powers in the 1998 impeachment of President Bill Clinton.
Lawmakers are expected to vote on the measure Thursday, according to Democratic aides who were not authorized to comment publicly. The House Rules Committee will debate and potentially amend the measure at a panel meeting Wednesday afternoon.
Rules Committee Chairman Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) said Tuesday the resolution “outlines the next steps in this inquiry, including establishing the procedure for public-facing hearings conducted by the Intelligence Committee and the process for transferring evidence to the Judiciary Committee once they are completed.”
“The president’s Republican allies in Congress have tried to hide the president’s conduct, but the American people will now see the facts firsthand,” he said.
On Sept. 25, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi initiated an impeachment inquiry against President Trump, following a whistleblower complaint over his dealings with Ukraine.
(Pictured) Donald Trump, accompanied by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, speaks on Oct. 23 in the Diplomatic Room of the White House in Washington, D.C.
Speaking ahead of the resolution’s release Tuesday, House Republican leaders blasted the Democratic tactics, arguing that the impeachment process was fatally flawed from the beginning and cannot be redeemed with the adoption of new procedures.
“You can’t put the genie back in the bottle,” said House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.). “Due process starts from the beginning.”
By confining the public hearings to the Intelligence Committee and excluding the other two panels that have participated in the closed-door interviews, Democrats are in effect sidelining several of the GOP’s most aggressive and outspoken defenders of Trump. They include Reps. Jim Jordan (Ohio) and Mark Meadows (N.C.), who serve on the Oversight panel, as well as Rep. Lee Zeldin (N.Y.) of the Foreign Affairs Committee, who have led the public pushback to the Democratic impeachment effort in the House.
Jordan said Tuesday that Democrats were “trying to put a ribbon on an already terrible process.”
“It’s complete garbage,” he said. “They can’t undo what they’ve done thus far. All the abuse of due process, all of the unfairness — they can try to dress it up, have a fancy resolution on the floor. But it does nothing. It’s still a sham process.”
Pelosi announced plans to vote on the resolution in a letter to Democratic members Monday, and, according to three House aides who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private discussions, she kept a tight leash on the process of drafting the measure — excluding the rank and file and even other Democratic leaders.
Addressing reporters Tuesday morning, House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.) said he had not yet scheduled a vote on the resolution — contradicting Pelosi, who pledged to hold one this week.
“I have not read it yet; the members have not read it yet,” Hoyer said, showing some frustration at a meeting with reporters. “We’re going to have to consider whether or not it’s ready to go on Thursday. I hope that is the case.”
“Nobody is looking for their five minutes of glory,” said Rep. Jamie B. Raskin (D-Md.), a member of the Judiciary and Oversight panels. “We’re looking for an impeachment process that has serious integrity.”
Besides setting out procedures for public hearings in the Intelligence Committee, the resolution would also authorize that panel and four other committees investigating Trump to publicly release interview transcripts and transfer their investigative materials to the House Judiciary Committee, which is expected to draft articles of impeachment based on the other panels’ findings.
The Judiciary Committee would also have the power to hold public hearings under similar procedures to those given to the Intelligence Committee.
Under the resolution, both panels could engage in extended questioning of witnesses in rounds of up to 45 minutes, alternating between the two parties, before beginning the traditional five-minute rounds extended to panel members under existing rules. Both lawmakers and staff would be authorized to question witnesses.
Republicans have raised questions about Trump’s right to be personally represented by attorneys during the impeachment proceedings, noting that Clinton had lawyers present during the House’s consideration of articles in 1998. Responding to those concerns, the Judiciary Committee on Tuesday issued a three-page summary of procedural safeguards for the president.
They include the right of the president or his counsel to recommend additional testimony or evidence for the committee’s review, to attend all hearings and question any witnesses who testify, and generally to respond to the allegations against him “orally or in writing as shall be determined by the chair.”
But Democrats included a significant caveat: Should Trump “unlawfully refuse” to comply with subpoenas issued by the investigating committees, Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) would “have the discretion to impose appropriate remedies” — including the denial of Trump’s requests to call or question witnesses.
Democratic leaders have been careful not to characterize the measure as authorizing the impeachment inquiry, something they say has been underway already for weeks without a House vote.
“We have an inquiry looking at whether articles of impeachment are justified by the facts,” Hoyer said. “We’ve been doing that. We are doing it. We’re going to continue to do it. This is about process as to when we move to out of the investigatory phase, which we’ve been in, into a phase where we have public hearings. That’s what it is. No more. No less.”
Several Democrats said Tuesday they believed the vote would undermine Republicans, who for weeks have raised objections to the process Democrats have undertaken and have called for a formal vote on launching impeachment proceedings.
“The message this week is going to be: You asked for it, you got it,” said Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-N.J.).
Several members who attended a caucus meeting held at the Democratic National Committee on Tuesday morning said they were ready to vote to formalize the next step in the impeachment investigation — including some in swing districts where the vote could be a political liability.
“I have no qualms about taking a vote,” said Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D-Va.), a freshman running in a district Trump won by seven points in 2016. “We’ve been clearly in an impeachment inquiry, and laying out the plans for the next step, I think, is a helpful thing to do for the American people to understand the parameters of the public hearings.”
Rep. Ron Kind (D-Wis.), a veteran lawmaker whose district voted for Trump by five points, also said he planned to support the measure: “We fully support a thorough investigation, and we’re going to continue doing what we’re doing.”
But at least one Democrat has said he planned to vote no, citing the upcoming presidential election.
“It’s not that I’m friends with the president. It’s not that I believe he should be protected. I don’t mind if he’s investigated,” said Rep. Jeff Van Drew (N.J.). “But what’s going to happen in my mind, it’s going to happen here in the House; it will go over to the Senate, and then he will believe that he has been exonerated. He will still be the president, and he will still be the candidate — a candidate who has been exonerated by the Senate.”
Story 3: Imperial Presidency of Donald J. Trump — Beyond The Rule of Law — Videos
What is IMPERIAL PRESIDENCY? What does IMPERIAL PRESIDENCY mean? IMPERIAL PRESIDENCY meaning
Is expanding presidential power inherently bad for democracy?
The imperial presidency in the age of Trump | LIVE STREAM
Andrew Jackson: The First Imperial President
Trump Attorneys Assert Immunity From Broad Sweep of Law
Legal filings and lawyers’ statements show attempt to put president beyond legal reach while in office
President Trump and his attorneys argue he is outside the purview of lawsuits, judicial orders, criminal investigations and congressional probes.PHOTO: JIM BOURG/REUTERS
By Byron Tau
WASHINGTON—Over his nearly three years in office, lawyers representing President Trump have made numerous legal arguments that, taken as a whole, would give the president sweeping immunity—even if he were to commit murder.
An extensive review of correspondence, court documents, legal opinions and public statements from lawyers representing Mr. Trump shows the president’s attorneys have consistently pushed to put him beyond the reach of any other institution in federal, state or local government—immune to civil lawsuits, judicial orders, criminal investigations or congressional probes.
One lawyer for the president recently even suggested that Mr. Trump could shoot someone on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue and not be investigated by local authorities, echoing a statement the president made during his 2016 campaign in which he said he wouldn’t lose any voters over such an action.
A longstanding Justice Department legal opinion says a president can’t be federally prosecuted while in office, but says nothing about being investigated, and in any case doesn’t apply to state and local efforts to enforce their own laws. Mr. Trump’s lawyers say he is beyond any such actions.
“This administration has articulated a view of presidential power in which the president is above the law,” said Erica Newland, who served in the Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel during both the Obama and Trump administrations.
PRESIDENTIAL POWER
Some positions that lawyers representing Mr. Trump, the White House or the Department of Justice have argued since January 2017 in court or in other legal documents:
Mr. Trump is immune from criminal investigation while he remains in office, even if he were to shoot someone on the streets of Manhattan.
Lawyers representing the president either in his personal or institutional capacity have argued that law enforcement can’t investigate the president at all; that he can shut down investigations into himself or his associates; and that obstruction-of-justice laws don’t apply to the president. (Nobody argues that presidents aren’t subject to all laws once they are out of office.)
At the same time, since Democrats took over Congress in January, Mr. Trump’s government and personal lawyers have fought numerous legal battles over congressional oversight—arguing that close aides don’t have to testify even if subpoenaed, that all congressional investigations must serve a “legislative purpose,” that cabinet secretaries can disobey subpoenas and that a congressional impeachment inquiry is invalid.
Further, they have argued that federal courts can’t transmit evidence of presidential wrongdoing obtained by a grand jury to Congress for possible consideration of impeachment. In some instances, Trump administration attorneys have contended that courts have no right to stop the president from taking official actions.
Some of the claims are contradictory: Mr. Trump’s personal attorneys have argued he can be held accountable only by Congress, while his White House lawyers fought efforts to hold him accountable in Congress.
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The White House, the Justice Department and an attorney representing Mr. Trump personally didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment.
To some extent, Mr. Trump’s lawyers are just doing their job: taking aggressive, legal positions in the best interests of the client, and hoping for the best. Lawyers for previous presidents have made similarly aggressive claims about powers and immunities to defend the president personally or the long-term authority of the office.
But scholars of presidential power say what is different about the Trump administration is its unwillingness to acknowledge the legitimacy and interests of other institutions.
“Mr. Trump has taken the position that the [Constitution’s] Article II powers of the president give him absolute authority. What makes his case different is that he is not even recognizing the legitimacy of countervailing powers” such as Congress, said Mark Rozell, a dean at George Mason University. “He is deeming them as politically motivated and not legitimate in their inquiries and therefore to be obstructed at every turn.”
Executive Privilege: What Are the Limits?
Executive privilege refers to the president’s right to keep certain things confidential. But how far can it be stretched? WSJ’s Shelby Holliday looks at past uses of executive privilege and explains how it could factor into the impeachment inquiry. Photo: Getty
The issue gets even more complicated in investigations like impeachment because overlapping legal teams are defending the president in both his capacity as an individual and his capacity as the president.
Government lawyers are supposed to defend the president’s institutional powers—not his or her personal interests.
The Justice Department, the White House counsel and Mr. Trump’s personal legal team are defending the president on a cornucopia of lawsuits around the country.
John Yoo, a former Bush administration official known for supporting expansive presidential power, said many of the most extreme legal positions taken by the Trump lawyers have come from his personal attorneys trying to defend him by invoking the powers of the presidency, while those taken by the government’s lawyers are in line with previous practices.
“When it comes to where he’s making the arguments on behalf of the office of the presidency, in his official capacity, I think he’s gone just as far as other presidents have,” Mr. Yoo said. “In the areas where the president has been defending himself as an individual rather than the office, he has made arguments that have gone beyond what past presidents have set out.”
Mr. Yoo added: “I think that Trump has been under unprecedented assault—constitutionally, legally—from his critics too. I can see why his lawyers are bringing out these arguments which are usually reserved for times of real crisis.”
Mr. Trump isn’t the first to provoke a legal showdown over his powers and immunities. But rarely did the attorneys representing other presidents deny that other institutions also had legitimate interests.
Richard Nixon sparked a major legal battle over his refusal to turn over tapes of Oval Office conversations to prosecutors and Congress. But he also offered numerous compromises, such as turning over transcripts, because he and his attorneys recognized that Congress and prosecutors had legitimate interests in accessing the materials as part of their inquiries.
