Rages at the Machine...

Trump rages at new impeachment inquiry

By QUINT FORGEY

President Donald Trump lashed out Wednesday following House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s announcement of an official impeachment inquiry into his conduct, complaining on Twitter that none of his White House predecessors have “been treated so badly” during their time in office.

"There has been no President in the history of our Country who has been treated so badly as I have. The Democrats are frozen with hatred and fear. They get nothing done," Trump wrote online. "This should never be allowed to happen to another President. Witch Hunt!"

The morning message followed a string of posts Tuesday night sharing clips of segments by his conservative cable news allies — including Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity of Fox News, as well as Lou Dobbs of the Fox Business Network — blasting Pelosi’s historic maneuver and defending Trump amid heightened scrutiny over his summer phone call with Ukraine’s president.

During that conversation on July 25 between the two leaders, which is at the heart of House Democrats’ renewed push to oust the president from office, Trump reportedly pressured newly elected Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky roughly eight times to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden and his son. Trump acknowledged Sunday that he discussed Biden, the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination, during the call.

POLITICO reported in August that the president was slow-walking hundreds of millions of dollars in military funds to Ukraine, and the The Washington Post reported Monday that Trump directed his acting White House chief of staff to hold back the financial aid at least a week before his call with Zelensky.

Trump’s statements during the call are also believed to be a component of the complaint an anonymous whistleblower filed in early August to the intelligence community’s inspector general, who deemed the allegations credible and “urgent.”

Trump on Tuesday afternoon announced he had authorized the release sometime Wednesday of "the complete, fully declassified and unredacted transcript" of his call with Zelensky. A senior administration official confirmed Tuesday evening that the White House is also preparing to release both the whistleblower complaint and the inspector general’s report to Congress by the end of the week.

Rudy Giuliani, Trump's personal attorney, predicted Wednesday that the transcript of the Zelensky call would amount to "a big nothing-burger," and asserted that the president would have been "derelict in his duty" to not bring up the unfounded accusations of wrongdoing by the Bidens during the conversation with his foreign counterpart.

"You're going to say, 'My God, why — how could he have not raised it?" Giuliani told the hosts of "Fox & Friends," adding: "Who could get allegations of a serious nature investigated about a vice president? Is a president of a country going to listen to, I don't know, an FBI agent?"