During a yearslong independent counsel investigation and later impeachment, President Bill Clinton also fought legal battles over his privileges and immunities, but frequently argued before courts that they needed to balance the interests of the presidency against those of Congress or law enforcement. Mr. Clinton, for instance, agreed to testify before a grand jury in exchange for independent prosecutor Ken Starr dropping a subpoena.
President George W. Bush fought back against a congressional investigation to keep his top aides from testifying about the firing of federal prosecutors for what critics said were political reasons, but allowed voluntary interviews and turned over documents to Congress.
Few of those legal positions have ever been blessed by courts.
Earlier this month, Justice Department lawyers argued that a court couldn’t give Congress evidence that was gathered by special counsel Robert Mueller if it was obtained using a grand jury—going so far as to say that a federal judge was wrong in 1974 to give Congress materials from the grand jury investigating the Watergate break-in.
“Wow, OK,” U.S. District Judge Beryl A. Howell said in response to that argument. “The department is taking extraordinary positions in this case.”
She ruled against the Justice Department last week, writing that her decision was motivated in part by the White House’s refusal to cooperate with congressional investigators.
PUBLISHED: 09:30 EDT, 27 October 2019 | UPDATED: 10:49 EDT, 28 October 2019
Donald Trump announced Sunday morning that ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi ‘died like a dog’ as the result of a U.S. Special Ops forces raid on his hideout in northwest Syria.
‘Last night the United State brought the world’s number one terrorist leader to justice. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is dead,’ Trump said from the Diplomatic Reception Room, where just a week earlier he announced a ceasefire between Turkey and the Kurds.
‘He was the founder and leader of ISIS, the most ruthless and violent terror organization anywhere in the world,’ he continued as he described the events of the raid.
Al-Baghdadi, the president confirmed, detonated his suicide vest, killing himself and three children, during an overnight targeted attack in Syria’s Idlib province.
The president touted the operation and al-Baghdadi’s death as ‘bigger than bin Laden.’ Osama bin Laden, founder of Al-Qaeda and the terrorist leader behind the September 11 terrorist attacks, was killed in 2011 during a Navy SEALs operation during Barack Obama’s presidency.
‘This is the biggest there is. This is the worst ever. Osama bin Laden was big, but Osama bin Laden became big with the World Trade Center. This is a man who built a whole, as he would like to call it, a country,’ Trump said, referencing al-Baghdadi’s creation of the Islamic State.
Donald Trump addressed the nation Sunday morning, confirming that the death of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. He said he had watched and monitored the whole operation Saturday night
Meeting in the situation room Saturday night (from left to right): National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien, Vice President Mike Pence, Trump, Secretary of Defense Mark Esper and Joint Chiefs of Staff U.S. Army General Mark Milley and Brig. General Marcus Evans
Trump also referred to al-Baghdadi and those who followed him as ‘losers,’ and lauded that no U.S. personnel were lost during the raid. He did say, however, that one ‘talented canine’ was injured.
‘I got to watch much of it. No personnel were lost in the operation, while a large number of Baghdadi’s fighters and companions were killed with him,’ Trump said during his rare Sunday morning remarks.
‘He died after running into a dead-end tunnel, whimpering and crying and screaming all the way,’ Trump continued, adding that Baghdadi drug three of his children with him. ‘They were led to certain death.’
‘He reached the end of the tunnel as our dogs chased him down. He ignited his vest, killing himself and the three children. His body was mutilated by the blast. the tunnel had caved in on it, in addition. But test results gave certain, immediate and totally positive identification. It was him. The thug who tried so hard to intimidate others spent his last moments in utter fear, in total panic and dread, terrified of the American forces bearing down on him,’ he detailed.
he White House confirmed that Trump watched and listened to the operations unfold in the Situation room Saturday night – Sunday morning Syria time – with National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien, Vice President Mike Pence, Secretary of Defense Mark Esper and Joint Chiefs of Staff U.S. Army General Mark Milley and Brig. General Marcus Evans.
The president said, while claiming he’s been looking for Baghdadi ever since assuming office, that he’s potentially the only one better at ‘using the internet’ than ISIS forces.
‘A couple of weeks ago they were able to scope him out,’ Trump said of the U.S. intelligence community.
‘You know, these people are very smart, they are not into the use of cell phones any more. They’re very technically brilliant,’ the president said in reference to those working for ISIS.
‘You know, they use the internet better than almost anybody in the world, perhaps other than Donald Trump,’ he continued. ‘But they use the internet incredibly well and what they’ve done with the internet through recruiting and everything – and that is why he died like a dog, he died like a coward. He was whimpering, screaming and crying, and frankly I think it’s something that should be brought out so that his followers and all of these young kids that want to leave various countries – including the United States – they should see how he died. He didn’t die a hero, he died a coward – crying, whimpering, and screaming and bringing three kids with him to die. Certain death.’
The president teased Saturday night, ‘Something very big has just happened!’ and the White House also announced that night that the president would be ‘making a major statement’ Sunday morning from the White House.
Trump said he does not regret his decision to withdraw U.S. troops from northern Syria, which opened the way for Turkey to invade and target Kurdish forces.
Caliphate leader: Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi detonated his own suicide vest during the targeted raid on his lair in Syria’s Idlib province and killed three of his children in the blast. He is shown in a still from a video released in April, having not been seen since he spoke at the Grand Mosque in Mosul in 2014
Syrians ride a motorcycle past a burnt vehicle near the site where a helicopter gunfire reportedly killed nine people near the northwestern Syrian village of Barisha
Al-Baghdadi arrived at the area of the raid 48 hours beforehand, Turkish officials said – and the CIA assisted in locating him.
Information is now emerging over how the U.S. was able to track down Baghdadi, including details of his whereabouts from two inside informants.
A senior Iraqi intelligence official told the Associated Press that a few months ago an Iraqi aide to al-Baghdadi was killed in western Iraq by a U.S. airstrike, and his wife was arrested and handed over to Iraqi authorities.
The official indicated that the wife ended up being a key source of information on al-Baghdadi’s whereabouts. The Iraqis who had her in custody were ultimately able to pass along to the U.S. coordinates on al-Baghdadi through information they learned from the aide’s wife.
A second Iraqi security official said al-Baghdadi’s brother-in-law was recently arrested by the Iraqis and also gave information on Baghdadi’s whereabouts
The ISIS leader’s two wives, who were both wearing explosive devices that never detonated, were taken down. Several of his children were taken from the lair and are still alive. Several others were killed in the attack.
Trump said more people were killed than captured, but confirmed there are some in U.S. custody.
Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) confirmed on Sunday they had worked with the U.S. on a ‘successful’ operation against Islamic State.
‘Our strong and effective operations once again confirm our strength and determination to go after (Islamic State),’ the head of the SDF’s media office said.
The Syrian Democratic Forces is an alliance in the Syrian Civil War made up of primarily Kurdish, Arab and Assyrian/Syriac militias.
SDF General Commander Mazloum Abdi took partial credit for taking down al-Baghdadi, but also thanked the president and U.S. Army in its efforts, which he said have been under way for almost half-a-year.
‘For five months there has been joint intel cooperation on the ground and accurate monitoring, until we achieved a joint operation to kill Abu Bakir al-Baghdadi. Thanks to everybody who participate in this great mission,’ Abdi tweeted, tagging Donald Trump’s Twitter account.
Al-Baghdadi, the leader of the so-called Islamic caliphate, blew himself up during the targeted attack on his lair in Syria’s Idlib province in the early hours of Sunday morning. His lair was in a village known for smuggling, and he arrived there 48 hours before the raid
The president also thanked those who had assisted in finding al-Baghdadi, participated in the raid and brought him to his death. He said that while the Kurds provided information that was useful in taking down al-Baghdadi, they did not assist in the military operations.
The ISIS leader has been among U.S. and Europe’s force’s most wanted figures since his chilling call to arms in 2014, which saw a shift away from the mass casualty attacks carried out by al-Qaeda in favor of smaller-scale acts of violence.
Shifting away from the airline hijackings and other mass-casualty attacks that came to define al-Qaeda, al-Baghdadi encouraged smaller-scale acts of violence that would be harder for law enforcement to prepare for and prevent.
He encouraged jihadists who could not travel to the caliphate to instead kill where they were using whatever weapon they had at their disposal, resulting in a series of devastating attacks in the UK and Europe.
His words inspired more than 140 terrorist attacks in 29 countries other than Iraq and Syria, resulting in the deaths of at least 2,043 people, CNN reports.
Since 2016, the State Department has offered a reward of up to $25 million for information or intelligence that could lead to Baghdadi’s capture or death.
Al-Baghdadi led ISIS for the last five years, presiding over its ascendancy as it cultivated a barbaric reputation for beheadings and horrific executions.
These recordings, often noted for their high production values, were distributed online along with the ISIS propaganda magazine Dabiq.
He remained among the few ISIS commanders still at large despite multiple claims in recent years about his death and even as his so-called caliphate dramatically shrank, with many supporters who joined the cause either imprisoned or jailed.
A picture taken on October 27, 2019 shows a burnt vehicle at the site where a helicopter gunfire killed nine people near the northwestern Syrian village of Barisha in the province of Idlib near the border with Turkey
Trump teased, without explanation on Saturday that ‘Something very big has just happened!’ and the White House confirmed the president would be addressing the nation on Sunday morning
With a £19.5 million ($25m) bounty on his head, al-Baghdadi had been far less visible in recent years, releasing only sporadic audio recordings, including one just last month in which he called on members of the extremist group to do all they could to free ISIS detainees and women held in jails and camps.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported an attack carried out by a squadron of eight helicopters accompanied by a warplane.
The attacks were on positions where ISIS operatives were believed to be hiding in the Barisha area north of Idlib city, after midnight on Saturday-Sunday.
It said the helicopters targeted ISIS positions with heavy strikes for about 120 minutes, during which jihadists targeted the helicopters with heavy weapons.
The Syrian Observatory documented the death of nine people as a result of the coalition helicopter attack, adding that the death toll is likely to rise due to the presence of a large number of wounded.
The strike came amid concerns that a recent American pullback from northeastern Syria could infuse new strength into the militant group, which had lost vast stretches of territory it had once controlled.
The purported audio was his first public statement since last April, when he appeared in a video for the first time in five years.
Reports suggest that al-Baghdadi, the elusive militant who has been the subject of an international manhunt for years, had been killed in Idlib, Syria
In 2014, he was a black-robed figure delivering a sermon from the pulpit of Mosul’s Great Mosque of al-Nuri, his only known public appearance.
He urged Muslims around the world to swear allegiance to the caliphate and obey him as its leader.
‘It is a burden to accept this responsibility to be in charge of you,’ he said in the video.
‘I am not better than you or more virtuous than you. If you see me on the right path, help me. If you see me on the wrong path, advise me and halt me. And obey me as far as I obey God.’
The death of such a high-value U.S. target comes amid a difficult political backdrop for Trump, who has been frustrated heavy media focus on the Democratic-led impeachment inquiry, which he calls a bipartisan smear.
He has also faced withering criticism from both Republicans and Democrats alike for his U.S. troop withdrawal from northeastern Syria, which permitted Turkey to attack America’s Kurdish allies.
The rise and fall of the Islamic State
The Islamic State group erupted from the chaos of Syria and Iraq’s conflicts, declaring itself a ‘caliphate’ after conquering a giant stretch of territory.
Its territorial rule, which at its height in 2014 stretched across nearly a third of both Syria and Iraq, ended in March with a last stand by several hundred of its militants at a tiny Syrian village on the banks of the Euphrates near the border with Iraq.
But the militants have maintained a presence in both countries, and their shadowy leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi had continued releasing messages urging them to keep up the fight.
Here are the key moments in the rise and fall of the Islamic State group:
Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi – who was also known as Caliph Ibrahim – released a propaganda video in 2014 where he addressed Muslim worshipers at a mosque in Mosul
April 2013 –Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi announces the merger of his group with al-Qaeda’s franchise in Syria, forming the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant.
January 2014 – Al-Baghdadi’s forces overrun the city of Fallujah in Iraq’s western Anbar province and parts of the nearby provincial capital of Ramadi. In Syria, they seize sole control of the city of Raqqa after driving out rival Syrian rebel factions, and it becomes their de facto capital.
February 2014 – Al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahri disavows al-Baghdadi after the Iraqi militant ignores his demands that IS leave Syria.
June 2014 – IS captures Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, and pushes south as Iraqi forces crumble, eventually capturing Saddam Hussein’s hometown of Tikrit and reaching the outskirts of Baghdad. When they threaten Shiite holy sites, Iraq’s top Shiite cleric issues a call to arms, and masses of volunteers, largely backed and armed by Iran, join militias.
June 29, 2014 – The group renames itself the Islamic State and declares the establishment of a self-styled ‘caliphate’ in its territories in Iraq and Syria. Al-Baghdadi is declared the caliph.
July 4, 2014 – Al-Baghdadi makes his first public appearance, delivering a Friday sermon in Mosul’s historic al-Nuri Mosque. He urges Muslims around the world to swear allegiance to the caliphate and obey him as its leader.
August 2014 – IS captures the town of Sinjar west of Mosul and begins a systematic slaughter of the tiny Yazidi religious community. Women and girls are kidnapped as sex slaves; hundreds remain missing to this day.
August 8, 2014 – The U.S. launches its campaign of airstrikes against IS in Iraq.
September 22, 2014 – The U.S.-led coalition begins an aerial campaign against IS in Syria.
January, 2015 – Iraqi Kurdish fighters, backed by U.S.-led airstrikes, drive IS out of several towns north of Mosul. In Syria, Kurdish fighters backed by U.S. airstrikes repel an IS onslaught on the town of Kobani on the border with Turkey, the first significant defeat for IS.
April 1, 2015 – U.S.-backed Iraqi forces retake Tikrit, their first major victory against IS.
May 20, 2015 – IS captures the ancient Syrian town of Palmyra, where the extremists later destroy archaeological treasures.
February 9, 2016 – Iraqi forces recapture Ramadi after months of fighting and at enormous cost, with thousands of buildings destroyed. Almost the entire population fled the city.
June 26, 2016 – Fallujah is declared liberated by Iraqi forces after a five-week battle.
July 3, 2016 – IS sets off a gigantic suicide truck bomb outside a Baghdad shopping mall, killing almost 300 people, the deadliest attack in Iraq since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion.
October 17, 2016 – Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi announces the start of the operation to liberate Mosul.
Iraqi Army soldiers celebrate as they hold an IS flag, which they captured during a raid on a village outside Mosul in November 2016
November 5, 2016 – The U.S.-backed, Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces launch Operation Euphrates Wrath, the first of five operations aiming to retake Raqqa, starting with an encircling of the city.
January 24, 2017 – Al-Abadi announces eastern Mosul has been ‘fully liberated’.
May 10, 2017 – SDF captures the strategic Tabqa dam after weeks of battles and a major airlift operation that brought SDF fighters and their U.S. advisers to the area. The fall of the dam facilitated the push on Raqqa, about 25 miles away.
June 6, 2017 – SDF fighters begin an attack on Raqqa from three sides, backed by U.S.-led coalition airstrikes.
June 18, 2017 – Iraqi forces launch battle for Mosul’s Old City, the last IS stronghold there.
June 21, 2017 – IS destroys Mosul’s iconic al-Nuri Mosque and its 12th century leaning minaret as Iraqi forces close in.
July 10, 2017 – Iraqi PM declares victory over IS in Mosul and end of the extremists’ caliphate in Iraq.
October 17, 2017 – SDF takes full control of Raqqa after months of heavy bombardment that devastates the city.
September – December, 2017 – Syrian government forces, backed by Russian air power and Iranian forces, recapture IS territory on the western bank of the Euphrates River, seizing the cities of Deir el-Zour, Mayadin and Boukamal on the border with Iraq.
Isis lost its hold over Mosul in July 2017 but the city suffered severe bombing
August 23, 2018 – IS leader al-Baghdadi resurfaces in his first purported audio recording in almost a year; he urges followers to ‘persevere’ and continue fighting.
September 10, 2018 – SDF launches a ground offensive, backed by U.S.-led coalition airstrikes, to take the last territory held by IS in Syria’s eastern province of Deir el-Zour.
March 23, 2019 – SDF declares the complete capture of Baghouz and the end of the Islamic State group’s territorial ‘caliphate’.
October 27, 2019 – President Donald Trump announced that al-Baghdadi was killed during a US. Special Ops forces raid on his hideout in northwest Syria. Trump said the ‘violent terror leader’ died after running into a dead-end tunnel, and detonating his suicide vest, killing himself and three of his children.
Story 2: Delusional Democrats Still Pushing Impeachment Despite No Evidence of High Crimes and Misdemeanors — Videos —
Varney: Dems still pushing impeachment despite al-Baghdadi triumph
Trump blasts Adam Schiff: ‘He’s a corrupt politician’
Trump calls impeachment inquiry a ‘lynching’
Story 3: Joe Biden The Marathon Man For President — Videos
JOE BIDEN LEAD IS FADING: Could Pete Buttigieg Win the 2020 Democratic Nomination?
Joe Biden slips in latest New Hampshire poll
Biden unconcerned about Warren’s rise
Behind Biden’s bounce back
Joe Biden in Danger of Humiliating Loss in Iowa, Top Democrats Warn
2020 Daily Trail Markers: Biden campaigns in Iowa as others rise in polling
Elizabeth Warren, Joe Biden In Statistical Dead Heat In Iowa: Poll | Morning Joe | MSNBC
Joe Biden Adds To Lead And Warren Surges In New NBC Poll Of 2020 Democrats | The 11th Hour | MSNBC
UPDATED DATA 10/28/2019
POLITICAL INTELLIGENCE
The State of the Democratic Primary
On a daily basis, Morning Consult is surveying over 5,000 registered voters across the United States on the 2020 presidential election. Every Monday, we’ll update this page with the latest survey data, offering an in-depth guide to how the race for the Democratic nomination is shaping up.
To receive an early look at this report, and other key 2020 data, sign up here.
Who’s Leading Now
The figures are broken out among Democratic primary voters nationwide and in early primary states, which includes just voters who live in Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina or Nevada. The latest results are based on 15,431 survey interviews conducted between Oct. 21-27, 2019.
Hover over or click each line to track how support for candidates has changed week to week.
Select Options
All
None Select Options
Andrew Yang
Amy Klobuchar
Bernie Sanders
Beto O’Rourke
Bill de Blasio
Cory Booker
Elizabeth Warren
Joe Biden
John Delaney
Julian Castro
Kamala Harris
Marianne Williamson
Michael Bennet
Pete Buttigieg
Steve Bullock
Tulsi Gabbard
Tom Steyer
Tim Ryan
AMONG DEMOCRATIC VOTERSJan-13-201917-Feb24-Mar28-Apr2-Jun7-Jul11-Aug15-Sep20-Oct0%10%20%30%40%
Second Choices: Where Voters Could Migrate
After voters registered their first choice, they were asked a follow-up about whom they would choose as a second option. The results below show where the supporters for a selection of leading candidates could go next. Hover over or click cards to see more.
BIDEN SUPPORTERS
Elizabeth Warren
U.S. Senator
BIDEN SUPPORTERS
Second Choice Selections
Elizabeth Warren
28%
Bernie Sanders
26%
Pete Buttigieg
9%
WARREN SUPPORTERS
Bernie Sanders
U.S. Senator
WARREN SUPPORTERS
Second Choice Selections
Bernie Sanders
28%
Joe Biden
25%
Pete Buttigieg
14%
SANDERS SUPPORTERS
Joe Biden
Former Vice President
SANDERS SUPPORTERS
Second Choice Selections
Joe Biden
30%
Elizabeth Warren
28%
Kamala Harris
6%
BUTTIGIEG SUPPORTERS
Elizabeth Warren
U.S. Senator
BUTTIGIEG SUPPORTERS
Second Choice Selections
Elizabeth Warren
28%
Joe Biden
20%
Bernie Sanders
11%
HARRIS SUPPORTERS
Elizabeth Warren
U.S. Senator
HARRIS SUPPORTERS
Second Choice Selections
Elizabeth Warren
25%
Joe Biden
22%
Bernie Sanders
14%
Tracking Name Recognition and Favorability
Respondents were asked whether they had a favorable impression of each of the following, and also had the option of saying they hadn’t heard of that person or had no opinion about them.
Favorable
Heard Of, No Opinion
Never Heard Of
Unfavorable
Bernie Sanders U.S. Senator
76%6%1%17%
Joe Biden Former Vice President
74%7%1%19%
Elizabeth Warren U.S. Senator
68%11%6%15%
Kamala Harris U.S. Senator
55%15%11%19%
Beto O’Rourke Former U.S. Representative
45%20%17%18%
Cory Booker U.S. Senator
47%19%18%16%
Julian Castro Former Secretary, HUD
34%27%19%19%
Pete Buttigieg Mayor
48%18%21%13%
Andrew Yang Business Person
40%23%23%14%
Amy Klobuchar U.S. Senator
34%23%27%16%
John Delaney Former U.S. Representative
18%37%31%14%
Tim Ryan U.S. Representative
21%32%31%16%
Tulsi Gabbard U.S. Representative
21%23%33%23%
Michael Bennet U.S. Senator
20%33%35%12%
Tom Steyer Business Person
26%24%36%14%
Marianne Williamson Activist & Author
17%24%37%22%
Steve Bullock Governor
18%32%39%12%
Methodology
About Morning Consult Political Intelligence
On a daily basis, Morning Consult surveys over 5,000 registered voters across the United States. Along with 2020 presidential election data, Political Intelligence tracks the approval ratings for all governors, senators, House members, the president, and more at the national, state and congressional district level.
Our Democratic primary results are reported using 15,431 interviews with registered voters who indicated they may vote in the Democratic primary or caucus in their state. For those who say don’t know or no opinion, they are asked to pick a candidate they are leaning toward. Results are reported among first choice and those who lean toward a candidate. The interviews were collected October 21-27, 2019, and have a margin of error of +/- 1%. The “Early Primary State Voters” demographic consists of 611 voters in Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, and South Carolina, and has a margin of error of +/- 4%.
In the case of a tie, candidates are ordered alphabetically by last name.
Vice President Joe Biden at a campaign rally in Philadelphia on May 18, 2019. Photo: Drew Angerer/Getty Images
Inevitably, he arrives late, by SUV or van. The former vice-president is thin and, yes, he’s old. He dresses neatly and always in blue. Staff envelop him. There’s the body man, the advance man, the videographer, the photographer, the digital director, the traveling chief of staff, the traveling press secretary, the local press secretary, the adviser, the other adviser, the adviser’s adviser, the surrogate, the other surrogate, and the bodyguard.
The looming presence of the last guy, Jim, is especially important for optics. Jim is tall and official-looking. He greets the world chest-first, his hands resting in a dignified clasp, his expression even, his mouth unmoving. Most people assume that he’s a Secret Service agent. Which he was.
But ex-VPs don’t get security for life the way ex-presidents do. Most people don’t know that, not even the politically savvy types who attend these sorts of things. And that’s all for the best, because Jim — or whatever local guy they’ve got filling in for him in Iowa or New Hampshire or Nevada or wherever else — is a necessary component of the vibe they’re trying to generate here, the Big Presidential Energy, if you will, that powers this production.
And it is a production. This is true even when the event is small, which it often is, because the stakes never are — Joe Biden speaking off the cuff is something the entire campaign seems focused on preventing at all costs. Inside the community center or union hall or college auditorium, the stage is crafted just so. The red and blue letters — each roughly the size of a 9-year-old — spell IOWA 4 BIDEN. The American flag is stretched taut and stapled to the plywood. The lawn sign is stapled to the lectern. The delicate panes of teleprompter glass angle to meet his hopeful gaze, so that he may absorb the programmed speech as he peers out at his audience, which usually skews quite old and white, unless he’s in South Carolina.
This first part — the reading of the speech — he almost always gets right. Even when he makes changes, rearranging the order of the words, skipping over a few, adding others, how could he not get it right? He’s been delivering some version of it for more than 40 years and living it for longer. He could deliver it in his sleep, if he ever sleeps. It’s like my father always said: Joey, a job is about more than just a paycheck. It’s about your dignity. It’s about being able to look your child in the eye and say, “It’s gonna be okay …” There is an undercurrent of shame that pulses throughout, this idea that the unequalness of our society is embarrassing for those who have access to less, rather than embarrassing for those who have more than anyone could need.
Folks … Not a joke! He’s always saying something rather solemn, about cancer or immigration, and then adding, “Not a joke!” as if anyone thought it might be. I’m being serious here … Come on … The bottom line is … I’m not kidding around … The fact of the matter is … Barack and me … Folks … Folks … Folks … folks … folks … folks … folks … folks … folks … folks … FOLKS … folks … FoLkS … fOlKs … F. O. L. K. S. …
And this next part — the greeting of the voters — he gets right, too. In this context, he possesses an almost mystical quality that, for whatever reason, does not come across when filtered through the kaleidoscope of newsprint or television. It’s the way he focuses his eyes, which are as blue as the seas, except for (yikes) that time the left eye filled with blood on CNN a few weeks back.
He is swarmed. Women reach out to him, linking their arms in his. He bows his head and lifts their hands to his mouth for a kiss and, later, when you ask them if that makes them uncomfortable, they look at you like you have three heads. This is the best day of their lives. Are you insane? There are men, too, who embrace him, wrapping their hands around his neck. He calls every male-presenting human he encounters “man.” I watched him call a baby “man.” As in, Hey! Howareya, man?! He is as skilled a selfie-taker as any influencer, and in the span of 30 or 40 minutes, he snaps hundreds, leaning his body against the rope that separates him from the crowd, straining it one, two, three feet forward. He really does connect with every living being this way, talking about their jobs or their health care as he listens, sometimes crying with them, whispering in their ears, taking their phone numbers and promising to call them. He does, in fact, do that. Everybody is Joe Biden’s long-lost friend. Every baby is Joe Biden’s long-lost child. A little girl in Iowa City called him her uncle Joe. On the Fourth of July in the town of Independence, he took off, running through the parade like a dingo with somebody’s newborn. As hard as it might be to believe that anything in this realm could not be bullshit, it’s simply true that this isn’t.
His own loss is staggering in its scale and cruelty: Neilia, his wife, and Naomi, his infant daughter, killed in a car crash. Beau, his oldest son, who survived that crash with his brother, Hunter, killed decades later by brain cancer. And it’s as though in that loss he’s gained access to an otherwise imperceptible wavelength on which he communicates in this way, with the eyes and the hands.
“I don’t know how to describe it, but sometimes some people would walk up with a lot of emotion in their face, and without even hearing their story, he could connect with them,” John Flynn, who served as Biden’s senior adviser in the White House, said. “He would know it was either one thing or another, and he would just know how to approach them and to get them to gently open up if they wanted to. And if they didn’t want to, he just said, ‘Hey, I’m with you, and I’m there for you. I feel your pain.’ ”
Chris Coons was an intern for Biden in the Senate and is now a United States senator from Delaware himself. He told me about Loretta Wootten, a former colleague who in January went into a coma after a car crash that killed her husband. “I went to visit Loretta when she regained consciousness, and she looks at me, and she says, ‘Does Joe know I’m here?’ That’s her first sentence. I said, ‘I don’t know. I mean, he’s running for president.’ And, she says, ‘I just would love to hear from him.’ The next time I see him, I say, ‘Do you remember Loretta Wootten?’ and he smiles and he says, ‘Of course.’ I said, ‘Well, Loretta’s husband was just killed in a car accident, and she’s in recovery.’ And he gets this look, and he turned to someone and said, ‘Get me a piece of paper.’ And he writes out this page-long, heartfelt message to her, hands it to me, and says, ‘Please get this to her.’ When I delivered that to her, she wept with joy.”
I have witnessed this kind of connection at nearly all of the countless events I’ve attended in a half-dozen states in the six months since Biden announced his campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination. If he ever does sleep, surely Joe Biden dreams as he proselytizes, of an unbroken America, its ideals and reputation restored, where everybody is folks and folks have everything they need and maybe some of what they want, where the field is just even enough that nobody is ashamed of their own place on it, and where the president isn’t an idiot but where you can easily deal with the idiots by kicking the shit out of them out back in a parking lot or something. Crucially, in this dream, Joe Biden is the president.
A campaign event in New Hampshire in October. Photo: M. Scott Brauer
The pitch goes like this: Joe Biden ought to be the nominee because he’s electable, a meaningless concept if recent history is any guide, and presidential, that wonderful word — the thing Donald Trump could never be even though he literally is president — despite the fact that Biden, who appears by almost any measure to be a good man, a man whose lone sin in life is ego (and does that even count anymore?), has spent a half-century grasping for this position and watching it slip through his fingers.
To anyone paying attention — the army of political professionals more wired to observe shortcomings than are those likely to actually vote for him or for anyone else — it looks, unmistakably, like it’s happening again. His vulnerabilities are close to the surface. There’s the basic fact of his oldness and the concerns, explicit or implicit, about his ability to stay agile and alive for four more years. This was true of Biden, who is 76, even more than it was true of Bernie Sanders, who is the oldest candidate at 78, up until Sanders had a heart attack while campaigning in Nevada earlier this month. (It’s not true at all of Elizabeth Warren, who is 70 but seems a decade younger. And it’s not exactly true of Trump, who is 73 and really just seems crazy, not old.)
But it’s not just his age itself. It’s his tendency to misspeak, his inartful debating style, and — most of all — his status as a creature from another time in the Democratic Party, when the politics of race and crime and gender were unrecognizably different. It’s not just that the Joe Biden of yesteryear sometimes peeks out from behind the No. 1 Obama Stan costume. It’s that the Joe Biden of today is expected to hold his former self accountable to the new standards set by a culture that’s prepared to reject him. And though he’s the party Establishment’s obvious exemplar, he can’t seem to raise any money — spending more in the last quarter than he brought in and moving into the homestretch with less than $9 million in the bank (roughly a third of what Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders has on hand). For political reporters, marveling every day at just how well this isn’t going, watching Biden can feel like being at the rodeo. You’re there because on some level you know you might see someone get killed.
Yet Biden is still the front-runner. Volatile and potentially worthless as they may be, it’s what the polls say. Biden leads the field on average by a handful of percentage points, though his lead has trended steadily downward, from a high of 33 in May to 20 in June to 11, and then to 9.9, and 6.6, and 5.4, according to RealClearPolitics. In the whole campaign, there has only been one day — October 8 — when he slipped to second place, an average of 0.2 points behind Warren. He’s also the front-runner in South Carolina, Nevada, California, Texas, North Carolina, and Florida. “There is this sense of hanging on. And perhaps he can. But that’s generally not the way the physics of these things work,” former Obama adviser David Axelrod told me. “Generally, you’re either moving up or moving down. Warren is clearly moving up. There’s no sign that he is.”
Biden is aware that it’s not going well. But it’s not apparent that he knows how to fix it. Recently, according to his staff, his anxieties have manifested more visibly. If he begins to question something small, he spirals, eventually questioning everything. Should he be saying this in his speech? Wait, should he be giving this speech at all? Should he even be focusing on this group? Is this even the right position? He freaks out over minor stuff on the trail that staffers don’t believe he should be concerning himself with and yet is unable to make strategic adjustments. But the staff concern themselves with unimportant matters, too, running what they think is a general-election campaign when they need to be running a primary. Inside the campaign, the Biden brain trust seems to exist more to comfort the candidate than to compel him, and strategy meetings inevitably devolve into meandering, ruminative roundtables that feel purposeless except to fill time in the day. Nobody will tell the candidate in plain terms what they think he needs to change. Not that Biden really listens anyway.
Some on the campaign still believe he can win, in part because they believe he should win. But even to them, the path to a collapse seems clear: Biden loses in Iowa and New Hampshire, where his leads have been steadily declining for months and where, recently, Elizabeth Warren has overtaken him, and then, as a result, loses his sheer aura of electability, too. But inside the campaign, they reportedly see another path, though it might not seem, at first, an optimistic one: Okay, so he loses Iowa and then New Hampshire, but so what? Because he is who he is and represents what he represents — the embodiment of both the white-working-class model of the electorate and the glow of the Obama years — he can weather the losses and march to victory through Super Tuesday and beyond. “Their theory is a long, twilight struggle where they accumulate delegates everywhere as minority voters start playing a larger role,” Axelrod said. “But in reality, it’s tough to be a winner when you keep losing or at least appear to be.”
Biden would obviously like you to think about his age as experience, but another way of thinking about experience is as a record. He’s got a long one. When he was elected to the Senate, Pete Buttigieg was still a decade away from birth. There’s a lot of material, then, for Biden’s critics to work with. All sorts of stuff that doesn’t age well, or doesn’t quite compute, in this season of absolutism: Anita Hill and allegations that he violated the personal space of several women, controversy over his crusade against busing as a desegregation measure and his eagerness to work with segregationist lawmakers. Last week, after Biden attacked Trump for calling his impeachment a “lynching,” video emerged of Biden calling Bill Clinton’s impeachment the same thing. If it was relevant to American political life at any point since Richard Nixon was president, Biden probably said something about it, but it’s new to many younger voters and activists and talking heads now.
Many of them treat Biden’s talking as yet another symptom of his age, but Biden has always been like this. “His major defect is that he goes on and on and on,” Orrin Hatch told the Washington Post in 1986, when Biden was 43. To say he overcame his childhood stutter would be a bad joke, like one of those I BEAT ANOREXIA T-shirts they sell on the Jersey boardwalk in size XXXL.
In Des Moines, in August, he told a crowd, “Poor kids are just as bright and just as talented as white kids.” Realizing what he’d done, he tried to correct himself. “Wealthy kids,” he said, “black kids, Asian kids. No, I really mean it, but think how we think about it.” Two weeks later, in Keene, New Hampshire, he said, “I love this place. Look, what’s not to like about Vermont in terms of the beauty of it? And what a neat town. This is sort of a scenic, beautiful town.” (When he returned to New Hampshire the following month, a protester held a sign that read WELCOME TO VERMONT, JOE.) And so on.
Biden is cocooned by family, longtime advisers, and former White House staff. His wife Jill, Val, Mike Donilon, Ted Kaufman, Bruce Reed, Annie Tomasini, Tony Blinken, Steve Ricchetti, Ron Klain. But beyond that small circle, veterans are harder to find on his campaign. Biden is chronically slow to make decisions, and his late entry into the race, which came months after many of his competitors, was an additional challenge to staffing the campaign. Many working at Biden headquarters in Philadelphia have no experience on a presidential campaign, and some have never worked on any campaign at all; even those closest to the candidate address him, deferentially, as “sir.”
“Some of these folks who have never worked on a presidential before are like, ‘Okay, I’m working for the former vice-president!’ They don’t really feel like it’s slipping,” one senior campaign adviser told me. “There’s such reverence for getting to work for the vice-president that I think, for some of those folks, there’s a mentality of How could we possibly lose? He’s who he is. I don’t think they see that that’s not all it’s gonna take.” (Yes, even Biden’s staff say “folks” the way others say “like” or “um.”)
For many of these staffers, the campaign feels like it should be a coronation. Joe Biden 2020 isn’t a labor of love or ideology. It’s about the proper order of things. It’s about who’s entitled to what. It’s the vehicle by which the Democratic Party Establishment arrives once more to power, the displaced Obama and Clinton professionals reinstalled at the levers. If the Republic is spared in the process — which everybody genuinely wants, sure! — that’s a plus. And it’s great branding. When it comes to the enthusiasm voters wear on their sleeves for Warren or Sanders, the Biden campaign strikes a cool, dismissive pose, as if it could be believed that a candidate for president weren’t preoccupied with such metrics.
The activist wing of the party is a lost cause to Biden just as he’s a lost cause to them. When they show up at his speeches to confront him or protest in support of the Green New Deal, something I’ve witnessed twice in New Hampshire, he attempts to formulate what he surely believes is a respectful response, and yet they don’t think it’s enough, because nothing that he says could be enough because of who he is. Can you blame anyone under the age of 30 for their cynicism, for their hostility?
“Internally, there was always this idea that there would be some point when he wasn’t No. 1,” one senior campaign adviser swears. “To some extent, people were prepped for that. There isn’t a culture inside the campaign right now like, This is a done deal and we’ve lost. The culture is, This is getting real. People are still reacting to that. The question is: Does this now change our strategy and our culture? That’s where we are right now, figuring out what this new stature means.”
Where they are, if you’re keeping track, is slumped. And it’s a strange dynamic — the most qualified candidate in the race, surrounded by entitled staff who don’t understand that they have to fight for the nomination, or even the presidency, but without a real case to make beyond a Democratic succession that would amount to an Obama restoration. “He has no center,” as one person close to the Biden family put it. “He’s literally only a politician. That’s who he is. That’s all he is. Biden is fundamentally a toadie. He’s just political. He needs to kiss ass? He’ll kiss ass.”
“They have him in the candidate-protection program,” Axelrod says. “I don’t know if you can do that. I don’t know if you can get through a whole campaign that way. Either he can hack it or he can’t hack it. If you’re worried the candidate can hurt himself talking to a reporter, that’s a bad sign.” (Biden declined to be interviewed for this story.)
For his part, Biden is consumed with his endorsements, another sign of his perhaps outdated political instincts; getting insiders to declare their support meant something when powerful political machines controlled the primary process, but it has much less relevance to presidential politics today. And the only endorsement that could matter hasn’t materialized. President Barack Obama has remained silent on the 2020 primary even as he saw it fit to involve himself in Canadian affairs, endorsing Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. A senior White House official, reflecting on Biden’s weakness, told me Biden should have never even entered the race without knowing he’d have the former president’s support.
Of course, that was always less of a sure thing than it might have seemed. In 2016, Obama went all-in for Hillary, even as his vice-president contemplated a run. In the early stages of this race, he didn’t just avoid aligning himself with Biden but gestured toward other candidates, including unlikely contender Deval Patrick, the former governor of Massachusetts, possibly to discourage his former veep from running.
And then there’s Hunter Biden himself, who was going to become an issue one way or another. The 49-year-old son of privilege and tragedy, he has had struggles with addiction and run-ins with the law that have been well-documented. The campaign did its best to control the subject, cooperating with a tell-all interview over the summer in which Hunter candidly discussed his drug use and his relationship with his brother’s widow. This is sometimes how flacks think they’ll get ahead of a story: You neuter the shock value by delivering the shock yourself. But when your son is a central character in an impeachment saga likely to preoccupy all of Washington and political news for six months, it’s a hard thing to get ahead of, especially when you don’t really seem to want to engage.
“It’s sort of bewildering,” Axelrod says. “I guess I understand it from a familial, psychological sense. It would just be so much better if he stated the obvious: Even Hunter has said he exercised poor judgment. He won’t even say what his kid said. It’s an obvious question as to why the rules that he’s going to apply in the future didn’t apply in the past. All this was foreseeable … You can’t say, ‘He did nothing wrong,’ and, ‘He’ll never do it again.’ Those things don’t go together. Biden can be stubborn. I think his stubbornness is showing here.” All of that said, Axelrod added, “what Trump is doing is loathsome and outrageous because there’s no evidence that Biden did anything wrong or that Hunter did anything wrong.”
In a certain sense, impeachment creates for Biden what he wanted all along: a direct competition with Trump. Looked at it one way, it’s a story about how the president of the United States was so worried about his formidable opponent that he risked his entire presidency, and even broke the law, to try to stop him. But in other ways, it’s exactly what Biden hoped to avoid: a focus on his most troubled child, the last remaining member of his first family, and the privilege his political and celebrity status affords. Even if he didn’t do anything “wrong,” Trump is right that there’s a swamp, though he doesn’t realize he’s its ugliest creature, and impeachment is a daily reminder that Biden swims there, too. Who could withstand an entire year of character assassination by the president, who is aided by a political media that projects his every statement to the world?
Photo: Mark Peterson/Redux/Mark Peterson/Redux
At the Iowa State Fair in August, as candidates took to the stage to deliver their stump speeches and answer questions from the Des Moines Register, I stood off to the side with a few members of the press. We craned our necks downward to squint at a zoomed-in photo of the side of Joe Biden’s head. There, just behind the ear, is where you can supposedly observe the scar from a face-lift, one of many cosmetic procedures Biden is rumored to have had.
The dramatic change to Biden’s appearance is a matter of preoccupation for Biden-watchers. In the timeline of images from throughout his career, you can observe as he grows older and then younger and then older but somehow more elegant and alert. His hair is white now but thicker than it was in the 1980s. He’s thinner, but his cheeks are fuller than they were in 2008. To be honest with you, he looks good. He’s almost 77!
This is also a minor obsession of the White House, as you can probably imagine. Privately, Trump has marveled at the “work” Biden has had done and the fact that, in his opinion, he doesn’t look any better for it. Those who know him say the president is against plastic surgery (by which I assume they don’t mean breast implants) and, especially, bad plastic surgery, and he considers it an all-too-common tragedy when someone has their face inexpertly altered.
A senior White House official who regularly discusses the campaign with Trump was describing how his view of Biden has evolved since the winter. It was then, before Biden declared, that the campaign began conducting polling and sharing the results with Trump himself. The internal numbers were as bad as the external. Biden destroyed Trump. The president’s anxieties only grew as Biden became a more popular topic on cable news. “It was easy to get caught up,” this official said. “The president saw that it’s easier to picture Joe Biden up on the debate stage than some of the others.”
Over time, as Biden formally waded into the race, and the president saw the reality of the candidate as opposed to the idea of Vice-President Joe Biden, he grew less concerned, according to the senior White House official. Biden was no longer “the guy he was worried about.” And one of the reasons was, in Trumpian fashion, “his look.” Though the official adds a few more items to the list as well: “His cadence. His inability to speak. His small crowds.”
Trump has also commented on Biden’s wardrobe choices, wondering why he’d wear Ralph Lauren polo shirts on the campaign trail that show off his graying chest hair and skinny arms. (Trump himself wears polo shirts almost exclusively while golfing).
Inside the White House and the reelection campaign, the true believers know how to decode Trump’s bitchy nicknames for his competitors. As iconic as “Crooked Hillary” and “Lyin’ Ted” may be, his crowning achievement remains “Low Energy,” his characterization of Jeb Bush. “Sleepy Joe” is considered Trump’s attempt at a 2020 remake of “Low Energy,” and it’s all about emphasizing Biden’s age.
In September, somebody had the bright idea to stage an afternoon event under the open sky at the Indian Creek Nature Center in sunny Cedar Rapids. It was the day after news of the whistle-blower broke, but Biden stuck to the event’s topic, climate change, addressing all the usual themes. Then faces began turning upward to the birds overhead. Somebody from Showtime’s The Circus told me the birds were bald eagles, but at the time I thought they looked like hawks, which, I guess, is a sort of glass-half-empty or -half-full dilemma. Eventually, word of the alleged bald eagles made its way to Biden, and with a look of optimism, he turned his face to the sky. He grew emotional. He said that at the Lake House, Beau used to sit by the water and watch the bald eagles fly overhead. The night Beau died, in 2015, Biden said he watched an eagle take off from the lake, circle in the sky, and then fly away. He hadn’t seen another bald eagle since that night, he said, until now. Looking at the bird, he said, “Maybe that’s my Beau.”
Biden wrote a book about his grief, and about his son, called Promise Me, Dad. Therein, he tells a similar story, but with a different bird. That night, he wrote, “Jill spotted a white egret at the far edge of the water.” She told her husband that, as he lay dying, she whispered to Beau to go to the dock, “his happy place,” with his brother. “We watched the egret for twenty minutes, until it finally took flight,” Biden wrote. “The two of us sat in silence as the egret circled overhead repeatedly, slowly gaining altitude, until it finally headed away to the south, beneath the clouds, and gradually disappeared from sight. ‘It’s a sign from God,’ Jill said. ‘Beau being at the lake one last time, and heading for heaven.’ ”
Anne Kearns is an 84-year-old grandmother of 16 and retired professor. For 58 years, she has lived in the modest blue house with black shutters on North Washington Avenue in Scranton, Pennsylvania, where Joe Biden lived during the first decade of his life.
“He calls this ‘the Homestead,’ ” she told me last Sunday. We were sitting in the living room, surrounded by framed photos of her large family and one photo of Biden, propped up on the TV stand. For most of his career, Biden was among the least-wealthy members of Congress, an attractive bullet point that he continues to note even after amassing a fortune in his post–White House life. He often claims that “they” call him “Middle-Class Joe.” (As far as I can tell, he is the only person who calls himself this.) But he’s always had a weakness for grand old houses, even before he could really afford them, and an odd habit of referring to his properties by nicknames: North Star (for the Delaware village in which it was located), the Station (his once-bustling home in Wilmington), and the Lake House (self-explanatory). What does Anne call the Homestead in which she lives? “Well, nothing,” she said, laughing.
You could tell the story of Biden’s astonishingly long political career through Anne and through this house.
She first learned there was an interesting man who had once lived here in 1972, when she saw Biden’s ads on TV. At the time, he was running for the U.S. Senate against Cale Boggs, a powerful Republican who had won seven consecutive elections in Delaware, climbing from Congress to the governor’s mansion and ultimately to the Senate. Boggs was 63, and Biden, who at 29 wouldn’t even be eligible to serve in the office he was seeking until two weeks after Election Day, used his seniority against him. “We need some new thinking,” read one of Biden’s advertisements. “He understands what’s happening today,” read another. “My husband said to me — he watched him all the time on TV — and he’d say, ‘Ah, he’s going to be something someday,’ ” Anne said.
In 1988, when Biden was running for president the first time, reporters and authors began knocking on Anne’s door. A boy who lived down the street brought her a signed photo Biden had addressed to her, thanking her for her cooperation in this strange endeavor.
By her count, Biden himself has visited the Homestead six times over the years, once privately with his late mother, who refused to get out of the car despite Anne assuring her that the visit was not a disturbance, and other trips with the media and even Hillary Clinton.
“He came another time with Terry Moran from Nightline, and they walked across the street. At that time, I had a leg done, and so my niece was sitting where you are” — she gestured to my chair — “and she said, ‘I think that’s Joe Biden coming.’ I thought, No, he was here two weeks ago. My nephew stood up, and he said, ‘Anne, it is Joe Biden.’ They had left a message on my phone and I didn’t hear it.”
In 2008, the Obama-Biden campaign staged a formal event here with 400 people plus Secret Service sweeping through and rows of seating set up next door for reporters. Biden went upstairs to his old bedroom and signed the wall. Anne keeps photos from that day in an album underneath the television, and in them, Biden can be seen writing in black Sharpie, I AM HOME — JOE BIDEN 9 * 1 * 08. By then, Biden had served in the Senate for 25 years and run for president twice — once disastrously, ending in a plagiarism scandal, and once unremarkably, ending in a vice-presidential campaign.
The whole neighborhood, Anne said, took pride in him, supported him. Even the old lady across the street, whose sons told her she wasn’t allowed to speak to reporters or let them into the house anymore, still loves Joe Biden.
Age isn’t just a weakness for Biden. There are a lot of old people in America, and many of them really like the former vice-president. They don’t see a doddering, out-of-touch, exhausted man, as the 20- and 30- and 40-somethings who cover the campaign and dominate social media do. They look at him and see, well, a statesman from the popular recent administration who has moved to the left as the party has, if not quite as much as his younger rivals. These are the people that really vote in elections, and, to them, that all seems pretty good. “I worry when I read that he is even with somebody. I just read a piece this morning that he’s even with the Warren lady,” Anne said.
“I really think he’d be wonderful in getting us back with the people that are overseas. I think he’s wonderful dealing with people. I would definitely support him. I think he knows what’s going on with all those people … He’s a wonderful man. He really is wonderful, and he cares about people.”
A few days after I left the Homestead, Biden gave a speech at the Scranton Cultural Center. At the last minute, he decided to make an unplanned stop on North Washington Avenue. As photographers snapped away from the sidewalk, Anne answered the door. Biden wrapped her in a hug.
WASHINGTON (CNN) Former Vice President Joe Biden’s lead in the race for the Democratic nomination for president has rebounded, and now stands at its widest margin since April, according to a new CNN poll conducted by SSRS.
Biden has the support of 34% of Democratic and Democratic-leaning registered voters, his best showing in CNN polling since just after his campaign’s formal launch on April 25.
Sens. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Bernie Sanders of Vermont are about even for second, with 19% and 16%, respectively. Behind them, South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg and Sen. Kamala Harris of California each have 6% support, with Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and former Texas Congressman Beto O’Rourke each at 3%.
Biden’s rise comes largely from a consolidation of support among his core backers, and doesn’t appear to harm any individual opponent. Warren and Sanders hold about even with their standing in the last CNN poll in September, and no other candidate has seen a shift of more than 2 points in that time.
But Biden has seen big spikes in support among moderate and conservative Democrats (43% support him now, up from 29% in the September poll), racial and ethnic minorities (from 28% among all nonwhites in September to 42% now) and older voters (up 13 points since September among those 45 and older) that outpace those among younger potential Democratic voters (up 5 points among those younger than 45).
The gains come as Biden’s time as vice president is put under the spotlight by President Donald Trump and his allies. Trump is facing an impeachment inquiry by the House of Representatives over allegations that he pressured the Ukrainian government to investigate Biden and his son, Hunter Biden, as well as the 2016 US election in return for releasing hundreds of millions in congressionally mandated defense funding meant for Ukraine. Hunter Biden was on the board of a Ukrainian natural gas company while Biden was vice president. There is no evidence that either Biden did anything wrong in Ukraine.
The poll suggests that although Biden’s October debate performance did not blow away the audience (15% who watched or followed news about it said he had done the best job in the debate, well behind Warren’s 28% — but better than most on the stage), the arguments he made on health care, foreign policy and the economy may have boosted his standing with the potential Democratic electorate.
Asked which candidate would best handle a range of top issues, Biden leads the way on four of the six issues tested in the poll. He holds a massive edge over the field on foreign policy (56% say he would handle it best, well ahead of Sanders at 13% and Warren at 11%), and tops the next closest candidate by nearly 20 points on the economy (38% Biden, 19% Sanders, 16% Warren). Biden also outpaces the rest of the field as most trusted on immigration (29% Biden, 16% each Warren and Sanders) and gun policy (27% vs. 13% Sanders and 11% Warren, with O’Rourke close at 9%).
Biden doesn’t hold a significant edge on the critical issue of health care (31% Biden, 28% Sanders, 17% Warren) but he’s surged 13 points on the issue since June, when he lagged behind Sanders. Neither Sanders’ nor Warren’s numbers on the issue have moved significantly in that time.
And Biden now runs even with Sanders at 26% as best able to handle the climate crisis. Warren is at 18% on that issue. The results mark increases for Biden and Sanders, who were each at 19% on handling the climate in June.
The former vice president’s advantages on the issues come as he emphasizes an approach that appears to align with the preferences of most potential Democratic voters. A 53% majority say they want the nominee to advocate policies that have a good chance of becoming law, even if the changes aren’t as big, vs. 42% who prefer advocating big changes even if they have less of a chance of becoming law.
Among those voters who prefer an approach that prioritizes policies with a better chance of becoming law, 38% support Biden for the Democratic nomination, 17% Warren and just 8% Sanders. On the other side, it’s nearly a three-way split, with 27% behind Biden, 24% Sanders and 21% Warren.
About 1 in 5 potential Democratic voters say they watched last week’s debate among 12 Democratic candidates, and those who watched it came away with a different assessment than those who mainly followed news about the debate. Overall, among everyone who either watched or followed news coverage on the debate, 28% say Warren had the best night, 15% Biden, 13% Sanders, 11% Buttigieg, 4% Klobuchar and 2% Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey, with the rest at 1% or less. Among those who say they watched it, though, Warren remains on top at 29%, but 21% say Buttigieg had the best night, then 13% Biden, 11% Sanders, 10% Klobuchar and 4% Booker, with everyone else at 1% or less
And those who watched the debate seem to have more favorable views of the lesser-known candidates who were seen as having good nights than do those who followed coverage. Among debate watchers, 74% have a favorable view of Buttigieg, vs. 54% among those who followed news instead. Booker’s favorability rating is 80% among those who watched, vs. 55% among those who followed coverage, and Klobuchar’s favorability stands at 56% among watchers vs. 36% among those who followed news.
Warren tops the list of candidates who potential Democratic voters say they want to hear more about: 31% name her, 24% Buttigieg, 23% Harris, 18% Booker, 17% Sanders, 16% Biden, 13% Klobuchar, 11% O’Rourke and 10% businessman Andrew Yang.
Majorities of potential Democratic voters say they would at least be satisfied with any of the top three becoming the party’s nominee, with about 4 in 10 saying they’d be enthusiastic about Biden (43%), Warren (41%) or Sanders (39%). Fewer would feel as excited should Buttigieg become the party’s nominee (27% enthusiastic).
Registered voters generally give Biden, Warren, Sanders and Buttigieg large advantages over President Donald Trump in hypothetical general election matchups. Biden leads the President by 10 points, 53% to 43%, with Sanders up 9 (52% to 43%) and Warren up 8 (52% to 44%). Buttigieg holds a 6-point edge, 50% to 44%.
The CNN Poll was conducted by SSRS from October 17 through 20 among a random national sample of 1,003 adults reached on landlines or cellphones by a live interviewer, including 424 registered voters who are Democrats or Democratic-leaning independents. Results for the full sample have a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3.7 percentage points. For results among potential Democratic voters, it is plus or minus 5.8 points.
OVERVIEW The study was conducted for CNN via telephone by SSRS, an independent research company. Interviews were conducted from October 17-20, 2019 among a sample of 1,003 respondents. The landline total respondents were 352 and there were 651 cell phone respondents. The margin of sampling error for total respondents is +/- 3.7 at the 95% confidence level. The design effect is 1.47.More information about SSRS can be obtained by visiting http://www.ssrs.com. Question text noted in parentheses was rotated or randomized. Unless otherwise noted, results
beginning with the March 31-April 2, 2006 survey and ending with the April 22-25, 2017 survey are from surveys
conducted by ORC International. Results before March 31, 2006 are from surveys conducted by Gallup.
NOTE ABOUT CROSSTABS
Interviews were conducted among a representative sample of the adult population, age 18 or older, of the United
States. Members of demographic groups not shown in the published crosstabs are represented in the results for
each question in the poll. Crosstabs on the pages that follow only include results for subgroups with a minimum
n=125 unweighted cases. Results for subgroups with fewer than n=125 unweighted cases are not displayed and
instead are denoted with “SN” because samples of that size carry larger margins of sampling error and can be too
small to be projectable with confidence to their true values in the population.
1,885 of 3,769[a] pledged delegate votes needed to win the presidential nomination at the convention‘s first ballot.[1]
(2,268 of all 4,535[b] delegate votes needed to win any subsequent ballots at a contested convention)[1]
Independently of the result of primaries and caucuses, the Democratic Party will—from its group of party leaders and elected officials—also appoint 765[b] unpledged delegates (superdelegates) to participate in its national convention. In contrast to all previous election cycles, superdelegates will no longer have the right to cast decisive votes at the convention’s first ballot for the presidential nomination (limiting their voting rights to either non-decisive votes on the first ballot or decisive votes for subsequent ballots on a contested convention).[2][3][4]
The field of major Democratic presidential candidates in the 2020 election peaked at more than two dozen. As of October 24, 2019, 18 major candidates are seeking the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020. The October 15, 2019 Democratic presidential debate in Westerville, Ohio featured 12 candidates, setting a record for the highest number of candidates in one presidential debate.
After Hillary Clinton‘s loss in the previous election, many felt the Democratic Party lacked a clear leader.[5] There remained divisions in the party following the 2016 primaries which pitted Clinton against Bernie Sanders.[6][7] Between the 2016 election and the 2018 midterm elections, Senate Democrats have generally shifted to the political left in relation to college tuition, healthcare, and immigration.[8][9] The 2018 elections saw the Democratic Party regain the House of Representatives for the first time in eight years, picking up seats in both urban and suburban districts.[10][11]
The 2020 field of Democratic presidential candidates peaked at more than two dozen candidates. According to Politifact, this field is believed to be the largest field of presidential candidates for any American political party since 1972;[c] it exceeds the field of 17 major candidates that sought the Republican presidential nomination in 2016.[14] In May 2019, CBS News referred to the field of 2020 Democratic presidential candidates as “the largest and most diverse Democratic primary field in modern history”.[15] As of October 24, 2019, 18 major candidates are seeking the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020.[16] The October 15, 2019 Democratic presidential debate in Westerville, Ohio featured 12 candidates, setting a record for the highest number of candidates in one presidential debate.[17][18]
On August 25, 2018, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) members passed reforms to the Democratic Party’s primary process in order to increase participation[19] and ensure transparency.[20] State parties are encouraged to use a government-run primary whenever available and increase the accessibility of their primary through same-day or automatic registration and same-day party switching. Caucuses are required to have absentee voting, or to otherwise allow those who cannot participate in person to be included.[19]
The new reforms also regulate how the Democratic National Convention shall handle the outcome of primaries and caucuses for three potential scenarios:[2][4]
If a single candidate wins at least 2,268 pledged delegates: Superdelegates will be allowed to vote at first ballot, as their influence can not overturn the majority of pledged delegates.
If a single candidate wins 1,886–2,267 pledged delegates: Superdelegates will be barred from voting at first ballot, which solely will be decided by the will of pledged delegates.
If no candidate wins more than 1,885 pledged delegates: This will result in a contested convention, where superdelegates are barred from voting at the first formal ballot, but regain their right to vote for their preferred presidential nominee for all subsequent ballots needed until the delegates reach a majority.
The reforms mandate that superdelegates refrain from voting on the first presidential nominating ballot, unless a candidate via the outcome of primaries and caucuses already has gained enough votes (more than 50% of all delegate votes) among only the elected pledged delegates. The prohibition for superdelegates to vote at the first ballot for the last two mentioned scenarios, does not preclude superdelegates from publicly endorsing a candidate of their choosing before the convention.[4]
In a contested convention where no majority of minimum 1,886 pledged delegate votes is found for a single candidate in the first ballot, all superdelegates will then regain their right to vote on any subsequent ballot necessary in order for a presidential candidate to be nominated (raising the majority needed for such to 2,267 votes).[2][4]
More than 250 candidates who did not meet the above-referenced criteria to be deemed major candidates also filed with the Federal Election Commission to run for president in the Democratic Party primary.[27]
The following list of current candidates includes major candidates that have filed with the Federal Election Commission to run for president in the 2020 Democratic primary, have officially announced their respective candidacies, and have not withdrawn their candidacies. As of October 24, 2019, the total number of current candidates is 18.
Beside these major candidates, more than 250 other candidates who did not meet the above-referenced criteria to be deemed major candidates also filed with the Federal Election Commission to run for president in the Democratic Party primary.[65] Other notable candidates who have not suspended their respective campaigns include:
The persons listed in this section have, as of October 22, 2019, reportedly considered presidential bids within the past six months and would be major candidates.
In December 2018, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) announced the preliminary schedule for 12 official DNC-sanctioned debates, set to begin in June 2019, with six debates in 2019 and the remaining six during the first four months of 2020. Candidates are allowed to participate in forums featuring multiple other candidates as long as only one candidate appears on stage at a time; if candidates participate in any unsanctioned debate with other presidential candidates, they will lose their invitation to the next DNC-sanctioned debate.[192][193]
If any debates will be scheduled to take place with a location in the first four primary/caucus states (Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, and South Carolina), the DNC has decided such debates, at the earliest, will be held in 2020.[192] The DNC also announced that it would not partner with Fox News as a media sponsor for any debates.[194][195] Fox News had last held a Democratic debate in 2003.[196] All media sponsors selected to host a debate will as a new rule be required to appoint at least one female moderator for each debate, to ensure there will not be a gender skewed treatment of the candidates and debate topics.[197]
John Delaney was the first major candidate to announce his campaign, two and a half years before the 2020 Iowa caucus.
In the weeks following the election of Donald Trump in the 2016 election, media speculation regarding potential candidates for the 2020 Democratic Party presidential primaries began to circulate. As the Senate began confirmation hearings for members of the cabinet, speculation centered on the prospects of the “hell-no caucus”, six senators who went on to vote against the majority of Trump’s nominees. According to Politico, the members of the “hell-no caucus” were Cory Booker, Kamala Harris, Kirsten Gillibrand, Bernie Sanders, Jeff Merkley, and Elizabeth Warren.[218][219] Other speculation centered on then-Vice-PresidentJoe Biden making a third presidential bid following failed attempts in 1988 and 2008. Biden had previously served as U.S. senator from Delaware (1973–2009).[220]
Entrepreneur Andrew Yang was the second major Democratic candidate to announce his campaign.
In August 2018, Democratic Party officials and television networks began discussions as to the nature and scheduling of the following year’s debates and the nomination process.[223] Changes were made to the role of superdelegates, deciding to only allow them to vote on the first ballot if the nomination is uncontested.[224] The Democratic National Committee (DNC) announced the preliminary schedule for the 12 official DNC-sanctioned debates, set to begin in June 2019, with six debates in 2019 and the remaining six during the first four months of 2020.
August 8–11, August 13, and August 17, 2019: The Des Moines Register Political Soapbox was held at the Iowa State Fair, Des Moines, Iowa by the Des Moines Register.[297]
August 15: John Hickenlooper dropped out of the race, later announcing a campaign for Colorado’s Class 2United States Senate seat up for election in 2020.[298]
September 7: New Hampshire state convention: 19 candidates were in attendance and addressed the delegates.[302]
September 8: The Asian American Pacific Islanders Progressive Democratic Presidential Forum was held at Orange County, California by AAPI Victory Fund and by Asian Americans Rising.[303][304]
September 20: Bill de Blasio dropped out of the race.[103]
September 21: The Iowa People’s Presidential Forum was held in Des Moines, Iowa by Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement Action Fund and People’s Action.[308]
October
October 1: This was the deadline to qualify for the fourth Democratic debate.[309]
October 13: The New Hampshire People’s Presidential Forum was held at the University of New Hampshire in Durham, New Hampshire sponsored by Rights & Democracy, New Hampshire Youth Movement, and People’s Action.[308]
October 15: The fourth official debate took place in Otterbein University in Westerville, Ohio,[313][314] aired on CNN. The debate featured 12 candidates, setting a record for the highest number of candidates in one presidential debate.[315][316]
October 26: The People’s Presidential Forum was held in East Las Vegas Community Center, Las Vegas, Nevada by the Progressive Leadership Alliance of Nevada Action and People’s Action.[308]
November
November 13: This is the deadline to qualify for the fifth Democratic debate.[319]
Democratic primary and caucus calendar by currently scheduled date
February
March 3 (Super Tuesday)
March 10
March 17
March 24
April 4–7
April 28
May
June
No scheduled 2020 date
The following primary and caucus dates have been scheduled by state statutes or state party decisions, but are subject to change pending legislation, state party delegate selection plans, or the decisions of state secretaries of state:[324]
The 57 states, districts, territories, or other constituencies with elections of pledged delegates to decide the Democratic presidential nominee, currently plan to hold the first major determining step for these elections via 50 primaries[l] and seven caucuses (Iowa, Nevada, Wyoming, and four territories).[324] The number of states holding caucuses decreased from 14 in the 2016 nomination process to only three in 2020.[330][331]
In addition to Milwaukee, the DNC also considered bids from three other cities: Houston, Texas;[335]Miami Beach, Florida;[336] and Denver, Colorado. Denver, though, was immediately withdrawn from consideration by representatives for the city, who cited scheduling conflicts.[337]
This is an overview of the money being raised and spent by each campaign for the entire period running from January 1, 2017 to September 30, 2019, as it was reported to the Federal Election Commission (FEC). Total raised are the sum of all individual contributions (large and small), loans from the candidate, and transfers from other campaign committees. The last column, Cash On Hand (COH), has been calculated by subtracting the “spent” amount from the “raised” amount, thereby showing the remaining cash each campaign had available for its future spending as of September 30, 2019. In total the candidates have raised $476,284,606.
Withdrawn candidate
Candidate
Campaign committee (January 1, 2017 to September 30, 2019)
^ Jump up to:abThe overall number of pledged delegates is subject to change as possible penalty/bonus delegates (awarded for each states scheduled election date and potential regional clustering) are not yet included.[1]
^ Jump up to:abThe number of extra unpledged delegates (superdelegates), who after the first ballot at a contested convention participates in any subsequently needed nominating ballots (together with the 3,769 pledged delegates), was expected to be 765 as of August 2019, but the exact number of superdelegates is still subject to change due to possible deaths, resignations, accessions, or potential election as a pledged delegete.[1]
^Prior to the electoral reforms that took effect starting with the 1972 presidential elections, the Democrats used elite-run state conventions to choose convention delegates in two-thirds of the states, and candidates for the presidential nominee could be elected at the national convention of the party without needing to participate in any prior statewide election events.[13] Twenty-nine Democratic candidates announced their presidential candidacies prior to the 1924 Democratic National Convention,[14] and a record of 58 candidates received delegate votes during the 103 nominating ballots at that 17-day-long convention. In the post-reform era, over three-quarters of the states used primary elections to choose delegates, and over 80% of convention delegates were selected in those primaries.[13] For more information, see McGovern–Fraser Commission.
^ Jump up to:abcdThis individual is not a member of the Democratic Party, but has been the subject of speculation or expressed interest in running under this party.
^Calculated by taking the difference of 100% and all other candidates combined
^270 to Win reports the date each poll was released, not the dates each poll was administered.
^Gabbard with 2.0%; Steyer with 1.0%; Bennet and Castro with 0.6%; Williamson with 0.4%; Delaney with 0.2%; Bullock, Messam and Sestak with 0.0%
^Gabbard with 1.5%; Steyer with 1.0%; Bennet and Castro with 0.7%; Ryan with 0.6%; Williamson with 0.3%; Bullock with 0.0%
^The Economist aggregates polls with a trendline regression of polls rather than a strict average of recent polls.
^Gabbard with 1.2%; Castro with 0.7%; Williamson and Steyer with 0.5%; Bennet with 0.4%; Delaney with 0.3%; Bullock with 0.2%; Messam and Sestak with 0.0%
^Gabbard with 1.6%; Steyer with 0.8%; Castro with 0.7%; Bennet with 0.6%; Williamson with 0.4%; Delaney and Ryan with 0.2%; Bullock with 0.1%; Messam and Sestak with 0.0%
^5 out of 50 primaries are not state-run but party-run. “North Dakota Firehouse caucuses” is the official name of their event, but it’s held as a party-run primary and not a caucus in 2020. Democrats Abroad likewise conduct their election as a party-run primary, with their pledged delegates allocated at later conventions solely on basis of the proportional result of their party-run primary. The last three states with party-run primaries are Alaska, Kansas and Hawaii.[329][330]
The Pronk Pops blog is the broadcasting and mass communication of ideas about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, prosperity, truth, virtue and wisdom.
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Pronk Pops 
The Pronk Pops Show 1413, March 13, 2020, Story 1: President Trumps Declares A National Emergency — Unleashes Full Power of United States Government — $50 Billion in New Funding To Deal With COVID-19 Pandemic — Videos- Story 2: House Expected To Pass Family First Coronavirus Response Bill Supported By President Trump — Videos –Story 3: United State Stock Market Rallies — Best Day Since 2008 — Consumer Sentiment Beating Expectations At 95.9 — Videos
Posted on March 15, 2020. Filed under: 2020 Democrat Candidates, 2020 President Candidates, 2020 Republican Candidates, Addiction, Addiction, American History, Anthropology, Banking System, Bernie Sanders, Biological and Chemical, Biology, Blogroll, Breaking News, Budgetary Policy, Business, Cartoons, China, Coal, College, Congress, Consitutional Law, Corruption, Countries, COVID-19 or Coronavirus, Culture, Deep State, Defense Spending, Diet, Disasters, Diseases, Donald J. Trump, Donald J. Trump, Donald J. Trump, Donald Trump, Drugs, Eating, Economics, Economics, Education, Elections, Empires, Employment, Energy, Environment, Eugenics, European History, European Union, Exercise, Fifth Amendment, First Amendment, Fiscal Policy, Flu, Food, Fourth Amendment, France, Freedom of Religion, Freedom of Speech, Genocide, Germany, Government, Government Dependency, Government Spending, Great Britain, Health, Health Care, Health Care Insurance, History, House of Representatives, Human, Human Behavior, Illegal Immigration, Immigration, Independence, Investments, Italy, Japan, Joe Biden, Killing, Labor Economics, Language, Law, Legal Drugs, Legal Immigration, Life, Lying, Media, Medicare, Medicine, Mental Illness, Mike Pence, Monetary Policy, National Interest, Natural Gas, News, North Korea, Novel Coronavirus or COVID-19, Obesity, Oil, Oil, Overweight, People, Philosophy, Photos, Politics, Polls, President Trump, Progressives, Psychology, Radio, Raymond Thomas Pronk, Regulation, Resources, Rule of Law, Scandals, Science, Second Amendment, Senate, Social Sciences, Social Security, South Korea, Spying, Spying on American People, Success, Surveillance and Spying On American People, Tax Policy, Taxation, Taxes, Terror, Terrorism, Trade Policy, Trump Surveillance/Spying, Uncategorized, Unemployment, United Kingdom, United States Constitution, United States of America, Videos, Violence, War, Water, Wealth, Weapons, Welfare Spending | Tags: $50 Billion in New Funding To Deal With COVID-19 Pandemic, 13 March 2020, America, American People Want No Politics With Response to COVID-19, Articles, Audio, Breaking News, Broadcasting, Capitalism, Cartoons, Charity, Chinese Communist Coughing Crisis, Citizenship, Clarity, Classical Liberalism, Collectivism, Commentary, Commitment, Communicate, Communication, Concise, Consumer Sentiment Beating Expectations At 95.9, Convincing, Courage, Culture, Current Affairs, Current Events, Economic Growth, Economic Policy, Economics, Education, Evil, Experience, Faith, Family, First, Fiscal Policy, Free Enterprise, Freedom, Freedom of Speech, Friends, Give It A Listen!, God, Good, Goodwill, Growth, Hope, House Expected To Pass Family First Coronavirus Response Bill Supported By President Trump, Individualism, Knowledge, Liberty, Life, Love, Lovers of Liberty, Monetary Policy, MPEG3, News, Opinions, Peace, Photos, Podcasts, Political Philosophy, Politics, President Trump Declares National Emergency, Progressive Pandemic Panic Pusher, Prosperity, Radio, Raymond Thomas Pronk, Representative Republic, Republic, Resources, Respect, Rule of Law, Rule of Men, Show Notes, Talk Radio, The Pronk Pops Show, The Pronk Pops Show 1413, Truth, Tyranny, U.S. Constitution, United State Stock Market Rallies -- Best Day Since 2008, United States of America, Unity, Unleashes Full Power of United States Government, Videos, Virtue, War, Wisdom |
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Pronk Pops Show 1413 March 13, 2020 posted as soon as possible
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Story 1: President Trumps Declares A National Emergency — Unleashes Full Power of United States Government — $50 Billion in New Funding To Deal With COVID-19 Pandemic — Videos
BREAKING: Donald Trump declares a national emergency
Trump declares National Emergency over coronavirus
Trump declares national emergency over coronavirus pandemic
Tucker: Regular life is all but suspended
Hannity: Major businesses working with Trump on coronavirus
Trump declares virus emergency; Pelosi announces aid deal
President Donald Trump on Friday declared the coronavirus pandemic a national emergency in order to free up more money and resources. But he denied any responsibility for delays in making testing available for the new virus, whose spread has roiled markets and disrupted the lives of everyday Americans.
Speaking from the Rose Garden, Trump said, “I am officially declaring a national emergency,” unleashing as much as $50 billion for state and local governments to respond to the outbreak.
Trump also announced a range of executive actions, including a new public-private partnership to expand coronavirus testing capabilities with drive-through locations, as his administration has come under fire for being too slow in making the test available.
Trump said, “I don’t take responsibility at all” for the slow rollout of testing.
Late Friday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced a deal with the Trump administration for an aid package from Congress that aims at direct relief to Americans — free testing, two weeks of sick pay for workers, enhanced unemployment benefits and bolstered food programs.
“We are proud to have reached an agreement with the Administration to resolve outstanding challenges, and now will soon pass the Families First Coronavirus Response Act,” Pelosi announced in a letter to colleagues. The House was poised to vote.
The crush of late-day activity capped a tumultuous week in Washington as the fast-moving virus shuttered the capital’s power centers, roiled financial markets and left ordinary Americans suddenly navigating through self-quarantines, school closures and a changed way of life.
The White House was under enormous pressure, dealing with the crisis on multiple fronts as it encroached ever closer on the president.
Trump has been known to flout public health advice — eagerly shaking hands during the more than hour-long afternoon event — but acknowledged he “most likely” will be tested now after having been in contact with several officials who have tested positive for the virus. “Fairly soon,” he said.
Still, Trump said officials don’t want people taking the test unless they have certain symptoms. “We don’t want people without symptoms to go and do that test,” Trump said, adding, “It’s totally unnecessary.”
Additionally, Trump took a number of other actions to bolster energy markets, ease the financial burden for Americans with student loans and give medical professionals additional “flexibility” in treating patients during the public health crisis.
“Through a very collective action and shared sacrifice, national determination, we will overcome the threat of the virus,” Trump said.
Central to the aid package from Congress, which builds on an emergency $8.3 billion measure approved last week, is the free testing and sick pay provisions.
Providing sick pay for workers is a crucial element of federal efforts to stop the rapid spread of the infection. Officials warn that the nation’s healthcare system could quickly become overwhelmed with gravely sick patients, as suddenly happened in Italy, one of the countries hardest hit by the virus.
The ability to ensure paychecks will keep flowing — for people who stay home as a preventative measure or because they’re feeling ill or caring for others — can help assure Americans they will not fall into financial hardship.
Hopes for swiftly passing the package seemed to be fading throughout the day as talks dragged on and Trump dismissed it during as “not doing enough.”
Ahead of Trump’s new conference, Pelosi delivered a statement from the speaker’s balcony at the Capitol imploring the Trump administration and congressional Republicans to “put families first” by backing the effort to provide Americans with relief.
“Our great nation has faced crisis before,” Pelosi said. “And every time, thanks to the courage and optimism of the American people, we have prevailed. Now, working together, we will once again prevail.”
Pelosi and Mnuchin engaged in days of around-the-clock negotiations with cross-town phone calls that continued even as Trump was speaking, both indicating earlier they were close to a deal.
They both promised a third coronavirus package will follow soon, with more aggressive steps to boost the U.S. economy, which economists fear has already slipped into recession.
The financial markets closed on an upswing after one of the worst nosedives since the 1987 downturn.
For most people, the new coronavirus causes only mild or moderate symptoms, such as fever and cough. For some, especially older adults and people with existing health problems, it can cause more severe illness, including pneumonia.
The vast majority of people recover. According to the World Health Organization, people with mild illness recover in about two weeks, while those with more severe illness may take three to six weeks to be over it.
Trump said he was gratified that Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro tested negative for the virus, after the pair sat next to each other for an extended period of time last weekend at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club. A senior aide to Bolsonaro tested positive.
Trump’s daugher, Ivanka Trump, worked from home Friday after meeting with Australian Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton, now in isolation at a hospital after testing positive for the coronavirus. White House spokesman Judd Deere said she was evaluated by the White House Medical Unit and it was determined that because she was exhibiting no symptoms she does not need to self-quarantine.
Attorney General William Barr, who also met with the Australian official, was staying home Friday, though he “felt great and wasn’t showing any symptoms,” according to his spokeswoman Kerri Kupec.
Several lawmakers, including some close to Trump, have also been exposed to people who tested positive for the virus, and are self-isolating.
Among them are Republican Sens. Lindsey Graham and Rick Scott, who were at Trump’s club on the weekend. Graham announced Friday that he also met with the Australian official who has now tested positive. And GOP Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, who had previously isolated himself after a potential exposure at a conservative conference in Washington, said Friday he met with a Spanish official and is now self-quarantining.
Hospitals welcomed Trump’s emergency declaration, which they and lawmakers in Congress had been requesting. It allows the Health and Human Services Department to temporarily waive certain federal rules that can make it harder for hospitals and other health care facilities to respond to an emergency.
The American Medical Association said the emergency declaration would help ensure America’s health care system has sufficient resources to properly respond to the ongoing outbreak.
Trump has struggled to show he’s on top of the crisis, after giving conflicting descriptions of what the U.S. is doing to combat the virus. On Wednesday he announced he would ban travel to the U.S. from Europe, and on Friday he suggested extending that to the U.K. because of a recent rise in cases.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, infectious disease chief at the National Institutes of Health, said more tests would be available over the next week, but warned, “We still have a long way to go.”
Fauci said Friday, “There will be many more cases. But we’ll take care of that, and ultimately, as the president said, this will end.”
___
Associated Press writers Aamer Madhani, Alan Fram, Lauran Neergaard, Martin Crutsinger, Laurie Kellman, Michael Balsamo and Kevin Freking in Washington and Bill Barrow in Atlanta contributed to this report.
https://apnews.com/83b0c8e168548fd453b0c177dd1f203a
Story 2: House Expected Passes Family First Coronavirus Response Bill Supported By President Trump — Videos
House Passes Coronavirus Relief Bill
House approves coronavirus response bill supported by Trump
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi says the House will pass coronavirus legislation
Mnuchin: Trump is very interested in putting money into the economy
PBS NewsHour West live episode, March 13, 2020
Story 3: United State Stock Market Rallies — Best Day Since 2008 — Consumer Sentiment Beating Expectations At 95.9 — Videos
The Dow Is Soaring – Here’s Why the Stock Market Is Cheering Trump
Barry Sternlicht: Stock market will make a comeback from coronavirus
El-Erian on markets: ‘It’s getting less scary than it has been for a while’
Cramer’s game plan for the trading week of March 16
Jim Cramer: Not sure this stock market sell-off can be stopped
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